hello and welcome my name is dawson church i'm a best-selling science writer and i just love the contribution that energy therapies science meditation and all the breakthrough tools we have today are contributing to a new era of personal flourishing and flourishing for people who might otherwise have spent a long time suffering and one of my collaborators in this wonderful effort is john depoy he is the co-founder and ceo of i awake technologies and i awake and john produce my favorite meditation tracks there are lots of images on the web of me with my headphones on meditating and it's usually to one of john's tracks he also came to this through psychology specifically transpersonal psychology and the integral movement he's also been working personally and professionally with brainwave and treatment technology for a long long time since 2004 and he has a passion for bringing the power of brainwave and training technology to the personal growth movement especially to heal ptsd addiction depression and some of the things that really sap and and and suppress human potential he also is focused on the other side of the equation which is flow not just digging deep into those things that obstruct our psyches but then how do we move into peak states and many of the ioa tracks actually bring you to those peak states so i am delighted today to be in dialogue with john and we're going to have a wonderful time together john thanks for being here well thank you uh dawson it's it's a privilege and an honor and thank you everyone for being here yes it's a joy to have you and so just before we dive into this whole wonderful world of both trauma healing and also peak states just give us a quick sense of your history in this field oh boy that's that's a that's a long question but i i'll give you the short version well um i was uh i went to the wilderness to find god for myself and um had to leave the cities i had been in the bay area before that and i discovered southern utah the wilderness and so we went out there with my wife and we yandered in uh southern utah wilderness for about six months and uh then we found there were programs that were taking young people out into the wilderness on healing journeys and um we you know we're running kind of low on our you know the beans and the rice was getting low at that point we were living in the wilderness and we had a background in psychology we'd been trained to be therapists and and uh counselors so we went and to the little programs were there we were hired on the spot so we spent the next gosh at least a decade uh being uh well myself being a wilderness guy and i noticed that it was pretty apparent that most of the young people that showed up were there because of drugs and alcohol and uh some of them were just having uh periods of abuse like some of us do when we're young we you know we drink for a while or we try drugs and we experiment and then we go okay this is not working for him anymore i'm tired of feeling like crap in the mornings and this is interfering with my life when we move on we moderate or we quit or whatever it is however if you are an addict by definition that there's something that you can't do by yourself and so i just saw this and i said well what am i going to do and i'd worked in a treatment program in the bay area thunder road i think it's still going a very respected treatment program for for young people and i was as much respect as i had for aaa i just knew that there was a lot of things that were missing and a lot had been discovered since 1939 i believe that's when the big book of aa was written god bless us guys god's plus bill and bob um so i started trying to put that together and then i was given the opportunity to design a program and i decided to do it for young adults so i wouldn't compete with all my friends that were taking adolescents out and let the focus be on addiction and i began to um i was convinced that we weren't doing enough and we just weren't covering all the bases so i started trying to sense into that and read more and also we couldn't find any really good recovery experts that could be wilderness experts at the same time so lo and behold i found that i had to fashion myself into the recovery expert yikes you know so um and around that time i discovered ken wilbur's integral map and uh when i when i first it was a paper online a pdf uh what is integral or something like that and and i read it and it was like the rosetta stone for addiction i just thought oh my god all these things just this that this that you know it all filled together and and i was convinced that other people had to this is low-hanging fruit and like a great genius to see how applicable this was and uh i called up the they were in boulder at time the integral institute and i called them and they were like um is there anybody doing this they just kind of hung up and i was so i was so uh just happy and amazed by my discovery it didn't even bother me i didn't get my feelings hurt i was going those guys really are busy you know and god bless them for that and and uh eventually it it uh i couldn't find anybody else uh that was doing it and later i found a paper that had been written about a year before i started this thing and the people three people that wrote it disappeared uh the aliens took him up or something i could not place him down so there were other people that kind of started looking at it but i was someone who really grabbed on to it and uh through that process of including the body the mind the interior life the relational life and all the other things that the integral map opens up i started fashioning a new way to uh to work with addicts and my own my own disease my own distress was uh addict not addiction but depression so i'd uh my brother committed suicide in my living room and they had a lot of traumatic things that happened to me and i was getting my butt kicked and all the tools that i'd learned in graduate school uh learning to be a therapist seemed like like having a teaspoon and trying to empty the ocean the trauma that i that i was dealing with was so vast it was crushing me and it was uh it was killing me it was taking my life so i had to uh oh it's a long story it was a long journey but little by little i started uh putting these pieces back together again and then i started well one way for me to deal with this is live life of service to others okay that seemed to help with my despair and my darkness so when i was working with my students at dealing with addiction i was very clear i deal with depression though i'm not an addict and uh i told them my story and they're going yeah you're one of us for sure you get it you know you get the depths of that kind of despair so it was a process of working on myself and finding practices that would that would transform me into the kind of man that i wanted to be in order to do what i wanted to do and that was to be of service in the world to give back and to make my life mean something so basically i was working myself the same time i was working with students and developing this model for addiction so that's the semi not too long story yeah that's that's a powerful analogy that they were saying you're one of us because when we look at the neurochemistry of addiction people are addicted actually not to alcohol cocaine heroin whatever it is they're actually addicted to the neuro chemicals that come along with that especially dopamine don't mean as a main reward neurochemical and they don't realize we can generate don't mean with meditation so meditation actually raises dopamine by up to 65 if you do it right and so they're getting those dopamine hits through other kinds of substances but also things like depression are often neurochemical and for example people can get addicted vessel van the kulk who wrote the body keeps the score says that uh you're actually addicted to this class of stress drugs called catecholamines and your catecholamines your cortisol your adrenal your adrenaline all of these these drugs these brain drugs actually are really addictive and so um whether you're using substances or whether it's mood you can be driving these these drugs really high in your your brain and the beautiful thing about what you do now and what we're focused on is that we now realize as we have sophisticated machinery like high resolution mris high resolution eegs we are able to measure cortisol adrenaline all of these other other neurotransmitters and hormones that we're seeing now that the kinds of stimulation that people get when they use energy therapies or meditation or the kinds of neurofeedback that you can generate through your meditation tracks uh they actually change the neurochemistry of the brain and they change it really fast and then people get addicted they get addicted to the high of feeling that good so you're still an addict you're just now addicted to something that isn't killing you that's true and hopefully you can get that through meditation and then we can kind of get that under control and realize that one of the things that drives addiction and depression is trying to run from the pain instead of just being present with it and uh i found that in my own work interior work that if i would just be with the darkness would be with the trauma and the pain eventually my body would express it and it would clear and after that there would be a place of peace and stillness and often uh not always but often insight into what the issues were and how i should proceed from from here yeah and you know that that question has been researched as to whether you need to go and be with that pain or whether you can skip it and transcend it and the answer is really clear that you can't skip and transcend it that's dissociation and if you dissociate and don't come to grips with with what is uh then you you just stay stuck there or use the precedent it becomes the shadow side so sitting sitting with it and and being with it and actually feeling it research shows is necessary there's no shortcut unfortunately to that step yeah and and of course in in my practice i i've discovered this i thought i was really brilliant and maybe i was in some sense but there were a lot of people that had gone there before me like peter levine and the work the somatic work that i discovered and later well at least i'm not schizophrenic there's there's evidence that uh this is actually real uh it was a big help and i end to this day when i'm meditating and the darkness starts to come on because i am a depressive it's something i have to be aware of i just say thank you teacher and i open my heart and i just stay with it and uh it comes it shifts it does its thing and then it begins to lift yes yeah how long does that process take for you that's a really great question uh i would say about 10 to 15 minutes unless it's something really big and then sometimes i have to do extended uh periods of meditation like a two hour or a three hour you know on on my saturday or something and make it make it a you know ongoing process and sometimes i found that um i seem to release maybe 25 of it and the message that's good enough for right now and then you come back so it takes work but you it it releases gradually or sometimes it goes because it's like it's like uh the the dawn first there's a false dawn you think you see light coming over the horizon and uh well maybe i just really wanted to be gay and i'm imagining this and after a while you start no it's actually getting lighter and the world begins to be illuminated and that's kind of how it is it just gradually lifts and finally you're just you're just there you're you're you're open and you're free again and uh you're grateful and humble and and connected to the world into your deepest self wow and you know i i always mentally in my mind have uh a picture of a fork when i come face to face with a story like yours john and the fork is the john and his life that's found these tools and resources and that john eminence life looks like who hasn't found them and i know for example from epigenetics that those two johns are going to diverge physically and that the the states of consciousness that they reach in are going to produce different epigenetic tags on their genes and they'll have different health outcomes they'll have different uh different longevity they'll have all kinds of different differential gene expression and it happens fairly gradually at first so you know whether you meditate one day and have a good meditation and move to that space one day um or whether you do it for two or three days two three days we'll move the needle a little bit tiny little bit two three weeks move the needle quite a bit to three months move the needle a lot two or three years we'll move the needle immeasurably and there'll be a big divergence gradually between those two john so i'm glad that now we have the john of service the john of i awake the john uh offering insights to other people and also that's going to be a much healthier and happier version of john as well yes on alive john i don't think i would have survived uh yeah i i'd gone the way of my brother and the only thing that kept me from killing myself at some point was just i didn't want to do that to my parents one suicide is enough right it's way more than enough and so that kept me on it was like god kill me take me home but i can't do it myself and so i think i think spirit honored that and it began to be revealed in it and also it's not just the interior meditation work but it's also exercise yes and diet and the search for wisdom in other words there's so much available on the internet and books and all of this stuff like no other generations ever had access to so we have to make choices strategic choices about what we're going to fill our hearts and minds with and i find when i focus on wisdom and learning and and knowledge that will help me be a better person and that we help me uh be of more service that i'm also happier and so i you have to pick and choose even the music that you listen to or the books that you read or or the company that you keep and of course in in life in general if you are trying to achieve i want to be a wise man who is a service to my people then i have to find relationships and friendships and communities with people that will support me in that quest and not drag me down in an addiction if you think you're going to stay sober and hang out with people who are not sober it's just not going to last at all so whether it's it's a cessation of these addictive behaviors or substance or it's the aspirations to become something beyond what you currently are and to be the the best version of yourself that you could possibly be as your gift back to life your gift back to god then it takes similar strategies yeah and focus on all those those areas exercise nutrition social support social awareness media and you can make choices about all of these things and make choices not to indulge in the ones that don't support you and the this thing about people is interesting uh ron das i heard ron doss say like 40 years ago he said you don't need to collect people uh you can let them go and i was like wow i i was so focused on having friendships and just just clinging to them and i began to realize at a certain point post ron das that i needed to let people go sometimes and it became a part of part of the journey afterwards it becomes part of the energetic journey too because as your energy changes as you're lifting that that burden as you're changing behavior then naturally you're drawn to different people and you resonate with different people this whole idea of resonance is so interesting that there's the resonant fields are one of the really pervasive characteristics of nature and the earth has its resonance 7.8 earths that's also the resonance of healing it's also the resonance that a lot of your meditations take people into that that theta band of healing healing um frequency and so resonance is is is a part of this and after a while you find yourself resonating with different people and then there might be people too in your life at a certain point we have to say you know i i need to not be around that person because that person does not support the kind of person i want to be and it's interesting how we we can cling sometimes to relationships that aren't serving us for a long time just because we've had them for a long time and so that letting go all those people who are who are helping you stay stuck yeah and that's the same thing about organizations if you're in an organization religious or otherwise that doesn't allow any honorable way for you to leave you're starting to get a little culty there and you start to get controlling and there's something not healthy going on so we have to be uh there has to be ways for us to depart and and i think uh uh we are not alone in this quest i i do believe in god in a higher power and a greater purpose and uh that comes through us at our best moments and when we're being healers boy that's that feels like absolute grace for me when it's coming through or either that's receiving it or or is it coming through me it's big so um [Music] the right people show up in the old cliche the teacher shows up uh when the student is ready well that's also true and the right people show up and if you i don't know if we're just putting out something some kind of energy into the universe it begins to attract like-minded people but if we're on the path uh we'll find the people that that can support us and they are they are essential it's very important yeah yeah in fact i've been getting needy but research now on people who break through to what's called enlightenment or the piece of process understanding or fundamental well-being in some in some ways of classifying it they actually become finders they're no longer seekers actually in that state uh semi-permanently predominantly that's the predominant state in that state and interestingly enough it's often catalyzed by contact with somebody who's there so they'll go and see a famous uh healer or they'll go see somebody who's really at an elevated level and just being around that person for a while again the residence factor is able to pick up what's resonant with them and then amplify that and then they they either then or subsequently are able to move to that that kind of other place so it really does shift us research just shows that that people who make that that transition from being secrets to finders actually usually immediately before that or soon before that have had a an experience with a great healer a great uh great leader a great transformational teacher something happened and that they were in in the feel of that person and that is associated with their they're subsequently breaking through so um yeah people were around are are super important and then other things you mentioned you know diet exercise and then i love what you do now with eye awake too because simply you you can get to those brain waves alone but it's way easier to have a guided track bring you yeah and uh your tracks are just uh remarkable just share with us how you came to learn about brainwave entrainment technology and and progress with io and go to where you you are today yeah well a great question um back in in the days when i was working just starting to work with addicts and design programs uh we knew that that step 11 and aaa so it says sought through prayer and meditation to increase our conscious contact with god seeking only his will and the power to carry it out and so that was built in to the uh to the dna of the modern recovery movement but there weren't a lot of people that were meditating and praying it might be you know lord help me to stay uh sober today and at the end of the day thank you for keeping me so which is nothing wrong with that at all but it's not deep contemplative transformative practice so i started i knew meditation was essential so i began to to meditate and try to get my students to meditate and we weren't doing a very good job of it you know i had this kind of on-again off-again gone in relationship with meditation over the years because it really takes a long time to start feeling the benefits and you know if you're if you're an addict or you're in deep depression you need relief more quickly than that ken wilbur said that he meditated for five years two hours a day before he felt any changes happening wow now that is super human effort which i was not capable of so that was my puzzle how do i get uh this meditation thing to kick in for myself and for my students and that's when i discovered uh binaural beats which is the kind of the basic technology of brainwave entrainment and um i uh ordered some and started listening to it and i had um i mean early on i had a classified um spiritual experience a boom nondual and uh i'm a little part of this everything and i'm like a little hologram of it but i am still there and also in that initial insight it says but your ego and your little self is very important it's part of god too so don't neglect that and i went okay so it wasn't like you know i'm nothing the self is just uh you know not real and all this it's like you got to pay attention to that stuff too meanwhile you are everything and so i was just holy cow i've been doing this uh for two weeks maybe and i'm enlightened well let's say i had an opening okay it gave me it gave me a preview and it blasted me into the section that i realized how powerful this technology was so i started using it and i went about after that big initial opening i had about eight months of powerful releasing of trauma and i would be you know just sitting there and sometimes my body would just be vibrating like that my wife would watch me oh my god he's going through something and somehow through that opening i i received the uh the intuition that by being present with this stuff was my way out and uh sure enough it got me through it and it was all of these things that piled up on me you know at one time i just crushed me and a native american elder said oh your initiation but yeah my initiation so a lot of us have uh addiction could be a powerful initiatory process so it ain't all bad you know you go to hell but if you come out of hell you come back with gifts for the rest of us and that's what my breaking process was and that was really when i truly deepened my understanding of my path and my gifts in life and that i did have something to live for and if i would just cultivate it and get out of the way that i could do good in the world and i heard the other day i think it comes from taoism and i'm paraphrasing this but if you learn through great effort to achieve effortlessness you've got it you know you understand yeah i can do that and also a musician uh dawson so i really get it you know and and just i played guitar since i was very young but i just started playing electric lead about 12 15 years ago and eventually got to the point when when the switch is on and when god is coming through i'm just i'm being played i am the instrument you know and uh that's the magic of music and they're saying now that music even predates language in human history so uh that's another way talking of energy what is the magic of music well it makes us feel alive it changes our state it's transcendent it's the blues i love that's my main focus now is playing the blues and i find that as a great healing uh uh journey of expressing sadness uh somebody said the blues is sad music that makes you feel good kind of thing and yeah it's it's just it's just extraordinary yeah and those what these things all have in common is they put you in a state of flow meditation puts you in flow that music is putting you in flow peak states put you in flow time and nature puts you in flow there are always ways of being in flow and actually what you described there with that that initial non-dual experience in in sufficient that's called the the glimpse this is called that the glimpse of heaven or the glimpse of the other side of the glimpse of you all it is and that then is powerfully transformative andrew newberg the great neuroscientist says that in his book called how enlightenment changes your brain says that if you have that experience one time it so disrupts the way the brain works that it never settles back down into the same pattern ever again so one time one non-dual experience like that he says is able to permanently ship brain activity hopefully you'll then move through it and then the next thing you did interestingly enough was that that trauma release piece and that is so incredibly important and like i teach eft primarily because i know that if people like if you close your eyes and try meditate and you're traumatized all you do is drop back into memories of the past fear of the future all these ways other than be in the present moment so that trauma release piece is absolutely essential to forward movement so you have to do the trauma release and then when you get far enough along with that you can start to go to that elevated place in in consciousness over and over and over again so that glimpse is good to let you know that it exists but then you have to go through the underworld absolutely yeah and then release that and then you can start to cultivate those states on a more consistent basis so we teach meditation to bring you to the mountaintop and then eft to excavate all that stuff that stops you from getting to the mountaintop or if you get to the mountaintop without having done work on all that trauma then we've seen plenty of spiritual teachers where their unhealed trauma becomes the dark side and they become advisers molesters swindlers all kinds of um people are at the mountaintop but unless they heal that trauma it becomes the shadow it becomes and the rest of they themselves hurt their own souls and they hurt the people that are looking to them for guidance and as a story often told yeah so you got to do your own work and just because you have those moments of clarity that you realize the united nature of things and that somehow it's very very very good it's not just everything's jello and you're part of it no this this this unity is is is brilliant and beautiful and beyond description and somehow it's like it it justifies and redeems all of history and all suffering and all things it's like wow at the heart of this there's something really amazing going on and from that place and what you were saying about flow i think in in meditation in contemplation in the wilderness in the stillness once we go through all the stuff we get there that is one of our ways of experiencing the divine the ultimate but the other way is in motion is in creativity is in flow so we get to have our cake and eat it too in other words and one informs the other it's from the stillness of my heart that i am able to go out and reach out in the world whether it's teaching or writing or playing music or uh playing tennis or doing anything else i love you know when it starts coming through it's like hey the world makes sense and it's not an intellectual thing it's just you know it and you're just watching it come through and the aftertaste is really good and one feels humbled and grateful and like one belongs in the universe and it's okay that you're here and the universe is glad you're here and it's using you and that's amazing wow the universe does use you and yeah it does extend all your daily activities after a while so initially it's a it's a peak you hit in meditation and it's something that happens in meditation later on it starts to extend outward a professor called teresa modulate harvard has done studies showing you enter that state for a while like an hour and the effects in terms of brain function extend 48 hours later you get 47 hours of flow and better creativity better problem solving ability as a result of your one hour meditation so it does extend everywhere else and then it becomes part of what you do in service and so you then are just delighted to share it and make a part of what you bring to everyone else i'd love to to actually two questions first of all how would you describe that state when you have popped into that sense of oneness with you all it is so you meditated for your 15 minutes or two maybe two hours on the weekend and um now you are in that that that state some some traditions call it the the great silence the boy the all that is the dao heaven there are all these these ways of characterizing those elevated states of consciousness you get to in meditation what is it like for you first of all it feels it doesn't feel like the void in in the western existential meaning of the word you know just vast nothingness it's vast everythingness and it's very loving and at the heart of it is love and any claims of enlightenment or spiritual growth or progress that doesn't include compassion and love seems to miss the point and uh jesus once said if that light be darkness how great is that darkness you know so uh and it fills me with peace and the deep profound okayness of my existence and the universe and it's all okay and no matter what happens it's gonna be okay because there is only god and thou art that okay yeah wow yeah all of those things and you you you sense them you feel them there is infinite love there and i know one of the um one of the reasons i'm so motivated to help people meditate and learn to meditate is because when people are feel lonely or disconnected which they can easily do just you know like right now recently we had a neighbor who died he died and his wife's alive still and she doesn't have a lot of friends there's a lot of a lot of people but if she's meditating and she's aware of the all it is and wherever the love there then she has everything you know she has all this all this connection and so um it is transformative to to be aware of that love and know that everything is love and that everything is fundamentally okay it's a whole different framing for your life than the usual framing of fight or flight of survival of struggle and it puts us into a whole different space it also engages totally different brain regions and in my book this brain i talk about the enlightenment network which we can measure in the brain it's composed of four different circuits and that it takes us out of the survival brain so a whole different set of brain regions are active and so now you're anchoring that love that sense of wellness you're anchoring it neurologically it's not just something that's going on in your mind or in your consciousness as an abstraction it's literally the activation of neural pathways in your brain and their reinforcement because as those neurons fire together they wire together and those parts of the brain become more capable and and more functional and so uh with you know ken wilbur uh five years two hours a day yeah that that's not something most people are gonna stick with so if we can use something like meditation the quick meditation guided meditation or those binaural beats to bring people to that point quickly and then anchor that in their experience regularly then we start to activate those neural pathways and it doesn't have to take so long no and it's it's uh diane hamilton a friend of mine a zen she's a roshi now by the way she's a zen teacher just found that out and she said that a practice is the cultivation through repetition so if you want to cultivate those experiences and then ground them and deepen them and make them part of your everyday process as we go through this life and we go through our journeys and our bodies and our families and the world you have to work on it you have to practice now i know that you've had challenges lately i know you got covered during the pandemic i know you've had some health challenges and how does having that anchoring in the infinite affect the way you deal with local just daily regular issues of being a human being having a body and living in the world that's that's a great uh i did have kovid and got really ill and pam thought my wife thought i was gonna die and i did came back and in march it would be four years i had a massive heart attack ironically i was i was leaving the gym in grand junction colorado a place i i'd work out when i traveled through there and right there just tremendous pain and i didn't know a lot about heart attacks i'd never had one but i knew it was a heart attack it wasn't one of these uh these subtle things you know maybe i had indigestion that was it was a heart attack and the first thing i thought about was my dog back in the motel room so i didn't want to die and have my dog abandoned so i drove back to the hotel room 3.8 miles and had some old guy going really slow in front of me and i'm just like got to the whole tune and the key didn't quite work or wasn't it wasn't a key it was a card and i finally got in to my dog said okay my dog's gonna be okay and i called 9-1-1 and uh bam they came in there was a there was a cardiac center right near there saved my life almost anyplace else on that journey it would happen i wouldn't be here so they were able to put a splint in and uh but i i don't remember i was scared for my dog being abandoned but it was like if this is my time it's okay you know that wasn't scary and when they put display i was in the emergency room and all of a sudden okay i'm gonna i'm gonna make it and i just said to the doctor and i group thank you guys to save my life i really really appreciate that so um i think those experience eliminated the fear you know because sometimes something like that happens and you're so traumatized by you know the fear you know any moment you could just die right i mean it's true for everyone but when you have that as an actual experience you're no longer in denial about it can be very traumatic so uh i think that that really helped and then for about five hours after i was in icu uh i just felt great clarity and great intellectual clarity and emotional and spiritual i felt i said maybe i'm gonna die now because i hear sometimes before people die they have these openings and i didn't but then after that it felt like a mule that kicked me in the chest and oh you know i had to go through the uh the whole recovery process but two weeks after the heart attack i was back on the tennis court you know maybe i could only play for 10 minutes but getting back and and you know i work out every day and do yoga and meditate and play tennis whenever i can i have a teacher now teachers really helped by the way i played 30 years oh my god just making it up or seeing what i could see roger federer or one of the greats on television doing it oh i suck it was terrible so when i got here to louisiana where i am we came to care for uh support my wife's aging mother i was able to have a teacher and i just totally reconstructed my game and for about a year i couldn't do anything i was just like oh gosh and then it started getting better now playing at at a much higher level so yeah it it the fact that that it already had a physical exercise path in place got me right back into into the game and i've had i think three or four stress tests since then and they say it looks fine you know they put you up to a you know just and and so i think it made my heart stronger i think my heart was strong enough to survive that i don't know how i did it that collapsed artery completely collapsed driving across town and trying to rescue my dog and uh it kept pumping until people could be there to open it up again and like i said yeah it did um the fear and uh and still you know it's not just all happy happy you know you still suffer you're still human right i still still read the news and yeah about what our brothers and sisters are going through and not just the human brothers sisters but all our brothers and sisters all the life forms and that can be very painful but it gives you a way of of using that as energy for depth and growth and compassion compassion compassion and uh and you can still you know get to be your you know your ego self and everything but you're not quite as lost anymore you know you can snap out of him i'm sorry i forgot and uh so yeah i think it made i don't think i would have survived without it it made all the difference and you lose your fear of death you just know that fundamental wellness that mental wholeness fundamental uh wellness of the universe regardless whether your physical body lives or dies it's very powerful to live not fearing death i know yesterday morning i kissed my wife before she went off to go and do an art project she teaches art and she does art and so i just kissed her and i thought you know either i can kiss her thinking about what's going to happen in my day up ahead where i can kiss her and be fully present as though imagine if i knew i was going to die today or she was going to die today how would i kiss her so i decided to kiss my wife that way uh that morning yesterday then i decided to kiss my wife that way every single day as though this was our last night you never do know and it's powerful to then be in the moment it's powerful to to not fear death and live a life where you know we all have an ex our bodies alive and expiration date and you don't know what yours is and you just go ahead and live fully being that being incarnate in your mind and heart and body regardless of what's going on around you sometimes it's good sometimes it's bad but um you love being yeah and i think i i think the fear might be that that somehow i haven't done all that i'm supposed to do no i haven't fixed that broken relationship i haven't extended compassion to that person i haven't dealt my own wounding about this or haven't written the book that i'm supposed to write or sing the song i was supposed to sing or something like that so there's there's a check-in and one of my daily prayers is okay god it's me again you know you're probably tired of hearing me but i'll shut up quickly um yeah is there any is there anything i'm supposed to be doing releasing confronting helping anything and if i miss one of the categories show me that too and i'll shut up now and i'm sure he goes thank god and then i said that's one of my that's one of my my my questions i often i i always offer up you know how can i be a better man how can i um how can i respond to the world in a way that makes a difference tips it toward love in this time of great change and evolution that we're going through and that's an open-ended question to the universe because there are ways i know i can do that and then there are the unknown ways so you're open to be used by the universe in any way and you don't even know the ways that uh that might happen i know that when i first i made a commitment to meditating every day in 2000 and i just made the commitment to to not skipping a day just meditating every single day and i've hardly skipped a day since that that that day i made that decision and all kinds of things have shifted from me all kinds of things have changed and so it's powerful to open yourself to the universe and say i'm here i'm available and when we do that then the universe has a way of saying okay there's somebody down there is paying attention who's showing up we can really work with that person and the other the other point you mentioned was your tennis game and training and i one of the fun things about i'm doing a series of events now with people and one of them was with donna eden and um with donna i i was saying back in 1989 1991 i was writing this this magazine called whole lifetimes and i was saying that energy healing and and these these states are a gift that they aren't trainable and then people like don eden came along people like eric pearl came along and all of these energy healers and they made them trainable and so now we can literally take people who know nothing about energy healing i mean through a program in six months or a year or year and a half and they come out the other end and they can do it and so um there are all of these ways now we don't have to go and spend 10 years in a monastery and do 10 000 hours and take powers of poverty chastity and obedience we don't have to go not not be in the world and close to ourselves in the desert or the himalayas we can be right here and then be effective and then learn techniques that are going to move us there really quickly so what i'm so awed by with uh my work training people in eft and meditation by things like i awake by what you do that we now can we have a a body of knowledge and a body of work we just didn't have as you were saying in 1939 or in 1839 and we can now bring people to this point of clearing trauma and i'm reaching those elevated states quickly it does need to take 10 000 hours we've seen people talking about an eeg we've seen people get there in a week a week a week of intense work like this and that training brings them to a whole new state of our brain function and then they can get to that state again pretty much in five minutes after that so i'm so grateful we have all of these these techniques now and um i just know that you and i will be sharing and talking and working together for a long time because we we totally share the same goal here so thank you so much you're so welcome thank you yeah so again to everyone who has shared this time with us thank you so much for being here so appreciate you know that what john and i have been sharing about is the universal experience that that that experience of being one of the universe is available to everyone what we're saying about trauma healing is really important that trauma healing is non-negotiable you need to go through this whatever method you use to release trauma it is necessary but you'll have those glimpses along the way of something transcendent and then as you let go of those old habits those addictions those patterns those behaviors those world views those core beliefs that are holding you back as you tap them away as you meditate as you said to yourself as you experience them and then as john was saying his body would shake with releasing them then you can start to move these elevated states of consciousness and really experience all of the universe so i i think i'll speak to you when i say that we know that everybody here today and listening is able to experience that love of the universe and i think i can speak for you john and saying that's what john and i want most for you [Laughter] yes and thank you dawson uh your your eloquence and learning and wisdom are uh really holy and it is flow uh there's an example right there it's happening living in love every day what a way to be thanks again john you're welcome every blessing bye
2021-10-06