Join us on The Grit Show as we dive into the compelling world of emotional resilience with our distinguished trauma expert, Dr. Dawson Church. After years of pioneering research on PTSD, Dawson introduces us to the groundbreaking treatment known as EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques), highlighting its astonishing success with veterans. Discover how the power of tapping can transform trauma into tranquility, the secret behind meditation-induced bliss, and the essential tips for nurturing yourself to buffer against life's unpredictable challenges. Dawson also shares riveting personal stories of overcoming adversity, including his harrowing escape from a wildfire, and how these experiences bolster his belief in the power of meditation and stress reduction techniques. Don't miss out on learning about eco meditation—a blend of physiological tools aimed at producing happiness, productivity, and inner peace. Be part of a valuable discussion on the importance of self care, positive relationships, and mental focus. Discover how you can foster resilience, boost productivity, and find joy through practical tools and techniques. Tune in for an episode filled with profound insights and practical tools to take control of your mental and emotional well-being.

Additional episodes mentioned on today's podcast:

Need a Surprising way to Reduce Stress? Learn EFT Tapping -91

Lean more about Dr. Dawson Church

Follow on Instagram: @theeftuniverse

Follow on YouTube: @EftuniverseEFT

Learn more about Dr. Dawns Church's books - https://dawsonchurch.com/bookshelf/

Get your free meditation & guide- http://DawsonGift.com 

Dawson Church is a best-selling science writer and the author of three award-winning books. The Genie in Your Genes broke new ground by showing that gene expression is influenced by emotions. Mind to Matter is based on hundreds of studies showing that our brains play a key role in constructing the reality around us. In Bliss Brain, he demonstrates that as we cultivate peak states, our brains rapidly rewire themselves for happiness. He is the founder of the Veterans Stress Solution, which has offered free PTSD treatment to over 22,000 veterans. After retiring from active business management, Dawson has continued to teach and inspire through his presentations, podcasts, books and blog posts.

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I have a friend who will talk about when lifes you. It's an interesting way of phrasing it, right? But I like it. It definitely captures the fact that sometimes things happen that you just don't expect that are outside of your control and you're not sure what to do with them. Sometimes those things are just turbulence. Things that kind of disrupt your day and set things a little off kilter. And sometimes those things can be a little traumatic, whether that's a big t or a little t. Today's guest gives us some examples of some of the big t traumatic things that can happen. But more importantly, he gives us some great tools that are easier than we might realize that cost us nothing and they're easily at our disposal that can actually help be a buffer against everything from the turbulence to the bigger t's.

We're talking the PTSD level t's. So the next time life shoe or things happen outside of your control and you know what's affecting you, you're going to want to remember that there are things you can do about it and we talk about them here today. You're going to get a lot out of this episode and you probably know somebody else who can benefit from it, so be sure to pass it along. I'm glad you're here. Welcome to The Grit Show: Growth on Purpose. I'm your host Shawna Rodrigues and I'm happy to be here with you as your guide for all of us growing together as seekers and thrivers. Do you know how you can meet people and be instantly drawn to their energy? Doctor Dawson Church is one of those people.

You want to listen to what he has to say because of the way that he says it. After listening to him, you aren't at all surprised to learn he's written three bestselling books and he's been part of over 100 scientific studies that have been published in peer reviewed journals. And he trains other professionals in evidence based methods such as meditation and EFT, emotional freedom techniques which we talked about in episode 91 on tapping. He studied post traumatic stress and trauma for decades and with his latest book he's looking beyond that at what we can achieve above and beyond. And despite experiencing trauma and extreme stress, his perspective is in perfect alignment with everyone who's listening right now and what we seek to learn about here on the grit show. Welcome, Dawson. I am so grateful to have you and to be having this conversation with you today.

Shawna, it's a huge pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

Yes, I love that your work has started with. First started with trauma and then elevated to how we can get to this place of not just seeing trauma as it was, but seeing how we can look at our lives in ways to look at the post traumatic piece of our world, to get to a better place. Because on the grit show, that's what we're looking at, is like, we've been through the grit. We've got the grit, we've got these experiences. And now, how can we get to a higher state and get to that place of ease and bliss in our lives? And you have your book, the Bliss Brain, that really looks at that. Can you tell us a little bit more about that book and what led you to write it and to get this perspective out in the world?

Yeah. Bliss Brain was written at a very interesting period in my life. I had another best selling book that sold over 100,000 copies called Mind to Matter, in which I trace the relationship between our thoughts and our external material reality. And it turns out that our thoughts are creating the world around us that we think of as an independent reality. We think it's out there. A ton of it is actually in here, in our awareness. Like, as we, for example, get stressed, we make lots of cortisol and adrenaline. If we're stressed by things that are going on in real life, if we are stressed by our thoughts, we also make adrenaline and cortisol.

So we're literally making molecules with our minds, and then in to Mind to Matter. I talk about the ways in which we create molecules and reality outside of our bodies, and we're doing this all kinds of ways. Like, I'm drinking water right now, and water, it turns out everyone knows the molecular formula is H2O. But it turns out that the bonding angle between the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in water changes when water is held, prayed for, or intentionally sent energy to. So people who actually send energy to their water, who pray over their food, for example, are literally changing the bonding angle in the molecular structure of that. That matter. Plants that are watered with that water, with that blessed water, grow stronger, grow faster, grow bigger, and produce more chlorophyll. So there are all kinds of effects like that.

And I wrote this best selling book that talked about all this. And then in 2017, I had this experience that just completely shattered my life in about two minutes, which was that our home was destroyed in wildfire. We woke up the middle of the night. My wife shook me awake. I looked out the window. There were flames racing toward our house, and I just yelled at her, we're getting out of here right now. Grabbed the car keys, grabbed our phone, sprinted out as trees were exploding around us. It was just a nightmare.

And we just barely made it to our car and made it out of there. And it was just a crazy night, beginning of a crazy few years. And we knew we're driving up through the flames. We're one of the last people to wake up and get out. Many people didn't get out. Many people died. Thousands. About 50,000 homes were destroyed.

5000 homes were just destroyed. Sorry. 5000 homes were destroyed. So huge amounts of loss and devastation all around us, and it just really meant a huge loss for us. And all kinds of bad things happened in the year after the fire, too. So health, money, savings, business, all kinds of things collapsed in that next year. So we found ourselves in this very, very difficult situation in 2018, 2019, that we were meditators. We were meditating many, many years.

And I meditate in the morning and I'd feel wonderful. I remember one week I couldn't make payroll, couldn't pay the people that worked for me, and I did my meditation, and I just affirmed prosperity. It looked nuts to be affirming prosperity and be feeling prosperous when I couldn't make payroll. But I found that meditation and the other stress reduction practices I had gave me the anchor in doing this. So I wrote the book, Bliss Brain, to explain this, that there are neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine. There are hormones like oxytocin, and we can have these flooding our bodies and brains in the middle of trauma, in the middle of loss. And we can be feeling totally wonderful.

Yes. Yes. It's amazing that you can have this buffer that separates you from what's actually happening, that you have no control over. You have no control over wildfires. You have no control over these things that are happening, and yet you can have this amazing buffer. That's incredible. So that's what prompted this book, was that realization of how you can still get through those times.

Today I wanted to share it with people because they think, and, in fact, people thought of me as one of the happiest people in the world. I was well known for being a really kind of lighthearted person, which I am. And I wanted to share that, hey, it's been challenging for me. I've had other things going on in my life as well. And that if you look at the great mystics, the great human potential leaders of our times, a lot of them didnt have very easy lives. They had really rocky, difficult, hard lives. I mean, Mother Teresa, her early life. And look at Gandhi and absolute horrendous persecution he faced early in his life.

And he was one man standing up to a whole empire. So a lot of these inspirational figures had really traumatic events in their lives. And what I did about it, I spent about 20 years as an academic researcher researching PTSD. And when the first batch of troops began to come back from Afghanistan and then from Iraq, around 2003, 2004, there was a really huge attempt on the part of our society, first of all to welcome them and integrate them, but then to treat them. And we looked around for effective treatments, and we found that about a third of them were coming back with flashbacks and nightmares and intrusive thoughts and hypervigilance, all the same symptoms as the previous generation of people came back from Vietnam, with, and before that, Korea, with, and before that, world War two, for that, world War one. So we have this long history of people coming back from war with these symptoms. And so that spurred us as a research community looking into what can we do with PTSD? And now there are such good treatments. Like, I pioneered a treatment called EFT, tapping emotional freedom techniques, and we've got it accepted by the Veterans Administration.

I'm now training VA personnel to apply EFT with those veterans. We can really take those symptoms and treat them super effectively in under ten sessions. So we really have begun to figure out how to deal with PTSD. But what the surprising thing was was that two thirds of people coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq had also seen dismembered corpses and suffering civilians and their friends blown to smithereens, and all the sights and sounds and horrors of war, and they didn't get PTSD. So we asked him, what's happening here? Why do some people spiral down into this cycle that often ends in homelessness and suicide and addiction? But why do two thirds of people not do that? And the answer is post traumatic growth. They are resilient. And so we then look at how do you foster resilience? And it turns out there are things you can do. There are things that predispose you to resilience.

If you had a reasonable childhood, then you're more resilient than if you had an abusive childhood. But there are things you can do. Like I mentioned, EFT that helps. Meditation helps. Meditation makes you resilient. In many studies now that look at the brains of people doing meditation, they actually are strengthening the neural pathways of resilience in their brains. And if they've done that when they get caught up in a financial crash or terrible divorce, or an economic downturn or a war, they are resilient. Without training therapists in Ukraine, working with refugees, working with people that were training people in Palestine and in Israel, we're training people in various hotspots of the world, and it's not a hopeless situation.

People even in these horrendous cauldrons of violence, can recover from PTSD and actually experience post traumatic growth. So that's the really good news here, is that trauma can send you in one of two directions. You can spiral down into PTSD and all the medical problems and all the longevity issues that come along with it. That same trauma, if you handle it with resilience, can actually propel you into that state of bliss brain into that state of inner growth. So that's the really encouraging take home message of all this research.

Yeah. That there is that possibility for you to actually shift into that post traumatic growth. And if you are somebody who's had like the PTSD and has had more of the symptoms and more of the challenges, that's something that with treatment, that you can then shift with treatment and then with the resilience factors to get more of that results, of being able to have more of that growth, if.

You get that help, its amazing. We can take people with years of PTSD, like we worked with many Vietnam veterans and they had PTSD symptoms, many of them for 40, 50 years or more. And I remember working with one actually. He was a veteran of the Iraq war, and I asked him about events in the war and he said, the worst day of my life was when I was given the job of cleaning the uniform of a friend of mine who'd been shot through the head by a sniper. And we had to clean his uniform up to send it back to his parents in the US with the rest of his personal effects. And he said that uniform, after being out in the iraqi sun for a few days, smelled absolutely horrible. And here I had to clean this uniform in the medic's hut and bleached to try and get rid of this bloodstains and the smell, and it smells so bad he had to run out of the hyperventilate to get enough air, run and hold his breath while he would clean it. And so again, this tremendous trauma that he called the worst day of his life.

But while we were working on this, while he was talking about this, he was using this wonderful tapping protocol that's been developed for veterans over the last 40 years or so where you actually apply pressure to acupuncture points and what happens on MRI scans is really amazing. So they have these terrible memories, and their emotional brain gets all lit up on the EEG. And then when they start to tap all of that emotion, all of that activation of the limbic system of the emotional brain just goes away. And the calm, they remember the event. They no longer are emotionally triggered by the event. And so he just got calmer and calmer and calmer and calmer. And a few months later, I ran into the same young veteran at a military conference and asked him about the event. That event, you said, was the worst day of your life, when you had to clean the uniform of your friend and the whole experience.

And he said, oh, that wasn't the worst day of my life. That was an act of love, because I'm glad I was the one assigned to clean the uniform. I knew him. I knew who he lost. And I did it with such appreciation for him. And I so felt good about setting that uniform back off to his family. So now he's gone from seeing this as the worst day of his life to an act of love. Radical shift in thinking.

That's resilience. And it can happen that quickly in one session, two sessions in our guidelines for the veterans administration, ten sessions or less to erase most of the symptoms of PTSD in most veterans. So, yes, we can recover. There are those two paths, and it doesn't have to take us, like, six months or ten years of therapy or 10,000 hours. We can learn to reshape the way our brain processes information very, very quickly.

Yes. And it really sounds like with the tapping at that physical piece of it to integrate things is a really beneficial aspect of that as well. Do you think that's really made a difference with processing trauma?

Yeah. When you watch those EEG scans on the monitor, when people are processing trauma. So it might be a car crash, might be a terrible divorce, might be losing a loved one, might be losing a job. And you see that emotional brain is all lit up on the screen, and they start to tap to simple tapping on these acupuncture points on their bodies. And there are. There's just 13 of them. There aren't a whole lot of difficult routines to memorize. You just tap on these.

But you have to be really thinking about the trauma at the same time. It's called exposure. You're remembering it lighting up those neural pathways. What you're then doing is you're calming them all down with this soothing signal of tapping. And then the body gets calm while remembering the bad thing. So when you remember the bad thing later, six months or a year from now, you recall it still, it just no longer has that emotional charge behind it, that negative charge that it carried earlier. So, yeah, it's the tapping that reduces that emotion.

That's wonderful. I had somebody else that was on my podcast to talk about tapping. And when she was explaining to me, it felt to me like she was like, you're going to get a massage and loosening up the muscle and that this is the way of like, massaging the brain. You can't actually touch the brain, but the tapping is what's actually loosening the brain to be able to kind of release those pieces so it doesn't hold it so tight and to kind of let go of those pieces. So I love that that's been found, that that's the resource that folks are able to use to be able to get to that next phase to release those pieces.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm so glad we have these therapy. We have, we have meditation now. We have eft tapping. We have mindfulness. We have many, many good therapies now that we didnt really have or have any research on. If you go back 30, 40, 50, 60 years, one of my friends was talking to me the other day.

He says, I meditate, I tap. My parents, they just suffered. Yes, to suffer, yes.

They were just taught to push everything down and to pretend that didnt exist and to just put things away instead of being able to find a way to work through it and process and get to the other side of it.

Deny, dissociate.

Yes, yes. Yeah. Didn't realize that those weren't necessarily effective strategies.

Right, right.

Yes. The follow up from doing those pieces. And so in your book, the Bliss Brain, does it really talk about how to apply some of these pieces and work through some of this, or does it just explain the science behind it?

What it does is it makes the analogy of addiction. And one of the interesting things is I asked myself, how can I be so high when I just lost everything? And what I began to look into was a particular molecule called anandamide. And anandamide is what's part of what's called the endocannabinoid system in our bodies. We have all these natural cannabinoids that our bodies produce. And anandamide is one of the most important ones. And it has the same molecular structure as THC, which is the active molecule in marijuana. It docks with the same receptor sites in the brain. And so when you meditate and you have this explosion of anandamide in your brain, it's like having smoked marijuana or had a big dose of marijuana.

But not only marijuana. Another molecule we find rises in the brains and meditators is dopamine. And dopamine is active in heroin and cocaine addiction. We find this big rise in serotonin. Serotonin has the same chemical structure as psilocybin. Magic mushrooms. Why do magic mushrooms work? They're docking with the serotonin receptors in your brain, and you don't need all these drugs. People think you need all this external pharmacology to affect your brain.

In the brains of meditators, dopamine rises up to 60%, 5%. We have these endocannabinoid receptors in various parts of the brain, in the heart and the gut. And so you're having these wonderful flushes of pleasure, and you look at some of these mystics. I mean, look at Ramakrishna, photographs from Ramakrishna, from the late 18 hundreds, or look at a painting of St. Francis of Assisi, or look at some of the other Thomas Mertons from the modern saints, Gangaji. They look stoned. And I thought, why do they look stoned? It's because they are. They're stoned on their own serotonin.

Adopt an anandamide and oxytocin and all these other great drugs. So you ask people about drug experiences, and what you'll find with seasoned meditators is they'll say, oh, yeah, I tried them, but they got me 75% of the way that I get in meditation every day anyway. So if you generate all of these wonderful pleasure neurotransmitters endogenously inside your own body, you don't need to go try to find them out there, because you're already generating them internally. So I wrote bliss brain to explain to people what these chemicals are, why you feel so good. Why do I feel just on top of the world? Why do I feel so creative? In one study, the researchers found that there was a twofold increase in creativity after you did this. Another study looked at resilience, dramatic increase in the neural circuits of resilience after meditation, after tapping, after other stress reduction techniques. So we have so much inner potential that we have inside of us that is untapped. And occasionally you may need to go to your doctor or go take some kind of a drug, but the potential of your own internal pharmacopoeia, your own internal pharmacy, is so enormous.

One psychiatrist I know, two of her siblings committed suicide. Depression runs the whole family. Her mother was depressed, her father was depressed. Two of her brothers commit suicide. She says, I just exercise. She's realized that exercise generates all these endorphins. And so her drug, her endorphins don't come from a bottle. They come from a natural source like exercise.

You can use all of these wonderful feel good techniques to raise yourself to these states of ecstasy without any kind of chemical intervention at all.

So with the research on it, is there a certain amount of time or certain type of meditation, or is there a certain, like, what are the parameters? Because I love that people have the tools inside themselves to be able to reach these states and to be able to do this. And yet we all tend to look externally. We go out to try to find things to fix instead of recognizing the power that we have and the abilities that we have to take care of ourselves and to address these things within. And sometimes it's like, but how do I do this? And how much do I need to give to this and understanding that? So how, what are the parameters? Do we know?

We do? And in Bliss Brain, I brought the lens of neuroscience, especially MRI studies, to meditation. And I asked, what's effective? And it turns out that a lot of the stuff that people do is ineffective. And, like, when I learned to meditate when I was 15 years old, the meditation master said, close your eyes and still your mind. And I thought, okay, well, I can do number one. I certainly closed my eyes, still my mind. Evolution designed our minds and our brains to be active. I mean, there's a bird feeder outside my office window over here. And the birds land on the feeder, and then they peck at the feet, and they look up, they look down, they look to the side, they peck the feed, feed together, they look around, peck feet, look around.

Why are they looking around their minds? They are not doing mindful eating. The tension is completely out there because there's a hawk that circles up ahead. And if you lose yourself in enjoyment of the bird seed, the hawks going to swoop down in a minute actually does capture a bird every once in a while. And there's a cat that stalks down on the ground, sometimes jumps up and tries to catch the birds. So the mindful bird becomes a meal for somebody else. And so our brains evolve to be very, very busy, very, very inattentive to what we're doing right now, always looking out for the next threat, the next opportunity. And so you constantly. Ominous.

So meditation styles that try and get you to do that usually aren't very effective. Ones that are effective, use physiology, use biology, use breathing, for example. Slow your breathing down. And we recommend, I developed this method called eco meditation, super simple, but all physiology, like a slow breathing rhythm of 6 seconds per breath, 6 seconds per out breath, that one thing will shift you into heart coherence. Your heart beats become coherent when you're breathing, 6 seconds in, 6 seconds out, that automatically trains your brain, your brain waves become coherent, and it's purely physiological. So the mental meditations tend to be harder and less effective. The biological ones are the easier ones.

Oh, that's good information, and so good to hear from people that are having a hard time finding that focus, and especially people who have been through trauma, like we have our, one of the podcasts in our network is the dog tag diaries, which is telling the stories of women in the military. And so as they're sharing their stories, a lot of it's talking about coming back from being overseas, and you're driving down the road looking for animals on the side of the road, because that's what you were trained in Iraq to look for if there was a bomb inside the animal on the side of the road. And so when you're on all the time with your brain like that for survival, it's hard to focus and to be able to do other things. And so you're getting your brain to be able to even survive in your day to day when your life is changing for folks that have been in the military, because that's a lot of what you've worked with is like a big shift. And so once you've gone through traumas, to be able to get your brain to not be so turned on, to not be looking for the hawk in the sky and the cats on the ground, for the bird.

Yeah, that's true.

It's a big shift. Yeah. So knowing that you can use your body and your body rhythms to help you do that, is such a great awareness. And you actually have a tool, correct, that you have from your website for people to be able to use towards that, right?

Yeah. I developed eco meditation because it was hard for me to meditate, but I could do it if I used physiological tools. So, ecomeditation is very simple, takes five minutes to do the breathing, relax certain muscles, do certain self hypnosis, very simple self hypnosis routines. And so we add these, there are actually five or six of these evidence based methods together, which together form eco meditation. And people just calm down right away. And what I try and encourage them to do is use eco meditation every day for just 30 days. And our research has shown that if they keep on doing it for even, usually much less time, a week, maybe two weeks, they get hooked. And why are they hooked? Well, they're getting all this delicious psilocybin, serotonin in their brain, dopamine, heroin, and cocaine in their brains.

They're getting all mushrooms are getting THC, they're getting all these wonderful neurochemicals and neurotransmitters. One lady, I ran into a workshop, and she said, I took your 30 day challenge. I said, I'm gonna meditate every single day. No excuses for 30 days. I said, that's wonderful. And what day are you on right now? She said, I am on day 147.

And she was still counting. Still counting. That is amazing. That is amazing. And when you find something that you can integrate, that simple, that works, that makes such a big difference, because sometimes people hear meditation and they hear 30 minutes, 60 minutes, and they hear this and they try it once, they're like, okay, this is too much. So they don't keep doing it.

Yeah, no, it's worth doing. And the ecommeditation tracks are available free online. They are between 15 and 20 minutes long. We find that's the ideal state. So about five minutes to enter that deep state and then a few minutes in the deep state. But then, Shawna, they always end with grounding, because what happens is people start get way, way out there after a while. I mean, the first time, you'll feel peaceful, you'll feel calm, you'll feel good in your body, but do it for a few weeks, and you're starting to get into a really elevated state. And so all my recent research the last ten years or so has focused on these elevated states that people get into.

The great saints, the great mystics, where Rumi wrote his poetry from, and Hildegard of bingen had her revelations from. So these elevated states start to happen after a while, and you can get really out there. So what has to happen is that you have to learn to ground and bring that experience down to earth. If you don't, then you aren't going to be able to be effective in your daily work. So we have people ground in the last, like, three minutes of ecommitation track, and that way they can go out and they can drive and they can change the kids diaper, and they can do their work and everything else. And we did one study recently being published in a medical journal now, and we looked at what happens to their elite level of productivity when they do this for a month. Because we said, are they now going so far out there in meditation? Are they feeling so good that they aren't really able to engage with their work, family, everyday pursuits. We found just the opposite.

We found that after 30 days, they were 20% more productive at home and work than they were before. So they actually got about a day extra in every week now of time available to them because they're so much more creative and productive than they were before. So it has a positive effect on your daily life and productivity.

That's incredible. I think everybody listening is like, I could take that. I could use that. That's exactly what I need more of in my life, is, is more of those good chemicals and my brain functioning better. And to be able to have more opening and more of those pieces. And I feel like focus is something that everyone I talk to has a harder time having. And it seems like opening up your brain to allow these chemicals in and bathing those chemicals, that's something that it invites in, and it trains your brain to be able to do more of those things, I would think.

Yeah, yeah. In fact, what we see in these tibetan monks, for example, who've been meditating for 10,000 hours or more, is this part of the brain that is highly engaged and lit up on an MRI. When you're focused, when you're highly focused, they'll sit there and do breathing, and they'll focus on a mantra, they'll focus on a Yantra, on an image, and they'll do it for an hour, or they'll even do it for 4 hours for some of them. And this part of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex. And the orbitofrontal cortex is highly active in these monks. And its actually big. Theyve worked this thing out so much over the last 10,000 hours that theyve got having gigantic muscles for attention in your brain. And so it develops four brain circuits.

We've been studying now the attention networks. One of them, the self observation network, is one of the others. People tend to be very self focused, very narcissistic, and worried about me and mine, my body, my money, my love life, my career, all of these things that really focused on my, my, mine, mine, mine. The monks are not focused on mine. They're focused on love. They're focused on global well being. They're focused on the all it is, they're focused on the great cycle of life in the universe. And so that is a transcendent focus.

And so the part of the brain that processes the self is quiet in those monks. Its really active in most of us. In people with major depressive disorder, its highly active. All they think about is themselves. They have very little mind share available for other people for compassion, for altruism, for empathy. And in these monks and nuns, oh, I just love seeing MRI scans of their brains because that network, its a network that handles a lot of different emotions. And even though we label them differently in terms of outer emotional style, theyre all mediated by the same brain region. And their compassion, their joy, their gratitude, their altruism, ecstasy, all of these are handled by the same brain region.

And that brain region is just lit up. And we found in one study I did with some colleagues of people doing eco meditation for a month, we compared them to another control group, and we found that after a month, that brain region was completely lit up in these people just doing this for a month. And their structure of their brains, their literal physical structure of their brains began to change with that self obsessed part of the brain just quieting down. And that compassion area, gratitude area being brightly lit up in everyday life. They weren't even meditating after a month. They wouldn't have to meditate to do that. They were able to enter those states just in normal states of consciousness, you can shift your brain activity really quickly. Does not take 10,000 hours.

But in these expert meditators, the effect is really pronounced. And attention is one of those key circuits.

Yeah. So it's easier to measure when someone's been doing it to that extent than for people that are just starting out. So when you went through your experience with the wildfires, were you in a place that you just automatically went to meditation and went to those skills? Or was it hard to prioritize it and to integrate that back into your life at a time when you'd lost everything and things are really challenging.

The first day was when we were 3 miles away. We knew we were safe. First of all, we drove to my ex wife's house because we wanted to make sure that she and her family were awake and they weren't there. We went in through the side door. We can get into their house easily. And no one was there in the house. So I then realized everyone in her neighborhood was sleeping. And so I thought, I need to blow my horn and wake them up because the fire is heading this way.

And I thought, I'm a really polite person. I don't lean on the horn at 02:00 a.m. in the morning. Nobody in this neighborhood leans on the horn at 02:00 a.m. in the morning. And I thought, Dawson, get over yourself. Lean on the horn. So I just blow my horn like crazy.

And first of all, one neighbor stumbled out of his bed and showed up and holding his cap, had his pajamas on, and said, there's a fire coming here. And then the whole neighborhood woke up and began to started evacuating. So that neighborhood, the fire never did reach that neighborhood, but everyone did get out. So we then drove to a friend's house about 15, 20 miles away. And we then drove with our friends. Later on, they were evacuated as well. And so we then drove about 50 miles away to the coast, northern California coast. And that first day, like we'd done this all during the night, that we spent the first day there.

The sunset. It was a weird sunset because there's so much ash in the air. Looked like a blood red sun, weird colored sun setting over the ocean. And we were really disoriented. We were listening to the news. There was not a lot of news coming out because all of the news transmission facilities had been destroyed. No one knew it was going on, so it was very disorienting. The next morning, though, we woke up and we looked at our phones, and a friend of ours had snuck in past the national guard and taken a photograph of our house.

And it showed a concrete slab, a chimney sticking up and ashes. And that was it. That was all at the house. The office. We had an office building. It was just a coffee slab, ash on top. And so we realized that everything we had both in our office and our home was gone. So we had those images in our mind.

But then I said, it's time to meditate right now. So right then we closed our eyes. And as we did that, we felt ourselves drop back into our bodies. We've been kind of disembodied, which is dissociation is really useful. If you're being beaten or abused or hurt or in a combat zone. Go dissociate. Don't be there. Not attractive to be there in your body, but once you're done, you need to come back.

And so we came back then 48 hours after the fire. And that's when we began to make plans, think about things, what to do next. And so we were able to move into resilience very, very quickly. Does that mean everything got better magically? Well, no, it did not. But we had that inner stable practice, and we had that all the way through. So every morning I'd wake up, and I'd been meditating 25 years every day before that. Once you get into this state, you wake up in the morning and you can't think of anything else you want your dose of dopamine and serotonin and anandamide. So you don't sit there and you just experience this bliss.

And then you push reel yourself in, ground yourself, and then you work. And then usually I work on an intensity creative project, like Im working on a new book right now. Ill do that kind of work early in the morning when your creativity is at a peak. So youll see, like, if you take one of our eco meditation courses, ill say do it in the morning, start out in the morning, condition your mind, condition your day with creativity, frame your day with positivity. And so you start your day that way that predisposes you to a much better day. And in our research, we show that if people meditate in the morning, they tend to have a much more flowing, puts you in flow throughout the day. So theres an association between flow flow states. Like, I have a dear friend, Stephen Kotler, who wrote a book called Stealing Fire with Jamie Wheal.

In that book, they talk about the flow states. I write a lot about flow states. Meditation puts you into a flow state. So you move into your work then, and you also have issues and problems and conflicts and disappointments. But you're in flow. And those people in flow that previous research are twice as creative. So you have all these inner imaginal resources to bring to bear on those problems, and you become much more productive. And again, your life is much better.

Is it perfect? I wish I could promise it is. But, Shawna, I think we know we don't ever quite get there.

Yes. No, that's really important for people to realize, because I think that a lot of times folks are looking for a magic bullet or they see other people in their experiences and think that it's a magic bullet, that life is really great. And I really try to do that balance on my podcast of making it clear that life happens and things happen and how you approach it and your perspective is such an important thing to bring to it. But having these tools, you can integrate that build that resilience, that build your ability to cope with things when they happen, is what you can do. And you can definitely set yourself up for opportunity and for things and have these perspectives and do that for yourself. But life happens. Wildfires happen, wars happen, things happen, and you really can't prevent them. I know that my life, I've been shocked at some of the things that come out of left field unexpected.

Yeah.

But the best you can do is to build practices and have tools in your toolbox to kind of help yourself be able to roll with those things and do whats best for you.

Try. And its great word from personal growth and psychology for that, which is called urgency. You have a sense of urgency. You have a sense that I can make a difference in this. So this bad thing happened. The economy went bad, and Im at the mercy of the economy. My business has gone down the tubes. What do I do? And do you have a sense of agency about that? One of the stories I tell in Bliss Brain is of during COVID there were a lot of upheavals for various businesses.

And one of the things that happened was that all the restaurants got shut down. People weren't allowed to gather in public places. And I remember in the town I was living in back then, there was a favorite pub. And I walked by the pub one day and there was a sign on the front door of the pub that said, I looked in the window and the chairs were all up on the tables. The pub had been closed for a couple of months, and they said, we decided to shut our doors for good. It's been a wonderful 31 years, but we made it through two recessions. This is too much for us. We're shutting down our business.

It's been nice knowing you. It was just sad, sad to read that note. This person just shut down the business for good when faced with the economic cataclysm of having the dining rooms closed. But a week or so after that, I was looking for takeout food because my wife and I were getting a little bit sick of our own cooking after a few months of lockdown. So I ordered some barbecue and went to the barbecue place and walked up there. And now their dining rooms also shut down. Tables on top of the chairs, nobody in there. But they put a table in front of the restaurant main door, and that's where you came.

And we'll be all at masks on. And they bagged up your order, and you just picked up your bag and took it with you, paid it, paid in and left. So we got our takeout, and a few months later, because we get barbecue there pretty often, I talked to the owner and she said, we're doing so well. And she said, we've had to hire all of our waitstaff because the dining room's still closed as sous chefs prep cooks, because we're so busy with our takeout barbecue business. And then all the dining rooms were allowed to reopen in 2021 or whatever it was. And guess what? She then had two businesses. She had the thriving takeout business and the dining room. So mindset the one person had this same issue of the all the restaurants being closed and quit.

The second person said, I'm going to find a way out of this. And wound up having two businesses for the price of one.

Yes.

So it's our consciousness. We think it's happening out there. We think it's the recession, the government, the economy, all the stuff it is here. This is what makes all the difference. And so that's where we have to focus.

Yes. That is incredible. I definitely appreciate that. And each of our episodes, we always do a conversation around, we call it the self maintenance minute, but it sounds like really, your self maintenance is prioritizing, doing meditation on a regular basis as your resilience. Do you have anything else that you regularly do for self maintenance or self care in your life?

Yeah, we have to pay attention to all the dimensions of our being. So what I do personally is just before we began to record here, I was mountain biking, and I mountain bike usually once a day, maybe twice a day. Sometimes I paddleboard, I play pickleball, I do all kinds of things. And I look at other people in my demographic, most of whom are retired, and some of them are highly active, super healthy. Others are just like rolling downhill. So being physically active is really, really important. Food just, you don't have to eat like, super picky, but bean food, organic food, high quality food is really important. Lots of fluids is important.

Supplements are important, but not excessively. We get a lot of supplements from high quality food. And then your body may need more supplementation of magnesium or some other substance. And a doctor, a nutritionist, a functional medicine doctor can help you with that. So make sure you put all of those pillars of your life in place. Relationships just seek out people who nurture you. And honestly, I feel a little bit harsh saying this, but I will say it anyway. Avoid people who don't.

Avoid people who don't nurture. My wife used to have all these friendships and she'd lament, oh, I'm not friends with this person anymore. I'd say, well, darling, that was a pretty negative person, and I'm rather glad she's not hanging around anymore. So there are people who, even in your family, if they're family members, you may have to see them once in a while, but minimize your contact with them. So relationships are so important. Nurture good ones. My wife and I were hugging and kissing the other day and just going out to get groceries, and one of our house guests was like, well, why are you hugging and kissing like you're leaving for a long voyage when all she's doing is going out to the grocery store. It's like, well, I don't know when I'll see her again.

Maybe she'll come back. Maybe she won't. Who knows? So get those hugs and kisses in now while you can. So with our children, our grandchildren, we have a lot of contact like this. And so nurturing human touch is so important. Even when you're alone. You can do what I'm doing right now. It's called the butterfly hug.

We have many certified practitioners on our website and they'll have you do this, just a little exercise but it produces profound shifts in your brain just to give yourself a hug and hold yourself, stroke yourself or tap on yourself. So human touch, loving yourself and then hooking up with that transcendent source of life in the universe. The universe is full of love, full of kindness, full of generosity, full of compassion. And when you meditate and hook up with that, your life overflows with it. So you want a life that isn't just a little bit good. You want a life where you're just screaming and yelling with joy and dancing around the room on a daily basis. I mean, hardly a single day goes by with my wife and I to grab each other sometime during the day and just dance. Put on some loud music and dance around the house.

Why not? Who says I'm not allowed to do that?

That is marvelous. You are doing things right, Dawson. You're absolutely doing things right. And I love that you have a partner and your wife that can enjoy that and be at that level with you. That is marvelous. I love everything you just shared.

So nurture yourself in all those ways.

Yes, it's very, very important because you are the person forming this world for yourself and living this life. And you're the one that can take that agency to be able to make it the life you want to live. And those are the ways that you can enhance it? Most definitely, yes.

They're all out of your control. They're all free. I mean, none of this is. Yes, it's all the stuff you just choose to do. And you can make that choice, have that agency and then just do those things. So there are choices you make.

Yes, absolutely. And you did mention, so dawsongift.com is where folks can go to get that meditation that you mentioned, correct?

Dawsongift.com is where you get the free meditation and also the free stress reduction tapping manual.

Oh, wonderful. That is very helpful. So they'll have both of those resources from that one website that is immensely helpful. Where else is the best way? You have a podcast so folks can listen to you on a regular basis as well? Do you want to tell them about that?

Yeah. I have a podcast called High Energy Health where I interview all kinds of people in the health field, so that's a source of inspiration. I also teach both virtually and I also teach in person at places like omega. We have features at Kripalu, Essel, and other teaching institutions so you can find all of those if you go to dawsongift.com, then click on events and you'll see all of our teachers worldwide where they are, where they are teaching now. So you take a live class in person or virtually. We also have hundreds of people that are trained as clinical EFT certified practitioners and they are so good, just amazing human beings. They can go there and find our practitioners and so we recommend you work on self help for the easy stuff. If you're working on trauma or big life issues, get a practitioner and work with them.

But all of that's accessible through dawsongift.com.

That's wonderful. So it's great to have one place to go to to be able to find the way to all of the other pieces so that everyone can get hooked up and connected to all of that. This has been such a valuable conversation. I value everything you shared with us and I really feel like people are going to be able to take away the concept of the importance of meditation, the importance of doing this for themselves and what they can release in their brain and in their lives when they do that by simply integrating this. Thank you.

Yeah, it's been a joy. Thank you for having me.

Yes, thank you so much, Dawson, thank you for joining us today. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Be sure to jump on over to Instagram and follow us at The Grit Show. And if you aren't already following Authentic Connections Podcast Network at 37 by 27, you should definitely be doing that as well. Don't forget, you are the only one of you that this world has got and that means something. I'll be here next Tuesday. I hope you are too.