Essential Medicine 4: What Is The Body And Other Questions

Hey,

Adam and Neil.

Hey.

Hey,

Julia.

Hey,

Adam.

Hey,

Neil.

So Adam was just before we turned on the recording device,

Was just explaining how the three of us came to do another one of these podcasts.

Would you repeat what you were saying?

And Neil,

I generally mute myself when other folks are talking just because of the background sound.

Sure.

Yeah,

I'd be happy to,

Julia.

So I think what happened is,

Julia,

You and I,

We started having conversations about the healing process and how there is a potential for a new paradigm to see healing in a new light.

And this started to go into concepts of non-physicality,

Concepts of who we really are,

The sense of self,

And what a new relationship between physician and patient or therapist and client might look like within this new paradigm.

And then I think we had three of those so far,

With the most recent one being a deeper dive into what healing is.

And then I had a very short conversation with Neil and Andrew Newberg and mentioned that to Julia.

And as luck would have it,

Julia knows Neil pretty well,

And they're good friends.

And she said,

Well,

This would be great.

Why don't I get Neil involved as well?

And it just occurred to me how profound and I think important to have two MDs.

And another,

And a doctor,

I think you're a neuroscientist,

Julia.

That's what you are in my head,

To have three scientists have a discussion about healing that is relatively outside of the mainstream.

But I think,

In my opinion,

A harbinger of a new way of looking at healing.

Yeah,

I think of you all as doctors.

And I know I'm a doctor with a PhD,

But you wouldn't want me to take out your spleen.

You know what I'm saying?

So I think it's a great mix.

Neil,

I'll- You wouldn't want me to take out your spleen either.

I should specify perhaps that,

Yes,

I'm an MD,

But I'm a pathologist.

So I don't treat patients directly.

I do it indirectly by looking at pieces of them under the microscope.

So and regarding taking out your spleen,

There is a joke I'm very fond of that internists know everything and can do nothing.

Surgeons know nothing,

But can do everything.

Pathologists know everything and can do everything just too late.

That would include splenectomies.

Oh,

That's horrible,

But also good.

So thanks,

Neil.

So we usually start out with just sort of a round robin of what's been going on for us lately.

And I'll start that up and just say what's been going on for me is I've been doing more healing work.

Remote healing work is something I'm experimenting with just pro bono.

I don't know.

I wouldn't know how to charge people for it,

But just was doing it with working with Adam with some of his folks and also with people who asked me.

And getting more confident in that and learning and more humble at the same time learning about that.

And so that's in relationship to this work.

It's very much not the traditional.

I have never met the person.

I don't know the person's name and I'm now going to work on doing some kind of healing.

So that's what I've been working on in addition to trying to understand the nature of time and human consciousness,

Which is my more traditional scientific work,

Even though that's also under traditional.

So that's my,

That's my recent last couple of weeks.

For me,

I'm now facing,

I live in Arizona right now and we're,

We're facing the second wave.

Part of it is because the lockdown was not that strictly enforced in Arizona.

There's multiple reasons for it actually,

But we're noticing it.

I am,

I have noticed that there is less anxiety,

Less fear amongst the staff and the personnel.

We've sort of gotten used to the PPEs and putting on the masks and engaging with patients in a,

In a new way.

Practically speaking that we're just,

All right,

Let's do it.

This is the next,

This is the second wave and yeah,

We're in it now.

Neil,

What's,

What's,

What's happened for you?

You might need a little bit of a longer what's happening since this is the first time we've had you on.

There's a lot happening.

Obviously all in the context of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter.

I'm in New York City,

So we're in the thick of both things.

And before that was everything before and everything's different.

So no point in discussing what came before in some measure.

The first,

I feel like I'm in a fourth phase of this era for me personally and professionally.

The first was the lockdown,

But I was still at the office every day.

But I'm a pathologist and my office is isolated and in fact within the pathology department it's isolated.

So it became a matter of getting comfortable with things like PPEs,

When do you wash your hands?

Do you have to take your shoes off before you come into your office or not?

Turns out you don't have to.

I was the only one saying take your shoes off if you're going to come into my office and no one else did and no one else got sick in the department.

But now I've gotten used to treating my office like a Zendo and I take my shoes off when I come in.

And because clinical volume vanished,

It melted away within the first days,

There wasn't much to do in my office.

So I started meditating more in my office,

Which was kind of good.

And then I started to move into a manic anxiety modulation mode.

I have all this backlogged academic work that I never have time to do.

So I started catching up on all that and was just working profoundly intensely on papers,

Papers,

Papers,

Papers,

Papers.

And that lasted for several weeks until the wave of COVID started to sweep through the hospital at the peak of which one of our leaders,

The head of the hospitalist program,

Catherine Hoffman was home with COVID herself and couldn't do anything and was lying there thinking,

What can I do from home?

And one of the things that she realized in pondering this is that as the ICU floors exploded and the acute care floors exploded,

The number of them and how many patients there were in each unit,

That the doctors were not having the time to call the families of the patients.

And because family members,

Visitors weren't allowed,

There was this profound disconnect that was painful for the patients who were conscious.

Many of them were not because they were on ventilators,

But many were.

Was excruciating for the families who couldn't connect and was painful for the clinicians on the floors because a key part of their caretaking was interrupted.

So she came up with the idea of specialties like pathology that aren't and radiology and psychiatry that had no direct clinical role to play.

We could play this role.

And within the course of a week,

She got this program up and running that ultimately had,

I think,

Close to 200,

Somewhere between 100 and 200 physicians and medical students reviewing the patient records during the day,

Listening in on the daily rounds on the floor,

Getting updates from the clinicians,

And then spending the afternoon calling the families of your assigned patients.

And then if feedback needed to go back and forth,

Facilitating getting them on FaceTime with their patients,

Or maybe they needed a social worker,

Or maybe they needed or someone at home was sick and they needed to be attended to and didn't know how.

So very quickly,

This sort of erupted into this really efficient,

Beautiful program.

But it puts me in mind of the what is healing.

Which body are we healing?

There was the body of the patient on the respirator.

There was the body of the patient and their family.

There was the body of the clinical staff in the hospital,

Those who were on the front lines in a really brutal situation,

And those of us who weren't on the front lines and feeling helpless and purposeless with nothing to offer.

And all those bodies needed healing,

As well as the collective body of just the whole shebang.

We were now a COVID hospital.

And it worked.

It worked brilliantly.

I mean,

Everyone has stories about how it helped them cope.

It helped the people they were working with cope.

And it was still brutal.

But it wasn't as brutal and it wasn't as isolating.

And then the wave passed by.

So I was doing that for about close to three weeks.

And then the ICU floors just started to melt away as the wave passed by.

And then we were sort of left with what do you do now?

And so the PATH department sort of,

I'm in a leadership position.

So as co-chief of my division.

And so finding out what my staff needed to figure out how to function and have reason to be doing things.

And we were just starting to figure that out when the clinical volume,

Because the wave had passed and doctors' offices are now opening and the clinical volume is now flooding back.

And we're increasing staffing levels on our diagnostic teams to meet that.

Though of course that's ahead of the,

We're catching up to what has happened in the last week.

We haven't gotten back to normal.

So that's the phase we're in now.

And it's pretty exhausting to,

Though an interesting thing is having gotten used to not having assigned tasks at work,

Which was a pleasure in some ways.

The absence of structure that the daily workflow provided,

Once the structure came back in,

It was like,

Oh,

We need this structure to be a functioning unit,

For the body of the department to function and for people to connect with each other.

That structure lubricates that.

And we needed to reestablish those links and physical and slides passing around the department that the kind of interrupt we had that was really kind of difficult is tissues come into the lab,

They get processed by residents and physicians as pathology assistants,

And then they get turned into microscope slides,

Which then go to the attendings or the residents to bring to the attendings for diagnoses to be made.

And then they send,

Go back into file.

And so there's this circulation.

But what if the virus lives on those slides?

And so we suddenly had to be disinfecting all our slides.

Every time someone hands something to you,

Someone that you were an intimate flow with suddenly became your point of weakness and vulnerability and danger.

That was an interesting,

So there's been a lot going on here since you guys started this podcast.

That's where I'm going now.

Just getting back to normal.

Yeah.

Neil,

Thanks for sharing that.

You hit on two points that I think are really,

I don't know,

Adam may have different points or also agree,

But my first take on this is what are we healing?

What is this body?

It's clearly not just the patient's body.

Clearly it extends beyond that.

It includes your whole department as a body.

That's one point that I think is really worth talking about.

The other point that's really worth talking about is you're in a time of stress.

You're in a time of stress and we are all in a time of stress.

But even with medical professionals,

This idea of handing it off from your enemy,

Like you handed me the slides before you were my friend because you got the slides ready for me.

Now I'm ready to go look or whatever it is.

But now you're my enemy because even though I know you're my friend,

You could be spreading something to me and how to heal that and to work with that in the context of healing so that you're not my enemy.

It's just,

We're both being very careful.

Yeah.

Well,

And Adam,

Oh,

I'm sorry.

I forgot to mute myself while you were talking.

So I'm still unmuted so I don't have to unmute.

But Adam,

I mean,

So you're frontline working with patients.

For me,

It was just worrying about whether it passes on slides and it probably does not be figured out.

But it does pass from your patients to you.

So what's,

And I'm hearing things from my clinicians.

I'm a liver pathologist.

So my liver team was out doing the general COVID work.

And as they started to come back to the liver world hearing their experiences,

It was brutal.

I mean,

There's really,

There was a lot of trauma and that was part of it because then they couldn't go home to their own families for risk of carrying it.

What was that like for you and your people?

Yeah.

Thanks,

Neil.

I do want to echo something that Julia said.

I would love to dive into at some point the idea of what is the body,

Right,

In the different layers.

That's a really exciting topic to dive into.

But really quickly,

You know,

Something happened a month and a half ago.

I feel like I share this in one of the earlier talks,

Julia,

But I'll just reiterate it here.

I had a patient.

So I'm an intensivist.

I work in the ICU.

That's my job.

I have a specialty focus in neurological ICU care.

But I work in the medical ICU,

The trauma ICU,

And the neuro ICU.

About a month and a half ago,

I had a patient who had a trach,

A tracheostomy.

It's an opening in the throat for those of the listeners where you can connect a ventilator to that opening.

And he was COVID positive.

And for someone to come into that negative pressure room,

You need to don on your mask,

Your hood,

Your whole gown,

Your gloves.

If you were to time that process,

It could be anywhere between five and 10 minutes,

Depending on the person.

I was standing outside of his room talking with one of the nurses.

He was restrained,

The patient,

But he had somehow managed to reach up and dislodge the connection to his tracheostomy to the ventilator.

And I look at him and in my head,

I'm thinking,

Oh,

Shit.

You know,

I look at his O2 sats and they're dropping,

You know,

Is 93%,

85%,

79%,

60.

And I'm thinking,

I can't,

The time it takes to get donned up,

This guy's going to code.

And I wasn't really thinking,

But I just,

I took a deep breath.

I held my breath.

I opened the door.

I went in,

Gloveless,

Grabbed the ventilator,

Hooked him back on.

And I tightened his restraints and I walked out,

Closed the door and,

You know,

Inhaled.

And I don't know what happened,

But I washed myself.

I switched my gowns.

I,

You know,

I put soap all over my face and my hair.

And,

But that was a little scary for me,

For the nurses,

For the patient.

And that is those,

I'm not sure if anyone else has experienced this,

But there are moments where it's,

You gotta,

You gotta do what you gotta do.

And it's those moments where I feel like,

I brought this up because action happens sometimes and you don't,

You don't have time to think about it.

You don't have time to be afraid.

You don't have time to decide what the best thing is for you and your health or for your loved ones.

I wasn't thinking about any of that.

Although since then,

I've,

I've,

I keep N95s in my pockets.

I keep this huge respirator around,

Around my neck for just those moments.

And when I do go home,

I,

I,

I opened the door and I take a B line it to,

To the shower and I have a little area for my scrubs that I,

I throw away and,

And that sort of thing.

So I try to minimize it.

But it,

It has created a scenario in the hospital where we,

We recognize that there are emergencies and we just do our best to prepare for it.

Now this person who's your patient can be perceived of as your enemy because you have to risk your life to go treat the patient.

And the patient,

You know,

Took out his own ventilator.

Anyway,

So I just,

I just think that that,

That is something that Neil really wants to comment about.

Yeah.

I,

The word enemy is really not the word.

Well,

Of course it's not an opposite.

But Neil,

I'm using that word on purpose in an informed way to say like,

That's the fight or flight feeling that one can have if they were,

But you need to listen to my full statement,

Please.

This is how Neil and I talk all the time.

I'm enjoying it.

It's fun.

Okay,

Good.

Um,

That the,

The,

The part of our brains that are not,

That are not healers,

The part of our brains that can get into the space where you're,

Where you're not a healer and you're,

You're fighting for your own survival.

That is the part that can see the patient as an enemy or your,

Your colleague as an enemy.

And I'm saying that that is,

I get that you don't have that experience,

Neil.

I'm saying is that some people can have that experience and it needs to be seen as something that makes sense,

But also needs to be seen and,

And addressed.

So that's what I,

I,

I,

I think it's a really,

Um,

In elegant framing.

I apologize,

But because,

Uh,

And this is partly what I was going to respond to Adam,

That one of the reasons he could do that is because he went to medical school and you take an oath and the act of going to medical school or into nursing or,

Or,

Or you were going in with the understanding that it is risky,

Less now perhaps than it used to be a hundred years ago,

But still risky.

Um,

And then you go through the process where you experience things and you were put in situations to prepare you to deal with that and set those sorts of equations aside.

And then you take an oath,

Which is a powerful thing.

Um,

They are not your enemy,

Even though doing what you need to do for them out of compassion may harm you.

And it's more like a mother and child.

You don't,

I would,

I would argue that it would be really,

Uh,

Indelicate to say,

Yes,

You can look at a child as a parasite on the mother.

There are ways in which that's an apt metaphor,

But it's not really a helpful one.

Um,

A helpful one is that there is a bond of compassion between the two and one needs and the other can provide and you don't hesitate and you don't ask.

Um,

The old thing,

You know,

I,

One of my Zen teachers will hold out this one,

It's an old one,

But your left hand,

You know,

Touches the hot stove and your right hand immediately goes to pull it away,

Risking getting burned.

I wouldn't call the left hand the enemy of the right hand in that moment.

And this goes to the one body thing,

Adam's experience was one body.

Yes,

Absolutely.

That's exactly what I was trying to say.

What I was trying to say was for people who haven't taken that off or haven't had that experience that it could,

You could imagine yourself feeling like this person's your enemy,

But here we have people,

A kind of training.

There's in other words,

What I was trying to say is there's something that's not broken about the medical training.

There's something that's not,

We talk a lot about how there are things broken about the medical training.

There's some things that aren't broken and this is one of them,

The oath,

The Hippocratic oath is beautiful,

But the training process where you learn that,

That you don't ask you help is beautiful,

Do no harm,

Beautiful.

So these are things that are not broken.

So that's just something I was saying.

You're right.

I was being an elegant about it,

But sometimes I use words that are so contrasty to make the point,

But yeah,

Thanks.

As soon as I,

As soon as you said the word enemy,

I also,

I sort of had a reaction,

But I got that that's what you were intending,

Julia.

I think what I,

What I like in this discussion is,

Is what tends to happen a lot for me when I talk about healing,

Which is the conversation around identity,

Which I think is linked with this idea of,

Of what is the body in,

In moments where,

You know,

You have someone that's about to commit suicide or jump off the bridge and you go to grab them and save them,

Right?

You don't think about it.

Or in this case,

You go into a room of,

Of a COVID positive patient.

I,

In my,

In my opinion,

It,

That comes from a very deep knowing that you and that other person somehow are one.

Now this is verging into you know,

Broader conversations,

But I think for me,

It's really what it is that there's a sense of identity with this other person.

And it's that sense of identity with the broader self of which we are all apart,

But seemingly separate,

But there's a knowing that there's,

There's some deeper connection that we tap into as physicians when we say for first do no harm or here to serve others.

And also that place that we tap into when we do things without thinking to put oneself at risk or using your analogy,

Neil,

The,

The right hand,

Putting itself at risk to save the left hand is because there's a deeper understanding that the hands are part of a larger whole,

Right?

Now what would this do if,

You know,

We extrapolated on a societal level,

You know we bring up Black Lives Matter and these conversations that comes from a place where we,

The racism,

It comes from a place where we truly feel,

Where we feel at least on a conscious level,

A separation.

But if we went deeper and,

And felt the knowing of the larger body,

The larger self,

Then we,

Then our behavior naturally changes,

Right?

The real question is,

Is where,

Where are we consciously in,

In the sense of self?

Yes.

And that comes right back to which body are we trying to heal?

And is there more than one body?

I mean,

When Neil,

When you said the whole shebang,

Part of me would do it when I'm doing the remote healing work.

And I'm really novice at this is that I,

When I'm working on a particular person,

I also sense the,

The family and the,

And the people around them.

And I'm like,

Well,

So where does it end?

Like,

And then that always comes down to the same as like,

It doesn't end,

But I'm going to try to localize this to the person I'm concentrating on now.

I don't,

I don't,

I wonder sometimes if,

If there was one person who's not healed,

If anyone can actually be healed,

I wonder that.

How does one measure the degree or completion of healing in any case?

So you know,

There's always more.

I don't know if,

If you want me to jump in with my levels of scale,

But I,

But I think,

I mean,

What's useful about it is I think that it gives people a concrete way when we say,

Well,

Which body it seems that's kind of metaphorical,

Unless you have an instinct for it.

It just sounds like nice,

Soft,

Spiritual ideals,

But,

But metaphors and poetry.

And it's through this stuff that I met you in the first place,

Probably Julia,

No,

Definitely as a matter of fact,

And Adam for that matter too.

It might be interesting,

But I'd love to hear how you and Julia met if just briefly,

Because I don't actually don't know that story.

Neil,

Do you know that story?

I don't know that story.

No,

It's just seems like you've always been there,

But only for like eight or five or 10,

12 years.

I can't,

Time has,

I've lost sense of it,

But.

Me too.

Or IONs probably.

No,

I think it was the Science of Nonduality meeting in San Jose.

Yeah.

But which year?

I have no idea.

It was a long time.

I bet we were on a panel together and then we just liked each other so much.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And we just went out and got IONs and hang out with you there.

And we had this amazing walk in the drive and the parking lot.

Yeah.

And then you showed me your tattoo.

And then you told me about being Jewish.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay,

Good.

And sort of continues to unpack.

That's cool.

But what brought me to Sand,

I mean your stuff,

The Science of Nonduality conference is science and non-duality.

And those are your themes in your research.

They're not theoretically mine.

I'm a liver pathologist.

But studying stem cells and stem cell biology got me into the notion of how cells self-organize themselves into a body.

And that led me into complex systems theory,

Which is how things organize into larger scale structures from interactions of smaller things.

To like how fish become a bait ball or how starlings become a murmuration or our cells become bodies or people become movements or cities or neighborhoods.

And elaborating on that sort of made clear how at the everyday scale our bodies are as we think of them objects that end at our skin and there's separation between us.

But like the way you see a flock of starlings in the sky and your first impression might be a shape of a thing and then you realize,

Oh,

It's birds.

So what appeared to be a thing at one level of scale turns out to be a phenomenon arising from smaller things at a lower level of scale.

The bird itself is just a flock of cells.

And so at the everyday level,

It's a bird.

At the microscopic level,

It's a community of cells and there's no bird there.

The same with our bodies.

But our bodies are shedding skin all the time.

That's the dust in the room.

So the outer boundary at the cellular level is at least your room.

And we have bacteria on us that are our microbiome without which we could not live as a human being.

They are part of our bodies inextricably.

And every time you shake hands or kiss or hug,

Have any intimacy with anyone else or touch a doorknob that someone else then touches,

You're passing your microbiome.

So where's your boundary?

It's at least as far out as your environment and the people you encounter in your environment.

And in fact,

People who share an apartment and their pets all share a single microbiome,

Becoming one single organism defined at the cellular level.

Well our cells,

I think,

No,

They're just biomolecules in water.

So I breathe out carbon dioxide for the plants and they breathe out oxygen for me.

And so at the molecular level,

My boundary is the entire ecosystem.

At the atomic level,

And the boundary just gets wider and wider the further out you go.

At the atomic level,

There's no atom in your body that you didn't drink or eat from the planet or breathe.

So we can see ourselves as beings that live on the planet,

Which is true,

That are separate and bounded by our skin,

Or we can see ourselves as the Earth that has self-organized itself into beings that think they are separate.

And then you go all the way down to the quantum level and boundaries are as wide as the universe because of non-locality.

And so there is only one body and that is everything within which it differentiates into things that think of themselves as separate.

Healing modalities that we have in our culture and in other cultures generally target one of those levels at a time.

So that an orthopedist will splint an arm and that's a thing.

Or you give stem cell therapy and those are cells at being entered into the community or now we're doing microbiome changes,

Fecal transfers,

So you're entering into the cellular phase.

We do lots of stuff with drugs at the molecular level,

But then you have energy healing,

Which is interacting at the quantum electromagnetic level,

Maybe.

Is it electromagnetic or some other energy?

So someone asked me the other day about the healing that goes on within an energy healing thing.

And this is kind of what I think you mean by a different paradigm when you spoke about it earlier,

Adam,

Is in our culture we see the healer coming in to heal the broken thing.

And that's like there's a machine to fix.

And we're stuck in our culture in this machine metaphor,

Which obviously doesn't work.

But if it's a process of placing your hands over someone and experiencing their energy and entering into it,

It's not you impacting on them.

There is a single energy body that extends beyond each of your skins and becomes one body in the process.

And so the healing in part is the experiencing of being one body,

Which is a real thing.

This isn't a metaphor.

I just gave a perfectly solid Western sciency sort of view of why this at the electromagnetic level we're one body.

You know the heart entrainment thing,

Julia,

Is that true?

Do you have a reference for that?

And do you want to say what it is?

Because I think that's really vivid as an example.

It's super vivid.

And I don't have the reference at the ready.

But it does exist.

Well,

You know,

So right.

Let me just say there's something really interesting that is going on that's not well understood.

I think that's the best way to frame it.

When two people are close and together and especially if they're doing synchronous things,

Like if you dance with someone or you're moving,

Walking in a synchronous way,

Your heartbeat rhythms can get entrained.

Is that what you're talking about?

Yeah,

Kind of.

But even the version I heard of this,

It was from a cardiologist,

So I sort of maybe inappropriately grant it truth.

But it does make sense.

So if you have a heart,

This I know is true,

If you put a beating heart in a strong electromagnetic field,

It will entrain its beating to the pulsing of the magnetic field.

So how strong?

Hearts are pretty sensitive,

So not that strong.

And being an electromagnetic thing,

The heart itself generates a magnetic field.

So two hearts approaching each other will sense each other's electromagnetic field and entrain to each other.

And the number I heard was that like to a distance of 12 feet.

Oh,

I heard that too,

But I can't find the reference for the 12 feet.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But regardless of what the distance is,

I just always go to what happens when you have a long-term couple sleeping next to each other,

So their hearts are within inches or a couple of feet for hours a day.

And then is it a surprise when after 50 years of marriage,

One partner dies and the other one soon dies of a broken heart and actually experiences like,

It's my heart.

But I think we're doing that all the time.

But as Adam said,

It's are we aware that all these levels are happening?

And for me,

This way of framing things has turned into my own practice of always remember to check what's happening from a different level of scales point of view.

Because we're all trained to do this level of scale really well.

I'm trained because I look at under the microscope all day long at bits of humans.

I'm used to going up and down between two levels of scale.

So I have a trained facility for that.

The only other people I think that get trained to do that are pilots who are going up all the time to a higher level of scale and then coming down.

But the rest of us in our daily practice are stuck at this level unless we say to ourselves or have the instinct to experience,

Oh,

There are these other levels.

So the two of you,

I think,

Probably just experience this directly.

It's an intuitive thing that you have then chosen to cultivate.

Yeah,

I appreciate everything you're sharing,

Neil.

There's so much that I wanted to say in all that you shared.

But one thing that did stick out had to do with the comment that you made regarding the paradigm shift.

In my experience,

Having been educated in the Western allopathic tradition and having had experiences with faith healing and energy healing and that sort of thing,

Reiki and all that stuff,

I have seen energy practitioners,

For lack of a better word,

Treat their client in a mechanistic way.

And I do want to point that out because the paradigm shift that I speak about with Julia is not going from physical mechanistic to non-physical.

I feel like that's eventually going to happen at some point.

There's way too much evidence to ignore it.

What I'm speaking about is when I approach someone,

Whether it's with an energy healing modality or not,

I don't intrinsically see them as broken.

And I think that makes all the difference.

If I relate to someone as already whole,

Already perfect,

Already part of a source that they've never left,

That intrinsic separation is not actually real,

Then it does something.

It completely transforms the bedrock of the relationship between me and my patient.

And at that point,

I would argue the modality that's used is irrelevant.

You could use energy healing.

You could use a pill.

You can use surgery.

And that's my particular perspective.

I know there's people that feel differently than that,

But for me,

The modality is like a permission slip.

It's like you're letting yourself get to the place of knowing you're already whole,

You're already healed.

And it might take some time for that to express itself on the different levels that we speak of,

The physical being one of them,

But there's also the mental and emotional and other aspects.

That's the paradigm shift for me is like,

Can we see each other as whole?

Can we see each other as pure,

As perfect?

That for me changes everything.

Okay.

So this was beautiful because from the outside as a non MD,

Right,

I'm listening.

And what I'm sensing is Neil,

You're talking about the importance of these shifts because of your experience every day,

Having to shift these scales,

You're embracing the whole.

It has become just a matter of course,

Because of course you could see that this looks like a liver here at this level.

And at this level,

It looks like these cells and we're going up and down all the times.

Like,

I like the pilot analogy.

So you're,

You're,

You're,

You're doing scales in space and you're seeing how the whole emerges from acknowledging that these are all aspects of one thing in space.

Meanwhile,

Adam is doing scales in time.

So he's seeing the patient as their healed self.

He's saying,

And maybe it takes some time to get there,

But that exists within them.

Now the seed of the future is in the present.

And so he is,

He is combining them across time.

And what I,

What I think what we're seeing here is that what is healing is being able to have the wholeness in space and the wholeness in time.

Are we creating a matrix?

I think we're creating a matrix.

I think that's,

I think that's the paradigm shift is that finding the wholeness in both space and time.

So I think it's beautiful.

Thank you.

That's a beautiful framing of that.

Cause I didn't go there with what Evan was saying,

Even though I instinctively know,

But yes,

That's exactly it.

And we know that space and time are not different from each other.

You know,

There's nearly other dimensionalities,

Whatever.

And what we use to make up stories.

The thing that makes me sort of hopeful is I'm sort of cognizant that Adam is significantly younger than me.

But significantly older than a lot of the medical students we have.

And it was I get to interact with medical students fairly routinely in teaching,

Though with this family connect thing with the COVID caretaking.

It was astonishing to work with them directly in this caretaking thing.

It wasn't about us teaching them and them teaching us.

Although in fact we learned,

We pathologists learned a lot more about how to navigate current clinical work from seeing our medical students who were fresh.

So that was cool.

But I feel like the majority of people that I meet who are young,

Who are going into allopathic types of training,

Whether it's MD,

RN,

NP,

PAs,

They're hungry and ready for this kind of thing.

They're already,

The next generation has an intuition and it makes me think about what we're watching with Black Lives Matter.

What's in part why now?

There are all sorts of things playing into it,

Including the way the pandemic took everything away from people.

So when this erupted,

They had to pay attention because there was no way to distract themselves.

But this young generation is done with this,

The old paradigms.

They just have no patience for it.

And so they're out there and it isn't just black people and a few friends.

Everybody is out there.

And I think the same way that this younger generation is ready for exactly this,

Their experience and understanding of the world for whatever complex reasons,

They see things as more seamless and they're hungry.

They don't want the hierarchy of traditional allopathic healing.

They don't want that false responsibility.

They don't want implicit cruelty that often comes with it.

And they're coming into medicine through whichever portal to accomplish healing.

And there's a sense that our traditional ways haven't evolved to do that.

So I feel like the shift is already happening.

I think they need people like you guys to name it so they can go,

Oh,

That's,

Yeah.

Because you have the experience to be able to frame it in a way that allows them to go,

I'm simply not against the old paradigm,

But this paradigm already exists and I can enter and partake in that.

Well,

I would echo that and say,

It gives me hope too,

But specifically Adam,

I think is as a doctor,

As an MD,

Is Adam,

You're thinking about writing a book related to the essence of healing.

Isn't that right?

Yeah,

Thanks to your,

I mean,

Julia,

You've inspired me on so many levels in our conversations.

I don't know how to write a book and I'm sure I'm going to learn how to,

But yeah,

There's something that just feels like it's welling up inside of me.

It's just,

I know it's a matter of time where healing will,

All modalities will flourish in the sense that the divide between healing and evolution of spirit will start to dissolve.

And we talked about this earlier,

But you know,

This,

It's an artificial distinction to say healing of the body or any aspect of the physicality is different than spiritual growth or the growth of the individual.

They go hand in hand.

In fact,

You could argue that any deep sense of growth is a form of healing.

And I feel like as time goes on,

Those artificial silos will fall.

And I loved what you said,

Neil,

About naming it.

That was the first time that I thought about the idea.

One initial concern is like,

As soon as you name it,

The name is not the thing,

Right?

We learned that in Zen and in Buddhism,

The finger pointing to the moon,

But there,

I don't want this particular perspective in having been named to be a fad or another healing body,

Which it isn't,

It's,

In my opinion,

It is a worldview shift.

It is a way of seeing the world that is different than before.

I completely agree with you.

And the thing is that I think that that shift is already taking place.

It can be encouraged and nurtured and helped along by exactly the kind of stuff you're doing.

But it's already in process is my sense of it.

The other thing that you just triggered in me,

I can't remember what specifically,

But that I think is worth mentioning is that when we talk about fixing things,

You're talking about restoring to some predetermined state of what we define as normal or healthy or whatever.

But I think about,

I took care of my mom who dwindled in some ways over the course of about 10 years until she passed away.

And she had neurological issues,

No short term memory and stuff like that.

So people would call her demented.

And I was like,

You know,

That's not what's going on here because it's not a disease.

She very gracefully,

Sweetly passed into other states of being,

Which she was completely cogent about and could say,

This is the happiest time of my life.

As she was becoming a woman that she had,

Part of her issue was Parkinson's.

And when she first got diagnosed and we went to her doctor's offices,

She would point to people in the waiting room and say,

Promise me you won't let me get like that.

Well,

She had become one of those people.

But who was that younger woman to tell this woman who was so profoundly happy that that was a wrong state of being.

And when she passed away,

Death itself also just became,

Oh,

The next state of being.

So in our allopathic medicine particularly,

But our culture in general is so like healing does not necessarily mean not dying.

Healing doesn't necessarily mean not having all the abilities you wish to have at the moment that you want them to be available.

It's something else.

And then can I throw Zen koan in?

We often do.

I gave a Dharma talk last night on this koan called Master Ma is Unwell.

And the Master Ma is Unwell,

The koan reads,

And the monastery superintendent comes in and says,

What is your state of being today,

Teacher?

And the great teacher responds,

Sun face Buddha,

Moon face Buddha.

And part of that is the sun is this radiant symbol of the absolute flawless radiant golden mind that is completely non dual,

Has no perceptual details in it,

No sunspots,

No flares,

You just see radiance.

The moon is bright,

But it has all this detail in it.

And on top of it,

It goes through phases.

So it's changing all the time.

But the fact is that the radiance of both is the same.

Just sometimes Buddha nature is about the absolute.

But when I'm not particularly attuned to the absolute,

And I'm just caught in my world of the relative cells or bodies or,

You know,

Whatever,

That's all still just Buddha nature too.

It's the same light.

And the issue isn't,

I'm a moon and I want to be a sun.

The issue is,

In this moment,

What is my awareness?

And everything else just sorts out.

When you said source,

Oh,

It was probably when you said source.

When you are just source,

Then the world is perfect as it is,

As hard as that may be to swallow or believe in our culture.

Or just being human.

But it's true.

Well,

There just,

I want to,

A short thing I want to respond to is how beautiful that koan was.

It reminds me of,

You know,

In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition,

Dilgo Kience Rinpoche is a great teacher.

He had a book that he wrote called The Heart of the Enlightened Ones,

Which I recommend to the listeners.

In it,

There's this description of absolute truth and relative truth and how in,

When at one point he was meditating and thoughts would just arise in the mind,

Not necessarily that he chose them to arise,

They just arose.

And in,

It's hard to describe,

But in his relationship with the thought or maybe lack thereof,

The thought itself became what he called self liberated,

Or self liberating.

And the presence of the thought and the space around it and then the dissolving the thought was Buddha nature.

That was Buddha mind.

Like all of that was right there for him.

And for me,

I always,

That touched me so deeply when I first read it,

Because it occurred to me that all of this relative stuff happening in this world,

The phenomenon,

That's all a gateway to Buddha nature,

To the mind,

To source.

It's not some transcendent thing that's out there unattainable.

Who you are is in front of you.

It's right there.

It's staring at you in the face.

It's always touched me and your koan brought that memory back up.

I am in love with this conversation.

I feel like this conversation in itself is healing,

Just to talk about these things with people who think so deeply about them and who can argue about no,

This,

Not that.

All of that is healing because that's all the,

I mean,

It's sort of,

It's fractal in nature,

Right?

I mean,

It's self representing.

The conversation itself represents what we're talking about with essential healing in any way.

So I just want to say that I love you both.

You're awesome.

Thanks,

Julia,

For having us.

As usual,

It's an absolute pleasure and joy to be with you on these calls and a total treat and joy to have Neil as well.

Oh,

And for me,

I have to go back to looking at another 150 GI Biopsy slides now,

But I feel completely healed and refreshed.

Awesome.

That's so cool.

This was really awesome.

Thanks.

It's a privilege to be invited in.

It's a privilege to have you,

Dale.

I love you and you're awesome.