 Welcome, we hope you've been enjoying the summit. It's been our honor to be hosting these sessions with you. And we thought we'd take some time to just have a conversation together. I want you to get to know our co-host, Dr. Paul Mills, a bit more, because while you've seen his prowess as an interviewer and his flow, you might not know of all of the amazing research that he's been spearheading and fostering over the years. So it's really my honor to interview you, Paul, a little bit, so that people can get to know you, your story of how you got here and why you're so passionate about the work that you do. Thank you, gentlemen. Really looking forward to our conversation. Happy to share some of my stories and my journey through the sciences and through healing. Of course, I also want to hear your stories of some of which I know, but I also want to put your story in perspective to the broader themes of the summit, which you and I are obviously very passionate about. Yeah, thank you for that. It's really been so much fun co-hosting this with you, Paul, and I can't wait for everyone to get to know you a little bit better. You obviously are coming to this with great wisdom, both from your own personal practice and from your own scientific inquiry. And it might be really interesting to explore, how did you get here? Because as we know, we're both academics. We've studied in some of the best universities. We've been privileged to conduct all kinds of great research, NIH-funded research, and you've been doing this for many, many decades. And yet, there's still this seeming schism between science and spirituality, where often we don't even feel comfortable sometimes talking about some of the things that we've been talking about here in the Science of Healing Summit, which is unfortunate. And I know that you are really passionate about exploring some of these stories, and perhaps it even starts with your own. How did you come to this kind of work that you do and your own inclinations of what it means to be a spiritual scientist? Well, thanks for that question. That causes me to start digging deep into my memory back quite a few decades ago. When I was in high school, I learned meditation. I had never heard about it. And a friend had heard about it when he was out skiing in Colorado. And I was living and growing up in Pennsylvania. So I went to an introductory lecture. This was Transcendental Meditation at the time, which you might not know this, but at that time in the 70s, it was really sweeping through the US, much in the way the mindfulness has been the current, say, the past decade or more. So I was curious. I went to the introductory lecture. I learned to meditate. I really liked the initial experience I had and I started practicing pretty regularly. And what really changed for me is that some months into it, I went outside to meditate under a large oak tree, which was over on the edge of our property. We lived out in the country. I sat under that oak tree, closed my eyes, began the mantra, usual procedure. And with a few minutes, I suddenly found myself outside of my body, up kind of in the tree and the branches looking down on myself. I could clearly see my back, the top of my head, the leaves, and it was shocking initially because I had never had such an experience. But within a few moments, I settled into it. It felt peaceful. It was also very expansive for me. And that lingered for a brief while and then I was back in my body. And really that was the beginning because I started thinking, well, what was that? And the TM introductory lecture speaks about rest, you know, quieting your mind, but there was nothing about being out of your body in a perspective and having your consciousness, basically without boundaries. So I basically was inspired around that time to start studying meditation, some of the philosophy I've moved into books on pedantia and so forth. And I basically decided I wanna be a scientist so I could study what meditation is and how it works with the thoughts that perhaps doing that would inspire other people to really begin such practices. That was the beginning for me. Well, that's so amazing. So really your path as a scientist began, it sounds like from your spiritual experience that you had this experience and then your naturally sort of curious, inquisitive, scientific oriented mind said, what was that? And how come more people aren't talking about this and how could we explore this using the lens of science? I mean, I so resonate with that. I had a very similar experience myself. So you found yourself as I understand it at Maharishi International University, both as an undergraduate and a graduate student. You were the first graduate of the neuroscience program there and you did some really in-depth work, right? True to your desire to explore meditation and its effects on the body. And tell us a little bit more about that and how you kind of journeyed into this whole area of psychoneuroimmunology. Yeah, I mentioned the Maharishi University. I was fortunate to go there. That was back in the mid-70s and it was the only place I could find that could help me fulfill this desire to study meditation, the physiology of it. So I found some mentors there who had done some meditation research at the University of California, Los Angeles. Studied with him for years. We did a lot of research on just the basic effects of meditation on blood pressure. I started getting into the sympathetic nervous system and stress studied effects of meditation on catecholamines. I developed assays for adrenergic receptors on white blood cells because they're very relevant to cardiac functioning and stress. And later, as you just said, I expanded some of that work to the psychoneuroimmunology which asked the question, well, what are these adrenergic receptors doing on the immune cells anyway? And that led to a whole fruitful area of research and eventually led me to the University of California, San Diego, where eventually, that's where we met of course, where you came to be a graduate student and we started doing our work together on the biofield, which obviously is very much your passion. I'm looking forward to speaking more about that. Yeah, you bet. Wow, so you innovated in many ways new tools and methodologies even to explore the effects of meditation on heart health by looking at how you could say are adrenaline and the receptors of adrenaline on the heart, these adrenergic receptors on the heart, how they're impacted by meditation and that set you on a path to learn more and sort of explore through the lens of the body how meditation affects health. And yeah, just to remind everybody, this was back in the 70s and it's interesting because I do know that TM was very much involved in the 70s. Of course, I was just a kid, but I wasn't necessarily practicing TM but certainly saw it in growing up in an East Indian household familiar with month or meditation of all kinds. But as you know, this was still not very mainstream and you went through a period, say in the 80s, psychoneuromunology itself was just a budding place of study. People didn't even really believe that emotions affected the body or health at that time. I mean, it was really like quite different maybe some of the things we take for granted now in science that the immune system and the hormone system and the central nervous system are all connected. People didn't even really think about that anymore. So you found yourself in this sort of, first of all, having this expanded experience, taking that expanded experience into science. And then what was it like? UCSD became UC San Diego has become your home institution, you're a tenured professor there, you've been there for decades, coming from a place like MIU, which as you said, was the only place where you could even study this stuff. And then finding a home and obviously because of how brilliant you are, you were able to find a home there. How did people kind of, did you feel like your interests were fostered or how did you sort of navigate that mainstream science area given these interests that you have? Yeah, when I went to UCSD, I landed in a behavioral medicine program, which you know, and Dr. Joel Jimsdale, psychiatrist there at the time had founded and he hired me to help develop a lab because he was interested in Taipei behavior and the effects of that stress on what? The cardiovascular system. So he wanted me to come in there because I had experienced measuring catacombs, beta receptors, and we developed all that. And we focused on pretty traditional behavioral medicine work for many, many years. In some ways, I did a detour from the meditation work for a couple of decades really. And another piece of that is when I finished up my first NIH grant and I was moving from a postdoc to be able to be a professor there, I was being interviewed by the senior members of the psychiatry department. And you know how these things go, they were looking at my CV, seeing my publications, Saul had studied meditation and so forth and they looked at me and said very explicitly, this is not a department which does research on meditation, you can't do it. And so that was that. And frankly, I was kind of fine with it because I was really enjoying doing behavioral medicine work, developing the psychonormalgy piece, but later than Joe and I did get into some meditation studies. And then of course, as you know, many years later in the past five, six years and been able to do a deep dive in that research collaborating with the Chopra Foundation. It's so interesting, Paul, thank you for sharing that story because it's so interesting to see how things can come full circle, even in mainstream institutions because as you know what you may have been told a few decades ago, we don't do that weird meditation research around here is very different now, right? There's- I might say the department of psychiatry in the same department approximately 12 years later, one of the faculty member, Dr. Stephen Hickman created a Center for Mindfulness which still exists. It's one of the biggest in the country. They have fabulous neuroscientists there studying mindfulness and other such modalities. So there was a real turnaround for the department and for the university as well. Yes, full circle. And it's people like you who have been able to gracefully kind of navigate these systems as they've been evolving, right? With you, with your own personal experience, with your research experience to not necessarily react to that kind of response initially to something that people in academia and say hospital systems and whatever just sort of getting to know. So this is a really key point because for people who might be watching and listening and thinking, and we get this all the time, Paul, the consciousness and healing initiative, we get students that say, where can I go and learn more about this in the biofield work especially which we could say right now is kind of in a similar pivotal area that meditation was in 10 or so years ago, 20 years ago or so where the biofield work has not yet reached sort of mainstream acceptance, as you know. Yeah, I fully agree with that, Shawmini. And when you were speaking about some of the resistance I initially experienced at UCSD, of course that took me to meeting you. You came to UC San Diego to do your PhD in clinical psychology and you wanted to do research on the biofield, specifically energy healing work for breast cancer survivors with chronic fatigue. I remember we wrote up the protocol and I presented it to the institutional review board there at the General Clinical Research Center. And I think really the only reason we got it through is because I had established myself as more of a traditional scientist. I hadn't moved into any of the meditation work again. I was doing lots of cardiology work and so forth. And I think from that point of view they were willing to allow us to do this study. And we also provided a rationale that really was our responsibility to provide that information to the public. And so ultimately we did it and you ran the study very successfully. You got your PhD, published the findings of that study in the official Journal of the American Cancer Society, right? Wasn't that the one? Yeah, that's right, Paul, and all due to your mentorship. So for those who may not know, Paul was my graduate mentor at UC San Diego where I did my doctoral work in psychoneuromyology and clinical psychology. And just sort of briefly, it's interesting, Paul, because our conversation is kind of speaking to perhaps an evolution in the way that we're approaching the study of these things in mainstream science or maybe it's just a difference in personality. I don't know. Honestly, I really don't know. But what I do know is that I could not have done the work that I did at UC San Diego without your support. That is very clear to me for some of the reasons that you just mentioned. And I think this conversation is important because people need to recognize that we're still in a place where we're evolving these systems. And we need pillars that are really bastions and contributors to mainstream areas that are also carrying this forward, as well as you can say more of the rabble rousers who say, we're gonna do this and we're gonna push forward even when we're told no. Which quite frankly, you did in your own way with meditation research. And I was able to do with the biofield research at UCSD with your support. So I wanna mention this because we received, and I will say I received through your support an NIH funded support for this study on biofield healing for fatigue, breast cancer survivors. So as a graduate student applied for this grant, got it much due to your mentorship. So it wasn't enough to just have an NIH funding for the study, right? We had to get ethics board approval, which means that the university says it's okay for you to do it. So you can have your own funding for studies just so y'all know. But if you don't get ethics board approval, it's not gonna happen. You can't do the study. So what Paul's speaking about is that we had to get permission, right? From this group, the General Clinical Research Center. And at that time, and this was what Paul, gee, maybe 15 years ago or something like that, that they were just reviewing whether they even wanted to do this. So this was a randomized placebo controlled clinical trial with three different groups. One was a group that went on with treatment as usual for their fatigue, which by the way tended to be sort of pharmaceutical antidepressants because at that time, and still quite frankly, it's sad, most of the medical model doesn't know what to do with cancer-related fatigue. So that was one group, treatment as usual. The other one was receiving hands-on healing, energy-killation technique that was taught by Reverend Rosalind Breyer, where all of our practitioners were trained in that particular method and used it. And the other was what we called a mock healing group where people actually were trained in the hand positions, but they were skeptical scientists. So they weren't trained in energy healing or yoga or anything, right? They were just kind of doing those practices. So it was a pretty rigorous, the point of it being, it was a pretty rigorous design, right? I mean, it wasn't like a sloppy design. As you know, we were looking at all kinds of placebo factors. It was the right kind of study in the academic setting. And yet there was pushback. And it was really because of you, I think, saying, don't we owe it to our patients to find out whether this stuff works? Because they're doing it, right? Yeah, that's exactly the rationale we used at that committee meeting. I remember clearly, actually, that very meeting. It was very relieved when it was all approved and then we could get going. And you're speaking about the rigor of the study. I mean, I've got to give a shout out to you. That was your design. And you managed to get a lot of energy healers to come in and volunteer their time and were able to recruit all the patients and run them through the center. And it was a very successful study. And you're speaking about the mentorship on my side. And I'll just add that since then for the attendees listening who might want to start pursuing research, there are many, many more mentors now. There are a lot of centers of academic centers such as UC San Diego, which have centers for integrated medicine, as you know, people committed, devoted to different forms of energy healing and acupuncture and so forth. So I think the climate's pretty good. Although, as you said, the biofield part, there's still resistance because we haven't quite made this technical jump that you and I often speak about and that technical jumping, we need a device to like validly and reliably visualize the field, all of its beauty, its dynamics, its inherent information, the whole mystery of it. And as you know, there are folks working on that but hasn't come along yet, but I am confident it will. That's really key. And to those who might be new to this whole area that we're calling the biofield, let's just unpack it a little bit, you know, and we can discuss, you know, I'm happy to discuss why I think it's so important for us to study to understand health. And I'm certainly talking about that in my book, which is coming out in the fall, which sounds true, which is all, it's called Healing Ourselves, Biofield Science and the Future of Health. So I unpack a lot of the research and what is the biofield, ancient perspectives, how does it play a role in my body medicine and even all of these studies. And we just mentioned one, for example, that we've conducted together. And as you know, there's so many cutting edge studies in this area, but let's unpack what we even mean by the biofield for a minute because maybe folks aren't familiar with the term. Paul, if someone were to ask you, what is the biofield? How would you describe it? Okay, here it goes. I'll give my best shot. So the biofield is a, we could call it an energy field that surrounds the body, depends on the person, but we could say on average, roughly three feet out from the domain of the physical body that surrounds, but not only surrounds, it utterly permeates the body too. And the biofield is not just a passive energy. Some people have described it actually as it's our mind, that it's not that the mind exists in the body, but the body exists in the mind, in the biofield itself being the mind. Cause as you know, there are many healing modalities which can work on the biofield and any spot on the biofield here, there, back front. And just by working there, people have memories triggered, detailed experiences triggered, healings triggered. That information is out there in the field. And those who have good clairvoyance, for example, when you can see it and then that's another level of validation, at least for that person. So as you know, we're working with a group of scientists and trying to figure out a way to create a device so that everyone can see the dynamics. And it's gonna be a game changer, really, for medicine, which you're titling your book around that very thing. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, absolutely. And sometimes I clarify for people, you know, an easy way of describing the biofield is, it's the fields of energy and information that connect us and heal us. So we learned that we're beyond just our flesh and bones. I mean, we are flesh, we are bones. We do have chemicals that are running through our bodies at all times, but that's not all. We're bioelectromagnetic beings and we can measure certain aspects of those emanations. We do all the time with EKG and EEG and things like that. That's part of the biofield. We can measure biofields of cells, as you know. In fact, you know of the great work by Michael Levin at Tufts University that has, you know, expanded on biofield research to show that you can manipulate the voltage gradients of a cell membrane, meaning that you're basically manipulating the electricity going through the cell and you can grow new neural tissue. So it really is a game changer. So there are all these things that we can already measure and explore, but then there's this whole subtle aspect, right? The stuff that we talk about with energy healing or subtle energy healing, the part that's part of Qigong, Tai Chi, yoga, many meditative practices, therapeutic touch, Reiki, all of these things that, again, you know, let's say our colleagues at universities sometimes just don't even think is real. And yet we've done all these studies with these healing approaches, including hands off the body at a distance and all of that to determine that these fields of energy and information, even if we can't 100% measure them using the tools that we have right now, they're fostering healing in another person. And I mean, I think that's really the take home is that our healing capacity is so great. And we're just, you know, as we're sitting here exploring this unfolding of your story, Paul, and how you explore deeply how meditation affects the body and you're connecting that again to your own experience of witnessing your body. You were in the biofield, let's say, you know, you were kind of aware of your body looking down. It was kind of a biofield-y experience, if you know, right? I like that perspective. It's interesting. Yeah, you know, another piece if I can add about this perspective that I think is important because as people become more aware of this field and become aware of the information there, how it's part and parcel of the very consciousness and identity, it helps a person understand that they are more than just this biology, which as you know, Western materialist science basically says you're a body and that's all you got and that's all you're ever gonna have and it's gonna be an end game at some point when that body passes. But people begin to have an experience and understanding that, oh, I'm more than the physical body, it's this field of energy. And actually, if you look at the biofield, yes, there's a kind of a boundary to it at some point, but it's not an exclusive boundary that's still interacting with all the forces that are beyond our individual biofield, including other people's biofields, including the biofields and energies of sacred places, for example. It just opens, I think, a person's awareness and understanding that they are much more than they believe themselves to be. So key, Paul, what you just said, the biofield really opens us up to recognizing the totality of who we are as conscious beings, right? Not just our bodies, we are our bodies and we wanna put our consciousness in our body and sometimes our consciousness comes out of our body for a particular reason, like you said, or just to remind us that we're spiritual beings having a physical experience, right? And that all of this is up for scientific inquiry and it's important. From my perspective, one of the key reasons that I think this area is so important, the focus on healing and the biofield as this bridge, I call it sometimes a bridge, to understand how consciousness affects the healing process is very in resonance with what you just said. We have been steeped in this model of materialism as the only solution and the only way to have effects. And what that means is that to some degree, we've been negating the power of our consciousness and the working with our energy to heal ourselves. Would you say that's a fair assessment? I fully agree with that, it is a negation. The whole concept around duality is, it's a false premise, it's a false perception, but materialism as we know it rests on this foundation of duality because fostering material possession, position fosters duality and separation, which foundationally is completely false. And that's one of the beauties of the biofield sciences and then moving into traditional medical systems, which inherently have an appreciation of the oneness of it all. And that's where those physicians operate from. Yeah, so speaking of oneness, I mean, you just hit on a key point here, which is as we explore the biofield, we begin to explore how we're connected, how we're more than we think we are, we're more than just our body or our conditioned mind. We begin to experience through these fields of energy information a greater level of consciousness. And I know that that's where some of your work has been taking you to recently, both again on a personal and professional level as this exploration of what some might call expanded consciousness or a recognition of one's own consciousness as part of the one or oneness. Even the experience of what's called oneness itself. Some people call this non-duality. And for those who may not be familiar with these terms, non-duality and duality, can you break that down for us a little bit? What do we mean by that? And why is it so relevant for understanding our healing process? Sure, so the non-duality piece, I prefer to go with this term non-separation and I'll tell you why because we were speaking earlier, I was studying behavioral medicine. You have your PhD in clinical psychology. If we look at a lot of the basic ills of a human being, a lot of it is fostered from this sense of duality, this sense of separation that I as a human being exist here in this physical body. Sometimes often people feel their consciousness and identities in their head. And then they're gazing out upon everyone else and everything else, including the vastness of the universe, that they're separate from, that they're different from. And this area of non-duality, the Vedantic philosophy and others simply helps promote the message and ultimately hopefully the experience that that's an illusion, that that's false. The fact is you as a I as a consciousness as an awareness is not separate at all. That's just an illusion based on ultimately having a little bit too much belief that you are this egoic identity only or the body only as you were just hinting at, yeah, we're all of it. And it is a beautiful awareness that condone in us as human beings so that we no longer live in any sense of separation. We realize that we've in fact, literally are everything and there's nothing that is not what we then take to be as ourself, which is different than the normal sense of self we might have had before, as far as being an individual human with thoughts and feelings and beliefs, other things open up. But that to me really is the foundation of wellbeing. And I think you've seen some of the papers we've been writing with the support of the Chopra Foundation, kind of arguing the importance of this state of awareness to be considered within the context of at least the integrative medicine model, which is often called the whole person medicine model. We raise the question, well, what does whole person really mean? And traditionally integrated medicine means mind, body, spirit, you know, psychosocial spirit can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. So in our recent papers, we're just introducing this more explicitly that you know what? You have to take into account the transcendent nature of the person. They're very awareness, which is the foundational being. Then we were talking about the whole person and let's see what can unfold from there as far as, at the very least, certainly wellbeing. And maybe that too would be as a foundation to support the physicality and the health of the body, body mind. Thank you for that, Paul. So this sense of oneness and non-duality being beyond our conditioned mind or conditioned self into a recognition really, an awareness and a recognition of being more than that, right? Being really almost a recognition if one would use, and I know these are very late in terms, but soul, spirit, God, you know, however we wanna describe it, that we're all part of the same fabric in a way. And then we can actually experience the fabric itself. You know, it sounds like that's part of the experience of oneness itself. And what I hear you saying is that that's part of our fundamental human nature. And so it's really up for study. And the reason why it's so important to study it is because you have a sense from looking at even the data that you've been gathering on these types of whole person approaches that the experience of that totality, that fabric, that oneness, that experience is key to understanding our wellbeing. So we can look at our wellbeing from the outside, we can look at things like, you know, hedonic wellbeing and seeking of pleasure and things that make us feel good. And we know from psychology, yeah, that's important. You know, doing things that make us feel good helps our mental health. Okay, so that's one aspect. And then the eudaimonic aspects of wellbeing that people talk about, which is living a life in accordance to our values, our virtues, our personal connections, that's all important for wellbeing. But you're talking about a whole other level of wellbeing, which is just almost awareness itself, right? It's the key to, you know, what everyone has been talking about with mindfulness, although as you know, mindfulness has become very commercialized. And so these days it's mindfulness to reduce stress or mindfulness. But that was never really the purpose of mindfulness, right? Mindfulness was to come into this deep awareness that you're describing, this state of oneness, this feeling of complete. Yeah, very much so. And you know, when the TM movement started, it was also the same thing, practice meditation to reduce stress, reduce your blood pressure, have a clear, calm mind and sleep better. And the mindfulness revolution too came to us that way. But you're right, all these techniques of meditation, whether it's more of a mindfulness or a mantra base like TM and others, it's just to help cultivate a kind of awareness of awareness. It's to change the person's relationship to their mind, to the experience of their mind and perception so that it really begins to loosen up in a sense that no longer is the person's sense of eye and consciousness so focused on the experience of the mind that that becomes the reality. Meaning that the only reality, the limited beliefs of all the experiences if that's what I am. But these techniques, they're all developed to loosen that up to a point where something can happen where suddenly the person just lets go of the stranglehold on the mind and the belief of the ego as themselves and it releases. And what happens when it releases? Well, it's an automatic phenomenon. You're back to who you really are, which is essentially awareness itself. And as you said, it's the fabric of everything. It is everything. And there's literally nothing that isn't that. And so that is, to my point of view, a foundation for well-being and the research we've been doing in this area when people start to dip into these so-called kind of non-dual transpersonal experiences, many other areas of the lives get better. They develop spontaneously a sense of self-compassion, sense of gratitude, their anxiety and depression go down, things like that. It's just more of an automatic. Not to say it's initially all bliss. Anybody can read stories from people who've gone these journeys and it can be a challenge, particularly to make that transition from believing you're this little mind body and that entire history to suddenly being in another space and how do you adapt to that and reconcile things and put your life back together in a new way. But ultimately, I mean, it's very worth it, of course. Really beautiful. It's really beautiful. And it's such important work because as we know, the exploration of these transcendent spiritual experiences in science and medicine have, we've barely scratched the surface of looking at this. So as you say, from your point of view, that experience is really key to our health. Well, we're just beginning to uncover that thanks to researchers like you that are really starting to point the way to, hey, this is actually fundamental. These aren't just like interesting sort of side experiences that people are having that don't have any meaning. They're really key because loosening our association from our anxiety, our depression, our sense of needing to be or do, our senses of lack and all of these things that we can get caught up in, they have profound effects on our health. And what happens when we experience something that's just really pure love? I don't know if you would explain it that way, Paul, but when I've touched upon these experiences for myself, as you know, in the Vedic literature, we talk about the experience of pure consciousness and pure consciousness itself as having these qualities of truth and expansion, expanded consciousness and bliss. And there is a sense of deep love that we touch when we get to these places and then how healing, how healing that is. And then there's so many pathways to get there, right? And we, as you said, this was really sort of the point of meditation, right? It wasn't necessarily to reduce our stress, although that happens because when we experience and contact love in this way, as you say, these associations begin to loosen. We start recognizing that we are perfect, beautiful beings as we are. You know that we can love another and we can see through wherever they've come from, whether they're separate, different, instead of coming to all these categorizations, you're like me, you're not like me, you think differently, you follow a different political scheme than I do, right? Wow, if we actually approached each other through this experience of being love. It's beautiful, Jean. I don't even know what to say in response to that. You just said it all, it was very inspiring, the way you did just speak about it, yeah. Because what, I'm just riffing on this for a minute because we talk a lot about our personal healing, but as we know, we're in a place where we're being called to do a lot of collective healing as well. So this experience and bringing ourselves to these experiences of what we might call oneness or pure love, of soul, of beyond conditioning, all these things that we're talking about, I would say, yeah, our key to our wellbeing collectively, collectively as well, because we can approach each other from that place, right? We could approach each other from that place of love and knowing that we're part of that, even if we've been brought up differently. No, I mean, I might add, please, that that becomes the set point. Because you know yourself as that foundational, say, beingness, and we could put many words to it, love is a very good word to use, and that becomes the person's foundational perspective, that it's an unconditional love for everything and everyone. And one of the scientists I interviewed for my book noted that observation without love is judgment. And we know, we live in a world with endless amounts of judgment. You see it everywhere, particularly in Washington DC, just the things that go on. There's just no love. There's no recognition of love there. So cultivating these kinds of experiences, as you were just saying, it's a game changer to how we would see each other and begin to relate to each other. I mean, you see them as love, but you see the person as yourself also. That's an implicit piece of this. So fundamental, what you just said, that experience of love is a recognition of non-separation, kind of bringing it back to what you said earlier, and that is that key facet of non-duality. So I bet that some folks who are with us right now are wondering, well, so how do I get there? What have we learned from all of our explorations of the science, of all these areas, of biofuel practices, of meditation, of dialogues, and what are some key fundamental ways that we can begin to taste the well of our being, as I like to say sometimes, to taste that fundamental aspect of love and approach people from that place. I'd love to hear your observations on that. I know you probably have several, even in your own life, what have you found? Gosh, there are what, thousands of traditions around the planet from all the cultures, which have sought to find ways on this journey to this destination. And certainly here in the West, we've been fortunate over the last, what, 60, 70 years, we started having an influx of so many traditions and techniques and philosophies from India and Tibet and China and so forth. And that really helped nourish us because we had the need. I mean, some people who have followed traditional religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, for example, each of these have the so-called esoteric, mystical branches, which have also had methods to pursue these sorts of experiences and awakenings. But of course, the common person didn't have them. I grew up Catholic. I never heard of such a thing as meditation until my friend mentioned it. And I was what, 18 by then, 17? So fortunately, it's different now. There's so many methods. I would encourage people to find something that resonates with them because that sense of resonance and a match is important for them to then stick with it, adhere to it. With that said, then there's always expectations. Okay, I'm going to start this path and here's my goal. And that can be an issue too over time because there's no guarantees what, when these things happen. But the degree to which it enriches your personal life and experience every moment of the day, regardless of what that insight and experience is, that's the beginning. And that in itself is worth it without an attachment to exactly where it's ultimately going to head. That's so well said. So, explore what I heard from you was explore the myriad of practices that are out there. There's so many pathways, a fine one that resonates, but do so without attachment, right? That's key. We haven't talked about the attachment aversion cycle necessarily here, but that, no expectations. It's almost like a curiosity, a playful curiosity that we might take towards our practice, whatever practice it is that we choose and just say, let's explore where this takes me. And maybe exploring it with that sense of curiosity, allowing ourselves to feel joy through these practices, maybe that's a good starting point for people. I think so. And to keep in mind too, you're basically loving yourself by providing these opportunities. So there's that self love, self compassion. So to allow that to cultivate and just residing in the joy of that goes a long way. To appreciating our day-to-day experience, just loving, loving ourselves. And that expands to others eventually or maybe immediately. It's key. And I was just reminded of the mental practice that folks are often taught in the Vipassana and other traditions in the meditative traditions of the loving kindness meditations as they're often called. And one of the interesting things about that is when we start with that practice, we often start with bringing to mind someone or some being that we feel love for. And it's perhaps an interesting commentary on the world that often that's not usually us for most people. We usually think of it as someone else, but it's a good place to start because whether we feel that sort of love for, say, God or the divine or a particular deity or our spouse or a child or a pet, we can start with that experience of feeling that love for another and then bring that really, I would say, because I'm a biofielder, you can say I experienced things energetically and I teach this too. We can bring that experience of love really palpably in our body. And then in the mental meditation, for example, then once we cultivate that feeling of love and loving kindness, and we really feel it energetically in our body, then we have a stronger grounding, you can say in ourselves, right, to then expand that outward, expand it to ourselves if we haven't really felt that love directed within and then expand that even to someone that we don't even know very well, but we just touch upon that we feel like could use some love and maybe even someone that we're having difficulties with, but this is what I've learned from that type of practice is what's really a great place to start is to start where you are, where you feel love, start with that feeling, right? Would you agree? I fully agree and I'm appreciating why you're speaking about it. Just the insight that, you know, the love and the compassion and gratitude, these are all faculties we innately have in our very self. We could say our soul, we could say our mind, body. Regardless, these are attributes of our own being that we often don't actively work with, actively cultivate, but that's, again, as you're saying, the point of many forms of meditation, specifically the self-compassion, heart-centered meditation, it's to get this, start dialing that up and to reap the benefits of having that on board because it doesn't typically happen very naturally and we have to put some earnest effort into doing it and then the rewards absolutely, they come to us. Wow. So it's really what we've learned through our journeys together is that it's not always easy to conduct this work as a scientist, but, you know, Paul, like you, like me, there are many, many folks, many of them here on the summit, many of them part of the consciousness and healing initiative that pursue this remarriage, if you will, this reunification of our spiritual lives with our scientific lives because we recognize the power of our own spirit to heal, right? And I think we can take away from this conversation is not only is that happening, and yes, sometimes progress happens more slowly than we want in some of these systems, it is happening and we're evolving and we have the power to take what we know already through all of the great work that you've done that others have done to begin to cultivate this inner power within us and really perhaps a great fundamental place to start is through that experience of love because it takes us to this sense of non-separation which is so, so deeply healing for ourselves and for the planet. Beautiful, I don't know what else to say. That was lovely. I mean, that's what I got out of our conversation. I hope that others followed this thread as well because it's so important. I think that we've never been in a better place to recognize our own power as human healing agents despite anything that might be thrown our way, you know, in these coming years, positive and negative, it's all here within us. Our power to heal is really within us. Very, very much so. You know, I wanna add a comment that most of us, at least in the West, we're socialized to be more outwardly oriented. We're socialized to rely on other people to help us make decisions or find a place in the world. And there is some place for that, but really it's really up to us to make our lives the way we want them to be. And the things we're just discussing and you're summarizing, these are universal tools across numerous traditions, probably for millennia. And it's just a conscious decision, you know, I'm gonna engage in this. This sounds good. I'm gonna run with it and just have that be as a beginning and fold and let it take you where it can because all these techniques and all the things that begin to unfold in our consciousness, our soul life there, they take us to the next step, you know, they take us forward to have the life we want. So I would encourage everyone to take those steps. Oh, thank you for that. Thank you for those words of encouragement. It's all right here and whatever steps we take are the right steps. They take us toward our journey of coming back to ourselves. Thanks for spending this time with me and conversation. It's always such a pleasure to be with you and I'm so grateful that you're in my life and that we have this beautiful connection. And I'm so grateful to the SHIFT network for partnering with the consciousness and healing initiative to bring everyone's vital critical information for our times. Indeed, and thank you, Shamini. You've been such a gift in my life from the very beginning when we met when you started your doctoral work together and all these subsequent years getting to know you, your children, your parents, your in-law parents and the costs and everyone and all the work that you've done, launching Chi and nursering along all these years, really appreciative of you and all that you do. Thank you. And we're appreciative to you all who've come to join us in this conversation and be part of the summit with us. May you always ignite your own healing capacity and spread your light to others as well. Take care.