Your mind is a powerful thing that can have control of your body and, ultimately, your life. Dawson Church, the Director of EFT Universe, sits down with Tanya Memme to talk about manifesting what’s in your brain into the world. Having studied the brain, Dawson explains how manifesting affects your perception and what you do, and how the universe plays a role in all of these. He also dives into the details of eco meditation and how doing things the natural way can be highly addictive, in this case, in a good way, as he shares real-life testimonies of people who have gone through the experience.

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Watch the episode here:

Manifesting Your Mind Into The World With Dawson Church

We have Dawson Church, PhD. You are a bestselling author and an award-winning researcher. You are the CEO of Energy Psychology Group, Inc. and you are part of the EFT Universe, which I love. You concentrate a lot of your studies in neuroscience and manifestation through yoga and other forms of philosophies too. Can you give me a little bit of a rundown on what that means?

I’m highly motivated, Tanya, by seeing people not suffer unnecessarily. I’ll give some silly examples like barking your shin on the corner of your sitting room table at night when you’re going to get a drink of water and it hurts. There are things that happened to us. A better example is global events. If we’re caught up in a big global event like an economic crash, a pandemic, or a financial crash or losing our job or our home, or something like that.

There’s real actual suffering out there and there’s also a lot of suffering that people have that isn’t necessary. That motivates me because if I see somebody suffering and I know that if they had this piece of information or use this simple technique, they’d be fine. I am motivated to give that to them. The theme that runs through all my books is, what can you do to stop your self-suffering in all those optional ways in between? We tend to suffer without even thinking about it. That’s my big focus.

I know that you’ve been working on this for many years. You have a website, www.EFTUniverse.com and there you have courses, professional development, and certifications. You have courses that you can take and become certified within a lot of this. I know that you’re putting so much goodness out into the world. You’re a wealth of information and I know you’ve been studying this for many years. What was the first time you ever felt drawn into the idea of manifestation, quantum physics, EFT, and that sort of thing? How young did it start for you?

I’ll tell you a time when I certainly wasn’t drawn into that. At first, I was trying to do affirmations and visualizations. This is ancient history. In the ‘70s, Shakti Gawain’s book, Creative Visualization, came out. It’s a huge, influential book and a huge bestseller. People were learning things like the Law of Attraction, manifestation, affirmations, visualization, vision boards, and all these good things. I was like all the other people into transformational tools back then, which guided me as well. I was affirming, “My perfect partner is with me now. I am financially abundant.” None of it worked.

How old are you here?

I was 18, 19, 20.

You heard this exists and you’re like, “I’m going to do this. I’m going to make a vision board. I’m going to start thinking about all these different things.” You started thinking about it and it wasn’t working.

Most people do that. They have the visions and all these things they want. They put it on the altar. This stuff rarely happens. What you have to realize is that psychologically, we’re multifaceted beings. We have many parts of ourselves. When we say something like, “My perfect partner is with me now.” Consciously, you want that but subconsciously, you might be acting in ways that drive that person away from you and be doing over and over again without ever knowing it. I did things that have to do with money. Money was a big one for me because my family was poor. We grew up poor. My father was a missionary. He will make clothes out of this thing called the missionary barrel at church.

Where did you grow up?

Partly in England, partly in Southern Africa, and partly in the US. The commonality was the church wherever we were traveling, and then we were relating to other people. That was growing up that way and then realizing I had all these scripts from an early age. Now I teach abundance workshops and interesting people take those workshops and often manifest huge amounts of money. I talked about this one time. We did it by Zoom. One of the ladies on the call said, “You won’t believe this. I just manifested something. I’ve given this person a sum of money many years ago and I’ve written it off.” During the workshop, she texted me and said, “It’s time to pay you back.”

Did she come to a place that you don’t even know or impossible? You have to believe in the possibility that it can come from anywhere.

Mind Manifesting: What you manifest, how you see the world, what you want to do, what you want for your life and everyone around you, is what the universe wants for you.

This is the teachings of Abraham. It’s all about how your thoughts create reality. As a researcher, I think, “I know your thoughts create your reality in some ways.” I know from my own personal research, and I had done several randomized control trials of cortisol, if you think negatively, if you’re angry, upset, and stressed, your cortisol goes up. That biochemical reaction is a direct consequence of thought. I know that in some ways, it’s obvious your thought does create your biochemical reality, heartbeat, heart rhythm, lungs, and all those things are being affected by your thoughts.

What about money? What about your relationships? What about stuff outside of you? I wrote the book, Mind to Matter, trying to carefully and painstakingly scientifically amass the evidence to see how much there was for thoughts becoming things. I thought I’d find quite a few links in the chain but I didn’t think I’d find a whole chain. By the time I finished the book, I was blown away because I found every single link in the chain of how your thoughts become things. Not just in terms of your own internal biochemistry, but in terms of things outside of your body and outside of your personal sphere as well.

How does one go about researching that? Do you go on the internet and you search? How do you even know where the trusted facts are? How do you go and research something like that?

I’ve been involved with over 100 clinical trials over the last twenty plus years. I know a lot of people and I know what good research sources are. Also, this may seem odd to mention in the same breath, but I’m guided. Sometimes I’m looking for a research study that’s a needle in a haystack, some obscure study. For example, maybe about when the human brain produces a frequency band between four cycles per second and eight cycles per second and what that does to nerve cells. I want something specific. I’ll get an email in my inbox from a colleague I haven’t heard from for seven years will say, “I found this interesting study today and something motivated me to email that to you.”

I’ll sit down at a conference or on a panel. In fact, this happened several times while writing the book. I’m getting chills because, Tanya, in writing the book, I have one section of Mind to Matter all about the synchronicities that happened while writing the book. All these synchronicities happen like this one crucial piece of information I needed about these things called field line resonances. I was working on a chapter on the big picture on the solar system, universe, and galaxy, and how these things like solar flares affect human behavior.

What do you mean by a solar flare?

The sun puts out these big emissions of gas, these big solar flares. There are small numbers of solar flares, and they affect human history. When there are lots of sunspots, we tend to have more revolutions, wars, big social movements, and big social events. In years when there are fewer sunspots, there are far fewer of these human events. This goes back 500 years that this has been charted. I was looking for research on this. I happen to be at a conference and happened to be on a panel and got seated on the panel next to a guy who happened to be the world’s foremost researcher on solar flares and how geomagnetic factors affect human behavior. All through writing the book even, there are only synchronicities that I thought all these links between thoughts and things, it’s a remarkable story. Your thoughts do affect reality all around you.

Were you writing some of that into the book as you were experiencing it kind of thing? It was then proven even in your own life.

Yeah. Every day.

Going back in time, I was interested to know, you started off going, “I’m going to have my perfect business. I’m going to have lots of money. I’m going to have this,” and it wasn’t working. What’s the key to helping people to manifest properly? Many people, including myself, especially when I first started, I wasn’t manifesting properly. I would have these things written on my mirror and I would have crystals all over my house. They weren’t working as often. I’m interested when you were younger, what was that growth in that transition period that you’re like, “That’s how you do it?”

I have a whole different take on this from most other people. That’s why the book is called Mind to Matter. It’s not called Mind Over Matter. I don’t believe in mind over matter. You can do mind over matter but I don’t recommend it or think it’s satisfying. What I talked about is mind to matter. In the first and last chapters of the book, I talk about the local mind and nonlocal mind. When you meditate, you sit down in a quiet place and close your eyes. If you have good instructions, you’re able to come to this place of focus.

If you have great instructions, you induce a state of flow. In a flow state, you let go of all of your identification with the self, the local you, and you emerge into this wonderful, blissful experience of unity with a nonlocal universe, so that’s a nonlocal mind and letting go of the local mind. What happens to the brain is amazing because of the parietal lobe on the side of the temporal-parietal junction where the temporal and parietal lobes come together. What you see in EEG as an MRI of the people who do this is that their whole parietal lobe, which governs your sense of location in space shuts down and deactivates in a major way.

The part of you that has to do with your orientation in space, me reaching out to say touch the screen, I need a parietal lobe to do that. I’m locating myself in space all the time. That part of your brain goes dark and the part of your brain, the mid prefrontal cortex, also goes dark. The part of the brain that is located in space goes dark, the mid prefrontal cortex, which constructs the sense of self goes dark and you lose yourself. Now you’re no longer in the local mind. You’re now blending and feeling one with the nonlocal mind. You drift off into oneness with a nonlocal universe.

You have surges of oxytocin, the bonding hormone, coming up throughout your body and you’re feeling this incredible, loving sensation, but not for anything local for the universe. Now you’re in universal flow, not merely in personal flow, but in flow with this whole universal cycle. What you manifest and how the way you see the world, what you want to do, and what you want for your life and for everyone around you is what the universe wants for you. That’s the highest good for all. It’s not making things happen. It’s getting into flow. When you’re in flow, synchronicities happen.

That’s when you’re seated in the panel next to the guy who’s the major researcher in the world on that. That’s when somebody emails you the piece of information you need the most. That’s when you’re living life in synchrony and it’s amazing how this unfolds. When I studied the brains of people who are not manifesters versus those who are manifesters, what I find is that they have brain synchrony. Their minds are congruent and their brains have even brainwaves. I have pictures in Mind to Matter what those waves look like. When you measure Jack Canfield or John Gray or Marci Shimoff or Marianne Williamson, they have a lot of congruent brainwaves happening.

That was such incredible information. We are more than just matter. You have studied it and you have proven it to be. We are also more than we think we are, the average person. We use only a small percentage of our brain. What about the rest of our brain? Is that what we’re tapping into is more of the other part of our brain that we haven’t used yet and we can develop that to tap into it to be on the more esoteric level or another dimension?

It’s not supposed to be odd using our brain. We’re all using most of our brains most of the time. It’s that kind of synchrony in which the brain functions. If you look at the EEGs of people who aren’t synchronous, they have different brain functions. All the brainwaves are there but the patterns aren’t on points of synchrony. The example I used in Mind to Matter, I don’t talk about is pure science. I use analogies and I talk about the stories of people. I talked about my wonderful friend, Jack Canfield, who wrote the book, The Success Principles and co-author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series. Jack is one of those people who’s a manifester. He wants something to happen. You can bet on that thing happening.

I love Jack Canfield. I’m trying to get him on Life Masters for a long time.

It’s hard to get him. I invited him up on my show once. I phoned him up and I emailed him. I said, “Jack, I’ll get you on the show.” He said, “I can do that. Let’s see. I have a Tuesday afternoon. Will fourteen months from now work for you?”

He’s a busy guy.

Another friend called Rose and she always has beautiful visions, ideas, and things she wants to manifest and none of it ever happens. What’s the difference between a Jack and a Rose? It’s that coherent mind. The analogy I use in Mind to Matter is a laser and a regular incandescent light bulb, 60-watt bulb or 100-watt bulb, and it will be putting on enough light to illuminate your room. That’s what light bulbs do but that light is incoherent. It’s going off in all directions and is not in phase. If you take that same 100 watts and you put all of those waves together, the same 100 watts as the light bulb but now it’s all in phase. That’s a laser.

Now it’s in sync. When those light rays are in sync, that 100-watt laser will cut through a steel plate. That’s the difference between coherent and incoherent light and that’s the difference between coherent and incoherent brainwaves. People like Jack have highly coherent brainwaves. Our brains are all working all the time. It’s just that in some people, it’s like an engine out of tune. The cylinders are all firing in sync, so the power output of the engine is lower.

There are things you can do. You can train yourself to put yourself into that synchronization. When you are in that space, suddenly you’re not only in this wonderful synchrony internally. You also then are able to synchronize yourself with that nonlocal mind. All of that wisdom starts to flow through you. That’s what manifestation is. It’s getting in synchrony with the nonlocal mind, and then allowing that to flow through you, not trying to make stuff happen down at the local level.

You’re saying that when you were younger and you would think to yourself, “I’m going to have this,” or “I’m going to have that,” what was the disconnect there? You weren’t thinking and feeling it and you weren’t being guided until you studied it a little bit more properly on how to do it? What was that thing where you’re like, “That’s how I know how to do it now?”

It is a subjective feeling and it’s good instructions. I joined a spiritual community when I was fifteen years old. When I was fifteen, I was depressed and anxious. I have PTSD and I was lost. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I joined the spiritual community and got taught to meditate there after a fashion.

Mind Manifesting: There are tools and ways of handling the raw anger of people around us that have to do with listening and understanding that are non-violent and non-reactive.

This is at fifteen years old that you did it?

Yes.

I don’t know that fifteen-year-olds would do that. That’s amazing. You are already probably somewhat in a more enlightened phase, at least as a human being born like that. What fifteen-year-old wants to go and join an ashram and be disciplined for years to come.

When my wife was fifteen, she was at Woodstock. She was at Woodstock and I was in an ashram. It was desperation, Tanya. I was desperate to escape my dreadful unhappiness. I was unhappy and depressed that people avoided me. No one wanted to be around me. People couldn’t stand being around me because I was depressed and anxious so I went there to try and fix myself. I learned to meditate, energy healing, and spiritual traditions. I knew I needed to fix my own happiness. Bit by bit, over the decades, using spirituality, psychology and various kinds of transformational methods, I improved a little bit.

I got into energy medicine, energy psychology, and meditation in a big way in my 40s, and then everything accelerated dramatically. Everything improved within a year. My financial situation improved a lot. I stopped getting to toxic relationships and I was able to get in a whole new career path within a year. My relationship with children improved and everything shifted, but I committed to daily meditation and doing meditation effectively. What I learned from the spiritual community, close your eyes, and still your mind doesn’t work. You can’t still your mind. Your mind is meant to be active and you can’t shut down the mid prefrontal cortex easily to seat itself. Those people try and fail. That’s why you need to meditate intelligently and correctly.

It’s like guided meditations, that’s what you’re saying.

I have a ton of guided meditations out there and people need them for a while. Six months, maybe two years, you’ll need a guided meditation. My meditations are different because they have you doing physical stuff like, “Take these many breaths per second. Relax your tongue on the floor of your mouth. Sit in this posture.” Mine is all about moving your body to mimic the physiology of a master meditator. When you do that, you can drop into that state more easily. They’re not spiritual instructions at all.

A lot of those virtual instructions are esoteric and sound magical. They don’t bring people in that elevated state, so I give people practical physical instructions, which almost everyone gets into. We’ve finished doing a big randomized control trial using MRI machines, putting people in this after a month of this special meditation I designed called EcoMeditation. What happened to them in a month of doing this was amazing.

You’ve done the research and you’ve seen the MRI.

I do the primary research. When the searchers who are running the MRI machines finally got them out and we looked at the brain scans, it was amazing. That mid prefrontal cortex seat itself, but also the seat of suffering, the part that makes you suffer. That part of the brain went dark and it’s blue. In an MRI, blue means low activity. Part of the brain to do with compassion, which is called the insula was red, which means high activity. These people in just one month had the wiring of their brains changed. They were downregulating their sense of self and they were dramatically up-regulating their feeling of oneness with all that is, with nature and the universe, so their insula was bright red. You’re making these state changes where you change your feeling state, which then results in neural plasticity that tray changes as you change your brain.

People that want to become a student or learn more about this or dive right in to improve their lives, you have courses. I know that your workshops, probably you’re not having them where people are together physically. Are you having them virtually where people can sign up?

Yes, virtually. In September 2020, I’ll be speaking at Donna Eden’s Energy Medicine Conference, keynoting there, talking about Bliss Brain and this whole thing about letting go of local self and moving through those levels of brainwaves and neurotransmitters. September seems to be when things are opening up again.

We can always go to your website as well and find out where you’re going to be speaking or what your next doing or anything like that. I live in Santa Monica and I went through two days of complete rioting and our whole entire city is completely destroyed. How do you take somebody that was a part of the looters and that was a part of this whole thing that thinks it’s okay to steal and take and hurt? There are some awful things that have happened right one block away from where I live. How do you take somebody that’s in that state and turn them into somebody who’s more enlightened and more positive? How on Earth does that happen?

Many of us have a few good role models. We don’t see it around us and we see people having negative emotions, and then expressing them and venting them. Anger, fear, resentment, blame, and all these things flow out. We see that happening and then you ask people, “Why did you hurt that person or break that thing?” They say, “Because it’s important to somebody else.” Think about the Dalai Lama and Tibetan monks. These people have their monasteries destroyed, have their friends killed, and often have their families killed. Many of them were tortured in the 1960s and ‘70s and have nothing but compassion for the murderers and the torturers. We need examples like that.

We need to fill our hearts with peace. For example, there’s one woman in a workshop I taught. What I often teach in workshops is a whole group of different kinds of stress reduction tools with the recommendation that you use the ones that best natural lifestyles. We were trying different ones at this workshop called Omega Institute where I teach every year. The particular exercise was to hug somebody and hold somebody, not the quick hug but the long hug, chest to chest, and see what you feel arises in your body. This woman was there with a friend. She hugged her elder friend and then held the hug for two minutes. That doesn’t sound like a long time, but it’s a long time.

I’m a hugger but even two minutes is hard. It’s uncomfortable.

What happens, Tanya, is if you stay with the discomfort, it arises and disappears, and then you feel your shoulders and feet relaxed, and you settle into the hug. That’s when you are connecting, but this woman became triggered. It turned out later on that she was a survivor of severe sexual trauma when she was young, so this was triggering all of that. This is in front of the whole workshop. After that, she began to scream and yell at me as the workshop leader. It has crept up in her anger and she was saying, “You’re abusing everyone in this room. You are hurting us. These exercises are dangerous and harmful.” She had to scream and yell and let me have it. This encounter lasted about two hours.

How did you feel sitting there?

I talked to her. I used active listening and nonviolent communication. I didn’t flinch. I was completely present for her anger.

It was in front of everybody at the workshop.

You can find a couple of posts on the EFT Universe workshops page about how people couldn’t believe how I didn’t justify myself or blame her or shame or anything. I just used these tools. These tools worked and the anger drained away. She was able to soften and come back into her body. There are tools and there are ways of handling even the raw anger of people around us that have to do with listening, understanding, and being non-violent and nonreactive. You just don’t react. If you’re reacting and pushing back, you’re adding energy into this energy system.

If you can breathe and stay in your body and stay present, then you’re able to absorb the anger. What we need in our world are people who have internal stability because we’re in a period of rapid change in our lives. Change is not going to decelerate. It’s going to accelerate in the decades to come so we have to form a stable core, be those stable people, be rooted in ourselves, and in the universe to meet the challenges that happen out there.

How do we make that happen? We need more leaders that share the same philosophies and come at it from a place of love. What you’re saying is loving. What’s the difference between being empathetic when somebody’s angry and upset and just doing what you’re saying?

One useful frame is what can shake your love and what can shake your joy? When you become rooted in that nonlocal mind and you become part of that nonlocal universe and it is thinking through your local mind, then the answer is nothing. I have a book called Bliss Brain. My wife and I live in Northern California and one night, she woke me up and shook me by the shoulder and she said, “Something’s wrong.” I looked at the alarm clock, it said 12:45. I looked at the window and I saw an orange glow. I walked out onto our deck and I saw a wildfire racing down the canyon toward our house. I pulled and yelled at her. “We’re getting out of here right now. Grab the car.” She grabbed our phones and we sprinted for the car. There’s a hail of embers. As we drove out through our own driveway, my wife felt all this heat on her head. She looked up through the moonroof and all the branches of trees above her head were on fire. We drove off through the fire and we got out just seconds before.

You didn’t have any kids, so you had to deal with you two.

Mind Manifesting: Meditation done in the way of eco-meditation is highly addictive because you are generating in your brain this cascade of neurochemicals that are very pleasurable.

It was just the two of us. We got out there just before the fire conceived. About 22 people died. The fire is moving quickly. People couldn’t get out of their houses to their cars.

Was your house burned down?

Yeah. We saw photographs the next day because a friend of ours stuck and passed the National Guard and took photographs. There’s ash. The house has been a huge property with an office building on it. The office building was all ash. We’ve had these things happen in our lives that are shattering like that. It’s not like we were all happy the next day. We had to do therapy, energy work, meditate, and stress reduction work intensively for a while but we didn’t get PTSD. It didn’t shatter our lives and we were able to make wise choices in the months to come.

What you discover is you’re resilient. The book is called Bliss Brain. It’s how to remodel your brain for resilience, creativity, and joy because the fire comes and sweeps everything away and you lose all your possessions in two minutes. That’s a lot of talk between waking up and driving out through the flames in two minutes. You are a resilient person. We have a big financial crash later that year. I had an operation because of an injury I sustained from the fire. It wasn’t all easy and yet, we were joyful. In the crucible of that year, I wrote a new book called Bliss Brain.

These are questions that I’ve always wanted to ask someone like you. I’m sure people out there reading are wondering similar things. What do you say to someone who feels stuck? Let’s say they want to move to a different country or a different city, but they have a child here that keeps them tethered to a certain place. They’re ready to make a big decision or move or they’re not happy in their life. I don’t even know why or where to begin to make changes. They feel tethered physically because of other reasons. They have a business there that they can’t just get up and liquidate. How do you work with people that feel like they want to be happier, but there are many things they feel like they can’t change?

It’s rare that something outside of you is going to be the big catalyst for change. Say your dreams live in Denver, Colorado and you moved to Denver, Colorado, but you’re still you. Say you want to be married to Sally and you get married to Sally, but you’re still you. You’re the same person. I realized my relationships after a while, I was just recreating them over and over again with different women in the same relationship because I was creating it. I’m moving. What do you move to? If you want to move to the place, you’re taking yourself with you.

My wife and I travel and teach in Europe every year. We always go to France because we love French people and French food. We have lots of dear friends in France. We teach there every year and we were flying from JFK to Charles de Gaulle airport. I heard this guy talking to some friends of his in the seat in the waiting room, waiting to board the plane next to me. He was saying to these people, “The flight was terrible last year. We got there and the taxi driver ripped us off and overcharged us for getting there after this terrible flight. The first day, the waiters screwed up my order that night at the restaurant.”

This guy was spewing a litany of bad stuff. He remembered all the bad stuff that happened to him last time he was in France. He is conditioning his mind, pre-framing his trip by remembering all the bad stuff that happened in the past. There’s a reason our brains work that way and I won’t go deep into that because there’s a lot of neuroscience there. That is the way our brains work. You can move to Denver and you can marry Sally, but you still have the same brain. You’ve got to fix your brain first and that’s why meditation, learning to set yourself and your heart, learning EFT, Emotional Freedom Techniques, acupressure, and tapping, where you tap on a bunch of points to release stress.

We have more than 100 clinical trials of EFT. When you have all these things, you start to then change the way your brain works. It’s amazing how they sometimes have people hook up to an EEG in front of one of the conferences in France or occasionally here in the US too. They will hook a person up on stage and there’s a 30-foot high giant screen behind them showing their brain state and then we start to work with them. We train them to meditate and their brain state changes completely. They move from that incoherent state of that Rose, who can’t manifest anything to the Jack Canfield brain state and they can do it in such a short while.

You have to shift your own brain and you have to shift it first. If you think you’re going to move to Denver and shift it, that may give you a little bit of boost. Maybe Sally will make you happy or at least distract you for a little while. You need to work on your own brain and assume responsibility for your brain state. At that point, you can be like the Dalai Lama and still be an exile 60 years later and still be happy. You can let the fire happen and still be happy because it’s not the fire that makes you happy or unhappy. It’s not the operation and it’s not going broke. It’s this that makes you happy or unhappy.

For that person who wants to know where to start, start right here. One of the stories I tell in chapter one of my Mind to Matter is a guy who got serious about meditation and signed up for an eight-week meditation course doing mindfulness meditation every day. He was a TV journalist called Graham Phillips. He took his whole TV crew into an advanced neuroimaging lab and had a whole workup of his body and brain before he did his first meditation, and then began to meditate and do mindfulness for eight weeks. He took the whole crew back in there after eight weeks and they measured the volume of each part of his brain afterward.

The researchers found that the part of his brain that regulates emotions is a little C-shaped sliver of tissue right in the center of the brain called the dentate gyrus. His dentate gyrus in eight weeks had gotten bigger and had measurably grown. He had more capacity to regulate shame, blame, negativity, resentment, anger, and all these negative emotions, and it grew by 22.8% in only two months. That’s how fast we remodel our brains. You don’t need to move to Denver and you don’t need to marry Sally.

What happens is you probably will find your creative life as more pleasing to you on the outside once you remodels this thing inside. You’re remodeling every thought, emotion, strong feeling, intention, and belief. You’re shifting patterns of neural activity, which in turn through neural plasticity builds in your brain. Keep it up for 6 weeks, 8 weeks, 8 months, 2 or 3 years, you’re having enormous amounts of neural plasticity going on and you’re building a whole new brain, and that’s how you get happier.

Let’s say that somebody like me or someone reading says, “I want to do what the reporter did. I want to go to a place that measures my brain and my activity, and then take the course and then come back.” How do we do that? Who do we sign up with? Where do these places exist? Can we do that? Can we jump right in and be a student?

Yeah. The technique that we’re teaching people is called EcoMeditation and it’s a combination of several other methods. There are some simple steps to doing it like breathing rhythm, certain postures, and so on. We’ve done EEG and MRI studies, so we know that this happens in people’s brains. You read the studies and you’ll know that if you do have annotation, it’s happening in your brain too. I have free meditations on Insight Timer, this free meditation app. I have free meditations online at EcoMeditation.com. We give these away and we encourage people to use them.

Also, in the Mind to Matter book. If you read the book, at the end of each chapter, there is something called the Extended Play bonuses section. You can go to that and download EcoMeditation. If you listen to these, they’re only about 15 to 20 minutes long. They start to do that neuro remodeling that happens to be measured this now, happening in eight weeks. Do those meditations and they’ll start to shift your brain.

If we want to get our brain activity measured before and after, can we do that? Is there a place to go that can do that for us and we can get that test done?

You can use a simple kind of test. There are some simple smartphone-based ones. There was something called Heart Rate Variability or HRV and that’ll help you do that. If you’re using the Muse headband, there’s a piece of software called the Mind Monitor seen by Muse. Put the Muse on meditate and you’ll find that as you meditate and use this technique for 2 to 3 months, your readings on the Muse monitor change. Those are cheap ways of doing it. The Muse costs about $300. Some of the smartphone apps cost only $10 to $20.

If you have the money, you can do something like that and get your brainwaves measured.

You are in Santa Monica. My wonderful friend, Dave Asprey, wrote the foreword to my book Bliss Brain. He’s deep into this as well. He has his center and he does mingle 40 years of Zen.

On Main Street right here. I go quite a bunch of times. Hopefully, his center is still there after what happened. You can go to Dave Asprey center and talk to him about this?

Yes. They will measure your brainwaves there. That’s a $50,000 approach, and then there’s a $300 approach to Muse. There are smartphone apps that measure HRV. You don’t need to measure those. We know that if you do EcoMeditation, those things are likely to be happening. There’s maybe one person, 50 or so who says, “I tried meditation and it didn’t work for me.” They may need something different like walking meditation and active meditation like Qigong or yoga. There are a few people that it doesn’t work for them, but it works for the majority of people.

What would you say to somebody who’s never heard of any of this before and they’ve been struggling for a long time? What are some simple steps or simple seeds people can plant to start shifting? Nothing too complicated, but where can they start and begin?

The simplest thing to start with is to go on the EcoMeditation site and use the free meditation there. It’s 15 to 20 minutes long. Do that every day for 30 days. One lady came up to me at a workshop and said, “I decided to use that EcoMeditation track once a day for 30 days and it made a huge difference in my life.” I said to her, “What day are you now in 30 days?” She said, “I’m on day 129.” She never stopped. What happens is in Bliss Brain, I write all about this amazing phenomenon, is that meditation done that way is highly addictive. You are generating in your brain this whole slew, this cascade of neurochemicals that are pleasurable like serotonin and dopamine.

Dopamine is your main motivation molecule, get up and go molecule, and central in addictive behavior like chocolate cravings and cocaine. It’s a big-time release of dopamine in the brain. In the EcoMeditation, you have that same dopamine rush, but it also produces high levels of serotonin. Serotonin is not motivation. Serotonin is satisfaction. Serotonin is feeling, “I’m feeling settled now.” The molecule serotonin has the same chemical structure as psilocybin, magic mushrooms. Psilocybin and serotonin dock with the same neurochemical sites in your brain as each other.

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Essentially, you’re getting these floods of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, the bonding hormone, and then there are several others like norepinephrine and beta-endorphin, but I won’t go into those. When I go to a big-time in Bliss Brain is Anandamide. Anandamide has the same chemical structure as THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. You’re now getting a whole flood of THC, serotonin, psilocybin, cocaine, dopamine, and THC like molecules and anandamide. All generated endogenously within your brain and body, is floods of oxytocin. You’re feeding one with the universe.

That’s why people get addicted and they try EcoMeditation. They’re getting their brains and bodies off filled with these seven most highly pleasurable drugs you can get. People don’t stop. They do the 30 days and they keep on going. You start there. Start by doing it today and then tomorrow, and then the next day, making a regular practice of it. After a while, you won’t have to set your alarm, calendar, and a reminder for yourself. You will be addicted to all the good stuff sloshing around in your brain that you won’t want to stop.

A major difference between doing that and getting it artificially by drugs, mushrooms, and cocaine is that this also affects your life on an energetic level. It can also bring in abundance and things like that where if you do it artificially, you might have similar sensations but you’re not affecting your life energetically the way the universe works. Thought is energy and thoughts can become things. Is that right?

Yeah. In the course of writing Bliss Brain, I talked to an old Cherokee medicine woman and she is a member of the shaman and there are four clans of Cherokee. She is a member of the Twister Hair Clan and she said, “In the Twister Hair Clan and shamanic teaching, you can take the plant medicine.” She does plant medicine ceremonies with people but she says, “The plant medicine is from the outside. It won’t grow. If you generate these experiences from the inside, then you will grow.” That’s the shamanistic answer. The scientific answer are two words, why it’s much healthier to take them internally, generate them internally than externally. Those two words are side effects.

Look at the meta-analyses of ecstasy and marijuana. The meta-analyses, the science is crystal clear in dozens of studies that it shows for example, that ecstasy produces a heightened risk of Alzheimer’s, cognitive decline, and greater depression and anxiety over time. The use of marijuana produces huge degradation of the brain’s memory learning systems, massive degradation of that. People who take marijuana for pain, randomized control trial show that after a while, they have more pain than people who don’t take marijuana for pain. The same thing for depression and anxiety. The science is super clear.

When it comes to marijuana too, there are marijuana scientists out there that say that it’s controversial. There are a lot of people that say they’re struggling from marijuana for years and their doctors and they would not agree at all. I find it fascinating. Somebody who has studied the brain and the growth of the brain like yourself, I would tend to want to do it naturally to see the side effects of that. You also have that other life experiences, bringing in abundance, and bringing in happiness that I don’t think you get from the other things. That’s a momentary way to feel good but it’s not also going to create abundance and peace in your life in the long run on an energetic level.

It may not reduce the brainwaves either. Somebody can do it internally and endogenously safely and exogenously with all the side effects.

The first thing that you’re saying that people should do is go to the website. What is the website again?

EcoMeditation.com. If you go to the website, DawsonGift.com, then you’ll get that EcoMeditation link and you’ll also get the EFT mini manual, and about ten other little goodies that we like to see people experimenting with.

Where can we learn more about you and get your books? I’m sure they’re on Amazon. Tell me where we can learn more about you, attend your seminars and your workshops, and where we can become a student.

I love the fact the world has got virtual because we’re teaching a lot of virtual workshops as well as live workshops. There are live workshops. I’m doing one in Clearwater, Florida. I’m doing one in Austin and one as part of Donna Eden’s conference in Cleveland. We have certified trainers training all over the world, Europe, Australia, and different parts of the US, but there are also virtual workshops. I was skeptical. I thought a couple of years ago, “Can people have the same experience at a virtual workshop as they do at a live workshop?”

Being a researcher, I measured that. I pull out the same question as before and after. The answer is that you don’t get quite as good an experience at a virtual workshop but you can get if it’s skillfully taught about 80% of that experience. We’re doing virtual EFT workshops and virtual meditation workshops. The link to all of those workshops is at DawsonGift.com. I would say take one and do one. Some people do workshops and they say, “I almost came to the workshop ten years ago.” I wish I’d done it then so I’d had this knowledge back then because it’s amazing. You see people just let go of their suffering. It also becomes healthier.

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One friend has written a book about her experiences and put it out there. She was diagnosed in March of 2017 with Stage IV metastasized breast cancer. The doctors found a large lump on her right breast and they also then looked for the metastasis and found all of the lymph nodes under her right armpit were swollen and inflamed with cancer cells and three spots of inflammation on her right lung. It looked like the cancer was spreading through her lymph system through her body. The doctor who gave her the diagnosis at this famous clinical, MD Anderson Cancer Clinic in Houston, said, “We want you to start radiation treatments today. It’s that serious. We’ve got to get you into the radiology department right away today.”

She said, “I need to step back and weigh my options. I need to think about this.” She elected to spend a few weeks, before she did the conventional treatment, shifting energy. She did. She changed her lifestyle. She tweaked her diet, be super clean. She had to do Qigong. We tapped with her and we did EFT with her. She began to meditate every day and she got rid of all the alerts on her devices. She had to love herself and change her energy. Her energy was everything. She did things like lateral, hyperbaric oxygen to adults and alternative treatments like that. She went back to MD Anderson. She got the diagnosis of metastasized breast cancer in March and she went back two months later in May and all of those under Beth’s armpit were totally clear and no sign of cancer. The tumor had shrunk from 5 centimeters to 1.4 centimeters. It’s now smaller and later on, it disappeared. A few months later, she had what’s called a blood biopsy that showed no trace of cancer in her body.

She did this by doing meditations?

Intensive meditation every day and Qigong.

Did she study with you?

No. She didn’t do my meditation. She did other kinds of meditation. I didn’t have that there. What I did with her was EFT. She already was a solid, experienced meditator.

It is incredible to think that the mind does control the body. Your thoughts and the way that you feel becomes reality. I’ve seen it happen to me too. That’s why I’m a big believer in it as well. I’m trying to learn how to stay on track because I feel sometimes, I slip. I wake up and I’m in the grumpiest mood, and then I don’t know how to get back into flow. It’s one of those things that we’re all working on.

If you do three weeks of EcoMeditation, you’ll get the other two parts into flow. The one path is physical activity. Being an athlete, running, extreme sports, those things will bring you into flow. Being a performer and artist will bring you into flow, but meditation brings you to exactly the same flow state that performance does. The cool thing about flow is we compact flow because we now can induce flow. We know what those brainwaves look like and if you do EcoMeditation, it will bring your brain into that coherent pattern that is characteristic of the person in flow, so it’s easy to put people in flow nowadays.

I want to come to your event in Austin. When are you going to Austin?

In October of 2020.

I might be there in October. You never know. We go to your website if we want to join and sign up for any of your workshops or sign up virtually for your workshops online as well. Thank you, Dawson. You were incredible. There’s a wealth of information that you have that you can share. Thanks for spending the time with me here on Life Masters and helping people spread more goodness and love into the world.

I love your mission of helping people become life masters and of course, we need mastery in every life area. There’s health, spirituality, money, career, relationships, and all those are different phases of mastery. We all tend to excel easily at some of them and struggle with other ones. I’m glad you’re giving people the tools to master as many as possible. Thank you.

Until next time. Thanks for reading.

Important Links:

• Energy Psychology Group, Inc.
• EFT Universe
• Creative Visualization
• Mind to Matter
• The Success Principles
• Chicken Soup for the Soul
• EcoMeditation
• Bliss Brain
• Mind Monitor
• DawsonGift.com