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.
Welcome to this episode of the Conscious Fertility Podcast, and today I am honored to have back Dr. Andrew Newberg. He’s a world renowned neuroscientist and expert in the study of the brain’s role in religious and mystical experiences. Dr. Newberg is the director of research at the Marcus Institute of Integrated Health and a physician at Jefferson University Hospital with over 250 peer-reviewed articles and 14 books, he is pioneered groundbreaking research exploring the connection between brain function, spirituality, and health. And I think we’re going to have to talk a little bit about sex too. Today because of his latest book, his research includes taking brain scans of people in prayer, meditation, rituals and trans states, an attempt to better understand the nature of religious and spiritual practices and attitudes. And Andrew, I’m so glad to have you back your last episode that we did together. People are really enjoying it. That’s episode by the way to our listeners. This is kind of like a continuation, so I recommend you go listen to episode 87 on the titles of the Brain Spirituality and the Path to Peace. And again, episode 87, welcome back.

Andrew Newberg:
Thank you. Thanks for being you back again.

Lorne Brown:
So we’re talking about your latest book and the title of that book is Sex, God and the Brain. And I was thinking when we put this out, will the podcast get banned or filtered out? We may have sex in the title. How have you found your book? Is it getting put into the X-rated and not showing up on people’s searches?

Andrew Newberg:
Well, I think so far so good. I guess throughout my whole career it’s always been walking a bit of a fine line between challenging ideas and trying to make sure that I look at things in ways that I hope are appropriate. I hope that people can appreciate that has a bit of an academic flare to it so that people can kind of understand it and see the intricacies of these kinds of questions. So it is certainly a book for the general readership. I mean, it’s written in a popular context, but it discusses some really fascinating ideas I think, and things that are really something that we all have to deal with in our lives and is an important part of our lives. It’s an important part of being human. It’s an important part of every species on the planet. Mating and reproduction and trying to understand what that is, the biology of it and how that ultimately our sexuality connects with our spirituality, I think is something that really has a little bit of something for everyone So far so good. But again, it really is about understanding who we are as human beings. And I think with that in mind, I think everybody can try to appreciate it for what it is and for the discussion and the topics that are sometimes challenging and are things that we all need to think about.

Lorne Brown:
And why I wanted to have you on is when I read the book, first of all, I did think it was going to be more like a romance steamy novel.

Andrew Newberg:
I don’t do those kind of novels

Lorne Brown:
Very well. Wasn’t I was like, oh, but what really caught my attention because like you’re saying, it’s something we do need to talk about because it’s part of humanity, is the fact that when I think of our podcast, the Conscious Chili Podcast and your last episode, we do a lot of focus on consciousness and spirituality and how this can impact your life in a positive way. And when I think of spirituality and sex and I think of our modern day religions, there’s a lot of shame around sexuality. Some religions forbid it or their religious leaders are not allowed to. And then when it comes to fertility, sex is something that’s going to be happening for those listeners. So what really caught my eye and I wanted to talk to, we’re going to get into it, I don’t know when we’re going to get into this part, but there was this research where you, or maybe we’ll start right now with the om orgasmic meditation, and I have a couple of, I’d love for you to give a little background on it.
And my questions are going to, I’m just so curious how you studied it. I’ve been in an MRI, so I’m trying to figure, and they tell you you can’t move. So I had some practical questions I would have for you on it, but part I wanted to lead into it just something really interesting. In Chinese medicine, sometimes fertility or unexplained fertility, a common pattern is what we call liver cheese stagnation. It has nothing to do with your western liver. And this is kind of, think of it just repressed emotions, unexpressed emotions, resentment, it’s cheese stagnation, right? And one of my colleagues once, one of her treatments that she would write out as a prescription is that they have to have an orgasm because that moves the qi, moves the energy. And then when I saw your own meditation, the orgasmic meditation, I was like, oh my God, it was totally aligned. So maybe rather than we save it for later, let’s start talking about what you’ve discovered about sex, God in the brain. And let’s just jump in so our listeners will stay tuned because I think they’re going to be what, how did you study this? What did you

Andrew Newberg:
Thought? Lemme take. I’d like to take at least a brief but big step back. I’ve been doing this research, looking at spirituality in the brain for 30 years, and my late colleague and my mentor, a fellow by the name of Dr. Eugene Dewie, who was a psychiatrist and he also was a PhD in anthropology. We had long suspected that there’s a very close relationship, sexuality and spirituality. And it really arose out of his interest as an anthropologist in the evolution of the human brain. And where a lot of our practices come from. The rituals that we do that are rituals, which are these repetitive processes, and we could certainly talk about this at more length, but the rituals that are part of humanity and really inundate virtually every aspect of our lives that these rituals, where did they come from? Where did they evolve from?
And they had to theoretically evolve from animals of our brains evolve from animal brains, then our rituals evolve from animal rituals. And what’s fascinating about that is that virtually all animal rituals are mating rituals. So that was one of the things that 30 years ago we sort discussed this relationship between mating processes and all the elements that go into sexuality and the rituals that are a part of religious and spiritual belief systems, but ultimately that are part of many different aspects of our lives. So now fast forward 30 years, so in my mind this has always been kind of percolating along. We never had an ability to truly look at the connection between sexuality and spirituality, but we did studies of meditation and prayer and many different types of spiritual practices. And then finally, and I tell the story in the book, so I’ll be brief about it, but one day I’m in my office and as I often do, I get a call from somebody who is interested in some aspect of religion or spirituality and maybe they want to talk a little bit about it or talk about how they can, some aspect of a study that we might be able to do or something like that.
And so what was fascinating was I get this call from this person who says, we do this practice called orgasmic meditation. Have you heard of it? No, I haven’t heard of it. And I said, well, tell me a little bit about it. And this is how I just start with so many of our studies to say, oh, we did a study of speaking in tongues. I had heard of it, but I didn’t really know what it was or how it worked or what people did or anything like that. So start to tell me about what it is, how does it work? And then she starts to describe to me this practice, and we can elaborate on that. But she starts to talk about this practice that uses sexual stimulation as a focus of meditation, as a way of entering into a kind of spiritual experience.
And so one, I’m quite fascinated by this just because it’s an interesting and unique kind of practice, but the other piece to this, in my back of my mind, I’m like, could this be a little bit of this missing link that we’ve been talking about for 30 years? And then finally, to your point to the question, well, how are we going to study this? And so again, that’s also in this larger field of neurotheology that I know we talked about last time, which is the study of different spiritual practices. In my mind, one as a researcher, one of the fascinating pieces of all of this is the ability to sort of think about the methodology. How are we going to study a prayer practice? How are we going to study something? Can we put somebody in MRI scanner? There are some practices where you can do that because they can just lie down in the scanner and they can just do their breathing meditation or whatever.
There’s other practices where the person has to be moving around or has to be in certain postures or something like that. And of course, in this practice, there has to be sexual stimulation, and it is a paired practice. So there’s one person who’s part of the practice who is doing the sexual stimulation of the other person. And then the question is, well, can we do this at all? And how would we do this? And one of the ways in which we have some all different abilities to scan the brain with some really amazing techniques that are available these days. And one of the ways that we can do that is not actually with an MRI, because with the MRI, you have to be in the scanner when you’re doing whatever it is that you’re doing. And we thought there’s just no way that this can be done that way.
But we can do what’s called pet imaging where we inject a little bit of a radioactive tracer, and that can be done outside of the scanner. And what’s very kind of cool about how some of these tracers work, the one in particular that we were working with, if I were to inject one of the people listening to the podcast right now and let it circulate and get up into their brain, have them finish listening to the podcast, have a little snack, and then drive down to their local hospital to get into the scanner, it would tell me what their brain is doing right now. It kind of gets locked into their brain, so to speak, and you can capture a snapshot, if you will, of what the brain is doing at a particular moment in time. So we had these individuals doing the practice in a study room in our lab, and we kind of set it all up so they could do the practice the way they normally do.
We put a small intravenous catheter into their arm before they ever start the study. And so at a particular moment in time when they’re kind of at the peak of the practice, we inject them through this IV catheter so they don’t feel it at all. That doesn’t disturb them or anything like that, but it gets up into their brain and then they do the practice, they finish the practice, and then we put them into the scanner. And then when they’re in the scanner, it shows us a picture of what their brain was doing when they were doing the meditation practice itself. So it really gives us this incredible opportunity to be able to study a study, a practice that’s very challenging to study by doing the practice outside of the scanner, but then taking the picture of that practice when they’re in the scanner. And that’s how we do that.
That’s how we’ve done a lot of our practice is when we did our study of speaking in tongues where people are moving around and dancing and singing and things like that. Again, we injected them while they were outside the scanner and then put them into the scanner so that we could see what their brain was doing at that particular moment in time. And that’s how we do it. So we have some incredible techniques to be able to study these practices, but it is always interesting. It’s always challenging, and certainly this was one of the more intriguing practices that I had an opportunity to study because of the sexuality piece and making sure that everything was dreamed off and all that. So we really didn’t disturb them or observe them in any particular way so that they could do it in private, but achieve the kind of experiences that they were looking for.

Lorne Brown:
And I’m very curious, did you get a ethics board response saying, you want to do what? When you said, oh,

Andrew Newberg:
Yeah, A slightly funny story was that I think they were struggling with it as might be, and we’re like, but part of what I think wound up working in our favor with regard to doing this study, I mean, first of all, again, we’ve studied lots of different practices, and one of the things we tried to point out to people is that many meditation practices take advantage of some physiological process of the body. The most common one is breathing. So somebody, we all breathe, but we focus on the breath as part of the meditation practice. And so other practices focus on walking other practices, focus on maybe pain in the body or something like that, or on the heart beating or something. So focusing on a physiological process like a sexual stimulation is certainly something that isn’t necessarily completely outlandish. The other thing that wound up working in our favor in this whole process as they were kind of trying to wrap their mind around it was that one of the people that was reviewing it was actually an old urologist who was used to sexuality.
And for him it was like, this is nothing, no big deal here. And so it was helpful to have someone who was more comfortable with sexuality itself and dealing with sexuality. And it’s interesting, a couple of my other colleagues, I have some colleagues in the world of neurology, for example, who take care of patients with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s and stuff like that. And we got into a conversation about this particular practice and about sexuality, and they’re like, it’s sort of sad that people don’t talk about sexuality very easily because when you have people with Parkinson’s, they have a partner, they’re married, they have a partner, maybe they’re in their sixties or seventies, and they can have a very active sexual life, and then this disease comes along, which can greatly affect that. It affects the intimacy of the relationship. So it really, from a medical perspective and from an understanding human being perspective, the ability to feel comfortable with this topic, I think is actually something that I hope is an important outcome of all of this work and an outcome of the book to help us to understand, as you were saying, many religions have kind of looked at sexuality very negatively, if you will.
They seem to be almost kind of afraid of it. A part of my argument is that it’s because having it makes sense to some degree because it looks like spirituality and sexuality take advantage of basically the same biology of our brain, but I’m also trying to turn that around to show to people that actually can be a positive, that it can actually be a way of trying to enhance a person’s spirituality by embracing their sexuality as well. And so that is another outcome I think, of this book, which is to help people realize what that link is, realize the intimacy of the link between sexuality and spirituality, and is that something that ultimately can be used to the positive, whether they do orgasmic meditation or whether they just engage in the intimacy of the act of sexuality and appreciating what that is and what that does for people. There’s so many quotes that I bring up in the book, and even the Pope recognizes that while they’re not so keen on having sex with anyone, but when you have sex with someone you love, that in many ways is the true expression of love and connectedness that human beings have with God. And so it really can be a very important and wonderful expression of the relationship, the connectedness that we have with each other when we have people who we are deeply and intimately connected to.

Lorne Brown:
And you’ve given new meaning to when people are orgasming screaming, oh my God, oh my God. So just like the Pope says, we

Andrew Newberg:
Did point that out too.
I mean, I know it sounds funny, but yes, I mean, you think about the elements of sexuality and the elements of spirituality. So when people have these peak experiences in sexuality, orgasm is referred to ecstasy, it’s sexual ecstasy. And in spirituality it can be referred to as spiritual ecstasy. And the same feelings of arousal that we have through sexuality that gets us very aroused and very excited can be something that can be experienced in a charismatic church or some very frenzied kind of religious activity. But then you have these incredibly powerful feelings of blissfulness, which are also part of both. So there is so much overlap, and really it makes sense because again, it’s using a lot of the same, if not the same biological underpinnings in our brain. And that’s part of what we’re showing. That’s part of what we saw with the orgasmic meditation. And part of what we kind of had always thought would be the case when we think about the evolution of these kinds of practices and rituals in human beings.

Lorne Brown:
So to kind of summarize what I’ve heard so far is it sounds like what kind of got you into writing this book was because of your mentor, but these mating rituals that came from the animal kingdom is where a lot of our religious and spiritual rituals come from, which is ironic that now they say where they come from, they’re saying don’t do it. And then you’ve done so much research on looking how the brain changes or what’s happening to the brain during the spiritual experience. And now you’ve measured what happens to the brain during sexual experience. What have you found? Is it very similar, exactly the same now that you’ve been able to look at the brain during these processes?

Andrew Newberg:
Well, the thing that’s interesting about the particular meditation practice that we’re talking about, this orgasmic meditation, so to now delve into it a little bit more. So the sexual stimulation is a little bit more female oriented. So it is a paired practice. There is a person who is giving the stimulation, which could theoretically be a male or female, although in our study was always a male, and then there’s the person receiving the sexual stimulation because it is actually stimulation of the female clitoris. So that leads to the person receiving the stimulation as being always a female. And so part of what is kind of fascinating about this is that they still consider both the male and the female participant to be part of the meditation practice, but it is ultimately a kind of true hybrid in the sense that there is this sexual stimulation piece that is arousing to both.
And obviously if you’re a male stimulating a female, that still is arousing to you as a male. But again, part of what is interesting here is that the goal is not actually sexual. It is spiritual. So there’s the focus on the feelings, there’s the focus on the connectedness between the individuals. And so now again, you kind of extrapolate this to the bigger discussion here. So if you think about the rituals that are part of mating rituals and what they do for us and what they do for animals, they cause a feeling of arousal. They basically enable two animals to come to one, identify each other because I mean, obviously that’s a very critical piece to mating. You don’t want a gazelle trying to M with a lion, that’s not going to go well. And so you’re trying to identify a member of your species and you’re trying to establish that connectedness, that sense of oneness between you and between the two animals.
And then again, extrapolating that into the human side of things that we start to see these same kinds of arousing experiences and the same kind of connectedness. So when we started to look at the brain scans during this particular practice as one example, we see a decrease of activity in an area that’s in the back part of our brain called the parietal lobe that normally, I think we probably talked about this in the last episode, that normally it takes our sensory information and it helps us to create a kind of spatial representation of ourself. Well, during these practices where you lose that sense of self, we see decreases of activity in this area. That’s exactly what we saw in this particular practice, that in both the male and the female, there was a decrease of activity in this parietal lobe because they were coming together.
They were not having sort of these clear boundaries between their self and other, but it was breaking down and they were beginning to feel this sense of connectedness. And I think the one thing that is distinct though, if you actually, the studies that have been done, which just looked at sexual arousal, everything just sort of turns in the brain. But in this kind of a meditative practice, and certainly when we compare it to other meditative or other types of spiritual practices, we actually see it the opposite. We see a drop of activity, particularly as you get towards these kinds of peak experiences. So there’s elements of the sexual piece to it. And we also saw, for example, we do see increases in some of the brainstem, some of these core areas of our brain, which are responsible for sexuality. And it makes sense actually that it would be the very core areas of our brain because sexuality has got to be part of every species on the planet.
So our brain ultimately evolved from little fish in the ocean or whatever those fundamental parts of the brain keep getting evolved into our brain. But then we have this higher part of our brain, what’s called the cortex, which are the parietal lobe and the frontal lobe and things like that that allow for our higher thinking and art and music and literature and all that kind of thing. And so those areas do all kinds of different things because as you engage these kinds of practices, it literally kind of changes the way you feel and think about the world, the way you see the world, the way you see reality. And one of the key elements in that is that sense of connectedness, which is such a fundamental part of spiritual experiences, but also a fundamental part of sexual experiences.

Lorne Brown:
So I’d love for you to clarify something that I was hearing. It sounds like it’s not just the act or the orgasm, but intention set and setting matter. And it reminds me of the psychedelic experience that we see where psychedelics, if the set and setting intention aren’t done properly, you may not get the same benefit or experience with the psychedelic as if you’re at a fraternity party taking it. Can you explore a bit of that?

Andrew Newberg:
Yeah, no, I think is, it’s very important. And also to clarify one very important point is that the name orgasmic meditation is a little bit of a misnomer because the actual goal is not orgasm. In fact, in our study, and we had about 20 different pairs that came in, none of them actually achieved climax, as they would call it, the actual orgasm itself. It is about the sexual stimulation itself. But to your point then also is that part of what leads to this kind of an experience is that it’s not just a person who is at a party and they’re just having sex with somebody. It is something that is extremely intentional. The entire practice itself is very well delineated, which was part of what I was intrigued by because as somebody who’s now going to try to study something, the more clearly delineated it is the better.
When we did some studies, for example of Buddhist meditation, which just kind of go on for some period of time, sometimes it’s actually more challenging to study because when am I supposed to scan the person at 30 minutes, 40 minutes, 80 minutes? Whereas here it’s very well timed and there’s very specific elements to this experience and to the practice that are a part of it. So it kind of creates an opportunity to be able to explore that. To your point also, I mean, what we did not do is look at all of the different potential contexts and things like that. Just like with psychedelics, it’d be very interesting to know the difference in the experiences if somebody is at a party versus just by themselves versus within a laboratory or a clinical setting where they’re being very purposely guided through the process. So there are a lot of different ways of thinking about the context of those experiences, but I think that’s definitely an important elements to all of this.
The beliefs that we hold when we talk about the rituals as we were talking about, and the meeting rituals and the religious rituals, part of what we have talked about my late colleague and I used to talk about in our early work was the connection between rituals and myth. And people may not fully understand the term myth in this context. A lot of times in today’s lingo, myth means something false like the myths of dieting or something like that. But in an anthropological sense, the myths are the stories that we tell about ourselves, the stories that we tell about our world that help us to understand that world. So that actually very important, very powerful ways of thinking about the world. And the myths are embodied in the rituals. There’s a deep connection there. So if you do meditation, it’s not inherently just meditating, but what are you meditating on?
Are you meditating on God? Are you meditating on consciousness? Are you meditating on some other spiritual concept? And those different elements become a very important part of the practice and ultimately are an important part of whatever the experience may be. If you’re meditating on God, and we’ve done studies of those kinds of practices, then the outcome tends to be the experience of connecting with God. I mean a feeling, a sense of oneness with God. If you are doing mindfulness, which may be a more secular meditation practice, well, you don’t typically feel a connection with God, but maybe you feel more relaxed. You have reductions in stress, anxiety. So you get different kinds of experiences depending on what the context is and what the actual sort of the mythic elements, the mythic stories of the practice are that really help to guide that practice towards a particular kind of experience.

Lorne Brown:
And from reading your book books, I would say books, but the latest one book, you talk about some of the hormone, first of all, you talk about how there is a lot of similarity that we see in the brain with spirituality and with sexuality. What about the hormonal immune system? How does spirituality and sexuality impact that? And again, our listeners are those trying to conceive and also those just want to be happy. And the fertility side, fertility, your hormonal system, your immune system is very important to be regulated and balanced in order to conceive and go to terms. So this would be entrusted to them. And then anybody else that wants to live well long would also want a healthy immune system in a formal system. So can you talk a bit about the spirituality and sexuality not only on the brain, but on our hormonal immune system?

Andrew Newberg:
Yeah. Well, so I think there’s a couple of really important pieces here for your listeners. I mean, one is that many of these practices, and I think orgasmic meditation would certainly fit into that. And we showed this in our physiological study that these practices are affecting what’s called the autonomic nervous system, which is our arousal and also our calming system. So it alters our heart rate, it alters our blood pressure. Ultimately, these practices tend to reduce stress and anxiety. And while we didn’t specifically look at that in our study, there have been some other studies over orgasmic meditation and certainly many other studies of mindfulness and yoga and so forth, which have shown reductions in the stress hormones like cortisol improvements, changes in neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine, which help us to feel better, which help us to feel more relaxed, to help us feel less anxious and less depressed.
So there’s clearly a pretty close connection between these kinds of practices and helping people to reduce the stress in their system. And when one does that, so cortisol, which is as one example, is one of the main stress hormones that we release. Well, we give people cortisone and I mean, if anybody’s ever put hydrocortisone cream on their skin, it suppresses the immune system. So if you’re stressed, you have more of it. That means your immune system is suppressed, and if you have less, then that means your immune system can actually work better. In fact, some other studies have looked at practices like meditation and shown that you get more immune reactivity to a vaccine, for example, if you’ve been meditating, then if you haven’t. So it helps your immune system to function better. And in the world that I come from, which is an integrative medicine, we frequently talk about the three main glandular systems, so to speak, three main glands that our bodies live off of, and that’s the thyroid gland, that is the adrenal gland, and it’s the sex clans, the testes, and men are the ovaries and women.
And so one of them is not working perfectly well. The others try to kind of help out, so to speak. But ultimately, if one is not working well for a long time or if it’s really out of whack, then that can actually affect the other ones. So being able to help the adrenal glands work as well as possible by reducing stress, then theoretically that allows the other glandular systems and including the hormone systems that regulate our sex hormones to be able to function in a more balanced way, hopefully a better way for people. And people have been doing studies looking at things like mindfulness and so forth, and you guys have probably talked about this on your program in terms of even things like fertility. And so these kinds of practices can potentially be very helpful in helping to balance the body, balance our hormones, balance the autonomic nervous system.
And the other piece that I’ll just mention, and this is not something I studied, and I am always very careful in my work to not endorse a particular practice. I think all of them have the potential to be valuable for people. They have to kind of experiment and find out what works best for them. But one of the things that I’m also somewhat intrigued by when it comes to this orgasmic meditation is that if you’re doing that as a couple, as a married couple, it can potentially create a safe space for people to be sexual without necessarily putting undue stress on it. And of course, and again, as I’m sure you’ve talked about many times in your program, one of the key aspects of fertility is stress and people getting kind of hyper-focused on all of that. The idea of being able to be sexual and engage that kind of sexual energy in a way that can actually be positive and take some of that stress away has the potential to be useful for people.
So again, I’m not saying that people should do it, but it is something that people can look into and if they think that it’s right for them, as with many different kinds of practices, it has the potential to be able to help people, again, with kind of balancing their body and make sexuality something that hopefully can be valuable and create positive experiences, connect that positive sense of intimacy. And I think it’d be fascinating to do a study to see whether it actually is even has a benefit in terms of things like fertility, but that will remain to be studied.

Lorne Brown:
Yeah. Well, when you think about the orgasmic meditation, I realize I keep calling it, I was calling it the OM meditation, but OM as an OM orgasmic meditation. Right, got it.

Andrew Newberg:
That may have been partially thought of, I don’t know. But yeah, they often refer to it as OM as the abbreviation. I was thinking, om, om is the, it’s also the mantra for many practices,

Lorne Brown:
But as you said, you’re not endorsing it, but go try it. And I always say, what’s the cost benefit? Well, it’s kind of free. And then side effects. We prescribe a lot of things as health professionals, and some of them could have side effects, although minimal are not common, but they do. And this one seems like little chance of a side effect,

Andrew Newberg:
Right? Absolutely. And as I do talk to people when I want to have patients who are interested in a meditation practice, kind of what you were just saying, I’ll say, well, you might want to try this one, or maybe you have a particular issue that maybe there is some research that supports the use of it in a particular context. And the only downside is the comfort of the people who are doing it. And if a person is doing a practice and it’s making them feel more stressed or they don’t like it, or it’s not consistent with their belief system or something like that, which certainly can happen, then obviously it’s not the right one for a given person. But if it’s something that as you begin to engage, it feels good and it feels right, and you feel like you’re kind of making progress towards whatever your goals may be for the practice and whether that is just stress management, whether it is for greater spiritual awareness, whether it is for health and wellbeing, whatever it is, if you feel like you’re making progress towards those goals, then that could be a good practice to continue.
And actually, in the world of integrative medicine, we often take a multi-pronged approach. And so I often encourage people to try more than one kind of practice because some practices may do one thing for somebody and then a different practice does a different thing for that same person. And maybe a little, it’s like exercise. If all you do every day is run, that might be good exercise, but that’s going to get hard on your knees. If you do running one day and swimming the next day and bicycling the next day and playing some pickleball the next day, that’s actually the best way to engage your body. And similarly, it’s the best way to engage your brain, the more different kinds of things you do. A lot of times that can be very helpful for people.

Lorne Brown:
And if we’re looking for health and wellbeing and improved fertility, if you’re supporting the autonomic nervous system, if you’re having balanced hormones and lower the stress response, then this is all a beneficial approach. And when you talked about the three glandulars, you talked about the thyroid, the adrenals, and the sex glands. There’s a hypothesis I have where I think of our perimenopause and menopausal women that we see once you’re in your mid forties, you’re definitely start can notice some perimenopausal symptoms. And the theory I have in our profession at least is as the ovaries naturally start to function less, what happens when you go into menopause, it’s the adrenal’s job to pick up for especially the progesterone. And so if you have that burnout because you’ve been so stressed and taxing, I’m always curious that these women will probably have more symptoms. So it’s again, another reason to just help with the benefit of keeping the adrenals, keeping your thyroid healthy, because stress hormones can impact your thyroid as well.
So it just shows you how to keep our body system running smoothly. And spirituality, as you’ve shown, and sexuality are very similar in having an impact on the brain and on our hormonal system, thus our nervous system and our immune system, which is wonderful. Question I have in your book, you talk about prairie dogs thinking about these good hormones. So I’ll back it up with when you have good hormones like serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, you feel better. And I believe these turn on and off genes for health and longevity and fertility. And when you have more of the adrenaline and cortisol high all the time, you’re probably turning on and off genes for poor health and not longevity. And for fertility, I wanted some clarification. You talk about prairie dogs or research, and I think if they were genetically the same, but yet one would be monogamy relationships and the other would not. I would love for you to talk about it. I was thinking about even couples during the fertility journey is so stressed and they start to rather feel join as one. They start to separate, right? They’re not together on this. And I was thinking about the orgasmic meditation, if it’s releasing oxytocin that this could actually bond the relationship, or if you’re worried about your partner not being monogamous, working on oxytocin may help keep you together. Together.

Andrew Newberg:
Right,

Lorne Brown:
Exactly. I was wondering if you could talk about the biology of being monogamous and what you saw in your prairie dog research, if you’re okay to talk about that.

Andrew Newberg:
Sure. Well, actually it was not my prairie dog research. It’s actually well-known data from probably about maybe 20 years ago. But yeah, I mean there are these prairie voles that are called actually. So there’s sort of these little rodents, and they’re two species that are very similar. But one of the main things is that one of them, as you said, is monogamous and the other one is very promiscuous. And one of the main changes that they noted in their brains was that the monogamous ones had a lot of oxytocin and oxytocin receptors, whereas the ones who were promiscuous did not. And when it comes to extrapolating all the way up to human beings, now we know that oxytocin is a very important bonding neurotransmitter. It is released when women give birth. It is released at orgasm. And so while I have not actually had the good fortune to be able to study oxytocin levels themselves in these kinds of practices, the idea that these meditative practices, especially those that connect people or help people feel connected to each other would elicit some kind of release of oxytocin, certainly seems like a reasonable hypothesis.
And to your point, I mean, I think when people can engage in different practices, especially when they engage them together, not only could there be a release of oxytocin, but we do know that people’s brains literally can start to resonate with each other. You talk about mating, we talk about rituals, the rhythmic patterns, the rhythmic elements of these practices are part of what bring people to together, and they can bring people together one-on-one when you’re talking about a mating ritual or maybe a paired meditation practice like orgasmic meditation, which can bring two people together. You can extrapolate that out to people who go to a church or a mosque or a synagogue and pray together, and then you’re hearing everybody pray and our brains literally start to resonate with each other. So that helps to form the connection and the bond not just between you and the person next to you, but with an entire congregation of people.
These kinds of practices really can lead to very powerful feelings of oneness and connectedness, and it’s a matter of who you feel connected to, whether it is a group of people as part of a congregation or one-on-one. And so again, to your, I think very well made point that a practice like orgasmic meditation, which actually brings two people specifically together, it is something, again, we have not been able to connect all of the dots in that. So what we found in our study, which was really intriguing is that actually just as I saying, there’s a bit of a resonance, if you will, so that when one of their brain, some of the structures in the brain of the person providing the stimulus, there are similar reciprocal changes in the brain of the person receiving that stimulus. And so they’re able to connect, it kind of brings them together in terms of the process.
It brings them together in terms of their feeling of connectedness and oneness. And that is certainly expressed by the people who were doing it. I would also add that the people who we had in our studies were very familiar with this practice, had all, we had the requirement. They’d been doing it for at least a year, that they had been doing it on a regular basis, and that the people that they were going to do it with as part of the practice that they had done it with before. So there was a lot of familiarity that people had. And so for people who are potentially interested in trying it, there are resources that are online that people, I think could explore that and then in a relationship to try that with their partner and see how that seems to help them. If they feel, again, if it’s something that seems to work for them, then that’s great. And of course, if it is something that winds up making them uncomfortable or it’s not causing increases of stress, then again, it’s not raised, it’s not right for them.

Lorne Brown:
Thank you, and I really enjoyed your book, and I’ll, again, I’ll remind our listeners this book, you’ve got lots of them. The one we’re talking about is sex, God and the Brain, because in our last episode, so episode 87 that we did, the Brain Spirituality and the Path to Peace, we talk a lot about spiritual practices and how it changes the brain, the hormonal system, the immune system, and how this benefits health, wellbeing. And we talked about reproductive health too in this one. What I learned from your book is that sexuality, or I should say spirituality, a lot of it comes from sexuality, the mating, the mating rituals that we learned and that you’re seeing similarities in the brain through some of these sexual practices. And even psychedelics has made a comeback. So you talk about psilocybin and some of the things that you’re seeing with psychedelics also similar in the brain. And for those that don’t want to do psychedelics or the percentage that don’t do well on it, I’m starting to have a practice. I had my experience was I was that small percentage that has the pad trip. So I’m starting to get people coming to my practice to help ’em get grounded and help heal their nervous system. For those that don’t want to do psychedelics, spirituality and sexuality are the same path. It’s kind of like there’s many paths to what we’re looking going forward towards.
And spirituality is one way, sexuality is another way psychedelics can help. Any comments on the psychedelic part? Because your eyes kind of twitched a bit when I said that.

Andrew Newberg:
Yeah, no. Well, we may have discussed this a little bit the last time in the field of neurotheology, which is looking at this overall relationship between the brain and spirituality. You said it perfectly. It’s exactly what I say is that we’re all trying to climb the mountain. There’s many different paths to the top of that mountain. And so psychedelics are one approach. Meditation is another. Sexuality is another near death experiences. Not that I recommend people to have them, but that’s another path. There are psychological disorders that seem to be associated with unusual spiritual experiences and things like schizophrenia or temporal lobe, epilepsy. So there’s so many pieces of this puzzle that I think are very helpful for us to look at. The value of psychedelics in this context is that we know at least where these substances go, and the large majority of them affect the serotonin system.
So we know that kind of a flood of serotonin in the brain is associated with these very powerful psychedelic experiences that can kind of change with the way a person thinks. Now, again, for somebody like yourself who may have had a bad experience, maybe you have too many serotonin receptors are not enough or something. We don’t know the exact cause of it, but maybe there’s obviously something physiological about how your brain is structured, how your brain responds to these particular substances that potentially makes it a good or a bad kind of an experience. And of course, I think one of the things that we also learn a lot about in Neurotheology is the wide range. I mean, when people talk about a spiritual experience, they range from the very mild what you feel when you walk into a house of worship and you feel a little pang or something like that, to really being fully involved in a particular ceremony or practice to mystical experiences.
And so there’s this whole range of experiences, and within that, there’s different elements that can range. So you can have feelings of oneness, you can have intense feelings, intense emotions. You can have a feeling of kind of letting go and surrender. So there are all these different aspects that again, all kind of exist along a very complex continuum that I think the more this whole field of neurotheology moves forward, we can study what these different practices, what these different approaches and pathways make us to understand and to see where the similarities are and where the differences are. Be really interesting to know if theoretically we could do a study where we know that psychedelics release are basically serotonin analogs. So we could study orgasmic meditation or speaking in tongues and see what’s happening in the serotonin system in the brain when the people do those practice. Is it the same? Is there a flood of serotonin, like there’s a flood of serotonin with psychedelics? Or is it a mechanism? Is it because there’s more dopamine or more oxytocin or changes in different parts of the brain? So these are some of the really fascinating questions that we have yet to explore and hopefully find answers to.

Lorne Brown:
Oh, and I have an idea for a study for you when we’re off camera. I’ll share with you, there’s a device that does light therapy, so it’s called a nerve visor. It’s a wellbeing device. But what it’s doing, I am curious to talk to you about it and curious to see if it can be studied to see what’s changing the brain, so

Andrew Newberg:
Follow up well, and there are many different ways now of stimulating the brain beyond the psychedelics. And you mentioned using different light electrical stimulation, transcranial magnetic stimulation. So there are a lot of different ways of literally stimulating the brain, which can potentially elicit different experiences. So yeah, I mean, it’s just more pathways to try to explore

Lorne Brown:
And a non-drug way with this neuro visor. It’s happened to me and one of somebody I’m working with that had a bad experience on her psychedelics when I did the neuro visor, I’ve now had some fun called mystical experiences, but the first time I put it on, I was like, oh, oh. It was like the psychedelic experience, but I could just take it off. That’s the beauty is I could stop it right away. So I think something’s happening, obviously that I’m curious to, I’m going to introduce you and see if something,

Andrew Newberg:
Okay, that would be great.

Lorne Brown:
I’ve really enjoyed your papers. I’ve really enjoyed your books including your latest book, sex, God and the Brain, and it’s really been an honor having you back on our show. I want to remind our listeners that I really recommend you listen to the first one, episode 87. The title is The Brain Spirituality and the Path to Peace, because your research has really been groundbreaking, and I’m sure our listeners are going to walk away with a deeper understanding of how sexuality, spirituality, and neuroscience now intersect. Where can the listeners find your book sex, God in their Brain, and follow your word?

Andrew Newberg:
So all my books are on major retailers like Amazon, and people can always go to my website, which is Andrew newberg, N-E-W-B-E-R g.com. And there’s more information about our research studies, our articles are up there, information on the different books and so forth. And people can even follow me on Instagram. And my link there is at Dr. Andrew Newberg, all one word. So Dr. Andrew Newberg, if they want to follow, continue to follow the journey. It’s a wonderful and exciting one, and there’s just so much for us to explore, and that’s what makes it all kind of fun and exciting to keep going down these paths.

Lorne Brown:
Thank you. And we’ll put your website and your Instagram in the show notes as well. Thank you very much, Andrew.

Andrew Newberg:
Thank you.

Speaker 3:
If you’re looking for support to grow your family, contact ABA 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 ACU balance ca. That’s a C 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 website, Lorne brown.com and ACU balance.ca. Until the next episode, stay curious and for a few moments, bring your awareness to your heart center and breathe.