Tapping Into Bliss: Harnessing EFT with Dawson Church

Embark on an extraordinary exploration of the mind with energy psychology pioneer Dawson Church and discover the transformative effects of EFT Tapping. Our conversation unveils the profound impact this practice has on stress and trauma, offering hope and healing, especially for veterans. Dawson's insights into the default mode network (DMN) reveal how our brains can become our own obstacles and how practices like meditation and EFT can liberate us from negative thought patterns, leading to a state known as Bliss Brain.

Dawson Church is an award-winning author whose best-selling book, The Genie in Your Genes, has been hailed by reviewers as a breakthrough in our understanding of the link between emotions and genetics. His follow-up title, Mind to Matter, reviews the science of peak mental states. 

He founded the National Institute for Integrative Healthcare to study and implement promising evidence-based psychological and medical techniques. His groundbreaking research has been published in prestigious scientific journals. 

He is the editor of Energy Psychology: Theory, Research, & Treatment, a peer-reviewed professional journal and a science blogger for the Huffington Post. He shares how to apply the breakthroughs of energy psychology to health and athletic performance through EFT Universe, one of the largest alternative sites on the web. 

How to get in touch:

https://dawsonchurch.com/
https://eftuniverse.com/get-your-free-gifts/

Dana’s info:
https://www.djsfitnessevolution.com/
http://www.djfetriathlonseries.com

Podcast Disclaimer:

The Pain-Free Podcast is presented solely for general information, education, and entertainment purposes. Any information presented in this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional diagnosis. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from this podcast or website is at the user’s own risk. As always, users should not disregard or delay obtaining medical advice for any medical or mental health condition that they may have and should seek the assistance of their healthcare professionals for any such conditions.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:05

Welcome to the Pain-Free Athlete Podcast. I'm your host, dana Jones. I am a certified personal trainer, and I'm here to help you achieve your fitness goals without pain. In each episode, I'll share tips and strategies that will help you stay safe and pain-free while you're working out. I'll also interview experts in the field of fitness and pain management. So if you're ready to learn how to stay active and pain-free, then subscribe to the Pain-Free Athlete Podcast today. Hi everyone and welcome to the Pain-Free Athlete Podcast. I'm your host, dana Jones, and I am here with a very special guest, dawson Church, and welcome to the show.

Speaker 2: 0:46

Dana, so good to be here. Hard way to share it with you today.

Speaker 1: 0:51

Thank you. You know, it's kind of neat because I'm going to go back and talk about how. So, dawson, I don't know what you don't do. You do all kinds of things like neurologically based, and you are an author. You are a, I guess, an instructor right, because you have your EFT universe with your certifications for EFT. Um, you have done amazing work with veterans. Um, your work spans um kind of the globe, I mean, at this point it's it's pretty amazing and I know for me, um, you know why I wanted you to come on the show was um tapping has always kind of played in the background of my life and, um, I first was kind of introduced to it through Gary Craig because he had, I don't know, it was like a little PDF that he had written way back when, and my father, who is a military veteran and I'm a military veteran and we were talking about the work that he had done with Vietnam veterans and just dealing with, I think it was a couple of the stories he shared was like PTSD with, you know, loud noises and going into crowded spaces, and he was, I believe, in California as well, because, or he did some stuff here, I felt like he was in California and you know through my research I was like where you know who does EFT around here and then your name pops up and of course I see you on.

Speaker 1: 2:30

You know all the EFT stuff with Jessica Ortner and Nick Ortner and don't worry, I'll put all the information in the show notes for those of you who may not know about all these people that are doing good things.

Speaker 2: 2:52

But I guess my first question that kind of get us started is like how did you come into this work and what has it done to kind of alter who you are? Oh, good question. And I came into it the way many of us do, through my own personal journey in suffering pain, dislocation, disorientation, feeling of lack of connection. And when I was a child 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 years old I just felt as though I just didn't fit in, and so by the time I was like 12, 13, I was really actively thinking about suicide much of the time and I realized I needed to do something to to fix myself. So I I joined a spiritual community and for many, many years I um, worked during the day, I studied the world's great traditions, great philosophies of the world and uh, and was in a community with many other people, did organic gardening, and we had these values and we had these spiritual studies. And what I came to realize after a while is we weren't getting a whole lot happier. So I turned to psychology. I thought well, you know, spirituality isn't moving the needle for me. It must be psychology study of the mind. Let's read Freud and Jung and figure out what those guys have. To me must be psychology study of the mind. Let's read Freud and Jung and figure out what those guys have to say and all those great pioneers of 20th century psychology.

Speaker 2: 4:11

And I found that I was able to get a little bit happier and deal with some of my problems. And I especially got into a school called Gestalt therapy, which has to do with being in the present moment and it's a lot like Buddhism in some ways. So I did that and I saw people start to get better. I was getting a little bit better. Then, when I was about 45 years old, I discovered energy psychology and also being to meditate every day, and that made a huge difference. With energy psychology, with EFT tapping, I found that I was able to get happening. I found that I was able to get through, move ahead in areas of my life of challenge much faster than I ever had with Gestalt therapy. Things that had taken me like a decade to get some progress in Gestalt therapy I was resolving them in just a couple of sessions with EFT. I couldn't believe how incredibly effective it was. So I thought, well, I don't want to know just that it's effective for me subjectively. I want to figure out why it is this good and what it does for people objectively. And so I turned to science. We had to do clinical trials. I got together with a whole group of really talented researchers and we did our first, fairly small-scale studies, but the biggest one I did before.

Speaker 2: 5:28

2010 involved 216 healthcare workers and they were doing a one-day EFT workshop either with Gary Craig or me or a couple of other trainers. And so between 2007 and 2009, we collected data, and these were chiropractors and doctors and nurses and therapists. 2009, we collected data and these were chiropractors and doctors and nurses and therapists, and we looked at their levels of anxiety, depression, stress, cravings before and after just a day of EFT, a one-day EFT workshop. And when the results came back from the University of Arizona, which was doing the data analysis, dana, I was completely flabbergasted because we saw results in those healthcare workers that were completely unprecedented in the history of psychology. We saw, on average, a 45% drop in anxiety and depression in that one day, and when we tested them again six months later, they had maintained all of the gains they'd made in that one-day experience. So that was a real groundbreaking experience for me around 2007.

Speaker 2: 6:34

And then I said I've got to get this into the VA. I've got to get this into where people are suffering, going to get it into Kaiser Permanente, the National Health Service in Britain, and so I really focused on institutionalizing EFT. I'm not an insider, I don't work for a hospital system, but I really focused on helping people who can do that, and now it's approved by the VA. It's in the National Health Service, kaiser Permanente. If you're a patient there, go on their website, type in EFT. They'll give you instructions on how to tap. So it's wonderful and it's now reaching millions of people. We estimate that over 40 million people worldwide are tapping and then really shifting their stress. So it began with my own personal pain, but it became a big mission for me and it's been a really gratifying trajectory to see so many people now using EFT.

Speaker 1: 7:26

That's, that's incredible and you know it's. I remember I think it was around. Was it 2010 when the the movie came out? That's right.

Speaker 1: 7:38

Yeah, and I believe Nick Polizzi lived in Marin County and I know I had spoken to him because I don't know how it popped up, but I saw it and I thought this would be perfect for my students and at the time I was a continuation high school teacher and you know, when you're dealing with students like that, they're often misunderstood, because you know, just like anybody else, right, they're walking into the room and you have, just like anybody else, right, they're walking into the room and you have no idea what they've been through and you know the experiences they had and how that shapes who they are and a lot of their behaviors. And he sent me a copy of the DVD to watch and show the class, and so we had all sat down and we all watched it and for those of you who haven't seen it, it's on YouTube and there are 10, I believe 10 people that were brought in and everybody. I believe there was a Vietnam veteran and there was a woman who had fibromyalgia and couldn't walk and or arthritis.

Speaker 2: 8:43

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 8:44

Yeah, yeah. So there was a, there was a, and, and then, of course, the one that absolutely destroyed me was the gentleman who had lost his wife in a car accident, and, uh, it was. That was my first like I guess I get to share my feelings with my students, as I'm like trying to not sob um through the process. Um, I think the interesting thing about that, and probably about the work that you were doing, is that, as it's, I think it's a human condition to try to resist, and I believe that with EFT, it's not about resisting, right, it's more about, like I don't know, being present, right, you were talking about you know, being in the now, like being present through, um, the conversation, you know, whatever it is, if you're recalling an event or whatever, and then, um, I don't know, just able to, I guess, move to a place of acceptance. I mean, is that what you have seen with the people that you've worked with?

Speaker 2: 9:49

First, acceptance, and often paradoxically, to gratitude. And I'll never forget what a cancer survivor said to me when I was interviewing her. She said cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me. And I was completely baffled, for one thing, by that statement, but what it had done was it had triggered her re-evaluating her life, her values, her health, her practices, her beliefs and making all the changes that brought her back to health.

Speaker 2: 10:20

And so these adversities can lead not just to acceptance. Accepting them is the first stage. So we aren't resisting because you know, whatever you're digging in and resisting, you are maintaining in your psyche. If you are focused on something and you wish it hadn't happened and you ruminate on that, that rumination does not change the past. It makes you unhappy in the present. You're then perpetuating those past struggles into your present day life and into your future. So that's one certain way to remain unhappy is to focus on the bad stuff of your past, and many of us are captured by especially traumatic events and we get into that loop of trauma where we can't think about anything else. In fact, our brain is built to prioritize thinking about the bad stuff A central part of our brain, it runs all the way from this part of the brain called the mid-prefrontal cortex, right behind your forehead, all the way back through an area called the precuneus.

Speaker 2: 11:20

It's like a mohawk of brain activity in the middle of your head. It's like a mohawk of brain activity in the middle of your head. That part of the brain's job is to reflect on the past and extract meaning and remember and the fear you felt when bad things happened in the past and project it into the future. And that network is called the default mode network because our brain defaults to using that network whenever we are doing anything active with our thoughts. So any bit of spare capacity the brain has, it grabs and activates the default mode network. We then move it to rumination and so your past then is carried forward into your future and your future looks a lot like your past into your future and your future looks a lot like your past.

Speaker 2: 12:03

So getting to that point of just being able to let go, being able to relax and breathe and know that that bad thing did happen in your past and know that it is not what you have to recreate in your future, is incredibly powerful. And EFT does that. It just simply removes all of the emotional triggering from those past experiences. When our emotions are calm as we think about the past, our brain then is not carrying it forward into the future and we have a chance to get our lives back and have spontaneity and just live in the moment and live the life we actually have in front of us now, without being hijacked by trauma in the past or the worry about trauma in the future. So it's acceptance, and then it's the freedom to choose, emotional freedom to say, hey, I'm going to be this kind of a person, not the person I was back then.

Speaker 1: 12:54

Now you mentioned the DMN. Did I say that? Right yeah, what is that?

Speaker 2: 13:00

Yes, Default Mode Network DMN.

Speaker 1: 13:02

And could you explain, for those who don't know, what that is?

Speaker 2: 13:06

Yeah, so it's the default mode network, called the default mode network because our brains default to using those brain regions when we're not focused on a task, and it was discovered in the mid-1990s. A lot more is known about it now than was known about it then. And it's called the default mode network because when we are doing stuff and doing stuff means anything that is task-oriented If you're driving, if you're focused on work, if you're having a conversation all of that is activating parts of the brain and the default mode network is quiet. But when you just quit all the tasks you're on, then the default mode network is quiet. But when you just quit all the tasks you're on, then the default mode network becomes active.

Speaker 2: 13:50

And in a big research project at Harvard, the researchers found that the paradox of the default mode network is that when people were doing things, even if it was work, hard work or even fairly boring work, they were actually moderately happy. When they were doing nothing, they lapsed into being unhappy. And you think that you know why would you become unhappy when you're doing nothing? Well, it's because the default mode network kicks in and you start to think about the bad stuff of the past. Now, that was just perfectly adaptive for our ancestors. They needed to think about the tiger that ate them, almost ate them yesterday, the tiger that might eat them tomorrow. That was really a perfect thing to use.

Speaker 2: 14:33

Brain capacity cycles on for our ancestors 10,000 years ago, a million years ago. Now for us, when there are no tigers around, our brains will function that way and we worry. We worry about inconsequential things. Most of the stuff we worry about is never going to happen and we do worry and we can't escape worrying. So that's the default mode network and it means that this rumination on the bad stuff of our lives drives us crazy. We take a break.

Speaker 1: 15:05

Literally.

Speaker 2: 15:06

We try to get away from it and it just consumes us. We can't get out of that trauma loop so we stay stuck there and for people with PTSD it often gets worse and worse and worse because now they're building more and more neural capacity around those neural pathways. Neurons that fire together, wire together. Now they're getting a bigger and bigger and bigger set of neural bundles that fire in response to trauma. So again, vietnam veterans, vietnam veterans in studies of boys who had a brother, and one brother went to Vietnam and the other did not, the brother who went to Vietnam has a quicker stress response, has more tissue in the stress circuits of the brain than the brother that didn't go to Vietnam. So it has a pervasive effect on our lives and it just makes us miserable until we start to meditate, tap and do all the things that extricate us from default mode network functioning.

Speaker 1: 16:00

Now does that because I notice with pain? Now does that because I notice with pain, especially with TMS, my back, and you know, is that the same kind of thing? Is that part of the brain getting activated and reminding me that I'm hurting? But when I'm having good stuff then it doesn't tell me. But then, as soon as everything quiets down, then all of a sudden I'm dying.

Speaker 2: 16:40

Yeah, exactly. So that's the other part of the brain that is engaged in opposition to the default mode network is called the task positive network. And when activity in that part of the brain rises, activity in the default mode network falls. Then focusing on a conversation, on making the tea, on sharing news, so then we're alone and the positive network becomes dormant. Then activity in the default mode network rises. That's why we become less happy when we have less to do.

Speaker 1: 17:15

So is the default network more active when we sleep.

Speaker 2: 17:21

When we sleep the brain slows way, way, way down and we move into this really interesting rehabilitation process. So the space opens up between our neurons. We have a flow of cerebrospinal fluid. It flushes out the brain. Our brains go into this very slow brainwave. Our brains go into this very slow brainwave. Normally in everyday life our brains are firing around 20 cycles per second. So our predominant brainwave is around 20, give or take a few, but 20 times a second our neurons are firing.

Speaker 2: 17:59

When we're in deep sleep that slows down to below four cycles a second. So our brain's functioning at a really slow pace. In that state all kinds of housekeeping begins. These cells called glial cells, which are the, the janitors of the brain, helps sweep all of the byproducts of metabolism out of the brain and clear the brain every every night in Alzheimer's patients. For this whole process quits working that well and so they start to have a buildup of these byproducts of cell metabolism. Beta amyloid and tau plaques build up in the brain. They eventually start to impede the functioning, the firing of neurons. So in sleep then we drop into this very slow brainwave activity. Now every hour or two our brains speed up quite a bit from that four cycles per second, firing rhythm to around eight cycles per second, and that's when we have vivid, vivid dreams. So when we're in that dreaming state we have several of these cycles, usually around five of them a night. For a few minutes our brains become a bit faster and then we're doing a ton of wiring, learning. So what your brain will be doing is, symbolically, it'll be giving you feeding you dreams, images, symbols that'll help you wire new understanding of the world and solutions to your everyday problems. When we're in deep sleep that's most of the night it's a housekeeping process where those beta amyloid plaques are being swept out, glial cells are highly active and the brain is being cleaned by that cerebral spinal fluid. So all kinds of again very powerful processes happening.

Speaker 2: 19:38

And people who don't sleep well. In veterans, for example, one of the persistent problems they report is insomnia. They can't sleep. One veteran came. We have this project called the Veteran Stress Solution, where we've been treating veterans for the last 15 years and they'll typically come and see one of our certified EFE practitioners. We'll tap with them. One veteran came to his second session and he told his therapist he said after the first session I got my first full night's sleep since Vietnam. Wow, he never slept more than two hours at a stretch before that. He fell asleep after his first session, slept a full eight hours. So it means that all kinds of other systems start to work well. Digestion, reproduction, respiration all of these things improve once you reduce your stress level through EFT, meditation Again. All these things we know are such powerful personal growth tools.

Speaker 1: 20:41

That's insane, that's amazing. What a wonderful way and what a wonderful tool. Can you explain what Bliss Brain is?

Speaker 2: 20:54

Happily, bliss Brain. So there are two kinds of personal growth that are possible. What is essential, what is desirable? And one of the ways in which psychology functions is that, for a century now, we measure conditions like anxiety and depression. And so when you go and get a battery of psychological tests, they'll give you a depression inventory, a stress inventory depression, anxiety, stress, traumatic experiences and they'll give you all these questionnaires and if you score zero on all of them, that means you're in good shape, you have no anxiety, no depression, and that's like a baseline. But what researchers began realizing a few years back is that baseline is okay, having no anxiety and depression is nice, but we aren't just meant to not be anxious and depressed, we're meant to be happy, transcendent states, and these are states where you break loose from your focus on all the things that you usually ruminate on and are focused on, and you move into these states. And in Buddhism it's called or in actually a lot of Eastern philosophy oneness, a sense of oneness with something larger than yourself. So when you meditate, when you do certain kinds of breathing, when you have time in nature, then you move into the sense of oneness with something larger than yourself. And Bliss Brain.

Speaker 2: 22:36

I wrote the book Bliss Brain because my life was upended in 2017 by one of the wildfires that swept through Northern California and it just wiped out everything we owned in a few minutes. My wife and I were dashing out as the flames were coming up to our property. We drove out and the trees above our head were catching fire. It was a nightmare and we escaped, but our house was destroyed, our office was destroyed and 5,400 homes were destroyed. That night, just a huge number of people were displaced. We went through a very difficult couple of years as we began to pull our lives back together again. So the shattering experience many people died. It was just a huge event for people in Northern California. And yet I, as a meditator for decades, I was meditating and even the day after the fire, we'd escaped to a coastal city about 100 miles away and we woke up the next morning. We looked at some photographs and realized our house was gone. And then we meditated and even the next day, I felt such a sense of inner peace around the fire, around losing everything, even a day later. So it was powerful to do that, as I meditated every single day off the fire.

Speaker 2: 24:01

In the year that ensued. A lot of other bad things happened. We lost all of our savings because our business went down. I have an operation actually I have two operations. All kinds of seemingly adverse life experiences happened in the year after the fire.

Speaker 2: 24:21

I meditated every morning and, dana, I found myself in ecstasy. I would just sit there in in meditation. I have no money, our retirement savings have been exhausted and I'd be completely happy. And I think I thought what is this? And I began to read about molecules like anandamide, also known as the bliss molecule, that flood the brains of meditators and I realized that I was experiencing not just regular happiness but bliss.

Speaker 2: 24:51

And so when you look at studies of meditators who've spent many, many hours in meditation and have a regular practice and they're doing an effective form of meditation, what you find is they are reaching levels of bliss for which we in Western society don't even have names. We don't even have words to describe these. You have to resort to Sanskrit. Like our regular kind of happiness in the Western world is regarded as the lowest level of happiness in the Eastern traditions. Far above that, you have another plane of happiness called Vishoka, or sorrowless joy, and then you keep on going up past that you reach Ananda absolute ecstasy. So there are these ecstatic experiences where you tune into the all that is and you find your whole mind and life are so filled with compassion, peace, love, joy, gratitude, awe. You're awed to be breathing, you're awed to have a body, you're awed to be alive, and so you feel this immense sense of just positive emotion with every meditation.

Speaker 2: 26:02

And so I began to research those states, and what we found is that people are capable of absolutely startling levels of ecstasy if they have a regular, effective meditation practice. So that's the second thing. You aren't just at baseline now. Baseline is having no anxiety, no depression, no traumatic stress. That's great to be at baseline, but that's just like being on this ground level. There is a mountaintop out there and when you're at the mountaintop and experiencing these peak states, even when your house burns down and you go under financially and you're sick, you're in ecstasy. So I want to write a book about that. It's called this Brain. It recounts this whole cycle of events and also all the science behind this and how we can attain these kinds of peak states you know, do I really need to sit there for three hours?

Speaker 1: 27:12

you know, or only Buddhist monks are capable of, you know, reaching this state. And so what are your thoughts or comments about when you run into people who say, like you know, no, that's not for me, I don't want to do that, and you know, because it's just too much time and I don't have time. Too much time I don't have to do that, and you know, because it's just too much time and I don't have time.

Speaker 2: 27:27

Too much time. I don't have time. So I've been collecting data about productivity and we've always known that people who meditate get happy. We've now been able to quantify in research just how happy they get. They get way happier than the average person. But the criticism has been that, okay, well, you're happy and you're in this elevated state that isn't doing a darn thing for your family, your community, your productivity, the rest of the world. So I just finished a study which is being published in a peer-reviewed journal in the next few months, and we measured productivity. We said how productive are these people in the workplace, in their families, when they go to their job, when they go to school, when they take care of their children, when they take care of the people in their community? And what we found was that people doing meditation effectively I say effectively because most kinds of meditation that people try are ineffective, they don't really work.

Speaker 2: 28:29

This brain is very clear in separating out the kinds of meditative practices that really move the needle in terms of MRI and EEG studies. So, effective meditation we found that that people who meditate effectively for one month have a 20% rise in productivity. That's like getting an extra day a week of your life to play, to work, to create, to do whatever you want. So if I offered you one extra day a week of productivity and all you have to do is spend half an hour every morning to do that, so here you're, spending three and a half hours a week, you're getting 24 extra hours. I mean, the math is just compelling. So that study is showing that that argument doesn't hold water. People who meditate become more productive than those that don't and in terms of time, become more productive than those that don't. And in terms of time, you need to give it a little bit of time. In various clinical trials they try to see what the minimum effective dose is, and there are some that test, say, an 8-minute meditation, a 12-minute meditation, and they are effective. My feeling is the sweet spot is around 20 or 30 minutes, and what's going to happen after a while is that you're going to start to feel incredibly good because you're getting a whole slew of pleasure-inducing neurochemicals flooding your brain in that meditation, and one of those is I mentioned earlier anandamide, the bliss molecule molecule, and another one is serotonin. And, for example, there's a lot of psychotic consistent therapy going on right now which is being really effective, and psilocybin. Magic mushrooms have the same chemical composition as serotonin. Psilocybin essentially is mushroom serotonin, so so they have the same effect on. They dock with the same receptors in your brain as your body's own natural serotonin does Meditators have a big rise in serotonin.

Speaker 2: 30:35

Another one is dopamine. Dopamine is part of our reward system, very active in smoking, chocolate, heroin, cocaine all recruits the dopamine reward system. Heroin, cocaine all recruits the dopamine reward system. When you meditate effectively, you can have a 65% rise in dopamine. Now you're getting a whole slug of a psilocybin-like substance in your brain, a whole slug of a heroin-like substance in your brain. You're getting anandamide. You're getting beta-endorphins.

Speaker 2: 31:04

After the first few minutes of meditation you're high as a kite. You are absolutely blissed out, like a druggie. I mean literally. You're like consuming all these brain drugs and you feel so good and all you've done is meditated and this is all being produced by your own body. There's no danger of an overdose. You can't make too much of it. It's all in a very specific ratio that works for your unique brain.

Speaker 2: 31:30

You start to feel super good and so after we found, after just a few days off and off, the very first experience, people so love the meditation. There's absolutely no coercion or reminder required for them to keep on doing it day after day after day, because who wouldn't want to feel high every morning for half an hour? So people tend to come back over and over and over again. They start to meditate. They feel like wonderful. They then have no hesitation doing it again the next day and the next day.

Speaker 2: 32:00

One woman I talked to at a conference she said because I challenge people to meditate for 30 days, every single day, and see what happens. So she took my 30 day meditation challenge and I said I'm so glad you committed to that 30 day challenge, like out of curiosity. I asked her what day are you on right now? She said oh, I'm on day 147. Okay, so she is an addict. It is just loving that feeling of joy, of Ananda, of bliss in her brain, in her body, every day. There's no way she's ever gonna stop for as long as she lives. So try, you'll like it.

Speaker 1: 32:45

Now I've. I've done because, associated with your book, you have resources, and so I've done a couple of the meditations and I think the interesting piece because I also, you know, every night before I go to bed, I'll, I'll settle down and I'll, you know, put I'll use a insight timer and I'll find something, you know, whether it's binaural beats or a yoga nidra or whatever. You know different things the interesting piece and I do, I did yours in the morning, and sometimes this happens is that even if I do something different, I'll fall asleep in the morning and then I kind of have to wake myself up and then get ready to go to work. But with your because I can't remember how long is like 16, or it's like 16 or 18 minutes I did not fall asleep and you know, when we reached the end I went, oh, we're done, okay, and then I got up and then, you know, there was a very different feeling that I have with other meditations.

Speaker 1: 33:50

There was this I guess I want to say lightness about me where you know, cause right now it's getting toward the end of the school year, so it's a very challenging time in dealing with students and their things and you know their allergies to graduating and being adults, and you know. So it can be very frustrating because you know, the parents and I want it to get done, and the kids are like, yeah, maybe you know, and it's just their last grasp of power, but you could be, you know, I could be very frustrated and I, you know, went in and I was like, oh, you don't want to do the work, okay, that's cool, all right, well, let's see what tomorrow brings. You know, and I obviously they were like they didn't know what to do with it. You know, because it wasn't the typical behavior, and so I kind of confused them and they're like, well, I'll get this one thing done. I'm like, okay, cool, you know, that's great, but I just noticed that through my day things were maybe not bothering me as much. You know, my reactivity was definitely down.

Speaker 1: 35:00

And if that's not something you know, because being, you know, someone who has suffered from chronic pain for I don't know, 30, some odd years, now 34 years or so, it is really you get agitated very easily, right, because you're already in a vulnerable state because of the fact that you have pain or you're afraid of the pain or whatever it may be. So then, I don't know you say something where you're, you know you're supposed to be here or whatever, and then you're not there and I'm like you know, and it's like just a default to go to the negative. And even Tuesday I went and got my truck fixed and I got breaks and they said, oh, it's going to take three hours. And I went okay, and it wasn't a big deal, where before I would have been like, oh, you promised two, why is it taking three? So I don't know what's happening. I guess all these chemicals who probably have been pretty dormant in my body and have not been activated in so long are kind of kicking in and I don't know.

Speaker 2: 36:06

I like it, I like the feeling, for sure you find yourself much less reactive than you were before. And what I emphasize in my book this brain is that emotion control is the foundation of happiness. You really cannot be happy in fact you probably have a good life easily if your emotions are out of control and if they control you. You have to learn to regulate your emotions and we find in studies of monks and nuns who've done a lot of meditation that they have superb emotion regulation and what it looks like in their brains is very interesting. It's not like they become emotionally flat. They actually become more emotionally sensitive. And the typical way this is measured in the lab is that the monk is hooked up to an EEG in one room of the lab and then the researchers play the sound of a child crying in another room and it sounds very realistic like there's a child crying over there. And they measure the response of the monk's brain to the child crying and they find, paradoxically, that the monks react more to the child crying than the average person, but that brain activity shifts from feeling the emotion and to the part of the brain that analyzes how to fix it. So it goes straight from emotion to action. How can I help? Their first response of their brains is feeling the emotion to. How can I translate that into effective action to relieve suffering? So it's very, very different and they regulate emotion. They dial emotion down, and there is a lot of new research on this now.

Speaker 2: 37:50

We used to think that people have emotions and they're driven by the outside environment. It's now becoming much more apparent in research that we really choose what our emotional reactivity will look like. So two people can be in exactly the same situation. One will have a big negative emotional reaction. The other will be totally calm and even invent a story or a way of coping that turns that difficult experience into a growth experience. So we can dial up our positive emotions, we can dial down our negative emotions, and that's emotion regulation. And there's a piece of tissue I talk about in this brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. That's like a conduit between our executive lobes in the front of the brain and our emotional brain in the middle of the brain. And that ventromedial prefrontal cortex that wiring in the brain in monks and nuns becomes really big and really well developed. And so they can dial down negative emotion. They can dial up positive emotion.

Speaker 2: 38:57

People who are depressed, the exact opposite thing happens their ventromedial prefrontal cortex gets thin and weak. And now what happens is that not only do they not have as much brain tissue in that part of the brain, the signals start to run in the wrong direction from the emotional brain to the thinking brain, to the executive brain Now that depressed person has a negative emotion, and that those neurons running in the wrong direction tell the thinking brain to make up a reason and justification why I feel so bad. So a lot of this is actually brain hardware and we control a lot of the growth of that brain hardware through our minds. If you're meditating, you're going to have a bigger and more active ventromedial prefrontal cortex. You'll learn to dial down emotions. So emotion regulation is the foundation of happiness. If you can feel the emotions but dial them down to a manageable level, then you have a shot at all kinds of other things that open up past that point. But emotion regulation is the key.

Speaker 1: 40:08

So if that's the key, what about individuals that grow up in addiction or very traumatic circumstances where you're not afforded the ability, because a lot of emotions get supported through your youth, right? So when you're a child and you cry, there's somebody to comfort you and the you know or hopefully you know the adult is saying, yes, you know, I understand this is so sad, and but if you're in a dysfunctional environment, you kind of, I guess, as a child, you make a determination, right, like it's not okay for me to be sad because I don't want the adult in my life who's barely hanging on to worry about me as well. Or I heard that if I show a particular emotion, like anger or whatever, that I'm being disrespectful, so I need to kind of just button it up and just take all the stuff. So how do you, how does this work for people who are, I guess, emotionally stunted would be a good word.

Speaker 2: 41:13

Yeah, we learn all kinds of dysfunctional patterns from the people around us, from the children, and there are role models. So we're looking at them, we're observing them, we're noticing them and that's the way our brains are wired. Them and that's the way our brains are wired how to do life, how to do relationships, how to do money, how to do love, how to do work, how to live as a human being in the world. We're getting all these messages from the people around us and so those messages wind up becoming hardwired into our brains and it's very difficult to change when we're then recognizing, even though we may realize when we're 15, 20, 25 years old, that was really dysfunctional behavior, but then changing it in myself is still extremely difficult. So that's the big conundrum how do we change ourselves when we have these strongly nearly encoded behaviors in our brains that influence our lives and they're hard to treat, they're hard to work with, they're hard to overcome?

Speaker 2: 42:12

And in EFT we have a training program for people getting trained and certified in what we call clinical EFT, the kind of EFT that is validated in over 200 research trials. And we find that if we use certain methods and they have to do with reaching into the body, reaching to the subconscious, we are able to shift those early life messages. But again, it takes time, effort, persistence. Often that level of dysfunctionality takes a therapist, takes a coach to reach, because the easy stuff we can usually solve by ourselves. So simply doing EFT yourself is going to enable you to address a lot of emotional challenges Early childhood ones, persistent ones, deep-seated ones, certainly prenatal, pre-verbal ones. You're probably going to need to get some external help to help you shift those.

Speaker 1: 43:05

So everybody needs a team.

Speaker 2: 43:07

Everybody needs a team, yes, and knowing which ones you can work on yourself is important. Knowing which ones you need help with is important. Generally, we say that if it's something that is at the surface level, work on it yourself. If it's trauma or if it's persistent, like, for example, we have a lot of people go through our weight loss programs every year, and the average American woman has gone through 18 weight loss programs in her life.

Speaker 1: 43:39

The average.

Speaker 2: 43:39

American woman by the time she's 50, has lost her entire body weight and regained it nine times. Okay, 18 programs, nine times losing your body weight Wow, that was also me when I was 40 years old. I tried every conceivable diet and I succeeded with all of them and I had regained the weight and wound up heavy every time. Then I got into the science behind it and designed this program with some colleagues of mine in various universities and now, with our weight loss programs, we're able to help people. They tend to lose weight and they keep on losing weight when we track them, even one or two years after the program ends. So those are the kinds of issues where, if you have a persistent weight issue or persistent performance issue, persistent relationship issue, persistent money issue, go get a coach. They know what they're doing and you get to your goal much faster than stumbling around yourself trying to figure it out for the very first time.

Speaker 1: 44:42

Now you had mentioned, you have your EFT universe and your training and I believe you have a training coming up.

Speaker 2: 44:53

Yeah, I do a lot of virtual trainings. I do a lot of in-person trainings at various institutions around the US and sometimes in Europe. So California Institute for Integral Studies, omega Institute. We train in various places in person, but you can also take them virtually. So all our training is available virtually and you can literally work with me or another certified trainer and we'll work with people over the course of five days. And one of the cool things that happens in those classes is when we measure people's not only depression and anxiety but also their physiology. After those those four days we found that their blood pressure goes down dramatically. Their resting heart rate goes down substantially. Their heart rate variability with one measure of health improves. Their cortisol drops by an average of 37%. Their levels of immune function rise dramatically. So all of these good things happen inside the body when you're regulating your stress and your emotions. And that's just a very brief training we offer people. But it makes a world of difference both to physiology and to their psychology of people.

Speaker 1: 46:06

But it makes a world of difference, both to physiology and to their psychology. So, what's next for you? Because you've done so much and you know what is what's on the horizon for you Is there another book coming? Is there, you know where? Where do we? Where does? Because the work that you're doing is so incredibly important and you know, with the scientific studies and the data to back everything that you're talking about. Because I think, you know, for a long time, people were like, oh cool, you tap a couple of places and you do something, right. So, but we're, you know, you are putting us in a position where you know this is valid. Now, right, these different types of I don't want to say remedies, but you know practices are really showing growth and you have data to back it up. So what's next?

Speaker 2: 47:01

What I began to realize and what neuroscience will realize soon and what neuroscience will map in the next 40, 50 years, the kinds of happiness levels, as measured by brainwaves, attained by Tibetan monks. And we find that they are so far above what people think of as happiness that most people who aren't monks and don't meditate have no idea there's a there there. Like an example in one study we found that people doing this effective meditation, their happiness is going up seven hundred percent.

Speaker 2: 48:03

Seven holy moly so, like you know, in the um, the local uh basketball team where I spent a lot of my time in only california and the golden state warriors, they're, they're, they're, they're star guy jumper can jump a yard off the ground. Jump, you know, one yard off the ground. I mean that's a real athletic feat to jump one yard, one meter off the ground. Uh, so when I tell people, hey, steph Curry can jump one meter off the ground, it's like, well, what a performer. If I told you Steph Curry could jump seven meters off the ground, seven yards off the ground, that's like jumping over a house, you'd know that was probably impossible. That's the kind of disparity we're seeing between the bliss and the brains of these monks and everyday happiness. So we're realizing in research now and we're quantifying that people in these states are out there at a level of bliss but the average person has no idea even exists. So we're cataloging these states, we're identifying which brain regions will activate them and then how people can actually develop those brain regions. When you develop those brain regions, when you intentionally develop them, they get bigger.

Speaker 2: 49:16

In one case history I provide, in Bliss Brain, there was a particular media personality and he wanted to explore what meditation would do for his brain media personality and he wanted to explore what meditation would do for his brain. So he took a whole camera crew into an advanced neuroscience lab and had his brain measured down to the last neuron by these neuroscientists and they measured the volume and the function of his brain. He then began to learn to meditate and then, eight weeks later, went back to the lab. After only two months they measured the volume of his brain again. In that eight weeks his emotion regulation control circuit grew by 22.8%. Wow, now think about that. Two months, eight weeks his emotion regulation control circuit grew 22.8%. That's the ability to regulate anger, fear, overwhelm, frustration, all the negative emotions. He now has one-fifth more tissue in that part of his brain. This isn't just a thought, this is brain hardware, this is neurons that fire. He's far more resilient than he was before, he's way happier than he was before.

Speaker 2: 50:26

We're now realizing that we human beings have this capacity to rapidly change the shape, the structure, the function of our brains by our thoughts, by our attitudes, by our practices, like meditation. And this is absolutely stunning that we can produce radical shifts in our brains in not 10,000 hours, not 25 years, in weeks, and so I'm exploring this in a book, I'm exploring this in research, and the research is just stunning and it shows that our brains are wired to experience extraordinary states of happiness and ecstasy. We just don't know how to turn on the circuitry, but you turn it on and you get out there, and then you turn it on tomorrow and get out there again. Do that for a week. You really hope to do it for a month. You'll never go back. And then you're changing your brain and then all kinds of benefits start to flow in your body.

Speaker 2: 51:25

In some studies, hundreds of genes are now upregulated Genes that help your body fight cancer, genes that improve your cell metabolism, longevity genes a whole variety of good things happen genetically when you do this. So this is the frontier of science and writing about this, working on this, reading about it, putting all the pieces together in a way in which I can explain this to people. I so want people to know that the limited little self you think you have to live with is just a figment of your imagination. We have abilities to attain these levels of ecstasy that we have no idea are impossible. Every human being has this brain tissue. It's simply a matter of it's like muscles. You watch a muscular person. They just work out at the gym regularly and their muscles grow. Your neurons are growing much faster than your muscles and you can have this super happy brain in just a few weeks. So that's really the big message, I think, of the new research that I find so exciting.

Speaker 1: 52:28

That is fantastic. How do people get in touch with you?

Speaker 2: 52:35

Well, I love to have people do two things. I love to have you download my free EFT manual and try the tapping Just when you're stressed. Try it once again. You'll feel the shift happening in your body, usually the very first time. So that manual is free on the web at Dawson just my name, dawsongift, g-i-f-t. Dawsongiftcom.

Speaker 2: 52:59

Download the manual and think of a problem that triggers you emotionally and try the tapping. You'll find it rapidly diminishes. The second thing you get at DawsonGiftcom is that effective meditation, a meditation that's proven in brain research to rapidly shift the function of your brain. And then through that portal you'll find our certified practitioners, you'll find our classes, you'll find a bunch of programs for weight loss, for insomnia, for anxiety, for depression, for stress, for psychological trauma, and so all of those resources are available through that DawsonGiftcom portal. But just go there, do the meditation, download the manual and use. These tools 're super easy. Meditation is only 20 minutes long. Do it in the morning and you'll find your brain starts to shift in just a few days. Do the tapping. You'll find your stress level goes way, way, way down in just a short amount of time. And then start to explore, get into those super happy states and you'll find that you have this neural hardware that can make you take you to that 7x level of happiness. You just have to turn it on.

Speaker 1: 54:13

Dawson, thank you so much for joining us today.

Speaker 2: 54:17

It has been a pleasure to hear, I'm so glad.

Speaker 1: 54:20

I want you to keep doing the good work because we all can benefit from what you're doing.

Speaker 2: 54:26

Oh, there's so much love available to every person and I just want people to know it, feel it and go there.

Speaker 1: 54:32

Thank you, oh, that was amazing. Did you see that the Zoom has when you make a heart symbol? He made it, so it was kind of burst. That was very sweet. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2: 54:43

Bless you. Thank you so much, bless you.