Lorne Brown:

By listening to the Conscious Fertility Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guest or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to Conscious Fertility, the show that listens to all of your fertility questions so that you can move from fear and suffering to peace of mind and joy. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. I’m on a mission to explore all the paths to peak fertility and joyful living. It’s time to learn how to be and receive so that you can create life on purpose.

Today on the Conscious Fertility Podcast, I have my colleague Lonny Jarrett, and I’m really looking forward to this conversation because in the present, I’m very interested in consciousness. However, when I started my practice back in 2000, I was very much into the physical, but Lonnywas into this kind of consciousness or stuff that I kind of dismissed quite a bit actually back in that day. And here we are meeting on our Conscious Fertility podcast to talk about consciousness because he, to me, was one of the earlier teachers and practitioners that was really tapping into the spiritual side of Chinese medicine. A little background about Lonny. He’s been practicing Chinese medicine in s Stockbridge, Massachusetts since 1986. He’s a founding board member of the Acupuncture Society at Massachusetts, and a fellow, the National Academy of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine. He’s the author of several books. The first one that I remember was Nourishing Destiny, the Inner Tradition of Chinese Medicine, followed by the clinical practice of Chinese medicine.

And his most recent text is Deepening Perspectives on Chinese Medicine. He holds a master’s degree in neurobiology, and he’s a fourth degree black belt in TaeKwonDo. And he recently was featured in the Text, the Great Work of Your Life, a Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling by the bestselling author, Steven Cope. So this is kind of why I wanted to talk to you, Lonny, because women and men share that this is their calling to have another child, to grow a family within. I find that we got IVF, we got herbs, we’re doing acupuncture, supplements, diet, and I’ve always found, or I think the missing link is on this spiritual even into the subconscious side that we don’t maybe pay enough attention to that. And this is why I wanted to sit down with you and talk about consciousness and its role in healing and where it shows up in Chinese medicine.

Lonny Jarrett:

Well, yeah, I’m glad to do it. I mean, I’m happy to answer any questions. I never really, when I went through school, when I learned Chinese medicine, which I started studying, well, I actually wrote my college entrance essay on it in 1975, and there were no resources. And when I went through school, even 84 to 86, there were only a few books

Lorne Brown:

In English.

Lonny Jarrett:

In English written in China. Well, and the ones in Chinese, the classical texts hadn’t been translated. And they wouldn’t have even been well understood by most of the people practicing Chinese medicine in China. They wouldn’t have had the basis to read the classical language under Mao. And

Lorne Brown:

Because there was a shift, right? Chinese medicine, how it was trained and often practiced. Now compared to the classical sages, the classical, I often hear that spirituality was taken out of the medicine. Can you comment on that?

Lonny Jarrett:

Well, sure. I mean, it’s actually a complex question, but if we read the classical texts, we can see the foundation for a profound meta systemic theory in it where they were rational medical texts and they tied human, the health of human beings into social health and into the health of the biosphere. And ultimately our connection to the cosmos, of course, was in the Han Dynasty, 500 to 300 bc. These great texts were written by the 18 hundreds. Chinese medicine sort of fell out of favor in China as China had to confront a country that was deeply embedded in superstition and myth and bring China into the modern age. So of course there was the communist revolution. And in the late forties Mao declared that Chinese medicine was a vast treasure house that was neglected and had to be restored according to the principles of dialectical materialism. So dialectical materialism is communism and the dialectic, the conversation is we’re only going to talk about what’s physically real.

Lorne Brown:

And that conventional medicine is a materialistic medicine, right? If we can’t measure it,

Lonny Jarrett:

We do. Well under the influence of Des card, I think with the emergence of perspectivism in 1450 with Leonardo da Vinci, and then the flowering of that in 1650 with I think therefore I am. And that materialism led to an industrial revolution really in the West and a technological revolution in the west. And the Chinese were falling behind. And Mao had the task of bringing China into the 20th century. And with that through the baby out of the bathwater. And just, there are three dimensions to our experience, which is the gross, which is the physical, the gross realm. Our gross experience is the body and our apparent separateness from the biosphere and the apparent separateness of everything that has a name. So the gross realm is the physical body and the parts of the nervous system that reflect to us our independent existence as a separate ego.

And then there’s the subtle realm, which is the psyche which we experience, and the soul is even more subtle, which we experience in dreams. And that is a world of metaphor, a world of symbolism where so out here a cup is a cup, but in a dream, a cup or anything we see is the tip of an iceberg with deep, deep roots and lots of potential meaning condensing on it. And then beyond our dream time and sleep and dreaming, we have the very subtle realm, which is spirit, which is just clear white light, which is deepest dreamless sleep. So we have the growth, the subtle and the very subtle dimensions of experience. And the maoists eliminated the subtle and the very subtle dimensions and really just turned Chinese medicine into thermodynamics.

Lorne Brown:

And where we’re at today, does Chinese medicine have a place where medicine and spirituality can merge? I asked this question because of the multiple guests that we’ve had on the Conscious Fertility podcast that are just scientists, teachers of consciousness. We’ve had a few practitioners of Chinese medicine, but these are just quantum physicists or consciousness teachers. They’ve shared what you said about this illusion of separateness, right? Yes. And that we’re connected to something greater. So do you subscribe to that from your own personal experience and through Chinese medicine that there’s more to life than us and that it is an illusion that we’re separate? And then really, how do we bring this down to the material world? It sounds great to talk about this over coffee and philosophize about this, but when somebody is struggling and suffering mentally, emotionally and physically, is there a way to tap into this to have a change on the material level?

Lonny Jarrett:

Well, sure. I mean, there’s only ever one thing happening in the full extent of the universe. So from a western linear, and I guess we could say patriarchal perspective, things are related to each other. That happened at different times. So in the West, we consider things related when an effect follows a cause. So cause effect, cause effect, cause effect. So when things happen in proximity to each other, but at different times we consider them related. And if things happen at the same time, we call it a coincidence. And a coincidence is dismissing the relationship between things, but from the perspective of all time existing in one moment, the synthetic point of view, which in the West, Carl Young championed as the idea of synchronicity, which he got by reading the Ying and reading the Daoist textbooks and the Chinese textbooks. From that point of view, we consider everything related that emerges together at the same time.

So there’s something called dependent origination. And that is that everything that exists in a moment depends on everything else in that moment for its existence. And nothing has an independent existence. So when people are suffering, we can make a distinction regarding suffering. So there’s physical suffering in proximity to a life-threatening illness, or one’s been in a car crash or shot by a gun or broke one’s leg skiing or has an infection of a bacteria or a virus that is threatening one’s life. And that is very much primarily focused in the gross realm and it’s most expediently dealt with in an emergency room. And that’s what western medicine’s very good for, is when life is threatened. But most of us are not in that position regularly. And most human suffering that occurs in the interior dimension of the self, psychologically, emotionally, in terms of distortions in the soul, have to do actually primarily with living inside an inherently limited context that comes from having all of our identification and all of our experience focused on the illusion of being separate.

And from the perspective of Chinese medicine, separation is pain. And there are seven stars in the big Dipper, which are seven sources of light in heaven. The big dipper is conceived of the spoon that stirs us through destiny. And at the moment of conception, confers a life curriculum, a destiny upon each individual. So there are seven sources of light in heaven, seven holes in the head to receive that light, and then seven internal pathogens and seven external pathogens to obscure that light. And the human body is a Lord vehicle. It’s temporary, it’s going to break down and it’s fleeting, but consciousness is eternal and it’s really the illusion of being a separate self, the illusion of being separate that causes pain. And we can understand that Chinese medicine addresses the inter penetration of yin and yang. All it can diagnose is how yin and yang come apart. All Chinese medicine diagnoses is separation and all it can do is promote communication and promote communication. When we talk about promoting the flow of Qi, the flow of qi is just a metaphor for ending separation by ceasing repression.

Lorne Brown:

And when you say ceasing repression and the lingo that we use in our practice, is that what we’d be referring to as cheese stagnation?

Lonny Jarrett:

Well, cheese stagnation, blood stagnation, damp stagnation, heat stagnation, wind stagnation, and it can all have both external and internal origins. And the external origins are the biosphere and culture society. Because human beings live in two environments. We live in an actual environment of trees and lakes and river and seasonal change in a daily life cycle. But we also live in an environment of rules, rules, laws, and regulations that we have created as projections of our own internal relationships to ourselves.

Lorne Brown:

So I want to talk a little bit more about this, and I want to talk about the repression as well, this stagnation. So the external environment, internal environment, many of the guests, and I subscribe to this as your external environment, is a reflection of your internal environment. And we often, if we’re asleep, if we’re not conscious, we project it out as well. So you can see people where they have their shadow to work, and if they are conscious, they don’t take it personally and they know it’s inside of them and it’s meant for them to transform. I’ll use these words very loosely. For those that are not awake, they’ll often project it out and we get the Putins and stuff where if I just kill these people or if I just take over this, I’ll feel better and everybody else will feel better. So they’ve shared that it’s about accountability and responsibility. It’s not about self-blame or blame at all. It’s about accountability, responsibility of realizing if I’ve seen something happening outside of me and I don’t like it, it is feedback to look inside. And I just wanted you to touch on that. You talked a little bit about we project things out and on the repression side, I’m going to just two part question for you, because Lonny, I wish we had hours with you, but we’re going to see how much I can pull from you to share with our audience

That stagnation, that repression. The way I’ve been understanding it is that when we have resistance, like you said, we have a society that creates root rules and we develop root repression, it impedes the receptivity and flow in life and things just we suffer, things don’t feel good, and maybe things don’t even manifest. We don’t notice these synchronicities. And when this resistance can be lowered, we start to experience receptivity and flow and start to notice these synchronicities. So that’s kind of been my observation. And with patients using Chinese medicine, using MINDBODY work, you use it as this form of communication. How can we help the body with this perceived separateness and find that communication where I’m understanding that receptivity and flow come back because the resistance has been lowered. So can you just elaborate a bit about this projection out and can we tie it in a bit with the health

Because when it comes to fertility, usually there’s this incredible desperation desire, I must have this baby, I need to have this baby, which that attachment to that form outcome I believe creates resistance. And then there is a place where people can arrive where they want the baby, but they’re not too attached. So there’s no desperation anymore. They’d be disappointed. So they haven’t stopped the desire, but it’s not this deep desperate need and one blocks resistance and one lowers resistance. So I want you to tie it into our population that often listens if you can.

Lonny Jarrett:

You’ve said like 12 things here. I’ll address a few and then if I’ve missed any, you can tell me. So the first thing you alluded to is this notion that when we see things outside of us that disturb us, we need to look inside. And that’s partially true. We can sum that up as paraphrasing Gandhi, as we need to be the change that we want to see in the world. And that is true. And on the other hand, there is a medical imperative to change laws, rules and regulations. And nobody is going to be healthy living in a fascist country. So to have adapted to life in Germany in 1943 and been healthy in that context would’ve been very sick. So yes, we consider just yin and yang. Yes, on the one hand, we need to be the change we want to see in the world.

And on the other hand, social justice and establishing systems and professions and rules and rules and regulations that allow all human beings to live a life of dignity free from fear, honoring their inherent dignity is also just as important. So really we need to change the interior. We need to change the exterior when it comes to fertility and getting pregnant. Now, I do quite a class on this like a three, four hour class on this. So this is just a very quick synopsis, but one I have found the greatest imperative is to get the couple to just relax. So this is what you were pointing to in terms of letting go of attachment. And we have a sort of epidemic these days because culture has changed and women can now have careers and rightfully and are not just homemakers and not just valued for sex and service.

A new value for women since really the end of the 1800s and continually being realized in certain cultures around the world is the idea that women can have agency. And as women have gained agency, they’ve put off child rearing. And then we see this sort of epidemic in Chinese medicine of 35 to 45 year old women who wake up on a Tuesday evening and all of a sudden hear their biological clock has the loudest voice in their head and all of a sudden decide that they want to, they absolutely must have a child all the way to the conclusion that if they don’t have a child, their life will have no meaning. And this leads, this is a very, very deep biologically conditioned structure and a very deep culturally reinforced structure that has everything to do with the sense of a separate self, an ego identification.

And it just is a very, very heavy trip and heavy context to create for the incarnation of a soul that you are what gives my life meaning. So I mean, I have two children and I raised a foster child, and of course I loved them profoundly, and they do bring a lot of meaning to life, but they didn’t provide my life with meaning. My life wasn’t empty before I had them. And my life is empty when they’ve moved out of the house. And in terms of actual agency, as I was discussing before and as the title of my book Nourishing Destiny Points to is that we have a life curriculum and we have a soul. And it’s our responsibility to rectify that soul for the sake of seeing through the independent self and working toward the true, the good, the beautiful for the sake of the whole. And having children can certainly fit into that. And I just get concerned when men and women have such profound attachment that literally they can’t focus on anything else, and the very worth of their existence becomes called into question that if they don’t get the outcome they want, their life is sort of devoid of meaning. And there’s sort of a cynicism and a bitterness. And I think you did point to this.

Lorne Brown:

Yeah. Well, I’m going to clarify this. I think once anybody attaches to anything, money, career, spouse, and they think that’s what’s going to give them meaning, then you run into challenges and struggle and suffering. If you’re not well,

Lonny Jarrett:

If that’s what is going to give them ultimate meaning,

Lorne Brown:

Yes, ultimate meaning,

Lonny Jarrett:

I mean, it’s fine. Of course our kids give us meaning. And if playing guitar gives me meaning for other people’s sailboat, and that’s fine. But when it comes down to this notion of ultimate meaning, and without doing this, my life is empty. And I’ve seen this a hundred times, this kind of syndrome, which happens very significantly in mid thirties to mid 40 year old women who haven’t had children. And then all of a sudden this biological impulse takes over and the clock starts ticking. Their biological clock starts ticking very, very loudly, and it sort of obscures, it inhibits the flow of G and actually makes the whole process more difficult. And one of the main things I focus on initially is getting the people to really relax.

Lorne Brown:

So that’s the part you said that twice I’ll share that when I hear that, I can empathize and feel the women listening and how that’s hurting their heart because the last thing I want them to hear is just relax because they’ve heard it before. And to be honest, if they could just relax, they would. But that’s the

Lonny Jarrett:

Problem. Well, and people can and they don’t.

Lorne Brown:

Well, we need tools. We need tools and practices because you can have the intention, I want to relax, and yet there is a part of them that is this biological need. And for me and for you, we can reproduce much older in life. And so I can sit here and relax.

Lonny Jarrett:

That’s getting to be less true though, right?

Lorne Brown:

Well, it’s all yin and yang compared to females. We can reproduce much later in life. And yes, there is research showing that there’s maybe health issues.

Lonny Jarrett:

Yeah, I think I just heard Robert de Niros having another baby.

Lorne Brown:

Yeah, 70 something, right?

Lonny Jarrett:

Mick Jagger will be going for the next 200 years.

Lorne Brown:

Yeah, I want to, for the listeners, when they hear, just relax doesn’t serve them in my opinion like this. Well,

Lonny Jarrett:

I don’t tell people to just relax. I am telling you that I think having them relax is one of the most insignificant things, but I don’t just look at them and say, just relax. We focus very deeply on all the things they have to be grateful for their love for their partner if they’re doing this with a partner. And another reason that I think we can tell people to relax is I have found in general fertility treatment to go rather well and be rather easy in the context of Chinese medicine, which is to say, in my 38 year career, there are only three women who didn’t get pregnant that I worked with and a hundred or more who did. And it was just essentially the woman’s body that evolved over a billion years to perform this function. And very often, as soon as we quantify a bit of blood and get the Q moving and resolve a little damp, it turns out that even longstanding infertility can change very, very quickly. So I’ve had very, very good luck treating it. So I’m usually optimistic.

Lorne Brown:

And your approach, you’re using acupuncture, you’re using herbal medicine as well in your practice

Or just Acupuncture?

Lonny Jarrett:

Well, no, acupuncture and herbs and dietary advice in anything that would fall under the auspices of lifestyle counseling, in terms of exercise, sleep regimen, what time of day to eat, what kind of foods to eat, what kind of foods to avoid, and in general. Then also talking on a very deep level. And I mean literally I’ve had women come in and the most important thing to them was having a child. And by the end of a conversation it got to, they completely saw through their motive and said, I think you’re right. I really don’t want one. And that happened in a 45, 45 minute conversation. And other people, we just work. And usually I ask people to abstain from trying to get pregnant for a minimum of three months because there’s often a period of rectification, of physiological processes like moving damp, moving blood stagnation very often, which would be contraindicated to getting pregnant while you were giving the kind of verbs that do it. So I’ll often ask people to wait three months, sometimes six months till I can see a result in the tongue and in the pulses, and that leads me to suspect. Okay, I think the conditions are right now, we also want to see changes around the woman’s experience relative to her period. For instance,

Lorne Brown:

As in lack of premenstrual symptoms, painful periods change in blood quality in color that you’re looking for, that shift,

Lonny Jarrett:

All those things. The significance is lack of tenderness in the breasts, lack of clotting, the blood being Bri and not clotted, dark brown or purple, lack of emotional upset and lack of physical pain. All of these things you mentioned,

Lorne Brown:

And for our listeners, because in Chinese medicine, what we call a healthy cycle and an unhealthy cycle, and in the West we hear your cycle normal, but normal doesn’t mean healthy. It just means a lot of people have this and what we consider normal PMS clots, pain with your period, having to take off a few days of work is maybe considered normal, but it’s definitely not considered healthy according to Chinese medicine. So Lonny was sharing what a healthy cycle would be described

Lonny Jarrett:

As. Yeah, if I had women rate their discomfort on a scale of one to 10, nothing more than a two is acceptable to me and anything more than a two, which would mean to me minimal for an hour or something like that. But really there should be no significant emotional, psychological or physical discomfort. And the blood should be healthy and the period should be regular somewhere around every 26 to 30 days. I mean 20 eight’s ideal, but there’s a little bit of latitude, but certainly I’m not happy if it’s less than 26 or more than 30.

Lorne Brown:

Okay. I wanted to go back to something you mentioned about the curriculum. So you subscribed to this idea that we come in with a curriculum like we’re here to learn stuff. Can you elaborate on that? And then how does trying to grow your family fit into your curriculum possibly?

Lonny Jarrett:

Well, having a family isn’t in everybody’s curriculum. We can acknowledge that. And when I’m talking about, I would not necessarily argue or make any strong case for the idea of reincarnation. I just don’t know. I’ve had some experience in my life that through contemplation and deep meditations, like I’ve meditated a lot and sometimes like 12 hours like sitting for 12 hours or I’ve done 24 hours straight, three hours on, 15 minutes off and go, or 10 days straight, 14 hours a day, something like this. And on deep contemplation or arriving at transcendent states in other ways, I’ve had enough experience that lead me to believe that some of what, for instance, the Tibetan say about reincarnation is true. But whether reincarnation is true or not, I do believe it is my experience. And I do believe that human beings come in with a condition. And any parent who’s had more than one child knows this is true, knows that their child came in

Lorne Brown:

Condition like a personality,

Lonny Jarrett:

Yes, with tendencies right there the second you meet them. I met a friend, a good friend’s parents a few weeks ago, and I said to them, you must have done something right because she is just so joyous and has so much love. And they both looked at me simultaneously and said, that’s who she was the moment we met her kids have conditions. So when I’m talking about the soul, when we talk about genetics in western science and medicine, we’re talking about physical transmission from ancestry, and that’s the gross realm. And it’s true and it’s not wrong, but I think there’s also a subtle transmission. And I think we come in with the condition and that condition is born by a subtle dimension of ourselves, which we can call the soul, and it is the job of each of us in our lives to rectify the soul. I would understand the soul to be the most subtle dimension of us, closest to the absolute that has a personal dimension to it, and its job is to convey light, to transmit and to light in the form of the true, the good, the beautiful in the form of love. And we come in with culture, we come in with all kinds of conditions, and then those conditions are activated and triggered by culture.

Lorne Brown:

Can you define a bit what you mean by conditions? I keep thinking when you’re saying conditions, you’re talking about literally physical conditions, but I don’t think that’s what, you’re not

Lonny Jarrett:

Just talking about that. Well, I think it must be reflected in the physical template, but I’m talking about life lessons that need to be learned. If we consider the soul as a mirror that reflects light, I’m talking about distortions in the mirror and it’s up to us to see, we come in with conditions from our people. I mean, for instance, when I was born in 1958, which was only 13 years after the end of the second World War and being Jewish, I came into a culture into my family of people who were profoundly traumatized by what happened. And that trauma wasn’t just something that they had lived to 13 years before. It goes back to thousands and thousands of years. And I think we all come in with possible conditions and from experiencing past lives possibly, but certainly genetically transmitted conditions from our people and our people’s experience, whoever our people happen to be, and that it’s up to us to become free, to rectify distortions, to rectify distortions.

From a psychoanalytic point of view, Freud basically dealt with what happened between the moment of first breath and basically toilet training as the temp, maybe up till the age of six as the template for who we were in life. And I just think that, I don’t think conception is a neutral event. I think we come in with issues and that it’s up to us to take these on. And of course, we all have early life experiences that when our mind is developing as we gain language in the face of our early life experience as a two, a three or four or five, a six, a 10, a 12, a 16 year old, an 18 year old, we draw conclusions about the meaning of our experience with a partially formed mind. And most people, if they live to be a hundred, the outcome of their life is dictated by conclusions they drew about who they were and how life is and the meaning of existence when they were six.

Lorne Brown:

I think it’s Dan Siegel, I heard it from Dan Siegel. I don’t know if he is the originator, that the environment creates your mind and then your mind creates your environment. And he’s saying up until that age of six or 12, you’re being imprinted on by your environment and that imprints on your subconscious and now you have tinted lenses, and then you start to experience the world. Now the mind creates the environment based on your experience, it sounds that’s what you’re sharing, that same,

Lonny Jarrett:

Yes. I would say there’s more than just the environment creating your mind, because I am saying that we come in with something

Lorne Brown:

And they add, and that’s his quote, but he talks about that from the, as you call, the growth, the physical, that our trauma is transgenerational and it tags the DNA they now know. So that comes in with you as well. And now you’re talking about more on the spiritual side that we come in with a curriculum with conditions possibly could be past lives regardless. We already come in at the time of conception, we have history. It sounds like you’re sharing

Lonny Jarrett:

Yes. And momentum.

Lorne Brown:

And so when it comes to, again, for our podcast fertility, some people can interpret this and think they’re being punished or blamed, but from the people, from my experience in talking to other experts in consciousness, there’s no real room for blame. And everything that’s happening is like a wake up call, an opportunity for you to integrate and heal. Do you subscribe to that idea?

Lonny Jarrett:

Well, sure. I mean, one of the main things in terms of falling under the auspices of helping a couple, or particularly the woman to relax, is that the human mind is a meaning-making apparatus. And when it doesn’t know, it makes stuff up. And that’s where all the traditions came from. And one of the main ways in helping a woman get perspective is that so many that I have worked with have a profound, they draw this conclusion and this profound certainty that the fact that they’re not getting pregnant is some kind of punishment or means something about them. They blend themselves and they feel fundamentally flawed.

Lorne Brown:

There’s always the opportunity when life happens, we give it meaning, right? Everything is neutral, and then we give it meaning to the lens of our subconscious. So it’s understandable that if you’re not getting pregnant, some of the experiences, my body’s failing me or I am a failure. Those profound statements, I also see those that come in and they have this desire to have a child, and they’re looking for, and what our listeners are looking for is are there tools, are there methods, are there ways, when you say to relax, I see this as, can we lower the resistance? Can we find ways to be present? Can we find ways to not be at the effect of what’s happening? So here is a diagnosis of infertility and how can I use my soul? How can I use my mind to support my body in finding that piece, in lowering that resistance, which I think you’re calling for it to relax, to be more receptive and allowing

Lonny Jarrett:

To make it, I’ve been involved in spiritual communities. I was involved in spiritual communities for 27 years and for much longer than that. And right up till now work with people in communities. And there are many people who take on a celibate practice for the sole reason that they can do the work necessary so that on the other side of the celibate practice, they can find a partner.

Lorne Brown:

I don’t get that

Lonny Jarrett:

Confused me. So the entire time they’re celibate, it’s a profound attachment to the opposite outcome from celibate.

Lorne Brown:

Okay, now I understand what, yeah. Okay. Okay.

Lonny Jarrett:

So when you say how can people relax? Well, I’m going to go back to what I said before, which is through a fundamental discovery of the inherent dignity of their incarnation and who and what they are, regardless of the outcome of the fertility treatments,

Lorne Brown:

A spiritual journey. And that’s what I see. To me, this is a spiritual journey, and this is I think one of my earlier questions is, is there a role or is there a place where medicine and spirituality can merge?

Lonny Jarrett:

Well, medicine and spirituality, we only ask that question. I mean, the question itself is predicated on the assumption that they’d be in any way separate. And so the medicine I teach is integral medicine, and the term integral was coined by the Indian sage, Shri Arab Bindu early in the last century who founded integral yoga. And integral yoga for him meant a practice that left no significant part of the self behind. And integral medicine, which is just an emergent medicine, is a medicine that leaves no part of, no significant part of the self behind. It acknowledges all dimensions of the self, the body, the psyche, the soul, emptiness, luminosity, the authentic self, the ego, the superego, the witness. These are all dimensions of the self that have been identified, and there just is no separation between mind, body, soul, and spirit. All medicine is always addressing all of them, but the issue is that the practitioner may not be awake to those dimensions in themselves. And if a practitioner is not awake to the subtle and very subtle and very, very subtle dimensions of the self, they’re not going to be able to guide the patient in that way.

Lorne Brown:

Thank you for that little piece there, that last little piece. And so it sounds like it’s already all happening, this spiritual, emotional and physical.

Lonny Jarrett:

Well, it’s just one thing. They’re just increasingly subtle dimensions of whatever phenomenon is occurring.

Lorne Brown:

And you talked earlier about the light, the dipper and the sudden orifices in the head. More and more, I’m reading about how it sounded almost naive that it’s all about light and love and more and more on this journey, there’s this shadow side where it feels dark, dense, heavy energy if there’s a lot of fear and it’s not a good feeling energy. And I’m just curious because of your own contemplative practice, spirituality, practice, is it all love and light or what about those that come across what feels like shadow or dark energy? How do you understand that, Carl? Because fertility, I just want to add, I think a lot of the people I see that are going through their fertility journey, they come into what sometimes feels like that shadow work as well.

Lonny Jarrett:

Well, sure. So Carl Young said that the tree that would grow to heaven has to send its roots to hell, but it’s all for the sake of liberation of light. I mean, it is all about love. If having a child and bringing a child into the world isn’t about love, then I have no idea what it could be meaningfully about.

Lorne Brown:

It’s interesting because you have children, I have children, and you already love your child before they’re born. Isn’t that I never knew I would love my partner before I met my partner, but when people are pregnant or when they even think about it, there’s this sense of they already love it. And you talk about it’s all about love. That’s one thing I’ve always been so fascinating and curious about. And if you have a comment on that to me it’s because, go ahead, let’s hear your thoughts.

Lonny Jarrett:

I mean, I think that’s probably true for most women. My experience was right up to the time my first child was born, I had no idea how I was going to find the time to be a dad. And it was abstract to me. And my wife had a C-section after 36 hours of labor, and I was standing there right next to her while they were doing the surgery and they lifted this baby out and handed her to me and said, congratulations Mr. Jarret, you have a beautiful healthy baby daughter. And I looked in her eyes and that was it. And I experienced just no separation whatsoever. Just no separation. Usually with people there are layers, and even if you feel a connection, there’s still time to build trust in everything. But with my children, it was the time in my life where I looked and there was just no separation at all.

So in terms of shadow, we do have dark motives. And I think in relation to having a child, one of the dark motives is I need a child to give my life meaning, because that is an inherently selfish motive. And what the problem’s going to be, Lorne is if you have a child to give your life primary meaning then every second the rest of that child’s life, when they do get here, you are going to be relying on that child to give your life meaning, which sort of denies their agency and their soul’s independent existence on a trajectory. And I think as parents, I mean at least I came to a point long ago of realizing I’m responsible for these kids and I love them, but they’re not mine.

Lorne Brown:

It’s interesting. I want to add that it became very early on in my life that it’s my responsibility and I will love my children, but they don’t need to love me. It’s a one-way street. And what you’re sharing here is about if you need, when I do the conscious work, I’m always asking, why do you want this child? And not at a very superficial level, it’s more about their internal working. And the only time I think there is a red flag, and again, it’s not a judgment, it’s just a red flag is I need this child because I need something to love me. That is too much pressure to put on an infant.

Lonny Jarrett:

That’s more or less what I’m pointing

Lorne Brown:

To. And a lot of us have our own issues, our conditions are because we were raised by behaviorists or we didn’t get that attachment needs because they were looking for us to give them meaning. And if we didn’t behave a certain way, they weren’t getting their meaning met. And so we have our issues because of that.

And that’s why I like the conscious work for those trying or wanting to grow their family, is they get to have this awakening and really explore why they have this and end up having their love affair with themselves where they find that agency for themselves and they want the child because they really want to nurture and love something and they have other reasons that it’ll bring to them. But I get what you’re saying. It’s not like I need them to have that meaning. And the only time it seems like it could be unhealthy is if they need the child for meaning to give them love. That’s too much pressure on a child. That’s what you’re saying?

Lonny Jarrett:

Yeah, that’s just what I’m saying. The point is that the mother has to be free, the father has to be free, and they have to raise kids who are free as opposed to there are a lot of strange and twisted motivations for having children,

Lorne Brown:

Right? It’s very true. And we can look at our planet and our world and maybe it’s what it looks like today because of that.

Lonny Jarrett:

Well, I mean we were just animals without minds. And as the frontal cortex grew and we grew the human mind, we came out of a fog just the way a newborn infant over the first three months of life, which is really the fourth trimester, their eyes start to focus, their ears start to focus, they start to have a sense. By the third month, the fontanels begin to close. And as the fontanels begin to close exactly at the third month where the sensory orifice is beginning to focus, they start to have a sense of each other. And the ops tell us if there is no other, why should I have fear that fear, anxiety, neurosis actually arise with the sense of others? And that sense of others is the beginning of the sense of separation for the ancient Chinese at the child’s birth. The father isn’t present and the child is kept with the mother and the child is given the family name like Lee.

And at the third month of life, now you have some confidence the child’s going to survive because the infant mortality was so high that the third month of life you present the child to the father for the first time. And the third month of life is actually the child’s first birthday. Nine months in the womb, three months out of the womb is 12 months. That’s the cycle on the father’s child’s first birthday. He meets the father for the first time who makes the child laugh and withs that laughter. The child’s heart spirit arises out of the kidney like the sun rising out of the ocean. And with that laugh, the father confers personal name, not just Lee, but Bruce Lee and the Da Ching tells us it’s naming things that creates separation. And in the DAOs cannon, it’s the gaming of name that is described as clouds dotting the clear blue sky and the early formation of the ego, which is the sense of separateness that will become really explicit at the age of two year old temper tantrums as the child’s ego is pushing from omnipotence in every direction.

And at the age of two, the child starts gaining language. And at the moment of gaining language is when the human mind starts to condense and solidify. And that’s when culture starts teaching it and saying, good Jews do this. Good boys do this. Good girls do this. Good Christians do this. Good Muslims do this. Good Chinese do this good to ’em. That’s when we start getting the interjection from culture via the mind of all the rules, roles and all the beliefs that are unexamined by the culture and just perpetuated as a neurotic ritual on us. And those become interjected and come into us. And most people go through life and the outcome of their life is determined by stuff they were taught consciously and unconsciously by the time they were six.

Lorne Brown:

And so is our role to unlearn and heal, is that what this earthly curriculum is about? You had shared that we had this separation that happens where we start to feel separate. And it sounds like that’s where fear, anxiety, shame, guilt. To me, separation doesn’t feel very good. So do you have a sense of what this is all about then because of what you shared? Because we share an ideology idea, and I’m just curious, why are we doing this?

Lonny Jarrett:

Well, this is as far as I’ve gotten,

Lorne Brown:

Okay?

Lonny Jarrett:

And as far as I’ve gotten is existence can be understood as spirit playing hide and go seek with itself and it incarnates. There’s an explosion, there’s energy, there’s light, then there’s energy, then there’s matter. It takes 14, 15 billion years, and then you get a form of matter that can awaken to its motive for having created the universe. We build the Hubble telescope and what’s looking through it is the same thing being seen on the other side of it. What’s looking is what’s being seen.

Lorne Brown:

I’m missing that. So what do you mean by that?

Lonny Jarrett:

Well, consciousness is looking through the telescope and consciousness is what created the universe. And consciousness is what is looking back toward its own birth. The further the telescope, the further we see out in the universe, the closer we get to the big bang back to the moment we decided to become. So we get hidden in these forms, development goes in stages. And I remember when my daughter would be three or four and say, dad, let’s play hide and go seek. And she’d crawl under the table in front of me and say, go.

Lonny Jarrett:

And I’d look. I’d say, Angelica, she’d say, don’t find me yet. And so I’d open the silverware drawer and go, is she in the silverware drawer? Is she in the cupboard? Is she under the place mat? And she would be after three or four things, she’d be losing it, laughing under the table right in front of me. And then she’d go, you can find me now. And I’d go, there she is. And she’d run and hug me laughing. And I remember the day she said, let’s play hide and go seek. And I said, sure. And she said, turn around. There was a change that took place. So consciousness involves itself in matter, in dead matter in a universe motivates it over the course of 14 billion years of evolution until a form of matter arises and consciousness awakens to itself and recognizes, oh, I did this. I think it does it over and over and over and over and over again.

Lorne Brown:

And so with my intention to help bring an exhale or some peace to the listeners, I want to again see if there’s a chance to tie this into the journey of wanting to grow your family and basically by having a different perspective. If you’re on the very material level, I think it’s very dense and linear and you suffer like you suffer a lot. And I’m wondering with a different perspective that you’ll see it differently and therefore you’ll experience it differently.

Lonny Jarrett:

Well, I think it comes down to what you said before and what I’ve alluded to is just having a family is just, if we’re working that it’s, look, the ego is always putting off wholeness. I remember thinking to myself, I’ll be okay when I get this model car. And then I built the model car and then the wheel broke and it went in the bin with the rest of them. And I thought, I’ll be good when I get a stingray bicycle. I’ll be good when I get a girlfriend. I’ll be good when she sleeps with me. I’ll be good when I get rid of this girlfriend. I’ll be good when I get into college. I’ll be good when I get out of college. And on and on it goes. And these are all substitute gratifications for wholeness. And I will always come back to over and over again the realization that the life force itself is sheerly positive.

To have an existence and to have the intelligence to understand the kind of conversation we’re having is a blessed incarnation and that everyone has Buddha nature and that Buddha nature is light love and compassion. And that’s who and what we are right now without anything else. Without anything else. And that is in fact the practice of meditation, which is when we sit still close our eyes and let go of everything, let go of everything, everything, every thought that arises, every attachment, and we surrender it all really in an act of dying to the contents of our mind, to the contents of our memory as we know it. What emerges is just a profound sense of being in the right place at the right time for the right reasons with an ever present fullness that’s always the same but ever new and is in and of itself pregnant with meaning.

And that is what I would want for everyone. And when it comes to the fertility project, it’s going to work out for most people who engage with it, at least my experience is, I’ve had three people in my career, as I said, who didn’t get pregnant, and two of them were around 44, 45, almost everybody under 40, and at least in their late, early to mid thirties, they all got pregnant. I can only think of one really offhand who didn’t. It’s going to work out for most people, and if it doesn’t, then they can’t blame themselves and they really need to awaken to the dignity and the beauty of their incarnation without having gotten something they wanted. Nobody gets everything they want.

Lorne Brown:

Nobody gets everything they want. And this journey is an opportunity for them to feel whole and complete again. And you’re not saying, I’m definitely not saying that doesn’t mean it’s easy. It’s not easy. And while you’re,

Lonny Jarrett:

It’s the hardest thing. It’s not that it’s not easy, it’s the hardest thing, the world to take on these structures. I mean, wanting to bear children is one of the deepest, evolutionarily, biologically conditioned structures. It’s really profound. The spiritual path is a path of getting to the very root of all attachments. I mean in terms of Buddhism, you can sum the whole thing up if life is attached to that. That if you incarnate, you’re going to experience suffering. Suffering is caused by attachment to that which is impermanent. This teaching is to help you let go of attachment to that which is impermanent and it isn’t easy. And the movement is from the growth to the subtle for over maybe hundreds of thousands of incarnations. I mean,

Lorne Brown:

And to witness this, and again, the women on this journey, we see women and men, but predominantly the women on this journey, you’re really witnessing this journey in a short period of time because every cycle they get feedback on not pregnant or an unsuccessful IVF, or they’ll have miscarriages or stillborns like what they go through to witness this. And some of them, some of them, it brings them to that ability to not attach a form, an outcome. They become more whole and complete. They are disappointed that they’re not pregnant yet, but many of them come to a place where they still want the baby, and yet they know they’re going to be okay if they don’t have the baby. Yes, and interesting. These women are the ones where I’ve seen what we’d call miracles, where then it happens when they don’t need it to happen.

Lonny Jarrett:

I had a woman come to me for lower back pain about 25 years ago who had been in, she had been severely beaten in a mugging, and she came for lower back pain and I gave her one acupuncture treatment and she had to miss a week. And she came back two weeks later smiling. I said, how are you? She was an ecstasy. She said, I’m pregnant. And I said, that’s great. And she said, you don’t understand. She hadn’t told me this on intake. She said, my organs were so damaged 14, 15 years ago, doctors had said it’s physically impossible to get pregnant, and I haven’t used birth control my entire life since then across multiple lovers and never got pregnant. And I gave her one treatment and she got pregnant. So you never know. You move a little chi, you move a little chi and things start communicating and something is touched and boom,

Lorne Brown:

And something is touched. I want to add to this, it’s not the one treatment, it’s not for me. It’s not my treatment. I feel like I’m the facilitator. It’s how they take that information and what they body and soul do with it. And so this is where there’s more to what’s happening than meets the eye on this material level. That’s my experience when I see these miracles

Lonny Jarrett:

And compliance is very important with diet and lifestyle and the herbs. And also I’m just adamant that women take three to six months before they try in many cases because when they do have miscarriages, it’s heartbreaking and creates cynicism and creates doubt and takes an energetic toll. So I really want people to avoid jumping the gun. I really want to have them give me time to do the work. Now, most women who are younger don’t have a problem with that. And it’s more the older women who think every day I’m not pregnant is a day I’ll never get back, who may not listen to my advice and may not wait. But really I find it critical at least to give three months of taking herbs and eating in a certain way. And of course, no, no alcohol, no cigarettes, no coffee, no marijuana, no nothing,

Lorne Brown:

No fun.

Lonny Jarrett:

They have all the fun and they can have sex.

Lorne Brown:

Yeah, we get rid of the stimulants. I understand what you’re sharing. And that waiting in my early days, I subscribed to that. And now we treat them while they’re trying, mainly because they used to say, okay, I’m not trying, and then they show up pregnant. So they were lying. They were still trying. And also they’re getting, the fertility clinics are not wanting them to wait because of age when you talk about the maternal age of women. And so it’s difficult to wait. And so

Lonny Jarrett:

It depends on the individual, right? Because I’ve had 27 year olds who were infertile and 32 year olds. And the imperative you’re talking about, as I suggested, is when they’re up around 40,

Lorne Brown:

Then we work at the same time. Lonny, I’ve enjoyed our conversation. As I said, I saw your book in the early days, nourishing Destiny and seeing you speak in my early days of practice. And I wasn’t ready for the spiritual side. I just wanted to know how to fix the material. And here I am since 2000, so many years later, over 20 years later, and this is the crux of my practice. I do the herbs and the diet and the acupuncture. And then the consult though is really on the conscious level and helps facilitate them. Finding that way of feeling whole and complete again, and then seeing how the things unfold and sometimes what appear to be miracles unfold. It’s quite something to witness. And it’s just nice regardless of the outcome. They feel good. And as an example, I’m going to take one.

Outside of fertility, we have the fertility we shared, right? When they no longer need the child, sometimes that’s when it appears. But I’ve seen people where they have terrible pain and they’re suffering and it creates incredible anxiety. And I have worked with people where they still get pain, but they don’t have anxiety around it. They don’t suffer. The pain actually helps them. It’s part of their meditative practice to find their presence. And sometimes the pain does just, they don’t feel it, but it’s a different experience. Before the pain, they couldn’t function at work, or life. It just overtook them. And again, what has changed, there’s pain, but it’s the relationship to the pain has changed.

Lonny Jarrett:

And the thing that changes the relationship to pain or to any experience is the context in which we’re interpreting the experience. And the more inclusive our context is, the less it’s about us, the wider embrace we have of others and others as self, the less all our experience is personal. It’s really this illusion of the purely personal and having our awareness confined to the purely personal that creates the separation that is pain. And the larger our context, the more easily it is to not take things personally. And that context. I understand in terms of the Maana Buddhism, Bodhi, which proclaims in its opening sentences, may I be the doctor in the medicine? And the context of the vow is that we didn’t have to come back and we decided as healers to come back for the sake of carrying others, carrying the wounded and suffering to the distant shore. And we agreed to come back no matter what we might experience in this life for the privilege of being the vehicle, for being the boat, the bridge to help others achieve freedom and to wake up. So when I have experience, when I have a difficult experience, it’s always contextualized by my responsibility to others. And I think that’s what’s liberating. That’s what’s freeing

Lorne Brown:

For you being of service to others. Yeah. Nice.

Lonny Jarrett:

Yeah. I can’t decompensate. I can’t become cynical. I am responsible for everything and everyone else. My suffering isn’t the main event.

Lorne Brown:

And this ties into your belief that everything is connected anyhow, so you’re serving yourself and you serve others belief.

Lonny Jarrett:

It’s not a belief. I mean it’s pretty substantiated by quantum mechanics.

Lorne Brown:

And this is the part where I’ll add with,

Lonny Jarrett:

I mean, it’s like we could call gravity a belief,

Lorne Brown:

And this is the beauty and why we’re doing this Conscious Fertility podcast is it seems like more and more people are waking up to what ancient culture stages have talked about. And now we’re using modern day science to validate what was dismissed for the last couple hundred years. For sure. And I think people in this modern day are struggling, not just our listeners on fertility, but in many areas of life. And the pills haven’t helped or helped enough. We know this because people are going to other people that don’t prescribe pills to help with the struggle. And so it’s forcing us, and I’ll use that word loosely, but it’s forcing us to find other ways, and it’s forcing us to come a spiritual aspect of our healing to get that relief that we’re looking for

Lonny Jarrett:

And ultimately I think it’s more than about getting relief. The path and the inclination, the spiritual path begins with a selfish motive, but it always ends with a selfless motive.

Lorne Brown:

Oh, got to say that again. That is beautiful.

Lonny Jarrett:

Well, the spiritual path begins with a selfish motive. I want to be free, I don’t want to suffer. But it always concludes and matures with a selfless motive, which is that my life is for everything and everyone.

Lorne Brown:

And that’s the beautiful part of this, again, where your initial intentions of doing this kind of work is fine. And when we started the Conscious Fertility Podcast, I had this idea, conscious fertility, to conscious conception, to conscious pregnancy, to conscious parenting. So your selfish motive was, okay, this may help me get pregnant, so I’m going to come and learn about consciousness and do conscious work. In the process they have their internal transformation. And now like you shared, it becomes selfless versus selfish.

Lonny Jarrett:

Yes. And I just want to make the point just because it arose in my awareness while you were speaking that the entire Daoist spiritual literature in terms of awakening and becoming conscious and becoming enlightened is cast in embryological terms of conceiving a self, gestating, a self giving birth to a new self and raising it. So there is a book on EJ printed by EJ Brill, called Transforming the Void, which is the translation of 500 pages of Daoist writing on the spiritual path in the language of fertility and conception. So they’re one and the same. And all the points, most of the points that we would use to tonify kidney young and to clear stagnations and to treat for fertility are actually points that have alchemical uses in terms of conceiving and cultivating what the Chinese would call a spiritual embryo and just awakening.

Lorne Brown:

So there you have it. There are other ways to help optimize your fertility. Most of you’re very familiar with IVF and now acupuncture, a low level laser therapy diet, which Lonny said, don’t dismiss that you are physical as well as spiritual. And he has invited us to explore more the subtle non-physical, the spiritual or other ways to optimize your fertility. And sounds like you may get more than a baby out of this. You may have a rebirth of your own, which you’ll be, it sounds like it’s all light and love, so it sounds like you’ll be welcomed.

Lonny Jarrett:

Well, I think love is the heat that incubates the fetus.

Lorne Brown:

Love is the heat that incubates the fetus. I think we’ll end on that statement. Alright, thank you very much, Lonny Jarrett. You can find more about Lonny Jarrett’s teachings on his [email protected]. We’ll put in the show notes as well where you can find his textbooks on his website as well. Lonny, thank you very much for joining us on the Conscious Fertility Podcast.

Lonny Jarrett:

Thank you, Lorne. It’s always a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you for the invitation, and I just wish everyone their hearts desire.

Lorne Brown:

Thank you.

Lonny Jarrett:

Blessings.

Speaker 3:

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

Lorne Brown:

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