Initially, I was diagnosed with lupus and I would say about four years ago I was also diagnosed with fibromyalgia. I was diagnosed with Lyme's disease 16 years ago and my MS 15 years ago. I just have a lot of head problems like headaches and just like migraines and like lightheadedness.
And then stomach issues that I've had for like a year that we're not really sure the cause. All I'm going to ask you to do here today is to trust and believe and surrender. This is not Western medicine. This is Eastern medicine and energy medicine. But Eastern medicine says, basically, and energy medicine says that as human beings we've learned how to hold on to all of our emotions.
And in doing so, We create density in our body. Things that Western medicine has labeled cancer, fibromyalgia, Crohn's disease, migraine, headaches, depression, anxiety, all of that. I'm fascinated with healers and how our thoughts and emotions affect our health. Now, energy healers and mind-body medicine may not be considered normal. But what's not normal to me is that so many people are sick these days.
I mean, the people in this room are just some of my close family and friends. I went from being a healthy, happy mom, the best days of my life, to being completely unable to take care of my child. I've been living with chronic pain for a long time and just haven't quite yet figured out how to feel good.
Doesn't it seem like so many people you know are dealing with illness? I feel like it's changed from the six degrees of Kevin Bacon to the one degree of cancer. I mean, has our world and our food become so toxic that illness is inevitable? And then I feel like every other ad on TV is a drug commercial filling us with fear that our bodies are failing us.
When I was a kid, besides being terrible at gymnastics, I remember thinking how magical it was when you get a cut, all you did was clean the wound, forget about it, and it healed all by itself. I feel like we've forgotten how intelligent the body is. Having been to all kinds of healers and doctors over the last 20 years, I've experienced firsthand how my thoughts, beliefs, and emotions affect my health. I'm convinced we have more power to heal than we've been led to believe. But don't take my word for it.
I'm going to go out on the road and speak to some of the leading scientists, doctors, and teachers in the field of mind-body medicine to share with you what is truly powerful. possible when it comes to healing. It's not just that disease starts in the mind, it's that everything starts in the mind. The body has a capacity to heal that I was never informed of as a medical student or resident. The mind, body, emotions, relationships, sensory experiences, sound, touch, sight, all these senses.
our windows to our inner pharmacy. You've got to get to the root cause of your dis-ease if you're going to find freedom. So if I change my perception, my mind, change my belief about life...
I change the signals that are going in and adjusting the function of the cell tonic thoughts produce tonic chemicals toxic thoughts produce toxic chemicals How deeply can we influence our bodies or the bodies of our loved ones when it comes to healing or the world beyond? Our bodies how much influence do we really have? Yeah, you're the guru now, so visualize In order for some of us to wake up, we need a wake-up call. And in 1986, I got the call. I was in a triathlon in Palm Springs, California, and I was in the biking portion of the race.
And I was coming up to this intersection, section. So as I made the turn, a four-wheel drive Bronco going about 55 miles an hour hit me from behind and catapulted me out of my bicycle. The compressive force compressed six vertebrae in my spine. The prognosis was I'd probably never walk again and that I needed a radical surgery called the Harrington rod surgery.
If this had been anybody else, I probably would have recommended that they have the surgery. But this was me. I decided to check out of the hospital, and I just had this one thought, and the thought was, the power that made the body heals the body. And I couldn't stop thinking about that because I knew that there's an intelligence that's giving us life that keeps our heart beating and digesting our food. So I decided that I was going to make contact with this intelligence, and I was going to give it a plan, a template, a design.
And when I was happy with my creation, I was going to surrender. this creation to a greater mind because it knows how to heal way better than I do. And the second thing I said was I'm not going to let any thought slip by my awareness that I don't want to experience.
So I would start off in my mind reconstructing my spine vertebrae per vertebrae and then I'd start thinking about living in a wheelchair. So for six weeks I went through this incredible dark night of the soul because I couldn't really get my mind to do what I wanted it to do. And it would take me about three hours of closing my eyes and reconstructing every single vertebrae. And starting over again every time I lost my attention. At the end of six weeks, I went through the whole entire process without losing my attention.
And it was like I hit a tennis ball in the sweet spot. Something clicked. In that moment, I clicked.
I started noticing significant changes in my body. My motor functions started coming back. and my body began to change dramatically. And I was back on my feet in 10 weeks and back training again at 12 weeks.
And I just made a deal with myself. And the deal was that if I was ever able to walk again, I'd spend the rest of my life studying the mind-body connection and mind over matter. And pretty much that's what I've been doing since 1986. The best science of our time is now showing that every organ in the human body has the ability to heal itself.
given the right environment. Even the organs we were told could not. So spinal cord tissue, brain tissue, heart tissue, pancreatic tissue, prostate tissue.
All of these organs are actually designed to repair and heal themselves under the right conditions, given the right environment. What are those conditions? That's the question.
Some of them are environmental, things like water, air, just the quality of our food. Some of them... maybe chemical, the supplements that we take and some of the herbal products that our ancestors understood and used with great success in healing their bodies before modern medicine ever came along.
And I think those are interesting. But what really fascinates me is the inner environment. And this is the environment that the Buddha talked to us about so eloquently.
And the Buddha said that every man and woman is the architect of their own healing and their own destiny. There is a natural intelligence that leads those cells from the embryo to the baby. There's a natural intelligence that leads the acorn into an oak tree.
There's a natural intelligence that keeps the planets revolving around the sun. We would not have been able to evolve without having a mechanism which allows us to take a hit. And that's what disease is.
That's what injury is. You took a hit. But the immune system is the way the body corrects. And that intelligence that's giving us life, that's keeping our heart beating and digesting our food, that runs through the autonomic nervous system, it is the greatest healer in the world. All we have to do is get out of the way.
I was always super healthy. My life was really just a journey of healing and health. I was studying acupuncture, yoga.
I was a super good eater. Mostly vegetarian, probably 40% raw. But I had gone through a lot of stress. I moved, was in a very bad marriage. My mom died.
That was probably the hardest part. And she died of cancer. So pretty much the whole foundation was shaken. But I, you know, have always had this real positive, so I just kept doing yoga and riding my bike, and I thought everything was fine. But I did know that there was something wrong with me physically because I would get headaches and just kind of feel a little nauseous.
So I went to a doctor three times over the course of a year, and each time he gave me a different test, he said, oh, you're fine. So the third time, I told him, I have a lot of pain. And there's like a stabbing pain in this area and so it was bottom of my colon at the junction of the rectum.
So he did a sigmoidoscopy and there it was. They thought it was stage two or three at first and then of course the first thing they do is they send you to a PET scan and then the PET scan showed that it was in a few places and it was in my liver also. So it was stage four and that was a shock. I had never heard of anyone living from stage four.
Elizabeth's story really shook me because she reminds me a lot of myself. She was healthy, worked out, did yoga, seemingly did everything right. Yet one day she wakes up with stage four cancer.
It makes me question, are we at the mercy of some random fate? Or is there something else going on that we just might not be aware of? I've been in practice for 35 years now, and I've seen a lot of patients, I've seen a lot of crazy things. And I'm more firmly convinced every week that goes by that the ultimate cause of disease is stress. 90% of what...
Takes people to the doctor as stress-related illnesses. They leave with antidepressants. They leave with every kind of medication.
We have three basic stresses. We have physical stress like accidents, injuries, falls, traumas. We have chemical stress like bacteria and viruses and hormones and foods and heavy metals and hangovers and blood sugar levels.
And then we have emotional stress, and that's family tragedies, loss, you know, job, finances. And all of those things knock our brain and body out of balance. When you perceive a threat, in the old days in school we referred to that as activating the adrenal system, fight or flight.
If you're being chased by a saber-toothed tiger, how much energy do you want to make available to run away from that tiger? I hope you get the answer, and the answer is, I want 100%. of the energy to run away from the tiger centuries thousands of years ago that was maybe appropriate because there was literally a a potentially life-threatening situation with a with a wild animal let's say but now it's your spouse or it's your boss you know or it's rent that's due in a week and yet the system reacts in the same way as though it's a life-threatening situation so you're still releasing cortisol you're still releasing adrenaline noradrenaline into the system And if you're running a flight-or-flight response all the time, by definition, you are mobilizing resources from your gut, from your elimination system, from your immune system, from your higher brain centers, and putting that energy in your muscles to fight for your life. That means your memory is not all that good, your concentration is down, you can't digest your food properly, you can't eliminate toxins properly, and your immune system is compromised, chronically. All the time.
Stress hormones inhibit the immune system. How effective? When doctors want to transplant an organ from person A to person B, they want to transplant a heart or a kidney or a lung.
The doctor gives the patient the stress hormones and then transplants the organ. Why? Once the organ is put in, the foreign organ, and the immune system is now shut down by stress hormones, then I'm not rejecting the foreign organ.
Unfortunately in today's world the stresses are 24-7-365. They never let up. Good evening just ahead of the spring and summer travel season we got a sobering update on Zika today. The net result is illness and disease that is the only consequence that will come from the chemistry of fear and yet look at the world today.
The Dow plunged another 260 points. New losses for Americans and their 401ks. In the beginning, I just thought maybe it was some kind of, like, reaction or a hive or some dermatological thing. Then it started to progress and get worse and worse, and I started to get massive breakouts and boils and hives, and then it started to spread a little bit to, like, my ears and my head. So then I started to freak out more and thought, okay, it's probably something more serious than I'm just guessing it to be by putting on some, you know, like, topical creams and stuff.
And I think what really sparked it was maybe about a year and a half ago. It was the middle of the night, and I woke up, but I couldn't move. My right side of my body was paralyzed. So I freaked out for a moment, thought I was having a stroke or something was happening.
And eventually I could start to feel some tingling coming back and then I rolled out of bed. From that moment, I think, about a year and a half ago is when I really started to, went to a rheumatologist, went to a neurologist, allergists. They keep saying, oh, it's autoimmune, you know, the biopsies now show connective tissue disorder, so we know it's something autoimmune. You know, they give me all this literature and all these different drugs, but I mean, they sound so scary, I don't want to take them.
It's like, causes blindness and then heart disease and just tons and tons of side effects. And it's so frustrating that no one knows how to help you, right? And you know, sometimes I'm thankful it's nothing worse.
But at the same time, for me, you know, just daily life, it's like I have to work. I have the kids, you know, I've got other responsibilities. And I just then have to go to the doctor like five times a week.
And it starts to just get really like daunting. It's really tiring. I'm just so tired. Jesus, take care of mommy. And hope her daughter goes away.
We always put the holy water on. Amen. My little one, she goes to a private school and she always prays. She goes, Mommy, I prayed for your dots today to go away.
And so I was telling her, oh, somebody from Mommy's work, remember Kelly? She goes, well, she's going to help Mommy. She goes, see, God's going to help Mommy.
It was so cute. I started crying. Oh, my God.
Yeah, and I was like, oh, yeah. See, just things are meant to be sometimes, right? Things that will come into your life for some reason. Like, who would have thought?
Yeah. It's so crazy how the universe works. Eva brought me some contracts to sign at the office and apologized for a rash that was on her hand.
Only then did I find out that for three years she's been struggling with this mystery illness. So I'm going to connect her with some holistic practitioners that I've worked with, see if they can come up with an answer for her and help her, and we'll just see what works, what doesn't, and hopefully find out why. You know, we are now about three centuries into a mindset in medicine that was predicated on the work of Descartes and even, you know, Newton and Martin even. You know, this idea that our symptoms are...
that our body is a machine, it's, you know, full of organs with buttons and levers that need adjusting, and that you're really not here for any purposeful existence. You know, you're here to live and survive until you die. Medicine being derived from Newtonian physics looked at the body as a physical device, and that if there's anything wrong with it, it is a consequence of a problem in the mechanics of a physical machine. I say, well, this is really cool until 1925. In 1925, a new physics came in, quantum physics. What's the relevance of quantum physics?
Well, it said that invisible energy realm that was out there that we did not count and even talk about in medicine because it's. is just a physical body. It turns out our perception of what is physical is an illusion. There's nothing physical at all. It's all energy.
If you look inside any part of your body with a microscope, so let's say your hand, and you look inside your hand, you find cells. You look inside the cells, you get your DNA in the center of the cell. You look inside the DNA, you find atoms.
You look inside the atoms, there's nothing there. Well, there's protons, neutrons, electrons. And what's amazing is inside an atom, there's 99.9999999999999999% empty space.
If a proton was an apple, size of an apple, the close... The closest the electron would be the size of a grain of salt, and it would be approximately two kilometres away. Now, that's how much space you would get, simple pi r squared. The particles themselves, they actually emerge essentially out of what's called the quantum field, and ultimately you can think of particles as just waves of energy, just literally vibrations of energy. And I think it shifts your mind from thinking that something is seemingly solid and permanent to perhaps something that's not.
perhaps something can change and something can be healed. Long, long time ago, the word spirit was what? Invisible moving forces that influence the physical realm.
Quantum physics is taking us back to a time that said the invisible forces that we have been discounting in medicine turned out to be the primary forces that control everything. And I said, well, what did they include? Mind.
mind, consciousness, and this is why, if you want to come back to the supreme power over our biology, it's thought, the invisible energy from our mind that not only shapes our body, but shapes our relationship to the world in which we live. February the 2nd, 2006 should have been the last day of my life. I had lymphoma, which had started four years prior with just a lump on my neck.
I had tumors, some of them the size of lemons, from the base of my skull, all around my neck, under my arms, into my chest, and all the way down to my abdomen. I was so weak that my organs started shutting down one by one. And I went into a coma, and the doctors told my family that these were my final hours.
I then went... into a realm where I became aware of my deceased father. When I was growing up, my father and I had a very turbulent relationship.
I was always left with this feeling that I had let him down and that I had never been the kind of daughter he wanted me to be. And here I was now with him in the other realm. All I felt from him and for him was pure, unconditional love. There was no judgment from him at all for anything that I had done. It was like I reached a state of complete and total clarity.
And in that state of clarity, I understood why I had the cancer. I understood how it was. That every decision and every choice I had made in my life up to that point was made from fear.
Now that I knew this truth, I realized that if I chose to go back to my body, that I would heal. And it was in those moments that I felt myself coming out of the coma. By about a week, The doctors could actually see that the tumors were dissolving faster than they'd ever seen tumors dissolve before.
At the end of five weeks, I was physically stronger and they really could find no trace of cancer in my body, so they let me go home and live my life cancer-free. Anita's story is the most powerful example of just what is possible with the human body. She's proof that no matter how far gone the body seems, it is possible for tissues to regenerate and function to restore.
She had a dramatic shift in the way she looked at life, from one of fear to one of love. That's it. And her body responded and healed. But is she just some random miracle or...
Can we study what happens so that more people can make this shift? So I've been studying radical remissions for over 10 years now, and it started with a trip around the world to interview radical remission survivors from all different countries. And then since then, I've gone on to analyze over 1,500 of these cases, and I've conducted over 250 in-depth interviews.
And these are people from all walks of life. So there have been radical remissions. verified and reported for every single cancer type.
People with pancreatic cancer, with stage 4 lung cancer, with a big brain tumor that's considered inoperable. There are examples of people out there who have healed from it. I've discovered over 75 different things that these people have done to try to get well. But not everybody uses all 75 of these factors. However, when I looked at the data, they were all using these 9. Only 2 of them are physical.
The rest are mental, emotional, and spiritual. And that hit me like a ton of bricks. There really is a way to activate the immune system with your mental, emotional work. And of course, there's plenty of science behind that.
Does that mean that we're all going to heal tomorrow? No, but it means they deserve to be studied and there's something incredible there for us to learn. I very much...
believed that perfect health was only one prescription away. And it wasn't until about nine months postpartum, my pregnancy, that I got my first diagnosis. And I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's thyroiditis.
I had symptoms of brain fog, forgetfulness, intense fatigue, and, you know, very much was not myself. But, of course, I was a new mom, so it's easy to sort of dismiss those. symptoms and I had that same feeling again like I don't want to take a medication for the rest of my life there's gotta be a way out right it's gonna be another another option and so I went to a naturopath which was very unlike me you know I'd only ever been trained to dismiss alternative medicine as sort of this nuisance you know like a nuisance to legitimate real medicine right and I went there because I knew that conventional medicine had nothing to offer me and I knew that there was no way I would ever get out of having a chronic illness if I proceeded with my conventional doctor.
So, of course, I put into remission in six months what should be a chronic. Lifelong, you know, disease. And I, you know, experienced the raising of a lot of red flags, essentially, where I said, you know, I never learned that nutrition has anything to do with health.
We have a sick care system where doctors and insurance companies are basically treating symptoms. But aren't really getting to root causes, in many cases aren't dealing with the whole person, they're dealing with the symptom by which they then give a drug which then has a side effect and so it keeps on spinning, more toxicity, more toxicity, more disease, more ill health. Conventional medicine tied up in an old belief system is locked into the cause of illness, is tied into our genetics and our biochemistry and therefore The pharmaceutical industry is the great savior. Why?
Because it'll make the chemistry that should bring us back to health again. Well, it turns out that's totally false. There are so few diseases that are actually organic.
In fact, 100% of diabetes type 2 has nothing to do with genetics and everything to do with lifestyle. 90% or more of cardiovascular disease has nothing organically wrong with the individual. It's just the consequence of dealing with stress.
Does this mean medicine is all negative? And I go, absolutely not. Medicine does miracles with trauma.
If I physically hurt myself, I get in a car accident, and my guts are hanging out, don't send me to a chiropractor. And I don't need a massage therapist. And homeopathy is really not going to help.
I want a surgeon. Medicine is useful. Pharmaceutical medicine, therapeutic interventions, surgery, et cetera, useful. I would say maybe 10% acute illnesses.
Otherwise, if you have a chronic illness, doesn't matter what it is, cancer, heart disease, autoimmune illnesses, use a holistic approach, which means everything from mind, body, emotions, energy healing, even distant healing, anything that influences your experience of mind, body, emotions. So with emergencies and acute illness like injury or infection, we need a quick fix. So thank God we have the most advanced life-saving technology.
But with chronic illnesses, they've developed over time, so the quick fix model won't work. We need to get to the root cause if we're going to make a change. I'm going to speak to a guy who is helping thousands of people get to that root cause.
He uses, well... A different kind of diagnostic technology. Can you do a little of this? Just hang on. I thought you had a heart murmur before, but it looks good.
It all started at age four. Woke up one morning to a voice that I call Spirit. And this voice talked to me just like someone else is talking to you or if you're hearing someone talk or you're talking to someone else.
So it's in real time. And then that evening at the dinner table with my family all sitting around, Spirit appeared. Asked me to come out of my seat, I came out, walked up to my grandmother, and then Spirit had took my hand, put it on my grandma, and I put it on my grandmother's chest, and Spirit said, pronounce lung cancer.
Say that grandmother has lung cancer, grandma has lung cancer. A few weeks later they brought her in out of curiosity because it just, they couldn't leave us, we couldn't forget about it, and she had lung cancer. So that's how it started.
Lower back's not as good as it should be. but I don't know if you go to the chiropractor. I like weekly.
Weekly? Yeah. Okay, is he working on that? Yeah, I feel like I have a spasm that's right there. Yeah, that's from L3, L4.
Yeah. Okay, but that's okay. I like that stuff.
This is fun because you're really healthy. Breaks my heart when someone has something serious wrong with them. How do you convince the skeptics out there to believe you?
It's really not an issue, and I don't really run into too many skeptics, actually, to tell you the truth. I'm sure there's plenty of them out there, but when you're in this, where you want to help people and you want to give them the answers and people are suffering out there and they got chronic illness and the answers aren't out there. It's not about the skeptics. It's not about that.
It's about the person getting better. It's about the person healing. It's about what they need. That's the focus. So I really don't focus on the skeptics.
Talk about, you know, these chronic mystery illnesses. Doctors have labeled them autoimmune disorders. The reason we call it autoimmune is because we don't know the cause. of the symptoms or the disease or illness that's occurring. Look into psoriasis and eczema.
Cause unknown. Multiple sclerosis, cause unknown. Fibromyalgia, cause unknown.
Rheumatoid arthritis, cause unknown. What's happening is there's a pathogen involved. There's something causing the problem, a toxin or a pathogen.
It's causing the symptoms. The body is trying to protect you from it. The key to getting rid of it is knowing how to use certain things like certain herbs, certain foods.
Most importantly is the foods to know what starves it. Treating certain toxins and pathogens with diet and herbs really resonates with me. Turning to nature and food as medicine is what ancient civilizations have been doing successfully for thousands of years. I know that when I cleaned up my diet, the positive effect on not only my physical health, but my mental health as well, was huge. And this is why I thought a good place for Eva to start was to see a nutritionist.
With Eva, she's got a barrage of symptoms. One thing in particular, as I looked at her blood lab, is she is really inflamed, chronic inflammation. We literally have trillions of bacterial microbes, good microbes in our body.
We actually have more bacteria in our body than we do our own human cells. And the majority of these live in our gut. And what the microbiome is, it's like a little universe in itself inside our gut that... Constantly is cleansing us, stimulating immunity, building vitamins, and keeping pathogens out of our system.
So if someone's microbiome gets killed off for various reasons, right, mostly bad diet, stress, medications, perhaps, you can kill off enough of that microbiome where the actual intestinal wall starts to get injured. So if your intestinal wall starts getting holes in it, junk is bleeding into your bloodstream. and then going all over your body. The key is we gotta remove that. We gotta remove the offending items, right?
Fix the diet and get her to heal. We're gonna start her on the diet this week. So a whole food plant-based diet is really an unprocessed, predominantly plant-based food.
What does that mean? That means vegetables and fruits and whole grains and legumes, you know, all the foods that are nutrient rich. So if we can stimulate your immune system, remove the offending things you're doing to yourself every day, you'll heal way faster than it took to get in the disease process.
And that's the beauty of healing. Over the last, you know, decade or even more so, the amount of research that's come out in the scientific journals showing without any shadow of a doubt that there is such a thing as a mind-body connection. I mean, thinking, believing...
emotions all cause really substantial chemical and physiological biological changes all throughout the body and I love that that's how much of a transition we've made in the last decade or two from woo woo stuff about the mind body connection to hard factual scientific evidence I have a PhD in organic chemistry. Now, it's nothing at all to do with organic foods. An organic chemist basically plays the child's Lego game, but we do it with atoms. So people like me end up in the pharmaceutical industry. So I work for one of the world's...
largest pharmaceutical companies developing drugs for cardiovascular disease and for cancer and although I loved doing what I was doing I loved the science of it but what fascinated me more so I would say was what happens when you test the drugs so So let's say in a typical trial you might give 100 people a drug to show that it works. So you've also got to give 100 people a placebo for comparison purposes. And you might get, say, 75 people improving on a drug.
But it's not uncommon to get 40, 50, 60, 70, 74, 75 sometimes even, also improving on the placebo because they think they're getting a drug. And I thought, wow, that's amazing. What we see here is belief itself shifts biology.
And I don't think that's taught enough. in medical schools. So how is it that you can give someone a sugar pill, a saline injection, or perform some false surgery or treatment?
And a certain percentage of those people will accept, believe, and surrender to the thought that they're getting the actual substance or treatment. And they begin to program their autonomic nervous system to make their own pharmacy of chemicals that may be used to treat their own health problems. matches the exact same chemical they think they're taking.
So the question is, Is it the inert substance that's doing the healing or is it the body's innate capacity to heal? Well, everyone seems to be aware of the placebo effect, the result of positive thinking. The important question is this, what is the consequence of negative thinking? Ah, guess what?
It's equally powerful in influencing your life, but it works in the opposite direction. While a placebo, positive thinking... can cure you of anything, a nocebo, negative belief, can actually cause any illness and can cause death just because you believe that.
Should we give too much authority to someone in a white coat? You know, I remember one time someone came in and they were really crying because they had received a tremendous diagnosis and prognosis. the doctor said, the doctor said, the doctor said. So I said, I'll be right back.
I went out and I got a white coat and put it on. I put my name tag on it and said, Dr. Michael Beckwith. And I came in, I said, I'm Dr. Michael Beckwith.
And I want you to know that your life is about to get better and better and better. You've had a tremendous wake-up call about tremendous habits that you have had for many, many years. You're about to break that cycle of those bad habits and you're going to watch your body change.
You're gonna watch yourself come into a greater sense of fulfillment. And then I got a prescription tablet and I said, every day this is what I want you to say to yourself, this is what I want you to read, this is what I want you to not eat, this is what I want you to eat. Come see me in 30 days and tell me how you feel.
You know, and she went from crying to just laughing because she realized that she had given her power away. It doesn't mean you don't go to a doctor. It doesn't mean you don't follow good medical advice. If you just give yourself over to an external authority figure, you basically become a victim twice. A victim to the condition and the diagnosis, and now you become a victim to an authority figure telling you about what's going to happen in your life.
Okay, so believe the diagnosis. Now you can do something about it. But don't believe the prognosis. Prognosis is when somebody says, you have three months to live, or 60% of people die, and...
Six months, it's like telling what the temperature is now, knowing the average temperature for the year. If you're from New York City and the average temperature is 75 degrees, it doesn't tell me what the temperature is right now. You know, statistics are impersonal, and you are a person, and no one knows what you're capable of or where you're going to go. You know, if someone says, well, there's a less than 1% chance of recovering from the kind of cancer you have, well, someone's got to be that 1%, and why couldn't it be you? It's important for people to understand when they're given a diagnosis that if they fall prey to the prognosis without actually considering that there's other options, without actually realizing that they may have to do something differently, that they may have to make new choices, that they are going to have to get beyond certain emotions and overcome their limited thinking.
If they can understand that if they're able to do that, more possibilities open up as a result of their own personal changes. That's when you start to see all kinds of magical things start to appear in the person's life. When the doctors gave you the diagnosis and the prognosis, were they trying to rush you into chemo and radiation?
Yes, and I wasn't going to do it. Because I always swore with the acupuncture background that I believe in natural medicine and natural healing. So I wasn't going to do it.
I was going to go to, you know, any of the places that do the natural healing with the juices and things. But I have a brother that's a rocket scientist, and I value his opinion. And he said, Lizzie, you're not going to make it.
You've been juicing all your life. More juices isn't going to save your life. You've got stage four.
You've got to do something. But it still took me another month and a half. Because I wouldn't do it. I was going to not do the chemo. And so finally enough people gathered me up and brought me in, so I did it.
And then I started doing a lot of spiritual healing. My friends did a fundraiser that went kind of fast and wild because people were like, oh my gosh, if Elizabeth Craig has got cancer, we're all going to die. So they raised so many for me, so I started doing. Um.
Going to all the alternative healers I could find because I thought if nothing else maybe I can just chronologue the whole thing and share it with people and then it'll be people will learn from that. Deanne Portia was one of the people I called and she's a spiritual psychologist. Healing. Tenga. Originally the primary purpose for calling her was so that I could die not afraid.
Because I was afraid to die and they said that that wasn't looking good. This guy's fear, panic, worry and anxiety, but... But through the process, instead of that happening, I started to feel miracles.
The first session that we had together was actually the day that she got her chest port put in. And I didn't know that she was going to arrive with that and that was such a tremendous... First step that she had to take in her cancer treatment.
They got me on a cocktail, they called it. I had one mitomycin that was in a little bag and they ran it into the port and then they attached me to this one. It's so stressful to think that, you know, someone is invading your body and then having medicine, which we know is very scary.
You know, so she had to make friends with that. Some people get the port in their arm, their upper arm. Deanne just kept working with me and saying, this is medicine, it's going to heal you, this is good for you.
And I think that made all the difference in the world. We have to relate to it as something that is targeted medicine. See it as little Pacmans or little soldiers that are there just attacking the cancer cells, leaving everything else intact. and not being harmed because the body does want to move into balance. Let's go.
I started calling him because he was my little chemo pack. I called him Kimo Sabe. Kimo Sabe.
Deanne helped me change my attitude that he was medicine and not, you know, poison. The power of belief is it's almost everything. It really is.
What you are believing and thinking at this moment. It's telling your immune system to either stop and not work because we've got to run from a stressor, or everything's cool, why don't we relax and if there's anything that needs to be cleaned up, clean up. That's it.
You're either in fight or flight or you're in rest and repair. And it's your beliefs that toggle that switch. So beliefs are everything. Back in 1968, I was learning how to clone stem cells. And back at that time, just a handful of people in the entire world even knew what a stem cell was.
So I was in the right place at the right time to make some interesting discoveries. I put one stem cell in culture by itself. It divides every 10 or 12 hours.
At first, there's one, then two, four, eight, 16, 32, doubling. So I have 50,000 genetically identical cells. That's not the experiment.
This is. I split the cells into three different Petri dishes. And...
What I do is I change the chemical composition of the culture medium. Culture medium is the equivalent of blood. So if I'm growing mouse cells then what I do is look at mouse blood, see what it's made out of, and then try to make a synthetic version of that called culture medium. So here's the point.
Genetically identical cells in three dishes but slightly different environment because of the chemistry. In one dish the cells form muscle, in a second dish the cells form bone, and in a third dish the cells form fat cells. Significance?
What controls the fate of the cells? Point? They were all genetically identical.
The environment is what was selecting the genetic activity of the cells. People who have the same DNA, who have the same susceptibility to illness, one can become ill and the other can stay well. One can heal and the other can't.
All because they optimize the environmental factors. that control gene activity and that's what the field of epigenetics is all about. The nature of biology is simple.
Biological organisms adapt their biology to fit into an environment. Let's say I'm looking at the activity of my liver cells in the body and I say well my liver cells should be adjusting to what's going on in the environment. I say well how does a liver cell know what's going on in the environment? The answer is this.
The liver cell is not touching the environment. It depends on the nervous system to send information about the environment inside the body so the cells adjust their biology to match what's going on in the world. Well, we only have one problem in that, and that is this. Consciousness is an interpretation. So my mind is interpreting the environment.
So if I change my perception, My mind changed my belief about life. I changed the signals that are going in and adjusting the function of the cell. The point is very, very significant.
I, by my ability to change my environment, and by my ability to change my perception of the environment, have the ability to control my genetic activity. I'm not a victim of my heredity. I'm a master of my genetic activity.
In understanding how we deal with the environment and deal with perception, there's a mind between the environment and my cells. And when I say the mind, everyone thinks of a single entity, the mind. The mind is comprised of two interdependent elements that work together. And that's the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. The conscious mind, the latest evolution of the brain, is the creative mind.
When the conscious mind is engaged in thinking, the subconscious is the default program, the autopilot. So my conscious mind can be engaged, but my subconscious mind will carry out whatever chore I'm doing, walking, driving the car, communicating with another person. I don't need my conscious mind for that.
I already have programs of how to do all those things. When we look at the world, We're actually operating through the subconscious mind. The programs in the subconscious mind primarily came from downloading other people's behaviors.
You mother, your father, your siblings, your community, and the first seven years of life. We are essentially an open sponge to the world, absorbing the patterns from all of those people that we are exposed to and surrounded with. So if we have caregivers, who are really conscious and have learned to manage their emotions and heal their hurts in a healthy way, that's a really good thing. Very few people I know were blessed enough to come from those families.
Let's say we're growing up in an environment where there's trauma in the household. Alcoholism, family conflict, inflamed relationships. And when we don't have tools to process our emotions, in a given moment, that becomes a memory that's not fully formed. We end up seeing ourself and the world around us as if we're still four years of age in an environment of just conflict and trauma and drama.
We filter and therefore feel that again and again. Every time colors, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings get triggered, boom. We react as if that memory were going on for the first time.
So you can attempt to outrun the subconscious mind, just like you attempt to outrun a shadow. You can't, you gotta turn around and face it. You gotta see the problem as the portal.
And so recognizing that these symptoms and stressors are meaningful and brilliantly intelligent in waking us up. I was going twice a week to visit Deanne and my brother would drive me up and do the sessions. And the funny thing is, is every time, well, after the first few... No, actually I'd say every one of them I would think, I have no idea what I'm going to say.
I don't feel like anything's wrong. I don't know. Okay, we'll just talk. And then somehow she would do like an exercise or a thing, and then something would come out, extracted from some place in the past that I never, you know, like talk therapy wouldn't get to this or your own thinking or whatever. By lovingly forgiving these all of the past, I choose to fill my world with joy and love and approval of myself.
Working with Deanne, we started working on like all those feelings. The grief, the sadness, the fear of the cancer. And then things that were deep down inside that I had no idea were residing.
Like old stuff that I really didn't even think of. And why is that you? She kind of takes what everybody gives her.
And she doesn't really ask for much. And she's going to get better. Elizabeth identified a time in her life when she felt really pathetic.
There was an incident where she... You know, all the kids were supposed to bring something to school, and she brought graham crackers. That's all she had to bring, and they made fun of her. So she just kind of adopted this belief that that was pathetic, how pathetic that was. And she carried that with her for a lot of years.
I mean, into adulthood, without even understanding or realizing how that pathetic... Self-image would carry forward in relationships and in adult life. The healing tools can involve inner child healing work, sacred anger work. So the sacred anger work, when that comes up, then there's anger in a session that's ready to move.
We will go out on the back hillside and we throw rocks. And to throw these rocks as hard as I can and move that stuck energy. I didn't know that I had such a detrimental mindset. I thought that it was a pretty good one. But the cancer personality style, the I don't want to be a burden, it's easier for me to give love than to ask for it.
It was really important for me to learn how to... Um, to ask for help and connect. To connect.
You know, there's this tendency for people to feel like they did something wrong if they got sick. But if we aren't aware that we have limiting and negative subconscious beliefs running our lives, then we can't blame ourselves for getting sick. If we stay in fear and resistance, we not only waste valuable energy that we could use to heal, but we are closed off. to information and possibility. If instead we ask ourselves, what is this pain or condition trying to tell me?
It creates space so that the answers can come into our awareness. I've always, even from, you know, when I was young, been fascinated with health and wellness, being the best you can be. It was always part of even going through high school and college.
And then I came across Ayurveda probably about 16 to 17 years ago. I was sitting there and I was like, finally someone knows what the hell they're talking about. The constitution is Pitavata. I think one of my favorite parts is that we have something called Samprapti, which is a Sanskrit name which describes the process of how disease comes into existence. And there's six stages.
And when I first heard this, it was just so beautiful and so simple. And the first stage is accumulation. You accumulate too much of what we call a dosha. Doshas is the quality of energy.
You've got too much fire, you've got too much air, you've got too much earth and water in your system. So let's take fire. If you accumulate too much fire in your system, you may have a symptom of like a sour belch from time to time. No big deal. But that would be a sign of there's too much heat in the system.
The next stage is aggravation. Now it becomes aggravating to the system so that what was a sour pouch now becomes a little bit of heartburn. Don't let the food you eat during the day haunt you at night. Again, in this day and age, no problem.
We got the solution, right? You take Pylosec, Nexium, whatever. You don't actually deal with why do I have the imbalance because it's considered somewhat normal to have heartburn.
The next stage is spread. So now the excess heat that's in the system that hasn't been addressed because that individual is still eating too much spicy food, still drinking alcohol, putting too much heat into the system, spreads. The fourth stage is localization. So now that excess heat that's in the system that started with accumulation now finds a weak spot in the system where we've lost some integrity.
Let's say the guy we're talking about was a football player in high school and maybe took one too many blows to the knee and his knee's a little funky. That would be an ideal place for the excess heat to find a home. So now that progresses over time to maybe arthritis. So it becomes manifested as disease and then the sixth stage it becomes diversified. So now it actually alters the tissue system itself.
Maybe it becomes rheumatoid arthritis. So the beauty of that system is if you understand those six stages, that if you want to prevent disease, what do you prevent? Excess accumulation.
Prevent buildup. Now to me, where the biggest buildup is, is right here. And so you see that whole disease process applies to the physiology and the psychology. We've been emailing back and forward before our meeting today of things that you want to approach.
Right. And why do you feel that it's time for you to work on this? I think it's the physical aspect of it that's forcing me to realize that maybe there's something more to than just being sick physically. You know, past emotions that are maybe affecting me.
Like when we go on a plane, we're frightened. Right. Yeah? Right. We have a physical response to something that's happening emotionally.
Which is we have sweaty palms. Right. We have heart palpitations. So that's a physical response to something emotional. Right.
Yeah. Now imagine if you were denying something. Right.
Daily. And it has nowhere to go. Until it starts to build. Right. And it builds and it builds and it builds into, you know, picture disease.
This idea that emotional blockages can lead to physical blockages. So the idea then is to release them. And you can do that however you want to. Some people, you know... Let it go in a Zumba class.
Other people went to see a shaman and did soul retrieval. You know, it's across the board. Some people did psychotherapy.
Some people, you know, burned all the letters from their ex-husband. So it really is whatever works. Whatever is going to allow you to let go of that anger, to let go of that resentment or that grief or that trauma, you know, that especially trauma, which can often be locked away inside your brain in the subconscious part.
So we're going to do emotional freedom technique. We spoke about it the other day. And it took a little bit to get to the emotions because you're so good at denying them and pretending that everything's fine.
And, but we took a lot of notes. And the emotional freedom is being able to go there, being able to go to the thing that we suppress and allow it to come up. I'm frightened of the unknown. I'm frightened of the unknown. I'm frightened of what I know.
I'm frightened of what I know. And what I don't know. And what I don't know. I'm frightened of what I know.
I'm frightened of what I know. And what I don't know. And what I don't know. I'm frightened of what I know.
I'm frightened of what I know. And what I don't know. And what I don't know.
I'm frightened of what might come up. I'm frightened of what might come up. When we have an emotion within our hearts, that emotion sends a signal to our brain and the quality of that signal determines what the brain does in response to the emotion.
So if you can imagine a signal from the heart to the brain that is a very smooth series of waves, nice, even, coherent is the term that's used, waves from the heart to the brain, the brain will match that smooth, even, organized chemistry. And it will release the chemistry that supports life into our bodies. This is where our immune systems become really strong, super immune response.
On the other hand, the stress chemistry, when we feel those moments of frustration, anger, hate, jealousy, rage, fear, the signal looks different. It looks kind of like a bad day on the stock market. It's a lot of very chaotic, unorganized, jagged waves going from the heart to the brain.
And the brain receives those waves and says, oh, I need to match this chemistry. This is stress chemistry. When we're in a state of stress, our energy field goes into a state of resistance. That's why a polygraph works.
You know, we're able to read. Eat it. In that energy, our blood is affected. It doesn't flow as effectively. It heats up, cools down.
When we're in stress, there's resistance. That affects our pH. And we become more acidic when we're in a state of stress. In a localized or systemic full-body acidity, inflammation occurs.
And it's just a reactive way of pumping more blood to attempt to help with healing. However, we're starting to go down a slippery slope because that inflammation is a fire. And that fire starts to burn the house down. So we have things building. Yeah, maybe.
Things just build and build and build and then they come out in the skin. Yeah. Things that you pretend don't bother you. Right. What about your mother?
You mentioned your mother in the email. You can't even go there. You can go there. This is the opportunity.
Yeah. Well, we're estranged. We don't speak.
Yeah. It's been off and on like that for 10 years, maybe more. Is she ill?
Mentally? Yeah. Yeah, I would say so. She's on Valium, you know, she's on a lot of stuff before and she's weaned down over the years, I think, but I'm sorry, it affected her a lot. You know, just okay, you have to go pay the rent, you have to do this, you know, all of this like from a very young age.
you know, third, fourth grade. So there was a lot of responsibility very young. You know, I started driving very young so I could drive her to work and drop her off. Yeah.
You know, ironing her outfit for work or doing certain things that just... You were the mother of the mother. I think so.
Yeah. Where's your father? Oh, he couldn't deal with her craziness either, so he left when I was maybe 11. Just left, and never came back. And you've never seen him since? Nope.
Ready? Take a nice deep breath. Even though It was a lot for me to take on But I did it anyway I deeply And profoundly Send that little girl my love Even though It was a lot for me to take on. There was a lot for me to take on. But I did it anyway.
But I did it anyway. I deeply. I deeply.
And profoundly. And profoundly. Love and accept that little girl. Love and accept that little girl. Even though.
Even though. It was a lot for her to take on. It was a lot for her to take on.
But she did it anyway. But she did it anyway. I deeply...
I deeply... And profoundly... And profoundly...
Send her my love. Send her my love. It was a lot for her to take on. It was a lot for her to take on. It was a lot for her to take on.
It was a lot for her to take on. It was a lot for her to take on. It was a big burden.
It was a big burden. It was a big burden. It was a big burden.
But who else was gonna do it? Who else was gonna do it? Who else was gonna do it? Who else was gonna do it? Who else was gonna do it?
Who else was gonna do it? He left. I picked up all the slack. I picked up all the slack.
I picked up all the slack. I picked up all the slack. I picked up all the slack. Because I loved her.
Because I loved her. I loved her. I loved her.
I loved her. I loved her. And I wasn't going to abandon her. I wasn't going to abandon her. I wasn't going to abandon her.
I wasn't going to abandon her. I wasn't going to abandon her. Take a deep breath. How do you feel?
Good. How do you feel? Good. How do you feel about her now? Every authentic spiritual path has some mention or some teaching around forgiveness.
I always say that all forgiveness is self-forgiveness because the resentment I may hold towards another or the unforgiveness... or the rancor or the resentment. All of those thoughts are happening within me.
Even if someone did me wrong, I still have those thoughts. Those thoughts are affecting me. They're affecting my body temple. They're affecting my blood chemistry.
They're affecting everything. So when I begin to forgive the so-called other person, I'm releasing rancor, resentment, animosity. I'm releasing all that unforgiveness so that I'm actually forgiving myself.
Now that doesn't necessarily let the other person off the hook for whatever they did or didn't do or should have done or should not have done. It has nothing to do with them. It has everything to do with me.
When it comes to emotions, it's the greatest access to letting go. The hatred you have of a parent, the judgment you have of a co-worker, the wrong-making you have towards your spouse. Like, just let go of that inner judgment, blame, and basically a victim mindset.
If you can let go of that and recognize that life is actually working for you, not against you, then again, you're going to generate. Healing. So now I have a really good idea how trauma, negative emotions, and subconscious beliefs can lead to disease and might be something we have to look at in order to heal.
But what about the kids that come into this world already sick? Or children that get sick at a really young age? Surely their condition can't be a result of accumulated stress or unprocessed trauma or disempowering beliefs.
Why do they get sick? So people ask me, what about children? You know, children, young children that come into this world with some condition, how can that be from their subconscious?
Or is it? And the answer to that is that we simply don't know. I just have to be honest and say that every human that emerges into this world, what has happened before we got here is different for all of us. And we have no way of knowing.
And this is where... We begin to cross the boundaries of science and spirituality. And the words like karma or destiny or fate, we don't know what those are.
What I do know, without any shadow of a doubt, is once that being, once that beautiful child arrives in this world, their bodies, their cells, their DNA will respond to the environment and the conditions that we give to them. Our job is to learn to optimize those environments and those conditions. Individuals come into the planet, and many of them come into the planet because they know they're going to go through some stuff, and they're coming to up-level the awareness of the species. So we don't look at it like, well, this person was born with this disease, and that kid was born with that disease, you know, what's wrong? Many of these individuals are coming with very special gifts.
On another level, today, a baby that's being born... ...is affected with tremendous, more toxins than ever....the world has classed outdoor air pollution as... When you look at so many of the cancers, for instance, we absolutely know, this is not some mystery, we know where a lot of these come from.
They have to do with chemicals in the food, they have to do with chemicals in the air, they have to do with chemicals in the earth. So did human consciousness create this? Absolutely.
But not necessarily the consciousness of the person who contracted the disease. If you are truly treating the earth with reverence, would you allow the level of pollution and contaminants that we allow? If you were really thinking about your children with reverence and holy responsibility to a future generation, would you allow some of the things that we allow?
So, if the entire society is allowing economic forces to prevail, Rather than real humanitarian principles and love of the earth and love of each other and love of our children, then you get what we're getting. Imagine for a moment popping a pill before bed that costs about $13.50. Now imagine waking up the next morning, find that the price of the exact same pill jumped to $750 overnight. That is just what happened to one drug.
Meg Terrell joining us now with that story and the man who's behind that price spike. Meg. Thank you, Brian.
And Martin Sperle joins us now from the NASDAQ. He's the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals. Martin, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me.
Now, you guys have said that the reason you increased this price so much after acquiring the drug was in order to do the research and development to develop a better version of Daraprim. I just got off the phone with an HIV doctor who told me they don't need a better version of this drug. We have the most money going into healthcare than any country in the world today, and we have some of the worst statistics of healthcare. The problem is this. The pharmaceutical industry is a corporate industry.
Corporations. What are corporations? They're systems where people invest money so they can make a profit.
I entered the pharmaceutical industry as a young scientist and I just wanted to cure cancer. And it turns out that most of my friends and colleagues in the pharmaceutical industry, all the scientists, they also just wanted, you know, a lot of them, to cure cancer. They wanted to save lives. It's only when you get higher up in the company...
that the goals begin to change. Martin, we do appreciate you coming. I got to ask you one more question. You know, in response to all of this attention and doctors and patient groups saying they can't access this drug, are you going to change the price?
No. So in my examination of pharmaceutical products in general, I began to notice a pattern. And the pattern is that We are told that there's a problem, and the problem may not actually exist, at least not in the way that we're told that it does. And then we're offered a product based on resolution of the fear inspired by awareness of this problem. Sleep.
Remember them to you like a f***. It became more elusive. When you have insomnia, it may affect the wake neurotransmitters in your brain.
disrupting your wake and sleep messages and in fact if you follow and dig into the literature what you'll find is that the very product that's offered to solve the problem actually creates and perpetuates the problem it purports to resolve hallucinations the temporary inability to move while falling asleep or waking up and temporary leg weakness have also been reported in depressed patients worsening depression including risk of suicide may occur alcohol may increase these risks Side effects include next-day drowsiness. Pharmaceutical industry looks at the destination that it wants to fix and ignores the fact that when you add a drug, there are multiple drug interactions, which are not side effects, but direct effects. So we have that, and then we have to look at the efficacy, right?
Do these meds actually work? Could those risks be worth it? And that evidence is really even more concerning. because we have a body of evidence that suggests that these medications are no better than a placebo. Placebo, of course, which wouldn't incur, you know, those same risks.
And then there's the bigger question of what are you opting out of when you choose to manage your symptoms in this way? You know, there's a story I really love, which, you know, talks about Caterpillar. that's in the chrysalis, right, and it's struggling to get out, and there's this little hole in the chrysalis, and there's a man nearby, and he sort of feels bad for the caterpillar.
It's, you know, it's trying to get out, right? So he takes a pair of scissors, and he snips the chrysalis. And, of course, the caterpillar turns into a butterfly that dies, that never can fly, right? Because it needs to go through the process of emergence and struggle, literally.
It physically needs to do that to be able to manifest. You know, I've really taken to Dr. Emerson's protocols. The nutritionist?
Yeah, it's really helping. And he's really good about keeping in communication, even though he's in Hawaii. The numbers are outstanding.
I mean, it's unbelievable. It's only been eight weeks that you've been on the program. And it's phenomenal. So this last two flare-ups, I haven't had the joint pains since I started the nutrition. Because that's the biggest thing, is I can't even go up and down the stairs to my bedroom.
I have to stay downstairs, sleep downstairs. Well here we are. We are about to go get a sound healing from Dr. Jeffrey Thompson. I'm putting these wrist sensors on her wrist.
This is just to hold them in place. These wrist sensors are connected to this laptop over here. It's got a little sensor. It's collecting the electrical information. from your heart.
As the sound sweeps into the correct range for her body, we'll see her nervous system beginning to respond. And when it hits this spot, I'm going to make a cue mark on my program here so I can identify what frequency we need to use. We use very precisely tuned sound frequencies for healing.
My innovation is to expose the body to these precisely tuned sound waves until I find a sound wave that makes the sympathetic nervous system push in the clutch. Here we go. It's getting there.
Getting really close. That's it right there. But that's what we're looking for is zero. Zero stress in the autonomic nervous system. or homeostasis.
Now normally I would expect it to look like this, where it comes down, hits that point, and then goes off into parasympathetic, the green, but hers didn't do that. She hit the point, but she went back into this stress response again. It means that she's had this chronic stress condition for a long time. When it begins to respond to the sound waves and it starts to push in the clutch, it took a little bit of extra time to get there. But once it did get there, it wasn't able to completely cross over and go into the relaxation phase, which is what Paris...
Sympathetic nervous system is the relaxation response because her nervous system is still too worried to go there to completely let go. So people ask me what kind of conditions can you heal with this and my answer at this point is anything that has stress as its cause and as far as I'm concerned that's pretty much everything. Welcome back.
Wow. It's the first words out of everybody's mouth. Yeah.
It's wow. What Dr. Thompson showed me is that Eva is in a constant state of stress. Even when she's relaxing, it's hard for her to fully switch over into the parasympathetic nervous system, which is where you need to be if you want to heal.
So that just proves to me that healing really needs to take place on multiple levels. When it comes to stress, the tool that's absolutely changed my life, and I know millions of others, is meditation. Meditation has been around for thousands of years.
The mind is yapping all the time and it's telling us generally scary and limiting things. The mind is wonderful when you're using it as a tool. It's not so great when it's calling the shots. In the very first research on meditation done by a mentor of mine, Dr. Herbert Benson, he said, well, it shuts down the fight or flight response, the fear response. And it stimulates the parasympathetic or relaxing nervous system of the body.
And that's what heals. So at the very most basic level, meditation relieves stress. If you wake up in the morning, you take a shower, you take a bath, because you don't want to take yesterday's dirt with you out into the day. But if I wake up in the morning and I immediately go to television or radio or the computer or newspaper...
and I'm taking in all the stress of the world, then I might cleanse my body, but my mind is carrying so much stress. So that's why meditating in the morning is as important as taking a bath, purifying your mind, purifying your consciousness. There are many kinds of meditation.
There are meditations that involve self-reflection. So you sit quietly and you ask yourself, who am I? There are forms of meditation that are called self-questioning, which is questioning your beliefs.
A third form of meditation is what is these days called mindfulness, which is a terrible word because you're not using your mind when you're practicing awareness. The awareness of a thought is not a thought. Then there is what is called transcendence, which is...
Usually using a technique like a mantra. The mantra is kind of a sound that competes with your thoughts and ultimately takes you to a place where there is no thought and no mantra and you're just left with awareness. So as we practice these techniques we get in touch by and by with our core being or core consciousness.
Which in spiritual traditions is often called the soul. You pituitary gland does amazing things when you are in meditation. It releases oxytocin, dopamine, relaxant, serotonin, endorphins.
Everything good that your body can make is released when you make this spiritual connection. There really is this, this... internal process that we can flip on like a light switch.
We can flip on these juices of life if we just take a moment to connect. It doesn't have to be meditation or prayer. It could be going for a walk in nature.
But your mind needs to quiet, your breathing needs to slow, and you want to feel that unshakable peace. We did an amazing study just a little ways back at one of our advanced workshops. We took a hundred and twenty people.
And we wanted to measure their circulating cortisol levels and a chemical called immunoglobulin A or IgA. We put them through four and a half days of training and at the end of four and a half days, we measured to see if there were any epigenetic changes or chemical changes that took place by their internal work. We found that the majority of people's cortisol levels diminished, which means they were no longer in survival.
They were no longer stressed. But the relevant thing that happened was that their IgA levels went from about 51.5 to 83, right to the ceiling of what's considered high, and some people were up in the hundreds. Now, IgA is the primary defense against bacteria and viruses.
It's greater than any flu shot. The best part about meditation is it doesn't cost anything. You can do it anywhere, anytime, just quiet the mind and get rid of that excess mental baggage. But the mind isn't all bad.
You can actually use your imagination through visualization to activate a powerful healing response. What if I told you to do a simple exercise of imagination? To go to your refrigerator, open it up, find a lemon, take the lemon, put it on the cutting board, cut the thing in half, take a look at it, juice is welling up, and stick out your tongue and lick it. You salivary glands would go crazy and it was all in your imagination.
So there's no question that what we imagine can affect our physiology. For several years I've been collecting stories, testimonies, interviewing several hundred people who've used visualization as some part of their healing journey. And amazingly, 99% of them do. Is you take an internal picture of illness and convert it into an internal picture of wellness. And that's it.
It's illness to wellness. That's it. And they just do it over and over and over again.
So to give you a few examples of this strategy of illness to wellness, people who are even getting chemotherapy, imagine the chemo drugs as little piranha fish going and nibbling at the tumour. But in their mind's eye, what they're seeing is the tumour getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller until it's gone. People in radiotherapy imagine the radiation like bolts of lightning going and burning chunks out the tumor.
But again, the tumor's getting smaller and smaller and smaller until it's gone. Toward the end of the treatment, I was really weak. So Deanne called and she said, Do you want to have your session?
And I said, I don't think I can make it. I can't really get up. I was just laying down a lot. I couldn't really get up. And so she came.
to visit me to give me a session and when she got there I was just shaking. So she said I think you're running a fever. She came with a thermometer and it was 103.5 so she said we need to take you to the hospital. So she drove me to the hospital and it was going up as we're driving. I got to the emergency room and they started giving antibiotic bags after one after another and nothing was working.
I just remember I could hear my heartbeat. It was like I could hear water and air, really loud. The fever kept going up, and I kind of thought, oh, I wonder if this is it.
When I woke up, my brother was standing outside the glass door with the laptop, and he was telling me, they're praying for you. They did a group prayer on Facebook with over 100 people, and right after that, I kind of came out. How could my prayer, how could my meditation, how could my loving thoughts of gratitude and appreciation possibly impact the healing of another person in the room with me or halfway around the world? And the answer is that we are deeply connected through a phenomenon that is known as entanglement. Entanglement is the term in physics that tells us once something is unified once something begins as a whole, even though it is separated physically by many miles or light years is what they're finding in the cosmos, energetically everything's still connected.
Why is that important? Because if we go back far enough in time, there was a point in time when you, me, and the earth were all connected before what is called the Big Bang, the big release of energy. When that happened, physically particles began to separate, energetically the particles remain connected. We are part of this earth and we are part of one another.
And that empowers you and it empowers me to participate in the healing of our bodies and those of our loved ones in ways that science is only beginning to understand. So entanglement explains scientifically how our prayers might work. But there's a whole aspect of faith and prayer that can't be explained through science. People travel all over the world to holy sites to receive energy or faith healing. Is it their unshakable belief in God's power and therefore the placebo effect that is responsible for the healing?
Or is there an actual divine energy that is causing their transformation? Either way, I'm fascinated by the mystical. And if faith healing works for people, why not respect the possibility and keep an open mind?
So let me just tell you a little bit about me, okay, because you might be a little curious. I was born into a very religious family. We were taught to pray, right? We were taught to ask God for help.
So what I learned as a child was that if you trust, if you ask God and you trust and you believe and then you get out of the way, then anything's possible. I have a brain tumor called a meningioma and there is no cure for it so you're kind of Constantly wondering what's going on inside of your head, is it growing and you know you have things like that and you know a little bit of fear because you don't know if the things gonna explode and grow faster. So please understand I'm not doing anything.
Please understand that everything that you'll see happen is coming from the divine. There are no spirit guides or no entities. I'm just grateful that, for whatever reason, the divine has chosen me to work through.
All that stuff, go. Let me have all of it. Every last bit of it, let me have it.
Shake your head, shake your hands, shake everything up. Got a new hairdo. Cool. You doing okay, brother? You came in here wanting this, whatever's going on with you, to be gone, and so they're picking that as a...
I'm clean. Yeah. I'm vibrating. So you look different. Wow.
Ah. Ah. Whew.
This work My face was like on fire so to speak was electrical current and pulse But it went throughout my whole body and when I stood up I was shaking But it was a good shake. It was different. I've never felt anything like this in my life Shit This is why I get up in the morning.
Right here. I mean all of you, but this is like the perfect place to see what's possible. Oh my god.
What do you know I've seen in your body so far? I thought it would be really hard to let go because I don't know who I am without being sick. Yeah, well, and?
I feel like I'm trying for the first time trying to. You're doing it, girl. You're not trying, you're doing. Big difference. Let go.
What she just said is like the bottom line with so many people. They don't know what it's going to be like, what it would be like to be well, and it's scary, so they don't go there. People say, well, I don't have faith. But actually, everyone has faith of some kind. You either have faith in possibility, or you have faith that that possibility doesn't exist.
And in a way, we have more faith in the power of cancer to kill us than we have faith in the power of God, the power of miracles, the power of infinite possibility, the power of any force other than what our eyes can see and our hands can touch to actually interrupt the power and the trajectory of disease. I had no idea what was coming, you know. I was just trying to prepare myself for whatever answer they gave me.
And Deanne took me into the appointment, and the oncologist said, well, your scans came back all clear. No cancer! No cancer! And...
I was just started crying and laughing at the same time and he said yeah we must have misdiagnosed you What yeah, well I think because he didn't think it could be resolved so quickly The regimen always was with everyone, they said it'll be a two-year thing. It'll be chemo first, then chemo radiation, then surgery, then more chemo, and that would take two years. And mine was gone in one round. And even my oncologist who I thought was the best of the that I could find They'd say wow it's amazing all of your hair hasn't come out. You're what are you doing?
You look really good your your numbers are good and stuff, and I said I'm doing wheatgrass And he'd go, okay, well, whatever. And I said, do you not believe in wheatgrass? And he said, no, you know, but if it makes you feel better. They gave me two different types, and with the one, my hair would have come out completely, but with the two, yeah, for sure, it was a goner.
And it never all came out. I still had a good two-thirds of it at the end. God has all the time in the world to enjoy it. The best part for me was that I was supported by friends and family and that I had a spiritual therapist that really helped me work through all of this stuff and get rid of the fear and the old hurts and wounds and then allow me to return to a really high state of... Healing.
If you perceive that people are coming to help you and hold you and help you through this process and you feel this outpouring of love. They are actually helping your body heal because as soon as you perceive that, as soon as you believe that people are sending you love, you have this oxytocin response. And oxytocin release has been associated with increased natural killer cells, increased white cells.
You know, the immune response just goes through the roof. It's really important to work with doctors that treat you as a whole person and surround yourself with friends that inspire hope and strengthen you. Rather than add to your fear. It's hard though because when I'm sick or in pain, I feel vulnerable and just want to crawl up in a ball and be alone.
So how do we break out of that downward spiral of fear? How do we transcend the pain and shift to a positive mindset? So when a person shows up in a doctor's office and they're given the diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis or MS or cancer or diabetes. Once they hear that diagnosis, the common emotions they experience is either fear or sadness.
They can think positively all they want. They can say, I'm going to overcome this condition. But if they are feeling fear, that thought never makes it past the brainstem into the body because it's not in alignment with the body's emotional state. You get that person to change their emotional state and get them into a state of gratitude. Why gratitude?
Well, we normally give thanks when we get something, but if you're giving thanks in a state of gratitude, your body is believing it's receiving something because the emotional signature of gratitude means it's already happened. So the more that we can feel the feeling as if our healing has already occurred, giving thanks for that healing already being present, that is the trigger for our bodies to grow. The nerve cells to make the connections to trigger the brain chemistry to reflect that healing.
We have this advanced nervous system that we regulate through the choices we make in our lives. What we think, what we feel, what we believe, and specifically the emotions that we choose to respond to what life brings to our doorstep. You know, I've been trying not to take the steroids. Yes. So I went through a small breakout last month, which I thought was good.
And then it was kind of just, you know, dormant. Like it never really went away. And then all of a sudden just exploded over the weekend.
Oh. So I have like these massive boils that are starting. And then I have them all over my chest.
Oh. Oh my god. Yeah. So that's like... This is like when it's almost full blown, it's not quite.
So if you have something residing in you, like say you have Epstein-Barr virus, or say you have one of the shingles viruses, stress can trigger it. Mold can trigger it. Someone breaking your trust can trigger it. Problems at work can trigger it. Being fired from your job, everything can trigger it.
But there has to be something in there to trigger. The key is knowing what the real cause is so you can live life like a normal. person and have things go wrong and not go down because of it.
Okay. So my little flower blossoms are turning into big dahlias. They're starting to merge together and get really huge and extremely painful and hot, constantly burning up and then getting the chills.
Powered through today. They immediately called some doctors and put me in isolation because they didn't know if it was you know contagious, viral, what was going on, infectious. I've got some really bad abdominal pains and this is just getting so painful and intense. So they called all those specialists and they ran all these tests and everything came back basically normal. You know, as I got out, they gave me just really heavy doses of steroids to knock it out because they could see that it wasn't getting better on its own.
And then my dermatologist was concerned about me taking the steroids after to initially knock out the breakout. So she gave me a prescription of Dapsone, which is an antibiotic. And I didn't realize the strength of the antibiotic until I went to the pharmacist.
He stopped me at the counter and said, Do you know that this is a really heavy dose of antibiotic that you're taking? So that's where I'm at. You know, I have to pick my poison.
Do I band-aid it with steroids, or do I take this heavy antibiotic indefinitely? Being in L.A. and going to some of the best doctors in their field and probably seeing half a dozen to a dozen doctors now, nobody can figure it out. They give me drugs for all these different things that they think it may be, but I mean that's kind of the process with Western medicine.
It's very difficult because it's just, let's throw everything at it and, you know, which one velcros the best? Do you think that if alternative doctors were covered by insurance, you might go more often or they might seem more credible? Definitely, because I know with steroids it's very easy.
It's $5, I get it and I'm better. If I could get access to these vitamins and to these alternative doctors at those nominal costs, then I would... probably go much more often. I believe in the naturopath and all that and doing everything that's alternative.
I just can't seem to dedicate myself. I don't know why. You know, maybe I'm just, you know, emotionally stunted to do or open myself up to that. Or there's just something that's blocking me because it seems achievable and in my condition, like I should be able to, but for some reason I can't. Eva made me realize how much courage and sometimes cost it takes to commit to a holistic path of healing.
As a society, we've been conditioned to believe that conventional doctors know best and that convenience is key. For me, though, it's either pay now or pay later, and I really fear the long-term effects the steroids will have on Eva's body. But I truly understand her struggle, so all I can do is continue to support her in any way I can and pray she finds an answer soon. It's around your third anniversary being cancer-free. Some fear comes up around this time of year because you've heard stories.
Oh, so many. When I first went back to work, they'd say, oh, great to have you back, and then say, yeah, my so-and-so had cancer, and then, oh, they were great, they did the chemo, and then they had no cancer for two years, and then two and a half years later, oh, covered with cancer, they died months later. So many stories like that. So I've been kind of dreading this. pet scam and also I don't like the radiation but you have to do it.
I actually was manifesting a lot of pain in my body and then you can't tell whether it's from the radiation damage or what's going on but yeah it got to the point where I thought for sure it was coming back. What seems very very clear to me is that my body wants to be healthy. Our bodies want to be healthy, but it's the head that just, it's the fear and this and whatever that wants to, you know, it's just like a racket you're running on yourself, kind of, and how to let go of that. What is your one takeaway message that you want to share with everybody? Well, I would say that the most powerful moment...
The one when I had the largest epiphany was toward the end of the chemo radiation. I was really weak and I told my brother I just wanted to go to the beach and I wanted to be in the sun. So he carried me and laid me in the grass and then he went out on the beach.
And I was just laying there looking at everybody. And I was watching people rollerblade and bicycle and walk with each other and laugh. And I just wished I could have told each of those people, you're so fortunate.
It occurred to me that this life is, it's as beautiful or as terrible as you make it. And we have so much beauty and opportunity around us. I just wish I could let you all know what an amazing gift it is to be alive. Focus on life. Focus on something that brings you joy.
Focus on love, focus on your loved ones, and spend every day doing things that make you feel good. What I usually tell people who've been told that they're in remission, I say think of the word remission as actually meaning remember my mission. So now it's time for you to go and remember your mission.
Disease can be complicated, painful, and scary. I don't claim to have all the answers, but on this journey, I have learned that the human body is capable of miraculous things. It is an intelligent system, deeply connected to our minds and the world around us, and brilliantly designed to help us.
to self-regulate and heal. By detoxing our environment, the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, and the products we use, we support the healing process. And as we go beyond the physical and improve our inner environment, our thoughts, beliefs, and emotions, we can shift our lives and health in powerful ways. And it's all about faith, whether it's faith in God, faith in medicine, faith in our body's ability to heal, or a combination of all three.
If we believe it, we can achieve it. We live in a world of infinite possibility. Choose and focus on the possibility that you want.
Don't get sucked into the fear of what you don't want. We have the power to heal. So, tap me out and tap me into you Heal my brain and my body too Balance my chemistry Hydrate these cells cause the body talks in me Meditation helps. The body talks and meditation helps.
If I could get people to realize how precious they are. They're an expression of life. There's no other you. out there.
That's one in eight billion. That's pretty special. But I guarantee you most people don't give themselves that kind of love and care. That would be a wonderful precursor to healing.
The better we know ourselves, the better equipped we are to heal our bodies, to heal our emotions, to heal the inner experience that allows us to love to the deepest degree in the outer world. Educate yourself. about the mind-body connection. Because your mind exerts an extraordinarily powerful effect, impact on your body, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Every day, I meet someone who beat incredible odds and turned around stage 4 cancer.
Healing can really happen at any time, even when you're at, quote-unquote, death's door. And ultimately go beyond your fear of death because... Death happens to an experience, not to you. It's my expectation that this will become more and more compelling to more and more people as we all grow together into a different kind of medicine. Rather than this being something that you just read in a book or you watch in a documentary, put it into action.
Fall down, get back up. Fall down, get back up. Reach out to other people. Ask them their stories.
Don't ever give up. You body. loves you.
It loves you unconditionally, and it's not letting you down. Have patience, have compassion. Take one day at a time.
You're going to get there. It doesn't matter how long you've been sick. You can heal and always remember that and never forget it. I speak the word, knowing that from this moment on, everything is working together for our individual and collective good, and that we claim our wholeness right now.
We claim our health right now. We claim our vitality and our vigor and the power to rejuvenate and regenerate right now. Something wonderful is happening.
And we, we let it be. Now and forever. And so it is.