Mind, Meditation, & Genetics With Dr. Dawson Church

Best selling author and researcher, Dr. Dawson Church, swings by the Energy Matters podcast to have a deep discussion about his work on epigenetics, meditation, and his upcoming book Mind to Matter. Dr. Church is also the founder of the National Institute of Integrative Healthcare, and editor of Energy Psychology Journal.

Transcript

Are you meditating enough?

Probably not.

Welcome back to the Energy Matters podcast where we make you feel guilty about not meditating enough,

But at least you're listening to a podcast about meditation.

Welcome back Insight Timer listeners.

We have a really special guest for you today.

Dr.

Dawson Church.

He's an award-winning author of the bestselling book,

The Genie in Your Genes.

He's got a new book coming out,

Which is called?

It's called Mind to Matter,

The astonishing science of how your brain creates material reality.

And it's going to be published through Hay House.

And you can actually preorder it,

He said.

If you look it up on Amazon or Hay House,

I'm sure you can find it.

Mind to Matter.

Yeah.

And Dr.

Church is also the founder of the National Institute for Integrative Health Care.

He's a researcher writer.

He contributes to Energy Psychology Journal.

He teaches emotional freedom therapy,

Which is also known as tapping.

He's got some great wisdom for us today around genes and how our minds affect our genes and on the importance of meditation and his own personal meditation practice.

So thank you all for being here and listening.

And let's jump into the episode.

Hey,

Energy Matters.

Welcome back to another episode.

I'm here with my co-host David.

Hey,

David.

Hello.

And today we have a very special guest.

Dr.

Dawson Church is coming to us live from Santa Rosa,

My old stomping grounds.

And we're here to talk today about kind of the link between emotions,

Energy,

Thoughts and genetics.

You know,

It's having done energy work for many,

Many years.

There's always kind of been this thing where some of the things that's happening in energy awareness and metaphysics,

It always feels like science is kind of catching up to us.

You know,

Things that 30 years ago we're kind of working energy and we see things happening and say,

OK,

This is what's happening.

And then suddenly research starts to happen around that.

And sure enough,

That's what's been happening.

And Dr.

Dawson has been really studying and furthering this awareness of how energy affects matter and genetics and what's happening on the forefront of that development.

So welcome,

Dawson.

Nice to have you here.

It's great to be here.

And I love that focus because you're right.

Ten,

Twenty,

Thirty years ago,

Energy work was thought to be hopelessly fringe,

Woo woo,

Way out on the left field and not with much relevance to the real world of matter.

And now what's been happening,

As we'll see in the coming hour,

Is that energy is right in the forefront of new research.

And we're showing now that energy has profound effects on matter.

So I'm excited to share this.

And I just so appreciate the focus that both you,

Cody and you,

David,

Have on making people aware of the shifts that are happening when they do energy work.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah.

And Dawson.

So me and Cody are very much laymen.

We are really good at closing our eyes and sitting still.

But you are very good at research and explaining what happens when we do that.

And before the show,

We were just chatting a bit about some of the new research in genetics,

Epigenetics,

And how consciousness research is really taking some steps.

And we all know that,

You know,

Meditation lowers stress levels.

You know,

It has all these incredible biological effects.

But if we could just start maybe on some of the research that you've been doing and the consciousness research and the biological effects of meditation and other energy techniques and kind of what your focus has been on,

I think our audience would love to hear some of what you've been doing.

Well,

The two techniques I've studied most written about most are meditation.

And the second one is emotional freedom techniques,

Also known as tapping,

Which is basically using acupressure.

So rather than acupuncture needles,

People just apply pressure or tap on acupuncture points.

And that also shifts the energy flows in the body and then shifts the physiology of the body.

So that's been my focus of writing and research for the last 20 years or so.

And all of our initial research was focused on the psychology of what shifts when you tap,

When you meditate,

When you do anything that changes your consciousness.

And we found in some of our early research that massive changes were happening in those in the psychological domain.

Just for example,

We did a very early pilot study of veterans with PTSD.

And this was right after the Iraq War started in 2002.

In 2003,

We had to look at veterans coming back from Iraq,

And a lot of them had PTSD,

Just the way Vietnam veterans had PTSD in the 1960s,

Early 1970s before the Vietnam War ended.

So we saw the same pattern of these Iraq War veterans with PTSD.

And then we did this tiny pilot study,

And we found that they had a massive reduction in their levels of symptoms like flashbacks and nightmares,

Intrusive thoughts,

Hypervigilance,

All the characteristics of stress that we saw in Vietnam veterans.

So we then got a very large scale clinical trial going nationally in the US,

And eventually that expanded and took in a lot of veterans and we found the same thing.

We found that their levels of symptoms dropped by over 60% in just six sessions.

And this was a time again 2005,

2006,

When PTSD was widely regarded as incurable.

And the American Psychiatric Association had done a big study of all the research on PTSD.

And in 2006,

They said basically,

It's incurable,

The best thing to do is manage it with drugs.

And that was like the best thing that they could think of back then.

Now,

Of course,

We know that PTSD is readily curable,

That over in the most advanced research over 90% of people with PTSD recover using energy therapies.

And so that was the initial focus of my research and the research I did with colleagues was looking at psychology.

How did depression symptoms change?

How did anxiety symptoms change?

How did PTSD change?

Hostility,

All those other kinds of psychological characteristics that affect people.

But we then began to think about biology.

I remember sitting once in a big conference and I watched trainees,

People who were just learning these acupressure based techniques,

Doing work with stressed people.

And the trainees were really new to these techniques.

They were doing their best,

But they were really unskilled.

And I noticed that even though their skill level was low,

That these stressed people that were working with were still getting big and good results.

And so I began to notice that as these people who were so stressed were being worked with by these trainees,

Their shoulders relaxed,

Their breathing deep,

If they were crying or flushed,

They calmed down,

Their respiration,

Their heart rate.

All of these biological functions became much more regulated and calm.

So I then said,

Well,

Like,

Next big question to myself was,

Okay,

What's happening inside their cells?

And that's when I designed a study of cortisol,

Because cortisol is a really handy marker.

Adrenaline and cortisol are two main stress hormones.

And if the quantity of adrenaline and cortisol in your body is going down,

That means you're getting less stressed.

If it's going up,

You're getting more stressed.

And so I then began to study cortisol levels in stressed people.

And we did a research trial with three groups.

One group got tapping acupressure,

One group got talk therapy,

And one group got rest.

This was a triple blind randomized controlled trial published in the oldest psychiatry journal in the US,

A very prestigious journal,

Very rigorous study.

And we found that the levels of anxiety and depression in the acupressure group dropped twice as much as in the talk therapy group and the rest group,

And their levels of cortisol dropped precipitously.

In fact,

When I was working with the lab,

And I was emailing them looking to get these results,

The cortisol levels of people before and after,

And my results were being delayed by several weeks,

I eventually was phoning the lab saying,

What gives here?

What's going on?

Why it's taking so long to get these cortisol results back from your technicians?

And the head of the lab eventually called me back and said,

Dr.

Church,

We've been recalibrating our equipment and running these tests over and over again,

Because your results are anomalous.

Cortisol cannot fall that quickly.

But it did.

And now,

Actually,

I just got some more results back from the same lab last week,

And now they're like,

Oh,

Yeah,

It's more stuff than Dr.

Church.

We'll see those cortisol levels just plummet when people start to apply these stress reduction methods.

So that is the most interesting thing to me is that it's not just psychological.

It's not just a spiritual experience.

You don't just feel better psychologically.

There are real objective things happening inside your cells and the molecules of your cells.

So energy techniques are affecting matter,

Mind consciousness is having a not just a small effect on matter,

But sometimes massive effects on matter down to the level of hormones,

Enzymes and genes in your body.

So let me jump in here.

Dr.

Dawson.

Well,

Wait a minute.

Let me not say Dr.

Dawson.

That was a really great point.

And it kind of brings me to a question that I have about what's happening in the psychology of change.

You know,

Many years ago,

Not that many years ago,

Actually,

It really was thought that we couldn't change all that much.

Right.

And and then as the advent of fMRI came out and we could watch someone's brain,

Like inaction,

Suddenly this concept of neuroplasticity,

You know,

Beyond the age of whatever it was,

Depending on who you were,

Age three or seven or 20,

Really hit the scene.

And then suddenly this idea that you could change and that your brain changes all the way till the day you die became,

You know,

Very commonplace.

But the idea that our genes change is kind of a new idea,

I think.

So,

You know,

Gene awareness or gene study has been really just mapping the genes like something that's kind of static.

But this idea of epigenetics and epigenetic medicine,

What is that about?

And I think it incorporates the idea that our genes change and are interacting with our environment until the day we die.

Is that right?

Or am I off on that?

It is.

And I want to just pick up on the idea of change firstly and then go to genes and how these change.

And I want to do that because personally,

I had a really difficult and frustrating time with personal transformation and change in my own life.

And so when I was 15 years old,

I went and lived on an ashram.

I was meditating.

I was doing energy healing.

I spent my later teenage years doing that.

My 20s,

I was doing that.

And I worked on myself a lot because I had a traumatic childhood and I had a lot of personal hurdles to overcome.

And it was hard.

And I watched it being hard for my friends.

My friends were meditation teachers who were yoga teachers who were on various spiritual paths.

There was no magic spiritual paths.

Some were Buddhist,

Some were Hindu,

Some were Christians,

Some were spiritual but not religious,

Some were Jewish,

Some were traditional,

Some were alternative.

But they all wrestled with these same problems.

And if you read the history of spirituality and spiritual teachers,

There are all these scandals with people acting unethically,

Financially,

Sexually,

In various dimensions of their lives.

And so what this points to is that change is hard.

And I know I read books,

I went to workshops,

I studied with teachers,

I did all this stuff.

And I did change,

But we saw small amounts of change happening.

And often,

You'd work with a client,

Say in psychotherapy for years and years and years,

And they might make small incremental change.

And so that's what we find with meditation,

With other techniques is that people can change sometimes,

But it's a real slog to change.

And what's happened just in the last little while,

I mean,

I'm talking about maybe five,

Seven years,

Is we've discovered new psychotechnologies that produce rapid change.

Like when I say 60 plus percent drop in PTSD symptoms,

In this case,

Six to 10 sessions,

That's awesome change.

In my new book,

Mind to Matter,

I'm talking about people who had cancer,

And I have several case studies of people who had cancer,

And they literally have a diagnosis,

And then they do something dramatic.

I had a friend of mine who had a breast cancer diagnosis very recently.

And so rather than doing the whole medical route,

She did the energy route,

And she phoned energy healers,

Had them work with her,

Did chi gung,

Did tapping,

Meditated,

Got really serious about her spiritual practice,

And three months later,

Got a new cancer scan,

New scan,

And her body was cancer free.

And it astonishes me that we now have these ways of shifting ourselves.

Now,

That's psychologically,

She felt better,

But that's physiological.

There are other genes called oncogenes,

Cancer genes.

And what we're seeing,

For example,

In one study of,

Again,

The two methods I teach and focus on are EFT tapping and acupressure basically,

And meditation.

And so a lot of the research I do is on one of those two things.

In one study done by a colleague of mine who's a psychotherapist,

The subjects got a genome test before and after a one hour EFT tapping acupressure session.

And in that one hour,

72 genes changed,

Including genes that control metabolism,

Genes that control immunity,

Genes that affect various kinds of cancers,

Throat cancer,

Liver cancer,

Esophageal cancer,

Various kinds of cancer genes literally were turned off,

Or the activity of anti-cancer genes was turned on just by that one hour psychotherapy session using acupressure.

Another study I did with Dr.

Joe Dispenza,

Joe and I were looking at people in one of his advanced workshops doing four days of intensive meditation.

We found that eight key regulatory genes were turned on.

Three of those had to do with suppressing cancer.

So the remarkable thing is that as you reduce your stress level,

It's not just a subjective feeling of change.

It's an object of change happening in your body.

And while change was so hard for people back along the path,

You look at,

You know,

The old religious communities of 2000 years ago,

3000 years ago,

People had to go to a cluster or into the desert or into the high mountains and spend decades perfecting their meditation points.

And now we're perfecting their meditation practice.

Now we bring Vietnam veteran or an Iraq or Afghanistan veteran into a psychotherapy office.

We give them a series of sessions,

Mainly be five or 10 sessions,

And just a whole bunch of that stress falls away.

And then it goes down to the level of their brainwaves and other gene expressions.

So we now are at this absolutely remarkable place in medical history where we can change.

We do have tools that help people change that they're not perfect.

They're not a panacea.

But again,

In my life and in training people doing live workshops,

Literally,

We'll have a whole room full of people that will have a simultaneous massive breakthrough,

And their lives are different.

And we can test that both genetically through their brain function and subjectively in terms of anxiety and depression.

Now I'll give you just one example of that from this new book.

There was a guy who's a TV reporter in Australia for a program called Catalyst,

But he was also a PhD astrophysicist.

So even though he worked as a reporter,

He had a doctorate in astrophysics.

And he was really skeptical about all this stuff,

Meditation,

Mindfulness,

Tapping,

Didn't really have a strong belief in it.

But he read some of the research and thought,

You know,

I'm going to give it a try.

So he went on an eight week mindfulness program.

But before he went to start the program,

There was a team of researchers at Monash University who studied him and his brain function intensively,

Including a comprehensive MRI picture of the volume of each part of his brain.

So they measured the frontal lobes,

They measured the temporal lobes,

Measured the hippocampus,

The midbrain,

The hindbrain.

They measured all the different parts of his brain.

And then they began to practice these techniques.

And after just two weeks,

He found he had less road rage.

He was less irritated by people at work.

He was much calmer.

He felt much better.

And then in eight weeks,

They got him back into that lab at Monash University,

Gave him this whole huge battery of tests again,

His psychological function to get improved a lot.

And then they did a MRI and they measured his brain regions,

They found that some parts of his brain had changed,

Had grown in volume by several percentage points in just eight weeks,

3%,

4%,

5% in only two months.

And the part of his brain that had changed the most in those two months was the part that had to do with emotional regulation.

It's called the dentate gyrus.

It's part of the emotional midbrain,

Part of the hippocampus.

His dentate gyrus in his brain had grown by 22.

8% in eight weeks.

And that's a massive neurological change.

So that's what's happening to us now.

We are able to use these techniques and these sophisticated new technologies are showing us that we're not just feeling better,

That literally our bodies are changing,

The enzymes are changing,

The genes are changing,

And our whole brain function starts to change,

Which then as our minds and conscious change produces new matter in our brains.

And I think it's just beyond exciting that change is possible.

It's not that hard,

And it's producing big effects inside our bodies.

Incredible.

That's just incredible.

And so Dawson,

For example,

You're saying that if I'm meditating or doing tapping and my thoughts change,

That translates to actually changing the gene.

Can scientists explain how that actually happens,

How I can have a thought and then that could switch a gene on or off?

Let me just ask you,

Have you had a really bad experience the last couple of years,

Like a car crash or a nearly sliding off a cliff?

Yeah,

Actually,

I went snowboarding with Cody.

I definitely fell.

So that was tough.

Yeah,

I took a good tumble.

Okay,

So how did you feel after the tumble in your body?

Oh,

I just kept thinking I want to punch Cody,

But oh,

In my body,

In that fight or flight kind of painful shock right away,

I would say.

Right,

Painful shock,

Fight or flight,

We all know how it feels like in our bodies.

And so when we're in that state,

Our bodies are changing.

And in response to a threat to our survival,

Our heart speeds up,

Our breathing becomes shallow,

Our muscles tense,

Blood drains out of our brains into our muscles,

All kinds of physiological shifts happen in our bodies and all those shifts are mediated by genes and by hormones.

And so when you have that big rise in cortisol,

When you feel that sense of shock in your body,

When you have the bad experience,

When you have the physically threatening experience,

That's something that triggers gene expression.

And so your body only knows how to make a lot of cortisol or that adrenaline,

Because the genes that code for that are being turned on.

And that's perfectly normal and natural.

Like if you were being attacked by a dog,

It was a big barking dog that got off his chain and ran into you with its jaws dripping with saliva and snarling at you.

You'd very naturally want to escape.

You'd be in fight or flight.

You'd look for a stick.

You'd run away,

Do something appropriately as you have that adrenaline and cortisol going up in your body.

And so that's the way Mother Nature designed us to operate.

What we do though is we human beings will then talk about whether it's a snowboarding accident,

Whether it's the dog,

Whether it's the car crash,

We'll remember the bad stuff.

So here I am talking about this event,

And it's been six months,

Maybe even six years.

And as we talk about that and vividly remember it,

All of the emotions start to occur that were activated by the experience.

So even though the experience is now an old experience,

It was six months ago or 10 years ago,

As we tell the story,

We are having shifts in our body.

I worked with one guy as part of that cortisol clinical trial,

And he was a male nurse in his 50s.

And he happened to get randomized into the group that got talk therapy.

And so we measured his cortisol before and after that.

And before and after the talk therapy session,

His cortisol rose by about 50%.

So he had a big rise in cortisol.

And his tragedy in his life was that he was a single guy in his 50s,

And he'd really been wanting a relationship.

And then he met somebody,

He had this relationship for a while,

And then she ended the relationship.

And so the vivid memory he had was driving her to the airport and her leaving,

Her walking into the terminal.

That was like the last time he saw her.

And as he talked about this event,

He had tears in his eyes.

This was like the huge grief and loss of his life.

And this had happened like six or seven years before.

So even though it happened all the time ago,

When he did talk therapy and talked about that,

His levels of cortisol rose by 50%.

We then got him back in the lab a week later.

And we did the same thing.

We gave him a one hour therapy session.

We tested his cortisol before and after.

And again,

Even though this thing has happened a long time ago,

As he talks about her leaving,

He's crying,

He's upset,

His face is flushed,

He has all the physiological signs of the stress response.

And so that's what we do.

Even when it's been a long time ago,

If we're still triggered by it,

It affects our bodies.

And so we then did a tapping session with him for an hour.

And we found that his cortisol in that hour of tapping,

Same event,

Talking about the same incident,

His level of cortisol dropped by almost 50%.

So huge drop in cortisol.

And that's what's happening.

So we think about the bad thing that happened a long time ago.

And as we remember that,

Our cortisol level rises.

And if we do this repeatedly,

If we,

There was a huge study done of patients at Kaiser Permanente,

A big hospital chain in California,

And they looked at the health histories of 17,

400 patients.

And they found that those people with unresolved childhood emotional trauma had more heart disease,

More cancer,

More diabetes,

More high blood pressure.

And every major disease,

These people who had unresolved emotional trauma,

They had more of it.

And these patients were in their 50s.

And so this,

This childhood trauma happened when they were,

You know,

Three,

Four,

Five,

Seven,

Nine,

Whatever it was,

That childhood trauma had happened almost 50 years earlier.

And now 50 years later,

They have high cortisol,

They're highly stressed.

And by not dealing with those emotions,

It starts to really have a bad effect on your body over time.

So yeah,

Those memories,

It is so important that we come to peace with them.

We resolve them,

We deal with our childhoods,

With the negative things of our past,

We live our lives free of those influences.

Because if we do that,

Then we live in the space of emotional freedom,

We have great lives,

We're living in the present moment.

But if we are trapped by our past in that way,

We end up reenacting it,

We think about it,

We drive our levels of cortisol sky high,

We turn on all those stress genes,

Even though there's no barking dog,

There's no snowboard accident.

But by talking about it,

Remembering it vividly,

I can turn on all those genes,

Just as though that bad thing was happening right from here and now.

So again,

Genes are turned on,

All those stress genes are turned on either by a real thing happening,

Or by remembering a thing,

Or even an imagination about something that's never happened,

Never likely to happen.

Just anything you think about that stresses you is turning on those cortisol and other stress genes.

So if you're just worrying over and over stressing about the future,

You're literally switching genes on.

Yep.

Yep.

Hundreds of them.

Cody,

You better start meditating more.

Look,

They see that their genes are changing.

It's not just that subjectively they feel that they face,

You know,

Someone says,

Oh,

I feel a lot better now I've done meditation.

And what I translated into is,

Ah,

Okay,

Their cortisol is dropping their serotonin and dopamine in their brains is regulating their DHEA,

Their main cell healing hormone is rising,

All of these things are happening as you feel better subjectively when you meditate.

Right.

So there's a real physiological change.

Big one.

Yeah.

And the reason I kind of brought up the question about change is because I think how we think about change really determines how much we can conceptualize and actively create change,

Right?

There's kind of this fatalist idea that we have,

Especially around genes,

Right?

The old kind of,

As you write the dogma of genetic determinism is that,

You know,

Well,

I can't change it because it's just in my genes.

So that's like,

I'm stuck with that.

But this whole idea of epigenetics really opens kind of blows that out of the water and opens this idea up that we can influence and change our genes.

But what is kind of the new thinking in terms of how much determinism in genes,

You know,

Maybe percentage wise affects us versus how much environment our thoughts and feelings,

What we eat,

You know,

Everything that we can actually control and do affects and helps to determine,

You know,

Where our genes are moving forward.

That's a very good question.

And it's good to think about that percentage.

And the consensus in science is about 85% of our genes are malleable.

They can change.

And about 50% of our genes are fixed.

Like,

You know,

I'm six foot four.

I will never be seven feet tall.

I have brown hair.

Sorry,

David.

He was hoping to be taller,

But I'll never be six feet tall.

Damn it.

Dr.

Can you please do something about these genes and their limitations?

Yeah,

Sorry about that.

You're pretty much stuck with those.

The hand you would tell when it comes to things like height and eye color and gender.

But that's only 15% of the genome.

The other 85% is influenced by other things epigenetically.

Just a simple example.

You have clock genes in your body.

In my earlier book,

The Genie in Your Genes,

In The Genie in Your Genes,

I talk all about clock genes and about how you wake up in the morning,

Wake up at a certain time,

Because your clock genes tell you to do that.

In fact,

The Nobel Prize for Medicine was won recently by researchers who really discovered how these clock genes work.

And you get drowsy around 10 or 11 at night,

You go to bed because your clock genes are doing things.

Your clock genes are also shifting your cortisol.

Around 6am,

You have a big spike in cortisol and your highest cortisol levels are around 8am.

So 8am,

You're feeling perky,

You're doing things in your day.

And then around 8,

9pm,

They're dropping and you start to get drowsy around 10 or 11.

And you go to sleep point,

Cortisol is at its lowest point at 4am.

All this is governed by clock genes.

What do you eat?

Eat healthy food and that will trigger the expression of certain genes.

Eat unhealthy food,

Eat sugar,

For example,

And then your body is going to have to produce lots of insulin and may develop insulin resistance and get all of that triggered by diet.

So diet affects your body,

Sleep affects your body,

Social interactions affect your body tremendously.

If you have high quality relationships,

Nurturing,

Loving relationships,

One of the phrases I love is elevated emotion.

If you have,

Like my wife and I focus on having interactions throughout our marriage that produce elevated emotion where we feel good.

So if we have two topics to talk about,

We choose the one that will produce elevated emotion.

And so if you have relationships that do that,

All of these things are affecting your gene expression.

So 15% of your genome is fixed.

That's your skin color and all those other physiological things.

85% of it is being influenced by all these external factors,

Including what you think,

What you have in your consciousness,

What you ruminate on,

Whether you think about good things or bad things,

And those simple techniques like tapping,

Like meditation that are nudging your genome in one direction or the other.

Incredible.

Dawson,

I have one last question about genes and then I want to get into some other stuff,

But I just really want to ask.

So when they did the genome project,

They were predicting that there would be over 100,

000 genes in the human genome,

Right?

And when they finished it,

There was something like 25,

000 genes.

We have almost the same amount of genes as a fruit fly,

Right?

If I'm not mistaken,

Do you have a theory on where those missing genes are or how we work,

You know,

With only 25,

000 genes?

I know there are so many theories about that.

But do you have a point of view on that?

Yeah,

It was a big puzzle because we knew going into the human genome project that we sequence the genome of simple organisms like a nematode,

A little worm,

And we knew that that had over 30,

000 genes.

We had sequenced things like a carrot and we knew some vegetables had over 30,

000 genes.

So we thought,

Oh,

I know,

It was a big complicated human being must be over 100,

000 genes.

And then what's switching those on and off?

What's controlling those genes?

There must be another 20,

000 or so regulatory genes which are running the show.

And then we found we only have about 24,

000 genes.

It was such a surprise because we didn't really know then about epigenetics.

And now we know that the certain triggering a gene to produce several different kinds of byproduct.

So the genes essentially produce proteins.

And depending on the epigenetics,

Depending on the these these like RNAs,

Micro RNAs,

Various other actors in the epigenome,

They're triggering the DNA to produce very different things.

Even the same strand of DNA,

The same gene can produce different proteins depending on the epigenetic tags.

One of the cool things I've been researching for the last few years now is the epigenetics of stress.

And so we're finding that there are certain of these molecules that are directly controlling genome and these are changing epigenetically.

And again,

It's happening in response to stress.

So whatever you do to de-stress yourself,

You are shifting this and most of your genome is being influenced by your mental state as well as those other environmental influences.

Dawson,

We only have a few minutes left,

But I would love to ask,

What are your practices when you get up in the morning?

What's your meditation technique?

What do you teach when you teach workshops and help people reduce their stress levels?

Well,

I know that the two of you teach meditation.

And so I will confess,

David and Cody,

I am a terrible meditator and always have been.

When I was 15 years old and did my first meditation class and meditation teacher said,

A meditation is simple.

All you have to do is still your mind.

And I was thinking,

Are you crazy?

Still my mind?

Give me a break.

It's never going to happen.

And here I am in my sixties and I still cannot still my mind.

I just have never succeeded in taming my wild mind.

So I meditate every morning,

But I helped with a group of scientists around 2008,

2009.

I began looking at practices that let people get into a meditative state mechanically.

What I mean by that is that we looked at the kind of physiological state a master meditator is in.

Somebody who's been practicing for a long time is a really good meditator.

And we then had people do certain physiological things that mimic the state of a master meditator.

So I helped collaborated with several other people.

We designed this technique called eco meditation,

ECO,

Eco meditation,

And it's just a series of physiological cues,

But they affect your vagus nerve,

Your main relaxation nerve.

They affect various muscle groups in your body and you just do these very mechanical things and you do these seven things.

And we found that it just produces this very deep meditative state without needing to still the mind or believe in anything or have a spiritual practice or anything like that.

It's just a mechanical way of getting into meditation.

And so I do that myself every morning.

And what happens also,

I'll be working on a new book in the next four or five years on what happens in our bodies when we practice regularly in terms of changing our set points of hormones like cortisol and neurotransmitters like serotonin.

And this is really interesting lineage work.

So I meditate every day and what happens when you meditate and you get used to it when you're doing an easy form of meditation like eco meditation.

So you're doing this really simple physiologically based method of meditation,

Not having to try and calm your mind or do anything advanced.

You start to have shifts in your levels of these hormones,

Your baseline of cortisol drops.

We did one study and we found that people's baseline cortisol in a week of doing this dropped by 37%,

Which is a massive drop in just a week of practice.

Their resting heart rate went down by about 8%.

Their blood pressure decreased,

All kinds of good changes happening in the body when you do this over time.

So I meditate every morning and then if I get upset during the day,

I tap and again tapping only takes like a minute or two to do and then you rapidly get a lot more relaxed.

So meditation is the fundamental practice and it has such remarkable effects on your health and well-being.

It is an essential part of being human.

If you meditate,

You get in touch with who you are.

You're also going to touch with all of the non-local levels of being.

In my new book,

Mind to Matter,

I talk a lot about non-local mind and about how there is universal consciousness and about how most people are distracting themselves with television,

With media,

With social media,

With various kinds of substances,

With drama and relationships,

With work drama.

There are all kinds of ways which people aren't tuning in to that pulse of the universe.

There is a pulse of the universe.

When you get quiet enough meditation,

You tune into that.

You can hear it.

So that pulse of the universe is there that those messages from the universe are always present for you.

It's just that you aren't getting quiet enough to hear them.

So meditation,

You get quiet and you hear them.

You then start your day in inspiration and in creativity and in joy and absolutely explosion of just this inspired action and being.

So it's powerful to start your day of meditation.

And so I advocate doing that.

It's just a wonderful way to connect with the universe.

You also then open yourself to synchronicity.

And so all kinds of synchronic things happen.

We talked earlier before we went live about Insight Timer and I've been curious about it.

I've been on that site a few times and I thought about maybe doing some meditations for them.

And then it turns out you guys do that and gave me some advice and introduced me.

The person who runs their programming department.

So I had a thought.

How about doing meditations for Insight Timer?

And then I've done nothing and the material level and then suddenly boom.

There it is.

So you did universal mind.

That's how your life works.

That's how your whole your whole world unfolds.

And it's just wonderful.

So I recommend meditation is a foundational practice every day.

Eco meditation is super easy to do.

You just sit there,

Close your eyes,

Do seven mechanical things with your body.

And now you may want to do a lot more meditation past that point.

That'll get you to first base.

And then if you get upset,

If you get stressed,

If bad things happen during the day,

You tap because that brings your cortisol level down,

Makes you calm.

And those are the two practices that I think are really the foundation of a happy and connected life.

And Dawson,

Where can people find more information on that meditation practice and on the tapping?

Both of those you can get for free at my website,

Dawson gift dot com.

And what I've got there is a collection of a dozen things.

So there is a link to our certified EIP practitioners,

All of the workshops we do all over the world every year because we have workshops,

East Coast,

West Coast,

Europe,

All over the place.

And we train people in these methods.

And that's all at Dawson gift dot com.

And then eco meditation,

Again,

Seven simple steps to doing it.

Those are there at Dawson gift dot com,

Along with an MP3 download.

You can just download the MP3 for free.

And I'll walk you through an eco meditation routine in about about a 15 minute routine,

As well as the free tapping manual.

So that's all at Dawson gift dot com.

It's one place where you can find out all about all of those things.

Great.

And Dawson,

I'm so glad that you kind of talked about using meditation and starting your day and the effects that it has.

You know,

And it's great that meditation can handle stress and we were talking about reducing stress.

But I think in today's world with so much coming at us and so much noise,

A lot of times there's a lot of stress happening.

We don't even realize we're stressed,

Right?

And it's like meditation is the preemptive way to bring our attention back so that when something happens in the middle of the day that is stressful,

And we may just automatically override it.

If you have that awareness,

You know,

To come back and do tapping or do something to re center yourself or calm yourself.

That's so powerful.

So,

Yeah,

We have high levels of stress when we test people for cortisol,

Often they're in vital flight,

And there's nothing wrong in their lives.

And they're basically safe and secure.

And you test their cortisol level,

Look at their heart rate and heart,

You know,

All these biological markers.

They look like they're in the jungle.

And we just are meant to live that way.

We're meant to live happy,

Low stress,

Healthy lives.

And so,

Yeah,

It is so essential to do this and to establish a healthy baseline.

Absolutely.

And,

You know,

If you have a wild mind,

Dawson,

I think more power to you is probably why you create so much cool stuff.

We didn't even get a chance to go over the amount you're doing.

But when I read your bio,

It was like reading a book in and of itself.

So you contribute to Energy Psychology Journal,

You started the integrative,

The National Institute for Integrative Health.

You've got all these amazing books and research.

And I do want to mention and you already kind of mentioned it,

But you have a book coming out with Hay House in June called Mind to Matter,

The astonishing science on how your brain creates material reality.

Holy crap,

I want to read that book.

That sounds phenomenal.

And your last book,

The Genie in Your Jeans,

Which we got to touch on a bit today,

We could probably talk for like four more hours,

But Dr.

Dawson Church has other things to do today.

We're going to let him go.

I am reading Genie in Your Jeans,

By the way,

And it's fascinating.

I love it.

It's great.

Thank you.

Yeah,

So if you haven't gotten a chance,

Check it out.

Genie in Your Jeans and Dr.

Dawson Church,

Thank you so much for being here.

We really,

Really appreciate your time.

We look forward to seeing all your new research and writings coming out and come back and hang with us again on Energy Matters sometime.

Thank you.

I love what you two are doing and your message.

I'm so appreciative of the community you built around it and the passion you have for sharing it.

So thank you again.

Yeah,

Thank you.

All right,

Guys.

We'll see you on the next episode of Energy Matters.

Enjoy yourselves.

Meditate.

Stay calm.

Hey,

Insight Timer Meditators.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Energy Matters.

That was Dr.

Dawson Church,

An incredibly gifted teacher,

Author,

Researcher,

And we hope to see you on the next episode of Energy Matters.

Make sure between now and then you meditate.

Be well.

Enjoy yourself.

Take care.

Reviews

So interesting. If you are waiving in your commitment to mediation then listen to this. 🌸

Super! Always awesome to listen to insightful and intelligent conversations, thank you David and guests!

it was a good interview..A little dated since his even newer book "Bliss Brain" was just released..Dawson's work is timeless though..

Incredible and exciting!

Thank you for bringing the wonderful doctor to your program fascinating stuff

Awesome Dawson!! Currently reading and practicing your teachings ... Thank you so much for sharing it.

I love these chats. Thank you.

Wow, really fascinating, and right around the corner from me there in Fulton, CA! I’m inspired to learn that by taking care of myself psychically and emotionally, I am profoundly taking care of myself physically. David and Cody, you guys do a great job; I love the connection you bring to the show, keep up the good work!

Thanks for all the information! I love learning the science behind things. It’s amazing what we can do with our bodies, how much agency we actually have to make positive change in our own lives. Looking forward to checking out Dr Dawson’s ECO meditation and tapping techniques! Thanks guys 💕

Absolutely mind blowing!!! .... I took a break from planning my workshop delivery ‘your mind. Your life’ and I sat to listen to this without realising it was everything I’d be trying to pull together.... plus it gave me a true understanding of a challenge in my life. 3 yrs ago a doctor ‘found hidden’ in my medical files for 28 years old diagnose & told me there was nothing I could as it was a fixed disorder. I always knew it didn’t sound right at the time and now I know why. Because for the previous 10 yrs I had a daily meditation practise. I had ‘cured’ myself.
I cannot tell you HOW GRATEFUL I am for the gift of your podcast. Thank you 🙏🏼❤️

Thank you so much!

Fascinating, insightful, exciting and so encouraging of our human potential and how to best tap into it. 🙏🏻

Game changer. Epigenetics the next big thing.

Very interesting work. Thanks for sharing. Would be interested in learning more about research about other techniques and how they interact with mindfulness meditation and energy. Thanks guys,

Fabulous talk guys!! Oh David your laugh is infectious! So grateful for Dawson’s work- he’s amazing.
Thank you for having him on your show.
Namaste 🙏🏼🦋💐🐾💕

Extraordinary information that will change so much of how we see things that seemed fixed about our health and psyche. Wonderfully interesting stories with research to back it up.

Practical, insightful and transformational.

THANK YOU!

I just learned so very much about how we can use our genes to heal permanently.