Insights at the Edge: Dawson Church on Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT)

welcome to insights at the edge produced by sounds true my name is Tammy Simon I'm the founder of sounds true and I'd love to take a moment to introduce you to the sounds True Foundation the goal of the sounds True Foundation is to provide access and eliminate Financial barriers to transformational education and resources such as teachings and trainings on mindfulness emotional awareness and self-compassion if you'd like to learn more and join with us in our efforts please visit soundstrufoundation.org in this episode of insights at the edge my guest is Dawson Church Dawson is an award-winning science writer with three best-selling books to his credit he's a prolific researcher on how to apply the breakthroughs of energy psychology to health and personal performance also dozens of his Studies have been published in peer-reviewed journals which sounds true Dawson church is the creator of the new audio learning series it's called healing the roots of trauma emotional Freedom technique for recovery and resilience I have to say that I am floored by the research that Dawson has done the studies that he's done and the results that he's found from the effectiveness of EFT in the field take a listen Dawson you and I are connecting here for the first time after something like two decades and I remember meeting you 20 plus years ago at some kind of publishing event year in the publishing world I'm in the publishing world and here you are a sounds true author creator of this new audio series on the emotional Freedom technique so bring me up to date what was your personal Journey moving from being in the publishing business to now being a writer researcher and teacher of the emotional Freedom technique yeah that was a Book Expo America Tammy many many years ago and it was a wonderful experience meeting and Publishing because in publishing as you know we get to meet the most fabulous people who are authors and then we play a role in getting their ideas out of the world and I love doing that but then in 1997 I retired and I wound up buying a small hotel and being a bed and breakfast owner for a while and Tammy it was so boring boring you know just wasn't me so I got back into it I also recognized that this burgeoning field of energy Psychology was really growing so I started energy psychology press and it's the intersection of the energy work Energy Medicine work that all these wonderful healers do and also psychology and the ability to shift PTSD anxiety depression phobias other psychological types of disorders and I realized there was a big opportunity there so I the other publishing company just in time after 10 years to see that the world was going away from books and toward online sorts of media so I then made the switch began to offer online courses and now we do do a few books and hardly anyone that knows what those are anymore they have their Pages inside they have covers things like that but we're mostly doing online courses and so now we can reach people also in all the time zones of the world we have such a big reach doing that and I love that that about this work and I also became I moved having from being a an observer and a facilitator as a publisher I wanted to get these these ideas out there and after a while I realized that people are suffering people are suffering psychologically they're suffering medically and energy therapies can make an enormous difference and when we look at the research into how large the effects are of energy treatment we realize the potential of these therapies and so I switched from being a publisher to being an author and a real advocate for these these therapies eventually I was able to help get them into the Veterans Administration they're in Kaiser Permanente there are a lot of possible systems they're at Johns Hopkins they're in Cleveland Clinic and so I really want to see these Therapies in primary care and that's my current Focus now you yourself have done quite a bit of research on the effectiveness specifically of the energy therapy the energy Freedom technique can you explain just introduce people who are not familiar to EFT and then what kinds of studies you've done and the results that you're seeing I remember the very first time I used EFT myself and I was a Gestalt therapy Advocate at the time and this therapy this therapist friend of mine said Dawson I'm working with Vietnam veterans I work with people having Sports Performance and anxiety and I'm working with these this variety of clients and we're using this technique where they tap with their fingertips on acupuncture points Tammy I thought I'd never heard anything more ridiculous in my life tapping on acupuncture points can help with Psychotherapy and so I didn't really have much faith on the idea and I in fact I took the instruction manual he gave me and threw in a big pile of papers and forgot all about it until a few months later I had a really difficult moment in my own life when I was trying to sell a business and the sale was collapsing and I got really anxious and at that moment mysteriously that instruction sheet surfaced at the top of my slash pile and I sat down on the steps of my office and I tapped and my anxiety dropped by Hoth a lot and then I'd be able to pay attention to it then other psychotherapist friends began saying I'm not just treating people westerners I'm not just just treating westerners for anxiety I just got back from Rwanda and I'm treating people whose parents were killed in the genocide there and tapping is releasing those PTSD symptoms like flashbacks and Nightmares then I really paid attention when I heard about Vietnam veterans and uh Haitian orphans and for a variety of people with severe chronic stressful events in their life that were were being affected by it so I dove into research and research quantifies things I want to know not just that you got better I want to know on average if it's a group of people by how much you got better and then we compare that for example to psychopharmacology and traditional tool therapy and the results of of EFT that we began to measure any studies were immense and so I got further and further into it in my very first study published in 2010 in a medical journal called Integrative Medicine a very respected Journal we showed that one day of tapping one day of tapping and we were using the tablet with healthcare workers like doctors and nurses and chiropractors a single day of tapping dropped their levels of anxiety and depression by 45 their cravings for things like cake and chocolate and cookies and alcohol and all these other things dropped off tapping in a single session by 83 so we were getting these massive massive results and I then said we absolutely have to get these Therapies in primary care we had to do research on them and now we have just literally yesterday there were over 30 million people tapping in the world it's very simple you just think about something that's bad something that troubles you could be a a personal event could be a childhood event current event could be a really old event but you think of about something that bothers you and you really focus on it intently what that does is it lights up all of the stress circuits of the brain especially the midbrain or limnic system and so now you have an and solitary there are a lot of authors wonderful authors who talk about the limbic system and the arousal of the sympathetic nervous system people like Stephen porges and Stephen Levine talk about this and we know from a lot of research that when you're stress those parts of the brain are highly active you have a highly active limbic system and we can read those signatures on an MRI we can see on the MRI that you are highly stressed we then notice as we have people tap and this stimulate these 14 acupuncture meridians we see rapid deactivation of that if they were dealing with a craving the craving goes way down if they were thinking about a child of memory their limbic activation drops remarkably in only a couple of minutes so it's acting on the information flows in the brain and when your limbic system you're Olympic whole limbic structure is then deactivated and it's no longer sending signals of fight or flight through the amygdala into the peripheral nervous system the central nervous system you get much calmer and then for example that veteran who was sharing about the the death of his friend in a roadside explosion in Iraq and is 10 out of 10 for emotion his limbic brain is all lit up as he recalls that stressful event after only a few minutes of tapping typically those levels of triggering will go way down he remembers the event clearly still and the death of his friend in combat and he now remembers it without that strong activation of the fear response that's a typical scenario with EFT okay Dawson so you said when you were first introduced you threw the piece of paper away and rolled your eyes and it seems like there are still a lot of people in the mainstream culture who are like come on this is you know it's if it sounds too good to be true it's not kind of thing and you know it's only you're only talking about one day and you're getting a 45 reduction in anxiety and depression that we would all know about this it would be in the news it wouldn't be in these you know semi-narrow or esoteric platforms like a podcast like insights at the edge so what's the gap between the effectiveness of EFT and its mainstream adoption how do you understand that actually it's very widespread in primary care and in the mainstream we expect there are tens of millions of people using it I've had a free manual Mini manual on my website for over a decade and over three million people have downloaded that so it's had a lot of attention that way if you go on to the US government's uh website pubmed.gov which reports clinical trials and top-level journals you'll find dozens of studies of EFT there you'll also find practice guidelines developed by Kaiser Permanente a large Hospital chain you'll find other practice guidelines for the veterans administration it's been approved by the VA it's in use by the VA so uh it's working its way into primary care but I mean the main obstacle actually is not skepticism or disbelief it's really our fundamental Western approach of believing that material reality is the primary reality and thinking that energy and Consciousness and and awareness is just something vague and ephemeral and what I show in my books I have a book called Mind to matter where I literally look at all the research showing how our brains transceive signals and then turn that into what we think of as material reality when our constant changes it's a very simple example of conscious change and lack of change is when I think a stressful thought when I get upset when I go to fight or flight my body produces cortisol much more cortisol cortisol Rises I'm literally producing a molecule cortisol using a thought with EFT we find that cortisol drops in one of my studies on pubmed.gov in one week people's Baseline levels of that stress hormone cortisol drop drop 37 so big drops in physical things as a result of changes in Awareness Consciousness fear emotion always intangibles but they're having a huge effect in our body so it has worked its way into mainstream medicine it's in wide use and private therapy one study found that about 42 percent of therapists are using some form of energy therapy usually EFT it's also now started to be applied for other things but our culture is so oriented to give you the pills give me the surgery give me the the the the external agent to go into my body and we're so not oriented looking at energy but if you change your energy you change the molecules your body is producing and very very quickly you can shift all kinds of we find for example that high stress leads the ace study the adverse childhood experiences study which I know you've covered on previous podcasts uh that show that people are unresolved trauma have much higher levels of cancer heart disease diabetes suicide attempts smoking hepatitis and on and on and on so unresolved trauma emotional trauma emotions are literally driving disease when you release emotion when you drop cortisol when you have much lower levels of all those stress hormones and brain waves then your body thrives and so it is working its way into a surprising number of medical and psychological treatment centers do you have a vision of where EFT is going to be in a in a decade it's funny I was I was walking through MB Anderson Cancer Center MD Anderson is about as probably the most advanced cancer treatment instead of hospitals in the U.S and I was walking there there through there with a nurse friend of mine who does EFT with cancer patients and with stuff there are especially staff staff nurses doctors other Hospital workers already stressed so there's a big people going to go to chemotherapy there and there's a big recovery room at MD Anderson in Orlando Florida for um them to be in to stabilize after chemotherapy and it's a gloss-fracted room so the nurses can walk past look at and make sure if anyone is having a serious AB reaction they're including so I walked past there with my friend Pat and she said Dawson my vision for the future is that one day we'll look in through this floss and we'll see a patient tapping doing EFT and I said to a pat that's not my vision at all my vision is one day soon we walk past this room looking through the glass and see that there's a patient not tapping and we'll wonder why so I expected to spread ready widely even spreading widely right now and these therapies are so good that they're going to become part of primary care part of pain management part of physiological issues and psychological issues so they are gaining ground but they need to be part of this whole Paradigm Shift we're in the middle of of realizing that energy and Consciousness and awareness has dramatic effects at the level of the physical body what's the history of tapping who first came up with this notion and the actual protocol I mean you start by saying to yourself as you're tapping I deeply and completely accept myself I found that really interesting really powerful but I'd love to know more how this particular protocol that you teach came into being well they do have self-acceptance is really powerful Carl Jung said a century ago that self-acceptance is the primary marker of the material psyche so Carl Rogers said that every journey in Healing Begins With accepting myself the way I am so that's a fundamental pre cept of psychology for more than a century self-acceptance is really important and then tapping itself comes from Qigong and that goes back thousands and thousands of years I've been happy with Qigong monsters now for 20 years it's wonderful to realize that they they've been incorporating tapping for four centuries and then when uh during during President Nixon's trip to China in 1972 one of his advisors witnessed a uh an operation done surgery done only with air acupuncture for pain and that then began the whole cycle of the acceptance acupuncture in the U.S also shiatsu acupressure pressure pressure on acupuncture points which is tapping or simply hard pressure on the various points it's been around for a long long time a psychologist called Roger Callahan began to experiment with his his clients in the late 1970s early 1980s and he worked with one client in particular and tried everything with her I tried all kinds of things because she had a phobia of water her name was Mary she couldn't take immerse herself in water she was afraid whenever she was around water he had a swimming pool and he treated people at his house and she couldn't go within 20 feet of the pool she was terrified she'd have a panic attack if she got that close to a body of water and after trying every single therapy he had he read about acupressure and one day he just leaned over and tapped gently on her stomach Meridian which he knew was associated with fear which is right under the people of her eye and so he tapped on her there just wondering that might make a difference that night she phoned him and said my fear of water is gone he didn't believe her had her over the next day she walked right up to the pool and stuck her feet in and her her the Cure was permanent she never get out of fear of water he then wrote a book called The five-minute phobia cure which was published in 1985. his students took took tapping further so it's an ancient technique but it's been systematized now and EFT just uses a really simple form of tapping but what again that's now been proven in over 100 clinical trials can you talk me through the method and the import how each step of the method is effective how we'll walk you through it now I've had to warn you Tammy do you know who Lisa gar is Lisa gar Lisa anyway okay she asked me that my first interview with her and this is live on the air big audience and she she broke down crying and we had to address I'm all right I'm gonna be I'm prepared for this let's go with that disclaimer in place so you you do that and also every person listening now I'd like you to think of an event in your life within the last two weeks that trouble you emotionally so something that bothered you could have had a wait in line you could have had a tense conversation with a co-worker or a family member so something that in your life in the last couple weeks that affected you personally directly and when you have an emotional response to that so think of something like that that happened in the recent past don't go back to your childhood it's too triggering has to be within the last two weeks so Tammy what what just a couple of words of an annoying thing or a triggering thing that happened to you very recently I'm gonna pick a pretty um low lift one which is my dogs are getting groomed upstairs and they whine and they bark and they howl and they're upset and when they're upset like that it upsets me and I I my nervous system gets all jambled up when I hear them whining and Howling and crying yeah entrainment so think about your dogs doing upstairs and then tune into yourself your body right now what number are you on a scale of zero to ten in terms of that triggering zero being no triggering 10 being the maximum figurine well I told you I'd pick something pretty mild so I'm only really A four at this moment especially because they're quiet at the moment okay good so they aren't making a lot of noise right spray movement and you're four and now we'll just go through the routine and if you're listening please do get your issue give it a really brief title like dogs being groomed and then I'll describe to you which points to tap on to shift your energy see what your number now 0 through 10 you've got your event you've got your brief phrase now all we do is we incorporate that in a statement of self-acceptance while tapping on a Meridian now this Meridian is on the side of your hand so if you just look at the Joint that anchors your little finger then tap with three fingers on the other hand on that point and even say out loud society and I think cloudy goes silently even though I'm remembering this issue until you can say the dog's being groomed in your mind really tender to the dogs being groomed sound of the whining I deeply and completely accept myself keep tapping notice your breathing make sure you're breathing deeply even though I remember this emotionally triggering event and then Tammy you'll say in your mind the name of your event you'll reaching into those sounds those dogs being groomed and if you're listening to us tune in and use the name of your event I deeply and completely accept myself one more time even though I remember this emotionally triggering event name of your event I'm breathing now notice your breathing and I accept myself just the way I am now tap on the top of your head right on the top of your head that's good yeah keep your eyes open eyes open there's a lot of scientific theory behind this I won't explain it all now I have whole books on that so let that go so tap the top of your head again re-tune into that that triggering event your number whatever your number is the event remember it vividly now tap where your eyebrow meets The Bridge of your nose with two fingers so two fingers tapping where your eyebrow meets The Bridge of your nose notice your breath and say either out loud or silently the name of your emotionally triggering event notice your breath again now tap on the side of your eye right on the edge of your eye socket in line with the very edge of your eye and say the name of your event again and again vividi recall the specifics so Tammy keep your eyes open and vividly recall the size out of that winding other noises they're making how long it went on how intense it was this volume which dog was whining the most that dog yeah now tap under the people of your eye with two fingers really focusing on your event this is your stomach Meridian the one that Roger Callahan tapped on with Mary with her fear of water and already tuned at your event let your mind be filled with your event and the recollection of your event tapping under your eye now tap onto your nose that's your governing Meridian endpoint and keeping your eyes open feeling your breath all the details of the event now tap on your chin on your lower lip this is your central Meridian you're stimulating now in your breath remembering that event all the details of the event that bothered you within the last couple of weeks and then tap where your collarbone meets your breastbone with three or four fingers on either side feeling your breath till the end of the event let me just reach out to your arm and turn that level with your elbow on the side of your body so spleen Meridian tune at the event as you stimulate your acupressure points and then one more time on the side of your hand and then tap one more location which is the back of your hand between the bones that anchor your little finger in your ring finger so the back of your hand between those big long bones that anchor your little finger and your ring finger and now we'll do a quick exercise that stimulates the production of calming brain waves so first of all keep your head steady and look all the way down keep your head steady look all the way up imagine you're looking at a giant clock and you're looking at 12 o'clock as you think about the event that annoyed you now look at three o'clock keeping your head steady look all the way to the side to the right at three o'clock now look all the way to the left at nine o'clock keep your head steady look all the way down at six o'clock again the other floor look all the way up at 12 o'clock feel your breath as you think about the annoying event and then stop tapping and relax completely feel your breath and now think about the event again like you did exactly let's see six minutes ago and CO2 new number is how triggered are you on a scale of zero to ten so Tommy for your dogs that sound of them whining what's your number now you're smiling yeah I'd have to I'd have to give it a one and a half and you know Dawson I intentionally chose something um that wasn't a a big deal event and of course I'd like to try this again with some things in my life that are more big deal events but uh thank you for taking us through that it does bring up a bunch of questions for me first is you know I had a tendency I wanted to shut my eyes why keep the eyes open because we used to think that memories were static like pulling a photograph out of an album looking at the memory and dropping it back in the album we now know that when we pull memories into our awareness we actually modify them and we modify them by combining those memories those images those sensory experiences with information from the present moment and the present moment contains safe information so when we pull up a troubling piece of information from the past and pair it with a neutral piece of information or a pleasant stimulus now just like for example tapping or telling it to a friend or sharing with a therapist now we're combining those two Memories the way the brain works now is it's putting that that photograph back in the album with these positive or neutral emotional tags which reduces the number and it only happens if it happens more if you have your your eyes open that if you have your eyes closed and this whole notion of of actually bringing forward bringing up the traumatic event I mean I've heard it say that that can be re-traumatizing yet in this approach that you're offering here with EFT were intentionally bringing up the memory so talk to me about that and what in the technique safeguards that it's not re-traumatizing yeah re-traumatization was coined by a therapist called Charles Figley in the 1980s and the idea was first noticed strongly by another psychiatrist called Joseph Walby after World War II and he was a famous psychiatrist and he was tossed with working treating soldiers coming back from World War II with what they then called shell shock and so being a good Freudian he said we'll lie down on the couch here and go ahead and talk about Omaha Beach he later wrote in one of his books he wrote we found that this approach was not effective it was harmful he noticed that they were worse after they remembered the bad stuff in their lives and that's re-traumatization but if you pair that memory and that event and talk about that while you're tapping then something happens called memory reconsolidation and emotional Extinction and that means that you now reconsolidate that memory with a neutral cue and you remove all the emotional tags of fight or flight attached to the memory and so that's why we keep our eyes open that's why we have this particular procedure because if you were just to tell the story you retrialmentize yourself if you tell the story and you introduce the therapeutic cue of tapping you then are able to cathartically discharge the emotion and Tammy I've done a lot of research that's Empirical research using MRIs eegs cortisol other genetic markers I've done several studies using genetic tags and I've done one study on epigenetic tags little tiny molecules called micro rnas and we did this with veterans veterans with severe PTSD flashbacks nightmares intrusive thoughts and a lot of disease so in that study we gave a 10 1 hour sessions of EFT and we literally measured the expression of their genes before and after and we found that a whole bunch of these micro rnas because micrornas attached to the genes of people who have traumatic stress we we see that parts of that genome that have to do with health to do with emotional expression to do with safety auto shutdown and these little tags micro RNA tags attached to the genes interest people and those genes remain silenced we literally saw those micro rnas popping up the genome in this large scale randomized controlled trial of veterans so it is literally changing you epigenetically okay now I can imagine someone saying whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa we went from uh reduction of cortisol to impacting brain waves to saying that EFT is an epigenetic intervention okay so how do you measure whether or not something like tapping is affecting gene expression you talked about these little art but I didn't follow it all Dawson to be honest what are you measuring so that you can say this is a successful epigenetic intervention yeah you don't have to measure these things in every and every patient every client you measure them in very I mean these are highly technical studies that are measuring things like clean expression and uh now what's really happened that's that's been a game changer in the last 10 years is we used to need a blood draw to measure things like cortisol and and gene expression now we can do it on a saliva swap so we have these companies like 23andMe now literally having people spit in a tube mail it up to a lab we can extract enough genetic material from that saliva be able to measure which genes are turned on if genes are turned off and about about 85 of your genome is is responsive to the environment 15 is fixed like you know gray eyes and brown hair and that's just a fixed genetic characteristic but that's only 85 of the genome is fixed the other I mean that's I'm sorry 15 is fixed the other 85 is fluctuating depending on and stress is having massive effects body wide because think about it your ancestors ten thousand years ago a hundred thousand years ago when they were faced with a predator or a hostile environment every single body system organ system had to come into play their muscles had to be filled with blood and be ready for fight or flight their breathing would get shallow forcing blood into their muscles for the stress response so their hearts were pounding their muscles were activated their lungs were breathing shallowly all these things were happening a lot of it controlled by hormones like cortisol and by gene expression and so we can measure these things now it's not not easy it's it's highly technical we can measure these now though and we're there now lots of studies showing that that all these things are being affected and the the the problem is that while those stress responses were highly useful for my ancestor 100 000 years ago now being highly stressed just because I have a pimple on my chin I mean my daughter is you know is is a grown woman I I adore her I see her a lot but what she was staying with us a while back and um visiting from Colorado where she lives and Tammy she had a pebble on her chin and she was so stressed over the table on her chin I was just laughing it's like I can't even see the people on her chin but she's like a blemish to her whole life so we get and we get worried and stressed about you know our deadlines and sure not being the right body shape and being overweight you know worry about all these things that as Mark Twain said never happened so um that stress is now not our friend the way it was to our ancestors and so we want to really learn ways to bring it down by tapping okay now you mentioned that we can impact our brain waves our brainwave State through tapping and you had us using our eyes to look up at a clock and down in a clock and three o'clock nine o'clock tell me what's going on in terms of brain waves when I'm doing that kind of thing it is so cool and we've now known as we've been studying brainwave so Hans Berger invented the EEG in 1929 and then around 1960 some Advanced scientists like uh Robert Becker and uh Maxwell Kade began to use eegs and look at how this affecting how was how the brain waves of people were changing when they were calm and they were studying meditators and they were noticing that they they shipped their brain waves also that's that was a great period of discovering what happens during sleep and so we got to realize that our brains slow way down normally they're in beta which is between 12 and roughly 30 cycles per second that's the normal State of Consciousness when we go to sleep we have this drifting down feeling and we go to Alpha which is 8 to 12 Cycles a second it's much slower brain wave finally we drop into Theta then Delta and most of the night we spend in Delta which is zero through four cycles per second the very very slow brain wave every roughly hour we pop into a slightly higher faster brainwave Theta and then we drop down into a Delta again so that's the Sleep Rhythm a very well understood phenomenon in Psychology what we found is that as people do these eye movements they drop into those slow brain waves they have more Delta more Theta and that is the time of night when we're say for example when we're in deep Sleep we're usually in a very peaceful deep sleep when we pop into Theta that's rapid eye movement sleep or dreaming sleep we our eyes move around a lot and we're dreams so Theta is when your brain is wiring and creating new memories and new connections Delta is when it's pruning and cutting away unused neural Pathways and so the eye movements Drive the brain into Theta and Delta and that's also of course how we process trauma and problems as we often do them do it through dreams dreaming and sleep you know you're worried about something you have a good night's sleep Benjamin Franklin said the best cure it for your worries is a good night's sleep and even though that was 300 years ago it still really is true today and so those eye movements we found hooking people up to eegs prompt those same Cycles you go through and steep only for a few minutes but that's the brain where the brain's way of making solving problems make neutral connections and pruning problematic ones how would you use EFT for a good night's sleep if you tap before you go to sleep to relax yourself you'll just find it's relaxing to tap uh sometimes I I just tap without any particular thought in mind just feel relaxed so you can tap before you go to sleep just feel relaxed you can tap to have good dreams like I visualize having good dreams while I'm tapping so I'm copying myself and doing the visualization you can tap to go to sleep quickly I I looked at all the research into this and for example in our clinical trials of veterans insomnia is a real problem for people with PTSD and veterans in our studies had high levels of insomnia after six one-hour sessions of EMP their levels drop back into the normal rate so you have increased sleep and increased Sleep Quality when you start tapping one of the interesting sections of your audio teaching series on EFT for recovery and resilience is what's going on when EFT doesn't work so you ask that question and then you answer it and I wonder if you can answer it here yeah and you know I mean empty is not a Panacea nothing's about a CF anyone tells you that their therapy solves everything cures everything just run away it's not true no therapy is kind of see uh efp works really well for things to do with episodic memory so it works spectacularly well with PTSD it works less well with things that are primarily genetic or purely medical so um there's a range of of how it works and uh for example in our studies about nine out of 10 veterans recovered from PTSD their levels dropped into the normal range one out of ten didn't budge well but Dawson first of all let's just take a moment nine out of ten that's huge that's huge that's huge yeah yeah and so what we tell doctors and nurses medical providers is that ucft has a front line treatment because nine out of 10 veterans we've shown in this research respond to EFT and that's the Cure they do their six sessions of 10 sessions and they're done but one out of ten doesn't so what we recommend for them is intensive individual Psychotherapy group work social support is incredibly important if you have caring people around you loving people around you then you want to bring them into the healing process and finally on school the stepped care model the final step is if all of that doesn't work then you do drugs and you do intensive psychotherapy but for for goodness sakes and I just want to I I'm about this timing do not do those extremely harsh drugs as your first line of treatment because they have side effects they have really severe side effects and so what we've been doing for the last while is we've been medicating these veterans to an extreme degree we have we have people coming to us we have another social project we've treated over 22 000 veterans free of charge in the last 12 years with EFT and we we find that many of them come into our program and they have they're taking 12 medications or six medications they take medications to control the side effects of other medications that's not the first thing to do the first thing to do is see how energy can change in meditation Consciousness awareness that can make a big difference and then go to your doctor with the real problem don't expect your doctor to medicate away emotional stress and your doctor will really appreciate that if you take that approach so you mentioned a six session series or a 10 session series hour long each together we did a six minute practice do you repeat that six minute practice up to an hour so do you repeat it several times or what makes up an hour-long session we typically ask people to bring in lists of their problems so they'll bring in for example the veterans will bring in a list of problems or some of those scores tummy so they'll have the the the the their list saying my dad beat me so hard when I was eight years old that I I lost Consciousness well my brother tried to drown me when I was 12 or um I got picked I didn't get picked for the football squad when I was 18 whatever it might be that lists of those those life issues and then some of it have to do with combat some have to do with with regular life and so we work through those with veterans one by one now some of these are severely traumatic life-threatening events and it's going to take more than six minutes to work on one and we may have to work on what that person smelled and tasted and so and heard as part of a treatment session and those can take a while so Small Things often drop pretty quickly that's why I do pick an easy thing for the recent past if someone's been traumatized and has dozens or even hundreds of traumatic memories then it is it takes longer to work through those in the audio teaching series one of the things you say Dawson is that EFT is unique among therapeutic approaches in that it actually makes deliberate and systematic use of dissociation in the healing process so I wonder if you can explain that how the technique actually uses our a response of dissociation to trauma in an efficacious way yeah so Trump in trauma treatment in Psychology generally dissociation is a real barrier to success you need exposure you need to think about the bad stuff and light up those neurons in your brain to treat them successfully if the client is dissociating and not lighting up those neurons then it's it's hard to work with and dissociation is normal for traumatized people early in life if I am a child being violated if I'm being ignored or hurt and I'm three or five or six years old then what do I do I just go somewhere else I have a picture in in the in one of my books of a of a woman who drew the an image when she was in therapy of what it was like to be raped repeatedly by a family member when she was young and you see this picture of this this little girl she Drew in a corner there's a giant head reaching through her body up in the corner there's a slimy face and the slightly faces B because it was not safe to be in her body so that's dissociation if you're in a if you're in a firefight in a foxhole it is not safe to be there you'd associate and you probably dissociate when you think about it again so the association's a real a real issue but when people are tiptoeing now into treatment and actually are willing to work on their issues a little bit maybe then giving them a couple of layers of safety and inducing a little bit of Association allows them to gain confidence in working with those issues so he typically start small with veterans and then there like we had one veteran who we Vietnam veteran called Bob Culver and there was a documentary about Bob and a group of other veterans we treated and Bob said I'll work on these issues from Vietnam these memories from Vietnam but not this other group of memories that are behind the wall those are too terrible to even think about now that is adaptive dissociation Bob can't even face them three days later Bob Culver was tapping away at his memories he'd gone behind the wall and retrieved them but we lit we didn't make that that we didn't suggest that the first day the first day we led him to all that Association he wanted while he worked on small issues and gained confidence that he could recover then he went eventually behind the wall by the end of that time he was describing a mortar attack on the field hospital he was added in Vietnam and the therapist worked with him said things like now think about the water attack and Bob's thinking about the motor attack while tapping the therapist then asks and you remember the bodies of the people were killed and Bob says yes the therapist then says how many bodies count them and Bob's tapping and Counting and telling us that 18 people were killed in the motor attack so he's doing that that's on day three initially we used Association therapeutically and Bob worked on the easy things first and then moved to the hard stuff like motor attack and the body count after which he remained totally calm he remembered the event but he no longer went into the stress response now in the in the audio series Dawson you get personal at a certain point and you share a huge trauma that happened in your life approximately five years ago and how everything uh you had done prepared you to be able to go through it and I wonder if you can tell our listeners about that yeah Tabby you know I've been a meditator for many years I joined an ashram when I was 15 years old that learned the perennial philosophy and we studied Elvis Huxley and Paul bronton and Adam Watson all these people but that you know that's that's wonderful to do that and immerse yourself in that material and yet I still faced a bunch of life's challenges in in my life over the last many many years and I already committed now to letting people know what those those techniques are are are are are without going through 50 years of stumbling through figuring it all out that um I had to apply it myself during that that time and on the night of October 9th 2017 my wife woke me up in the middle of the night took me awake and said something's really wrong and I looked at the alarm clock next by that and it was flashing 12 45 a.m I looked out the window there was an orange glow on the horizon and I went outside quickly and there was a wildfire racing down the opposite Hill toward our Hill and I just yelled at her we're getting out of here right now and I I ran through the house grabbed car keys grabbed phone threw on some clothes and sprinted to the car and drove out just as the Flames it began to engulf all the trees around us and it was um you know you go to an open space at that time I almost felt as I was watching myself from above and I it's funny I It Was Fear and he had this absolute feeling of of love and security and being protected at the same time but it was devastating for for our community we we lost five five thousand four hundred homes were destroyed 22 people were killed died when their cars when the power went out people got stuck in there in there and their garages they couldn't open the garage door trees fell across the the the the some of the neighbor's driveways eight of our neighbors died and so it was just a horrendous event and it took us a long time to rebuild and recover we had a whole bunch of health problems after that we had a huge financial crash because our office and our business was destroyed as well so um we've we faced a very challenging few years and yet we found tapping meditation energy therapies were were powerful and so in the year after that I'd sit in meditation after the the fire living in a rented house and gradually piecing our lives back together trying to rebuild our business and I was entering these extraordinary States as I would meditate and I I would feel the love of the universe Tammy just pouring down through me I'd feel so much love and so much compassion and so much joy that I I was just filled with gratitude and so I wrote the book Blitz brain during that period because I wanted to know what is this you know how come I have so much serotonin and dope mean these two pleasure chemicals anatomy and oxytocin so that book is all about those seven pleasure chemicals you get during deep meditation about the brain waves that are that go along with them about the regions of the brain that are active in people in this brain and um where we went from that point and the book ends with with post-traumatic growth and the fact is that PTSD is not inevitable that you go through trauma and research shows that two-thirds of people who go through a trauma like that actually emerge either with equilibrium or stronger that's post-traumatic growth and we tend to be really obsessed with PTSD and of course PTSD a quarter or a third of people do actually develop PTSD but two-thirds of people develop post-traumatic growth or stabilize software words are resilient and you want to learn those skills meditation EFT because we use them a lot in the year after the fire and they made I mean I can't imagine how you could even go through a a experience like that or even even the average disruptions of the average life without these kinds of tools to support yourself did you find yourself surprised Dawson that here you were experiencing these positive neurochemicals and writing a book like Bliss brain not that long after such an incredible devastation I found it astonishing Tammy I mean not not just it would you look at the uh the studies of the Tibetan Monks that use meditation there are long-term meditators and you look at markers like I like objective markers like how much gamma brainwave do they have in their brains and how high is their their level of uh Bliss molecule like an animide anatomide is a very recently discovered neurotransmitter and um its name Ananda is a Sanskrit word for Bliss and how do you have those that anandamide in your system and how do you have those that those high levels of gamma brain waves we find in research that those mugs have up to 25 times the amount of gamma in their brains not 25 percent 25 x the amount of gamma that's why it's list frame and you find yourself going to these extraordinary states of just being one with the old it is and so I found myself there just day in and day out both before the fire I've been practicing those techniques for for a few years and then after as well and I I just got passionate about sharing this with people because people again like my daughter's pimple on her chin you know they they have some little issue to deal with and they and they they just feel their lives being wrecked like you know we just had this hugely um annoying and um triggering event where the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and I I mean people I know and everyone I know is pretty much I mean the degree of of of of anger and and frustration and disappointment about that in in much of of of American society whether you're on the right or on the left is enormous and so I heard one friend of mine saying I heard the news and I was devastated I was wrecked well be disappointed and feel the emotion and then do something to rescue yourself don't be in that state of being wrecked all the time because it's going to drive your cortisol high and hurt your body we need these tools Tammy and that's why I'm so passionate about advocating meditation grounding you know so many wonderful things we can do anything body based that brings that experience of the infinite into our bodies is going to produce a a rapid shift in the world around us can you explain to me Dawson how in being a meditator and connecting to this Infinite Space that changes the actual neurochemicals that are being elicited in our brain and in our body how does how does that create that change when you meditate effectively now in blue sprain I shot a really clear light in terms of research into what is effective meditation and the unfortunate truth Tammy is that much what people think of as meditation like when I was in the ashram at 15 the meditation of monster said oh just close your eyes and steal your mind it's like I can do number one I close my eyes still in my mind I've been doing this for 50 years I still can't store my mind I couldn't store my mind if I was at gunpoint in order to steal my mind I I mine's just aren't meant to be still uh our brains evolved to look around them all the time at the environment and it's just us Crystal mind is is almost impossible so um you what you can do is do physiological cues so in this brain I I give people cues like tapping will calm you down like relaxing your tongue in the Floor of your mouth will stimulate the vagus nerve send a calming signal throughout your body and so I I give people seven evidence-based techniques like that that really work to bring you into those States a lot of what people are doing thinking it's meditation like um we had one of our team members while I was writing this brain he lived with his girlfriend and she was a meditator long time meditator meditated an hour every day and so um he would in the morning wake up get ready for work this is before the pandemic going to the office and he would be very careful not to disturb her but one day he made a little too much noise and she opened her eyes in the middle of her meditation and glared at him and said don't mess with my serenity was she meditating probably not and that's what's going on with most people they think they're meditating when they close their eyes but you've got to do things that are effective so with this brain I try to look at the science of what's really effective and there are a few things that are hyper effective but the saffron robes confirm no special uh gift to you the 108 prayer beads are doing nothing whatsoever for your well-being you got to focus on science that's why I love science science is showing us what really works and what really doesn't so when we meditate we we if people have meditating effectively we watch their whole central nervous system is going into parasympathetic mode their sympathetic phytoplate response is dramatically down leveling and the nerves that spread out from the spinal column into all your organs your bladder your tear ducts your lungs your your heart everything is being affected by that movement so meditation is is getting into the state of physical calm sending the sending a signal through the vagus nerve to carve everything in your body then it triggers those brain waves again those both slow waves of theta Delta and also that fast wave of gamma which is the brainwave of integration integration creativity and it also lights up the part of the brain it has to do with compassion compassion meditation is one of the three things you can do in meditation that'll dramatically shift great activity and we watch in MRI studies how when these meditators move into compassion the whole lobe of the brain that handles positive emotion gratitude happiness all joy all of those things those are the emotional phenomena that happen but what happens is that that love of the brain is called the insular becomes highly active in meditators so it's triggering those those feel-good neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine and those are the same neurotransmitters that are a part of the reward system that is stimulated by by heroin and cocaine so we're getting these wonderful feelings of pleasure from the reward reward neurochemicals we're getting oxytocin lots and lots of oxytocin so when you hear of Saint Teresa Villa talking about the Beloved or here Rumi or Hafiz talking about meditation and Oneness with you all it is in erotic or or relationship terms it's because they are having orgasmic experiences driven by oxytocin serotonin dopamine and anandamide so I have a profile in my up the sprain of of the neurochemicals of meditation and their chemicals of orgasm and they're pretty much an exact match so all these people are having these organically wonderful experiences they're also highly evicting which is why when people hit the mark and able are able to meditate once or twice effectively they tend to do it again so we can measure the effects of meditation in all these main dimensions of the human brain and body in the audio series you've created with sounds true healing the roots of trauma EFT for recovery and resilience you offer several different meditative practices you introduce something you called Eco meditation you teach not just the EFT technique and various applications but also some integrative meditative experiences and I wonder here at the end of this conversation can you leave us not just with that terrific laugh of yours that always comes shining through but can we have a type of of Integrative meditation together here as we end something some way to help us settle with everything we've heard another type of the full meditation that it's composed of several seven actually evidence-based techniques that dramatically calm the body and let's just do one little of technique right now which affects the vagus nerve so think of something that annoys you something different from the previous thing so something recent that annoys you maybe a person maybe a name of a person maybe an image maybe a thought or a belief but that makes you feel a little bit annoying maybe a little bit angry resentful uh blaming shaming any negative emotion and now relax your tongue on the floor of your mouth so that your tongue just fall on the floor of your mouth normally our tongue's at tense and often against the roof of our mouths this is the opposite place to let them fall to the floor of our mouths and now keep your tongue totally relaxed try and get upset about that thing just try but keep your tongue relaxed try to get the other side and you can't and you can't because what's happening is that when you relax your tongue on the floor of your mouth it sends a signal through your vagus nerve all over your body that you're safe and you can't then easily get upset so try it in traffic try it when you're stuck in a long line or have a long wait or have a disturbing meeting just relax your tongue and Eco meditation builds together seven of those techniques and you put them together in one package you go into this deep deeply relaxed State and you don't spill your mind you're able to function in that usual human way your mind can be as active or as still as you want it to be but you're doing these seven things that really set that signal of safety to your body wonderful Dawson what a great tip to lead to live people with wonderful I've been speaking with Dawson Church he's the author of bliss brain he's the founder and CEO of the EFT universe and what sounds true he's recorded a new audio learning series it's called healing the roots of trauma EFT for recovery and resilience sounds true waking up the world thanks for being with us thanks for listening to insights at the edge you can read a full transcript of today's interview at resources.soundscrew.com backslash podcast that's resources dot soundscrew.com slash podcast if you're interested hit the Subscribe button in your podcast app and if you feel inspired head to iTunes and leave insights at the edge a review I absolutely love getting your feedback and being connected sounds true waking up the world foreign

welcome to insights at the edge produced by sounds true my name is Tammy Simon I&#39;m the founder of sounds true and I&#39;d love to take a moment to introduce you to the sounds True Foundation the goal of the sounds True Foundation is to provide access and eliminate Financial barriers to transformational education and resources such as teachings and trainings on mindfulness emotional awareness and self-compassion if you&#39;d like to learn more and join with us in our efforts please visit soundstrufoundation.org in this episode of insights at the edge my guest is Dawson Church Dawson is an award-winning science writer with three best-selling books to his credit he&#39;s a prolific researcher on how to apply the breakthroughs of energy psychology to health and personal performance also dozens of his Studies have been published in peer-reviewed journals which sounds true Dawson church is the creator of the new audio learning series it&#39;s called healing the roots of trauma emotional Freedom technique for recovery and resilience I have to say that I am floored by the research that Dawson has done the studies that he&#39;s done and the results that he&#39;s found from the effectiveness of EFT in the field take a listen Dawson you and I are connecting here for the first time after something like two decades and I remember meeting you 20 plus years ago at some kind of publishing event year in the publishing world I&#39;m in the publishing world and here you are a sounds true author creator of this new audio series on the emotional Freedom technique so bring me up to date what was your personal Journey moving from being in the publishing business to now being a writer researcher and teacher of the emotional Freedom technique yeah that was a Book Expo America Tammy many many years ago and it was a wonderful experience meeting and Publishing because in publishing as you know we get to meet the most fabulous people who are authors and then we play a role in getting their ideas out of the world and I love doing that but then in 1997 I retired and I wound up buying a small hotel and being a bed and breakfast owner for a while and Tammy it was so boring boring you know just wasn&#39;t me so I got back into it I also recognized that this burgeoning field of energy Psychology was really growing so I started energy psychology press and it&#39;s the intersection of the energy work Energy Medicine work that all these wonderful healers do and also psychology and the ability to shift PTSD anxiety depression phobias other psychological types of disorders and I realized there was a big opportunity there so I the other publishing company just in time after 10 years to see that the world was going away from books and toward online sorts of media so I then made the switch began to offer online courses and now we do do a few books and hardly anyone that knows what those are anymore they have their Pages inside they have covers things like that but we&#39;re mostly doing online courses and so now we can reach people also in all the time zones of the world we have such a big reach doing that and I love that that about this work and I also became I moved having from being a an observer and a facilitator as a publisher I wanted to get these these ideas out there and after a while I realized that people are suffering people are suffering psychologically they&#39;re suffering medically and energy therapies can make an enormous difference and when we look at the research into how large the effects are of energy treatment we realize the potential of these therapies and so I switched from being a publisher to being an author and a real advocate for these these therapies eventually I was able to help get them into the Veterans Administration they&#39;re in Kaiser Permanente there are a lot of possible systems they&#39;re at Johns Hopkins they&#39;re in Cleveland Clinic and so I really want to see these Therapies in primary care and that&#39;s my current Focus now you yourself have done quite a bit of research on the effectiveness specifically of the energy therapy the energy Freedom technique can you explain just introduce people who are not familiar to EFT and then what kinds of studies you&#39;ve done and the results that you&#39;re seeing I remember the very first time I used EFT myself and I was a Gestalt therapy Advocate at the time and this therapy this therapist friend of mine said Dawson I&#39;m working with Vietnam veterans I work with people having Sports Performance and anxiety and I&#39;m working with these this variety of clients and we&#39;re using this technique where they tap with their fingertips on acupuncture points Tammy I thought I&#39;d never heard anything more ridiculous in my life tapping on acupuncture points can help with Psychotherapy and so I didn&#39;t really have much faith on the idea and I in fact I took the instruction manual he gave me and threw in a big pile of papers and forgot all about it until a few months later I had a really difficult moment in my own life when I was trying to sell a business and the sale was collapsing and I got really anxious and at that moment mysteriously that instruction sheet surfaced at the top of my slash pile and I sat down on the steps of my office and I tapped and my anxiety dropped by Hoth a lot and then I&#39;d be able to pay attention to it then other psychotherapist friends began saying I&#39;m not just treating people westerners I&#39;m not just just treating westerners for anxiety I just got back from Rwanda and I&#39;m treating people whose parents were killed in the genocide there and tapping is releasing those PTSD symptoms like flashbacks and Nightmares then I really paid attention when I heard about Vietnam veterans and uh Haitian orphans and for a variety of people with severe chronic stressful events in their life that were were being affected by it so I dove into research and research quantifies things I want to know not just that you got better I want to know on average if it&#39;s a group of people by how much you got better and then we compare that for example to psychopharmacology and traditional tool therapy and the results of of EFT that we began to measure any studies were immense and so I got further and further into it in my very first study published in 2010 in a medical journal called Integrative Medicine a very respected Journal we showed that one day of tapping one day of tapping and we were using the tablet with healthcare workers like doctors and nurses and chiropractors a single day of tapping dropped their levels of anxiety and depression by 45 their cravings for things like cake and chocolate and cookies and alcohol and all these other things dropped off tapping in a single session by 83 so we were getting these massive massive results and I then said we absolutely have to get these Therapies in primary care we had to do research on them and now we have just literally yesterday there were over 30 million people tapping in the world it&#39;s very simple you just think about something that&#39;s bad something that troubles you could be a a personal event could be a childhood event current event could be a really old event but you think of about something that bothers you and you really focus on it intently what that does is it lights up all of the stress circuits of the brain especially the midbrain or limnic system and so now you have an and solitary there are a lot of authors wonderful authors who talk about the limbic system and the arousal of the sympathetic nervous system people like Stephen porges and Stephen Levine talk about this and we know from a lot of research that when you&#39;re stress those parts of the brain are highly active you have a highly active limbic system and we can read those signatures on an MRI we can see on the MRI that you are highly stressed we then notice as we have people tap and this stimulate these 14 acupuncture meridians we see rapid deactivation of that if they were dealing with a craving the craving goes way down if they were thinking about a child of memory their limbic activation drops remarkably in only a couple of minutes so it&#39;s acting on the information flows in the brain and when your limbic system you&#39;re Olympic whole limbic structure is then deactivated and it&#39;s no longer sending signals of fight or flight through the amygdala into the peripheral nervous system the central nervous system you get much calmer and then for example that veteran who was sharing about the the death of his friend in a roadside explosion in Iraq and is 10 out of 10 for emotion his limbic brain is all lit up as he recalls that stressful event after only a few minutes of tapping typically those levels of triggering will go way down he remembers the event clearly still and the death of his friend in combat and he now remembers it without that strong activation of the fear response that&#39;s a typical scenario with EFT okay Dawson so you said when you were first introduced you threw the piece of paper away and rolled your eyes and it seems like there are still a lot of people in the mainstream culture who are like come on this is you know it&#39;s if it sounds too good to be true it&#39;s not kind of thing and you know it&#39;s only you&#39;re only talking about one day and you&#39;re getting a 45 reduction in anxiety and depression that we would all know about this it would be in the news it wouldn&#39;t be in these you know semi-narrow or esoteric platforms like a podcast like insights at the edge so what&#39;s the gap between the effectiveness of EFT and its mainstream adoption how do you understand that actually it&#39;s very widespread in primary care and in the mainstream we expect there are tens of millions of people using it I&#39;ve had a free manual Mini manual on my website for over a decade and over three million people have downloaded that so it&#39;s had a lot of attention that way if you go on to the US government&#39;s uh website pubmed.gov which reports clinical trials and top-level journals you&#39;ll find dozens of studies of EFT there you&#39;ll also find practice guidelines developed by Kaiser Permanente a large Hospital chain you&#39;ll find other practice guidelines for the veterans administration it&#39;s been approved by the VA it&#39;s in use by the VA so uh it&#39;s working its way into primary care but I mean the main obstacle actually is not skepticism or disbelief it&#39;s really our fundamental Western approach of believing that material reality is the primary reality and thinking that energy and Consciousness and and awareness is just something vague and ephemeral and what I show in my books I have a book called Mind to matter where I literally look at all the research showing how our brains transceive signals and then turn that into what we think of as material reality when our constant changes it&#39;s a very simple example of conscious change and lack of change is when I think a stressful thought when I get upset when I go to fight or flight my body produces cortisol much more cortisol cortisol Rises I&#39;m literally producing a molecule cortisol using a thought with EFT we find that cortisol drops in one of my studies on pubmed.gov in one week people&#39;s Baseline levels of that stress hormone cortisol drop drop 37 so big drops in physical things as a result of changes in Awareness Consciousness fear emotion always intangibles but they&#39;re having a huge effect in our body so it has worked its way into mainstream medicine it&#39;s in wide use and private therapy one study found that about 42 percent of therapists are using some form of energy therapy usually EFT it&#39;s also now started to be applied for other things but our culture is so oriented to give you the pills give me the surgery give me the the the the external agent to go into my body and we&#39;re so not oriented looking at energy but if you change your energy you change the molecules your body is producing and very very quickly you can shift all kinds of we find for example that high stress leads the ace study the adverse childhood experiences study which I know you&#39;ve covered on previous podcasts uh that show that people are unresolved trauma have much higher levels of cancer heart disease diabetes suicide attempts smoking hepatitis and on and on and on so unresolved trauma emotional trauma emotions are literally driving disease when you release emotion when you drop cortisol when you have much lower levels of all those stress hormones and brain waves then your body thrives and so it is working its way into a surprising number of medical and psychological treatment centers do you have a vision of where EFT is going to be in a in a decade it&#39;s funny I was I was walking through MB Anderson Cancer Center MD Anderson is about as probably the most advanced cancer treatment instead of hospitals in the U.S and I was walking there there through there with a nurse friend of mine who does EFT with cancer patients and with stuff there are especially staff staff nurses doctors other Hospital workers already stressed so there&#39;s a big people going to go to chemotherapy there and there&#39;s a big recovery room at MD Anderson in Orlando Florida for um them to be in to stabilize after chemotherapy and it&#39;s a gloss-fracted room so the nurses can walk past look at and make sure if anyone is having a serious AB reaction they&#39;re including so I walked past there with my friend Pat and she said Dawson my vision for the future is that one day we&#39;ll look in through this floss and we&#39;ll see a patient tapping doing EFT and I said to a pat that&#39;s not my vision at all my vision is one day soon we walk past this room looking through the glass and see that there&#39;s a patient not tapping and we&#39;ll wonder why so I expected to spread ready widely even spreading widely right now and these therapies are so good that they&#39;re going to become part of primary care part of pain management part of physiological issues and psychological issues so they are gaining ground but they need to be part of this whole Paradigm Shift we&#39;re in the middle of of realizing that energy and Consciousness and awareness has dramatic effects at the level of the physical body what&#39;s the history of tapping who first came up with this notion and the actual protocol I mean you start by saying to yourself as you&#39;re tapping I deeply and completely accept myself I found that really interesting really powerful but I&#39;d love to know more how this particular protocol that you teach came into being well they do have self-acceptance is really powerful Carl Jung said a century ago that self-acceptance is the primary marker of the material psyche so Carl Rogers said that every journey in Healing Begins With accepting myself the way I am so that&#39;s a fundamental pre cept of psychology for more than a century self-acceptance is really important and then tapping itself comes from Qigong and that goes back thousands and thousands of years I&#39;ve been happy with Qigong monsters now for 20 years it&#39;s wonderful to realize that they they&#39;ve been incorporating tapping for four centuries and then when uh during during President Nixon&#39;s trip to China in 1972 one of his advisors witnessed a uh an operation done surgery done only with air acupuncture for pain and that then began the whole cycle of the acceptance acupuncture in the U.S also shiatsu acupressure pressure pressure on acupuncture points which is tapping or simply hard pressure on the various points it&#39;s been around for a long long time a psychologist called Roger Callahan began to experiment with his his clients in the late 1970s early 1980s and he worked with one client in particular and tried everything with her I tried all kinds of things because she had a phobia of water her name was Mary she couldn&#39;t take immerse herself in water she was afraid whenever she was around water he had a swimming pool and he treated people at his house and she couldn&#39;t go within 20 feet of the pool she was terrified she&#39;d have a panic attack if she got that close to a body of water and after trying every single therapy he had he read about acupressure and one day he just leaned over and tapped gently on her stomach Meridian which he knew was associated with fear which is right under the people of her eye and so he tapped on her there just wondering that might make a difference that night she phoned him and said my fear of water is gone he didn&#39;t believe her had her over the next day she walked right up to the pool and stuck her feet in and her her the Cure was permanent she never get out of fear of water he then wrote a book called The five-minute phobia cure which was published in 1985. his students took took tapping further so it&#39;s an ancient technique but it&#39;s been systematized now and EFT just uses a really simple form of tapping but what again that&#39;s now been proven in over 100 clinical trials can you talk me through the method and the import how each step of the method is effective how we&#39;ll walk you through it now I&#39;ve had to warn you Tammy do you know who Lisa gar is Lisa gar Lisa anyway okay she asked me that my first interview with her and this is live on the air big audience and she she broke down crying and we had to address I&#39;m all right I&#39;m gonna be I&#39;m prepared for this let&#39;s go with that disclaimer in place so you you do that and also every person listening now I&#39;d like you to think of an event in your life within the last two weeks that trouble you emotionally so something that bothered you could have had a wait in line you could have had a tense conversation with a co-worker or a family member so something that in your life in the last couple weeks that affected you personally directly and when you have an emotional response to that so think of something like that that happened in the recent past don&#39;t go back to your childhood it&#39;s too triggering has to be within the last two weeks so Tammy what what just a couple of words of an annoying thing or a triggering thing that happened to you very recently I&#39;m gonna pick a pretty um low lift one which is my dogs are getting groomed upstairs and they whine and they bark and they howl and they&#39;re upset and when they&#39;re upset like that it upsets me and I I my nervous system gets all jambled up when I hear them whining and Howling and crying yeah entrainment so think about your dogs doing upstairs and then tune into yourself your body right now what number are you on a scale of zero to ten in terms of that triggering zero being no triggering 10 being the maximum figurine well I told you I&#39;d pick something pretty mild so I&#39;m only really A four at this moment especially because they&#39;re quiet at the moment okay good so they aren&#39;t making a lot of noise right spray movement and you&#39;re four and now we&#39;ll just go through the routine and if you&#39;re listening please do get your issue give it a really brief title like dogs being groomed and then I&#39;ll describe to you which points to tap on to shift your energy see what your number now 0 through 10 you&#39;ve got your event you&#39;ve got your brief phrase now all we do is we incorporate that in a statement of self-acceptance while tapping on a Meridian now this Meridian is on the side of your hand so if you just look at the Joint that anchors your little finger then tap with three fingers on the other hand on that point and even say out loud society and I think cloudy goes silently even though I&#39;m remembering this issue until you can say the dog&#39;s being groomed in your mind really tender to the dogs being groomed sound of the whining I deeply and completely accept myself keep tapping notice your breathing make sure you&#39;re breathing deeply even though I remember this emotionally triggering event and then Tammy you&#39;ll say in your mind the name of your event you&#39;ll reaching into those sounds those dogs being groomed and if you&#39;re listening to us tune in and use the name of your event I deeply and completely accept myself one more time even though I remember this emotionally triggering event name of your event I&#39;m breathing now notice your breathing and I accept myself just the way I am now tap on the top of your head right on the top of your head that&#39;s good yeah keep your eyes open eyes open there&#39;s a lot of scientific theory behind this I won&#39;t explain it all now I have whole books on that so let that go so tap the top of your head again re-tune into that that triggering event your number whatever your number is the event remember it vividly now tap where your eyebrow meets The Bridge of your nose with two fingers so two fingers tapping where your eyebrow meets The Bridge of your nose notice your breath and say either out loud or silently the name of your emotionally triggering event notice your breath again now tap on the side of your eye right on the edge of your eye socket in line with the very edge of your eye and say the name of your event again and again vividi recall the specifics so Tammy keep your eyes open and vividly recall the size out of that winding other noises they&#39;re making how long it went on how intense it was this volume which dog was whining the most that dog yeah now tap under the people of your eye with two fingers really focusing on your event this is your stomach Meridian the one that Roger Callahan tapped on with Mary with her fear of water and already tuned at your event let your mind be filled with your event and the recollection of your event tapping under your eye now tap onto your nose that&#39;s your governing Meridian endpoint and keeping your eyes open feeling your breath all the details of the event now tap on your chin on your lower lip this is your central Meridian you&#39;re stimulating now in your breath remembering that event all the details of the event that bothered you within the last couple of weeks and then tap where your collarbone meets your breastbone with three or four fingers on either side feeling your breath till the end of the event let me just reach out to your arm and turn that level with your elbow on the side of your body so spleen Meridian tune at the event as you stimulate your acupressure points and then one more time on the side of your hand and then tap one more location which is the back of your hand between the bones that anchor your little finger in your ring finger so the back of your hand between those big long bones that anchor your little finger and your ring finger and now we&#39;ll do a quick exercise that stimulates the production of calming brain waves so first of all keep your head steady and look all the way down keep your head steady look all the way up imagine you&#39;re looking at a giant clock and you&#39;re looking at 12 o&#39;clock as you think about the event that annoyed you now look at three o&#39;clock keeping your head steady look all the way to the side to the right at three o&#39;clock now look all the way to the left at nine o&#39;clock keep your head steady look all the way down at six o&#39;clock again the other floor look all the way up at 12 o&#39;clock feel your breath as you think about the annoying event and then stop tapping and relax completely feel your breath and now think about the event again like you did exactly let&#39;s see six minutes ago and CO2 new number is how triggered are you on a scale of zero to ten so Tommy for your dogs that sound of them whining what&#39;s your number now you&#39;re smiling yeah I&#39;d have to I&#39;d have to give it a one and a half and you know Dawson I intentionally chose something um that wasn&#39;t a a big deal event and of course I&#39;d like to try this again with some things in my life that are more big deal events but uh thank you for taking us through that it does bring up a bunch of questions for me first is you know I had a tendency I wanted to shut my eyes why keep the eyes open because we used to think that memories were static like pulling a photograph out of an album looking at the memory and dropping it back in the album we now know that when we pull memories into our awareness we actually modify them and we modify them by combining those memories those images those sensory experiences with information from the present moment and the present moment contains safe information so when we pull up a troubling piece of information from the past and pair it with a neutral piece of information or a pleasant stimulus now just like for example tapping or telling it to a friend or sharing with a therapist now we&#39;re combining those two Memories the way the brain works now is it&#39;s putting that that photograph back in the album with these positive or neutral emotional tags which reduces the number and it only happens if it happens more if you have your your eyes open that if you have your eyes closed and this whole notion of of actually bringing forward bringing up the traumatic event I mean I&#39;ve heard it say that that can be re-traumatizing yet in this approach that you&#39;re offering here with EFT were intentionally bringing up the memory so talk to me about that and what in the technique safeguards that it&#39;s not re-traumatizing yeah re-traumatization was coined by a therapist called Charles Figley in the 1980s and the idea was first noticed strongly by another psychiatrist called Joseph Walby after World War II and he was a famous psychiatrist and he was tossed with working treating soldiers coming back from World War II with what they then called shell shock and so being a good Freudian he said we&#39;ll lie down on the couch here and go ahead and talk about Omaha Beach he later wrote in one of his books he wrote we found that this approach was not effective it was harmful he noticed that they were worse after they remembered the bad stuff in their lives and that&#39;s re-traumatization but if you pair that memory and that event and talk about that while you&#39;re tapping then something happens called memory reconsolidation and emotional Extinction and that means that you now reconsolidate that memory with a neutral cue and you remove all the emotional tags of fight or flight attached to the memory and so that&#39;s why we keep our eyes open that&#39;s why we have this particular procedure because if you were just to tell the story you retrialmentize yourself if you tell the story and you introduce the therapeutic cue of tapping you then are able to cathartically discharge the emotion and Tammy I&#39;ve done a lot of research that&#39;s Empirical research using MRIs eegs cortisol other genetic markers I&#39;ve done several studies using genetic tags and I&#39;ve done one study on epigenetic tags little tiny molecules called micro rnas and we did this with veterans veterans with severe PTSD flashbacks nightmares intrusive thoughts and a lot of disease so in that study we gave a 10 1 hour sessions of EFT and we literally measured the expression of their genes before and after and we found that a whole bunch of these micro rnas because micrornas attached to the genes of people who have traumatic stress we we see that parts of that genome that have to do with health to do with emotional expression to do with safety auto shutdown and these little tags micro RNA tags attached to the genes interest people and those genes remain silenced we literally saw those micro rnas popping up the genome in this large scale randomized controlled trial of veterans so it is literally changing you epigenetically okay now I can imagine someone saying whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa we went from uh reduction of cortisol to impacting brain waves to saying that EFT is an epigenetic intervention okay so how do you measure whether or not something like tapping is affecting gene expression you talked about these little art but I didn&#39;t follow it all Dawson to be honest what are you measuring so that you can say this is a successful epigenetic intervention yeah you don&#39;t have to measure these things in every and every patient every client you measure them in very I mean these are highly technical studies that are measuring things like clean expression and uh now what&#39;s really happened that&#39;s that&#39;s been a game changer in the last 10 years is we used to need a blood draw to measure things like cortisol and and gene expression now we can do it on a saliva swap so we have these companies like 23andMe now literally having people spit in a tube mail it up to a lab we can extract enough genetic material from that saliva be able to measure which genes are turned on if genes are turned off and about about 85 of your genome is is responsive to the environment 15 is fixed like you know gray eyes and brown hair and that&#39;s just a fixed genetic characteristic but that&#39;s only 85 of the genome is fixed the other I mean that&#39;s I&#39;m sorry 15 is fixed the other 85 is fluctuating depending on and stress is having massive effects body wide because think about it your ancestors ten thousand years ago a hundred thousand years ago when they were faced with a predator or a hostile environment every single body system organ system had to come into play their muscles had to be filled with blood and be ready for fight or flight their breathing would get shallow forcing blood into their muscles for the stress response so their hearts were pounding their muscles were activated their lungs were breathing shallowly all these things were happening a lot of it controlled by hormones like cortisol and by gene expression and so we can measure these things now it&#39;s not not easy it&#39;s it&#39;s highly technical we can measure these now though and we&#39;re there now lots of studies showing that that all these things are being affected and the the the problem is that while those stress responses were highly useful for my ancestor 100 000 years ago now being highly stressed just because I have a pimple on my chin I mean my daughter is you know is is a grown woman I I adore her I see her a lot but what she was staying with us a while back and um visiting from Colorado where she lives and Tammy she had a pebble on her chin and she was so stressed over the table on her chin I was just laughing it&#39;s like I can&#39;t even see the people on her chin but she&#39;s like a blemish to her whole life so we get and we get worried and stressed about you know our deadlines and sure not being the right body shape and being overweight you know worry about all these things that as Mark Twain said never happened so um that stress is now not our friend the way it was to our ancestors and so we want to really learn ways to bring it down by tapping okay now you mentioned that we can impact our brain waves our brainwave State through tapping and you had us using our eyes to look up at a clock and down in a clock and three o&#39;clock nine o&#39;clock tell me what&#39;s going on in terms of brain waves when I&#39;m doing that kind of thing it is so cool and we&#39;ve now known as we&#39;ve been studying brainwave so Hans Berger invented the EEG in 1929 and then around 1960 some Advanced scientists like uh Robert Becker and uh Maxwell Kade began to use eegs and look at how this affecting how was how the brain waves of people were changing when they were calm and they were studying meditators and they were noticing that they they shipped their brain waves also that&#39;s that was a great period of discovering what happens during sleep and so we got to realize that our brains slow way down normally they&#39;re in beta which is between 12 and roughly 30 cycles per second that&#39;s the normal State of Consciousness when we go to sleep we have this drifting down feeling and we go to Alpha which is 8 to 12 Cycles a second it&#39;s much slower brain wave finally we drop into Theta then Delta and most of the night we spend in Delta which is zero through four cycles per second the very very slow brain wave every roughly hour we pop into a slightly higher faster brainwave Theta and then we drop down into a Delta again so that&#39;s the Sleep Rhythm a very well understood phenomenon in Psychology what we found is that as people do these eye movements they drop into those slow brain waves they have more Delta more Theta and that is the time of night when we&#39;re say for example when we&#39;re in deep Sleep we&#39;re usually in a very peaceful deep sleep when we pop into Theta that&#39;s rapid eye movement sleep or dreaming sleep we our eyes move around a lot and we&#39;re dreams so Theta is when your brain is wiring and creating new memories and new connections Delta is when it&#39;s pruning and cutting away unused neural Pathways and so the eye movements Drive the brain into Theta and Delta and that&#39;s also of course how we process trauma and problems as we often do them do it through dreams dreaming and sleep you know you&#39;re worried about something you have a good night&#39;s sleep Benjamin Franklin said the best cure it for your worries is a good night&#39;s sleep and even though that was 300 years ago it still really is true today and so those eye movements we found hooking people up to eegs prompt those same Cycles you go through and steep only for a few minutes but that&#39;s the brain where the brain&#39;s way of making solving problems make neutral connections and pruning problematic ones how would you use EFT for a good night&#39;s sleep if you tap before you go to sleep to relax yourself you&#39;ll just find it&#39;s relaxing to tap uh sometimes I I just tap without any particular thought in mind just feel relaxed so you can tap before you go to sleep just feel relaxed you can tap to have good dreams like I visualize having good dreams while I&#39;m tapping so I&#39;m copying myself and doing the visualization you can tap to go to sleep quickly I I looked at all the research into this and for example in our clinical trials of veterans insomnia is a real problem for people with PTSD and veterans in our studies had high levels of insomnia after six one-hour sessions of EMP their levels drop back into the normal rate so you have increased sleep and increased Sleep Quality when you start tapping one of the interesting sections of your audio teaching series on EFT for recovery and resilience is what&#39;s going on when EFT doesn&#39;t work so you ask that question and then you answer it and I wonder if you can answer it here yeah and you know I mean empty is not a Panacea nothing&#39;s about a CF anyone tells you that their therapy solves everything cures everything just run away it&#39;s not true no therapy is kind of see uh efp works really well for things to do with episodic memory so it works spectacularly well with PTSD it works less well with things that are primarily genetic or purely medical so um there&#39;s a range of of how it works and uh for example in our studies about nine out of 10 veterans recovered from PTSD their levels dropped into the normal range one out of ten didn&#39;t budge well but Dawson first of all let&#39;s just take a moment nine out of ten that&#39;s huge that&#39;s huge that&#39;s huge yeah yeah and so what we tell doctors and nurses medical providers is that ucft has a front line treatment because nine out of 10 veterans we&#39;ve shown in this research respond to EFT and that&#39;s the Cure they do their six sessions of 10 sessions and they&#39;re done but one out of ten doesn&#39;t so what we recommend for them is intensive individual Psychotherapy group work social support is incredibly important if you have caring people around you loving people around you then you want to bring them into the healing process and finally on school the stepped care model the final step is if all of that doesn&#39;t work then you do drugs and you do intensive psychotherapy but for for goodness sakes and I just want to I I&#39;m about this timing do not do those extremely harsh drugs as your first line of treatment because they have side effects they have really severe side effects and so what we&#39;ve been doing for the last while is we&#39;ve been medicating these veterans to an extreme degree we have we have people coming to us we have another social project we&#39;ve treated over 22 000 veterans free of charge in the last 12 years with EFT and we we find that many of them come into our program and they have they&#39;re taking 12 medications or six medications they take medications to control the side effects of other medications that&#39;s not the first thing to do the first thing to do is see how energy can change in meditation Consciousness awareness that can make a big difference and then go to your doctor with the real problem don&#39;t expect your doctor to medicate away emotional stress and your doctor will really appreciate that if you take that approach so you mentioned a six session series or a 10 session series hour long each together we did a six minute practice do you repeat that six minute practice up to an hour so do you repeat it several times or what makes up an hour-long session we typically ask people to bring in lists of their problems so they&#39;ll bring in for example the veterans will bring in a list of problems or some of those scores tummy so they&#39;ll have the the the the their list saying my dad beat me so hard when I was eight years old that I I lost Consciousness well my brother tried to drown me when I was 12 or um I got picked I didn&#39;t get picked for the football squad when I was 18 whatever it might be that lists of those those life issues and then some of it have to do with combat some have to do with with regular life and so we work through those with veterans one by one now some of these are severely traumatic life-threatening events and it&#39;s going to take more than six minutes to work on one and we may have to work on what that person smelled and tasted and so and heard as part of a treatment session and those can take a while so Small Things often drop pretty quickly that&#39;s why I do pick an easy thing for the recent past if someone&#39;s been traumatized and has dozens or even hundreds of traumatic memories then it is it takes longer to work through those in the audio teaching series one of the things you say Dawson is that EFT is unique among therapeutic approaches in that it actually makes deliberate and systematic use of dissociation in the healing process so I wonder if you can explain that how the technique actually uses our a response of dissociation to trauma in an efficacious way yeah so Trump in trauma treatment in Psychology generally dissociation is a real barrier to success you need exposure you need to think about the bad stuff and light up those neurons in your brain to treat them successfully if the client is dissociating and not lighting up those neurons then it&#39;s it&#39;s hard to work with and dissociation is normal for traumatized people early in life if I am a child being violated if I&#39;m being ignored or hurt and I&#39;m three or five or six years old then what do I do I just go somewhere else I have a picture in in the in one of my books of a of a woman who drew the an image when she was in therapy of what it was like to be raped repeatedly by a family member when she was young and you see this picture of this this little girl she Drew in a corner there&#39;s a giant head reaching through her body up in the corner there&#39;s a slimy face and the slightly faces B because it was not safe to be in her body so that&#39;s dissociation if you&#39;re in a if you&#39;re in a firefight in a foxhole it is not safe to be there you&#39;d associate and you probably dissociate when you think about it again so the association&#39;s a real a real issue but when people are tiptoeing now into treatment and actually are willing to work on their issues a little bit maybe then giving them a couple of layers of safety and inducing a little bit of Association allows them to gain confidence in working with those issues so he typically start small with veterans and then there like we had one veteran who we Vietnam veteran called Bob Culver and there was a documentary about Bob and a group of other veterans we treated and Bob said I&#39;ll work on these issues from Vietnam these memories from Vietnam but not this other group of memories that are behind the wall those are too terrible to even think about now that is adaptive dissociation Bob can&#39;t even face them three days later Bob Culver was tapping away at his memories he&#39;d gone behind the wall and retrieved them but we lit we didn&#39;t make that that we didn&#39;t suggest that the first day the first day we led him to all that Association he wanted while he worked on small issues and gained confidence that he could recover then he went eventually behind the wall by the end of that time he was describing a mortar attack on the field hospital he was added in Vietnam and the therapist worked with him said things like now think about the water attack and Bob&#39;s thinking about the motor attack while tapping the therapist then asks and you remember the bodies of the people were killed and Bob says yes the therapist then says how many bodies count them and Bob&#39;s tapping and Counting and telling us that 18 people were killed in the motor attack so he&#39;s doing that that&#39;s on day three initially we used Association therapeutically and Bob worked on the easy things first and then moved to the hard stuff like motor attack and the body count after which he remained totally calm he remembered the event but he no longer went into the stress response now in the in the audio series Dawson you get personal at a certain point and you share a huge trauma that happened in your life approximately five years ago and how everything uh you had done prepared you to be able to go through it and I wonder if you can tell our listeners about that yeah Tabby you know I&#39;ve been a meditator for many years I joined an ashram when I was 15 years old that learned the perennial philosophy and we studied Elvis Huxley and Paul bronton and Adam Watson all these people but that you know that&#39;s that&#39;s wonderful to do that and immerse yourself in that material and yet I still faced a bunch of life&#39;s challenges in in my life over the last many many years and I already committed now to letting people know what those those techniques are are are are are without going through 50 years of stumbling through figuring it all out that um I had to apply it myself during that that time and on the night of October 9th 2017 my wife woke me up in the middle of the night took me awake and said something&#39;s really wrong and I looked at the alarm clock next by that and it was flashing 12 45 a.m I looked out the window there was an orange glow on the horizon and I went outside quickly and there was a wildfire racing down the opposite Hill toward our Hill and I just yelled at her we&#39;re getting out of here right now and I I ran through the house grabbed car keys grabbed phone threw on some clothes and sprinted to the car and drove out just as the Flames it began to engulf all the trees around us and it was um you know you go to an open space at that time I almost felt as I was watching myself from above and I it&#39;s funny I It Was Fear and he had this absolute feeling of of love and security and being protected at the same time but it was devastating for for our community we we lost five five thousand four hundred homes were destroyed 22 people were killed died when their cars when the power went out people got stuck in there in there and their garages they couldn&#39;t open the garage door trees fell across the the the the some of the neighbor&#39;s driveways eight of our neighbors died and so it was just a horrendous event and it took us a long time to rebuild and recover we had a whole bunch of health problems after that we had a huge financial crash because our office and our business was destroyed as well so um we&#39;ve we faced a very challenging few years and yet we found tapping meditation energy therapies were were powerful and so in the year after that I&#39;d sit in meditation after the the fire living in a rented house and gradually piecing our lives back together trying to rebuild our business and I was entering these extraordinary States as I would meditate and I I would feel the love of the universe Tammy just pouring down through me I&#39;d feel so much love and so much compassion and so much joy that I I was just filled with gratitude and so I wrote the book Blitz brain during that period because I wanted to know what is this you know how come I have so much serotonin and dope mean these two pleasure chemicals anatomy and oxytocin so that book is all about those seven pleasure chemicals you get during deep meditation about the brain waves that are that go along with them about the regions of the brain that are active in people in this brain and um where we went from that point and the book ends with with post-traumatic growth and the fact is that PTSD is not inevitable that you go through trauma and research shows that two-thirds of people who go through a trauma like that actually emerge either with equilibrium or stronger that&#39;s post-traumatic growth and we tend to be really obsessed with PTSD and of course PTSD a quarter or a third of people do actually develop PTSD but two-thirds of people develop post-traumatic growth or stabilize software words are resilient and you want to learn those skills meditation EFT because we use them a lot in the year after the fire and they made I mean I can&#39;t imagine how you could even go through a a experience like that or even even the average disruptions of the average life without these kinds of tools to support yourself did you find yourself surprised Dawson that here you were experiencing these positive neurochemicals and writing a book like Bliss brain not that long after such an incredible devastation I found it astonishing Tammy I mean not not just it would you look at the uh the studies of the Tibetan Monks that use meditation there are long-term meditators and you look at markers like I like objective markers like how much gamma brainwave do they have in their brains and how high is their their level of uh Bliss molecule like an animide anatomide is a very recently discovered neurotransmitter and um its name Ananda is a Sanskrit word for Bliss and how do you have those that anandamide in your system and how do you have those that those high levels of gamma brain waves we find in research that those mugs have up to 25 times the amount of gamma in their brains not 25 percent 25 x the amount of gamma that&#39;s why it&#39;s list frame and you find yourself going to these extraordinary states of just being one with the old it is and so I found myself there just day in and day out both before the fire I&#39;ve been practicing those techniques for for a few years and then after as well and I I just got passionate about sharing this with people because people again like my daughter&#39;s pimple on her chin you know they they have some little issue to deal with and they and they they just feel their lives being wrecked like you know we just had this hugely um annoying and um triggering event where the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and I I mean people I know and everyone I know is pretty much I mean the degree of of of of anger and and frustration and disappointment about that in in much of of of American society whether you&#39;re on the right or on the left is enormous and so I heard one friend of mine saying I heard the news and I was devastated I was wrecked well be disappointed and feel the emotion and then do something to rescue yourself don&#39;t be in that state of being wrecked all the time because it&#39;s going to drive your cortisol high and hurt your body we need these tools Tammy and that&#39;s why I&#39;m so passionate about advocating meditation grounding you know so many wonderful things we can do anything body based that brings that experience of the infinite into our bodies is going to produce a a rapid shift in the world around us can you explain to me Dawson how in being a meditator and connecting to this Infinite Space that changes the actual neurochemicals that are being elicited in our brain and in our body how does how does that create that change when you meditate effectively now in blue sprain I shot a really clear light in terms of research into what is effective meditation and the unfortunate truth Tammy is that much what people think of as meditation like when I was in the ashram at 15 the meditation of monster said oh just close your eyes and steal your mind it&#39;s like I can do number one I close my eyes still in my mind I&#39;ve been doing this for 50 years I still can&#39;t store my mind I couldn&#39;t store my mind if I was at gunpoint in order to steal my mind I I mine&#39;s just aren&#39;t meant to be still uh our brains evolved to look around them all the time at the environment and it&#39;s just us Crystal mind is is almost impossible so um you what you can do is do physiological cues so in this brain I I give people cues like tapping will calm you down like relaxing your tongue in the Floor of your mouth will stimulate the vagus nerve send a calming signal throughout your body and so I I give people seven evidence-based techniques like that that really work to bring you into those States a lot of what people are doing thinking it&#39;s meditation like um we had one of our team members while I was writing this brain he lived with his girlfriend and she was a meditator long time meditator meditated an hour every day and so um he would in the morning wake up get ready for work this is before the pandemic going to the office and he would be very careful not to disturb her but one day he made a little too much noise and she opened her eyes in the middle of her meditation and glared at him and said don&#39;t mess with my serenity was she meditating probably not and that&#39;s what&#39;s going on with most people they think they&#39;re meditating when they close their eyes but you&#39;ve got to do things that are effective so with this brain I try to look at the science of what&#39;s really effective and there are a few things that are hyper effective but the saffron robes confirm no special uh gift to you the 108 prayer beads are doing nothing whatsoever for your well-being you got to focus on science that&#39;s why I love science science is showing us what really works and what really doesn&#39;t so when we meditate we we if people have meditating effectively we watch their whole central nervous system is going into parasympathetic mode their sympathetic phytoplate response is dramatically down leveling and the nerves that spread out from the spinal column into all your organs your bladder your tear ducts your lungs your your heart everything is being affected by that movement so meditation is is getting into the state of physical calm sending the sending a signal through the vagus nerve to carve everything in your body then it triggers those brain waves again those both slow waves of theta Delta and also that fast wave of gamma which is the brainwave of integration integration creativity and it also lights up the part of the brain it has to do with compassion compassion meditation is one of the three things you can do in meditation that&#39;ll dramatically shift great activity and we watch in MRI studies how when these meditators move into compassion the whole lobe of the brain that handles positive emotion gratitude happiness all joy all of those things those are the emotional phenomena that happen but what happens is that that love of the brain is called the insular becomes highly active in meditators so it&#39;s triggering those those feel-good neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine and those are the same neurotransmitters that are a part of the reward system that is stimulated by by heroin and cocaine so we&#39;re getting these wonderful feelings of pleasure from the reward reward neurochemicals we&#39;re getting oxytocin lots and lots of oxytocin so when you hear of Saint Teresa Villa talking about the Beloved or here Rumi or Hafiz talking about meditation and Oneness with you all it is in erotic or or relationship terms it&#39;s because they are having orgasmic experiences driven by oxytocin serotonin dopamine and anandamide so I have a profile in my up the sprain of of the neurochemicals of meditation and their chemicals of orgasm and they&#39;re pretty much an exact match so all these people are having these organically wonderful experiences they&#39;re also highly evicting which is why when people hit the mark and able are able to meditate once or twice effectively they tend to do it again so we can measure the effects of meditation in all these main dimensions of the human brain and body in the audio series you&#39;ve created with sounds true healing the roots of trauma EFT for recovery and resilience you offer several different meditative practices you introduce something you called Eco meditation you teach not just the EFT technique and various applications but also some integrative meditative experiences and I wonder here at the end of this conversation can you leave us not just with that terrific laugh of yours that always comes shining through but can we have a type of of Integrative meditation together here as we end something some way to help us settle with everything we&#39;ve heard another type of the full meditation that it&#39;s composed of several seven actually evidence-based techniques that dramatically calm the body and let&#39;s just do one little of technique right now which affects the vagus nerve so think of something that annoys you something different from the previous thing so something recent that annoys you maybe a person maybe a name of a person maybe an image maybe a thought or a belief but that makes you feel a little bit annoying maybe a little bit angry resentful uh blaming shaming any negative emotion and now relax your tongue on the floor of your mouth so that your tongue just fall on the floor of your mouth normally our tongue&#39;s at tense and often against the roof of our mouths this is the opposite place to let them fall to the floor of our mouths and now keep your tongue totally relaxed try and get upset about that thing just try but keep your tongue relaxed try to get the other side and you can&#39;t and you can&#39;t because what&#39;s happening is that when you relax your tongue on the floor of your mouth it sends a signal through your vagus nerve all over your body that you&#39;re safe and you can&#39;t then easily get upset so try it in traffic try it when you&#39;re stuck in a long line or have a long wait or have a disturbing meeting just relax your tongue and Eco meditation builds together seven of those techniques and you put them together in one package you go into this deep deeply relaxed State and you don&#39;t spill your mind you&#39;re able to function in that usual human way your mind can be as active or as still as you want it to be but you&#39;re doing these seven things that really set that signal of safety to your body wonderful Dawson what a great tip to lead to live people with wonderful I&#39;ve been speaking with Dawson Church he&#39;s the author of bliss brain he&#39;s the founder and CEO of the EFT universe and what sounds true he&#39;s recorded a new audio learning series it&#39;s called healing the roots of trauma EFT for recovery and resilience sounds true waking up the world thanks for being with us thanks for listening to insights at the edge you can read a full transcript of today&#39;s interview at resources.soundscrew.com backslash podcast that&#39;s resources dot soundscrew.com slash podcast if you&#39;re interested hit the Subscribe button in your podcast app and if you feel inspired head to iTunes and leave insights at the edge a review I absolutely love getting your feedback and being connected sounds true waking up the world foreign

Transcript for:Insights at the Edge: Dawson Church on Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT)

Transcript for:
Insights at the Edge: Dawson Church on Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT)