 Welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast. You know, this past year has brought with it incredible stress, uncertainty, and actually even tragedy. And in times like these, more than a few of us probably wish we could just think ourselves happy. Well, my guest today says we can. So in fact, he says that we all have the ability to rewire our brains to modify our health and achieve states of deep happiness. So boy do we need, you got to stay tuned, you got to listen because boy do we need this. So joining me today is Dr. Dawson Church, a research scientist founder of the National Institute for Integrative Healthcare and award-winning author of three best-selling books, including his newest release Bliss Brain, The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy. On today's episode, Dr. Church and I will discuss the science behind the brain's ability to radically change in response to spiritual experiences and share how you, yes you, can acquire deep states of happiness in just a matter of minutes and boy, Dawson, it is so great to have you on the program. We got to find out how to do this. It's a real pleasure to be here and I can't wait to share how quick and easy it is possible to get to those states. So you've been researching the brain and the effects of neuroplasticity for forty plus years and it turns out happy people actually have a vastly different biochemical and neurological profile than unhappy people. So can you explain this a bit more, I think this is a good jumping off spot. Well some ways in which people who are happy and unhappy have a different biological profile are really obvious. If I get stressed, if I get upset, if I have negative emotion, it's known to most people that hormones like adrenaline and cortisol will rise. At the same time what's not as well known is that hormones responsible for things like bone density and muscle mass like DHEA drop at the same time. So stress is producing these biological shifts in the body and around 2005 I began to reason that if it was producing changes in hormone levels then the underlying gene expression must be changing because those hormones are built out of genes and so I began to look experimentally in a series of studies first at the hormones and then looking at the genes below them and it turned out that people who were stressed had very different gene expression profiles from those who had discovered how to be relaxed. That then led to research into EEG research into neuroplasticity and then that led to brain states and then finally MRI research showing that structural changes happen in the brains of people who use their consciousness to shift into these states of joy and those structural changes make them resilient. So all of these downstream results occur in our biology as a result of our spirituality and our psychology. That's a lot for everyone to grasp. Let's go. I never said this would be easy. So tell me what the heck we've heard this term before but tell me what the heck is neuroplasticity? Do I have plastic in my brain or what is it? I do have nanoparticles of plastic in my brain sadly but that's not the subject today. But yeah the brain is neuroplastic and we didn't know this at first. For a long time, a century of neuroscience, most of the 20th century, we thought the brain grew and developed as the fetus grew and then the organism grew to adulthood. We had no idea but the brain was changing dynamically in adulthood and in fact Marion Diamond was the researcher who first showed this in the 1950s and she was female of course and she got a, she was a shut out of the male neuroscience establishment when she announced her findings and so when she announced that there were anatomical changes happening in the brain as a result of experience, I mean that was just a bombshell and then in the 1990s early 2000s Eric Candell won the Nobel Prize for showing not only are our brains changing in response to stimulation, they're changing really fast and in a landmark experiment he showed that if you pass a signal through a neural bundle over and over and over again for one hour, in one hour the number of synaptic connections in that neural bundle doubles. So we are literally reshaping our brains with every thought we think, every experience we have, every belief we hold, every time we meditate or calm ourselves, all of those things aren't just experiences that are mental, they're literally shaping our neural structures inside our brains. So how much of us is genetically hardwired? I'm an angry person, my father was an angry person, my whole family comes from angry people and it's my genes and I'm not talking about myself because I'm actually a happy person. But so how much can we impact this behavior or our mindset? Well if you'd asked a biologist or a physiologist that in 1950 they would have said pretty much 100% is genetically programmed, we haven't figured it all out yet but we know there was a theory of genetic determinism, you are your genes and Sir Francis Crick who won the Nobel Prize for discovering the double helix structure of DNA said that, he said everything you think of is you, your beliefs, your preferences, your musical ability, everything, it's all in your genes. Now as that theory has been eroded over the last 50 years the answer that most of those experts will give you is 15% of the genome is fixed. Like I have gray eyes, I have six foot five, those things are genetically programmed, I'm not about to shrink to four feet tall or get brown eyes, I mean those things, that's only 15% of the genome, the other 85% is engaged by experience or activities or other forms of onset influences. So epigenetics, that's the subject of my very first book, the gene in your genes is how we can really shift the process of gene expression by for example when we are stressed and having high cortisol and we feel jittery and we feel nervous and we feel tense, we can do things that calm us down very, very rapidly and I've done work now through my non-profit foundation with over 21,000 veterans over the last 12 years with PTSD and they will go from nightmares and flashbacks, one young veteran I worked for after he got back from Iraq, he had just terrible PTSD symptoms and they had to do with being a medic, dealing with body parts, blood, body fluids, I mean he just had, I want to describe the experiences he had because they would, they cause stress in the audience but he worked for example on cleaning the uniform of his best friend after his best friend got killed in combat and just the terrible tragedy of that and his first experience, his first description of that, his stress levels were sky high, 10 out of 10 for anxiety and stress, we did about half an hour's work with him using these advanced energy therapies and they were down to a zero and they stayed a zero when we retested him later on. So we've now found that people can rapidly change their gene expression, that those genes that were highly expressed and were triggering the production of all those stress hormones, within a few minutes of using the right techniques they come right down and we've now treated again over 21,000 veterans, seven randomized controlled trials and meta-analysis showing that these techniques really work and we can change our gene expression if we use the kinds of stress reduction techniques in my book, This Brain. Okay so in Bliss Brain you take us through quite a journey of how you used your research to overcome an incredibly traumatizing event that you went through, can you tell us all about that? Well I was due to write a book about post-traumatic stress and also post-traumatic growth because the research shows that if you look for example at veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, they all had the same terrible experiences, one third of them developed PTSD, two thirds don't, two thirds are resilient, a third of them develop PTSD, what's the difference? So I was due to write this book on post-traumatic growth and the publisher said to me, you know Dawson you must live through one of the California wildfires, tell your story. And so chapter one of this brain is about how on the night of October 9th 2017 my wife shook me awake and said Dawson something's really wrong. We lived in the foothills of northern California, Santa Rosa, California and I glanced out the window and I saw this glow on the horizon. I looked at the alarm clock that was blinking 12.45 a.m. A glow on the horizon at 12.45 a.m. is not a good thing in fire country so I sprinted out to my deck, looked at the adjoining hill and there's a wildfire cresting the hill and sweeping toward our home and I just yelled at her we're getting out of here right now and we just literally grabbed our phones threw out some clothes grabbed the car keys and sprinted out in this surreal world of there was this ash swirling around the winds were gusty after 70 miles an hour looked like a snowstorm of cinders and ash all around us and as we tore down our driveway we had this big property with an office building our home storage facilities all kinds of things as we tore down the long driveway my wife felt this heat on her head and she looked up through the moonroof of the car and all the branches of the trees above her were on fire so we narrowly escaped getting killed 5400 homes 5400 homes were destroyed that night in this massive fast-moving wildfire 22 people were killed in the wildfire and we were totally disoriented as we were displaced and trying to figure out what to do with our lives after that so in chapter one I tell the story of the fire the night of the fire and the next year after that because suddenly I wasn't just teaching PTSD techniques to therapists and helping them help their clients recover I suddenly was dealing with symptoms myself and so we had to apply meditation acupressure all the energy techniques we use to train professionals in to use with traumatized clients we were using them intensely ourselves and they just worked I mean with it just a few days 48 hours off the fire we were having it shipped in perspective we were coming back into ourselves and realizing that we were alive and gratitude began to be our predominant emotion rather than fear and stress so we had a chance to do a naturalistic experiment in our own marriage and live out those techniques gosh I wish I had met you you know almost three years ago now when we had a similar situation we lost our home in Montecito to the mudslide that followed the fires here in Southern California and I actually my wife was in Palm Springs that night and I left I had a premonition we that I was going to stay over because I have a clinic there and I loaded the dogs in the car at about midnight and I called my wife I said you know I think I'm coming home to Palm Springs tonight and she said no what I said I just want to get home and two hours later the mudslide you know tore our home to shreds and killed our neighbor and 25 people in our area were killed with that and you know it's in all of all of our family heirlooms all the pictures of our parents everything like you was gone we have we have nothing left but you're right I'm an opt I'm one of these crazy happy people and an optimist and I we weren't able to get back to our home to even see it for months it was all cordoned off and there was a Google that showed the roof line and the roof it was the roof was standing and I kept telling my wife it's going to be fine you know everybody else's home is wiped off look there's our home and I said it's fine and of course we finally got back in and what was not fine was there was six feet of mud of course inside the house and everything destroyed but I guess my optimism for two months at least kept me going and so all right enough of our terrible tragedies and we're smiling through it so but you want to be one of those people who is resilient who can smile maybe not you know you aren't brushing it away you aren't unaffected by it emotionally you are but you have those tools you want to be one of those two-thirds of people who not only I mean but that word post-traumatic growth means not only do they cope not only are they resilient it often that tragedy and that negative experience often is the fuel for personal transformation so you want to be one of those two-thirds of people that is able to use even the you know the the adverse experiences getting sick getting divorced going bankrupt housing crash whatever it might be these things affect us all and you want to be one of those two-thirds of people who's able to not just cope but then move through and use those tragedies for post-traumatic growth okay so I mean the technique that you know you and your wife used to get through this had to be simply more than closing your eyes and attempting to relax and take a break breath and say oh so help our listeners and viewers what techniques did you use and why is this so effective well you have to use certain techniques that are effective and when I was writing bliss brain I was focused on really combing through the neuroscience to see what really was effective in terms of meditation and what I learned very quickly was that meditation is a generic term it's like sport and not all sport is equal if you're doing extreme skiing very very different from say being on a treadmill and you want to use meditation methods that are effective and so I looked through over 400 studies and I found that certain things really shifted the brain's function quickly and it wasn't the prayer beads it wasn't the saffron robes it wasn't the spiritual beliefs and I'm not knocking spiritual beliefs but it turns out there are certain things that trigger quick neural plasticity and so you want to find techniques that will very quickly shift your brain and I know I got that instruction you mentioned earlier when I first joined the spiritual community at the age of 15 and I was a really unhappy person back then I was depressed I was anxious I had a pretty rough childhood I had all the symptoms of PTSD I had constant nightmares every night and I looked at my face once at the age of 15 in a mirror and the words flashed into my mind that's the most unhappy face I've ever seen I realized I had to do something to improve so I went into spiritual community started learning psychology all five try to find these leverage points and meditation master said just like you mentioned earlier close your eyes and still your mind and that didn't work for me at all and it doesn't work for most people who try meditation you close your eyes what happens is when your eyes are closed the flood of information coming from your eyes to your brain shuts off and a part of the brain called the default mode network kicks in I had to vote a whole chapter of this brain chapter 2 to the Swinomin and the default mode network is the part of the brain that fires up when you aren't doing anything so when you aren't doing a task then the default mode network is highly active and it has two nodes what is the mid prefrontal cortex right over here behind your forehead the other is the posterior singlet cortex in the back of your brain and these two nodes are responsible for constructing your sense of self and so when those are active you're very self-referential and you're thinking you're very self-absorbed it's all about me mine and especially threats to me from yesterday and possible threats to me from tomorrow so we are in the present moment we're thinking about the past up in our lives we're thinking about the future threats future problems might have and that's what the default mode network does and so people who try to meditate close their eyes default mode network comes on and suddenly they're just obsessed with the problems of the past and worries about the future and it doesn't work and people try meditation and then quit so you have to learn to meditate in the way that meditation adapts to and now there's all this research on Tibetan monks who spent more than 10,000 hours in meditation Franciscan nuns who spent more than 25,000 hours in contemplative prayer and these elevated emotional states and these people's brain function is remarkable they shut down that default mode network and parts of the brain like the insula which governs compassion the insula is a center of pro-social activities and has special neurons in highly social species that are very active and allows empathy and concern, love for other people those parts of the brain that these adepts like those nuns like those monks turn on and so now these people have really different brain functions and the brainwave of happiness jama is the highest brainwave that wave is highly active in these meditation experts and so when we meditate effectively and turn on those brain centers the empathy network the attention network we shut down the default mode network and we have sense of compassion if you do all of those things then you start to as those Tibetan monks as those Franciscan nuns and your happiness level shut down that those monks have 25 times the amount of jama that the average person has I mean they're so blissful in my book Bliss Brain I have like a painting of Saint Francis of Assisi in ecstasy and he's just totally paused out totally stoned in ecstasy I mean these are really powerful states described by Ramakrishna and Rumi and Haftiz and the other Sufi poets that are described throughout history by mystics and so if he makes you're able to reach those states and that then triggers neuroplasticity in all the happiness centers of the brain and you become not just in a happy state you literally grow the neurons that put you into a happy trait so you now turn the state into a trait and you are just a fundamentally happy person and that's when you become resilient wow so now wait a minute so when I close my eyes and try to meditate you know I get my typical monkey brain like and I just you know I give up so I have other ways to do it actually believe it or not when I practice heart surgery that's when I meditate it and we actually had me another surgeon wired up and I get into gamma waves and all sorts of fun stuff but okay so the person listening to you how can a meditation newbie get into bliss brain I mean it sounds like okay I just flip the switch and now I got my bliss brain going Well I just want to back up there for a second to your state of doing surgery and being in that space and what you are is you're in a state of flow and flow is a high performance state some people get there through their work you watch a jazz saxophonist playing a long riff and if you hook that person up to an EEG you'd find they had lots of gamma because they're in flow super athletes are in flow scientists are in flow when they're making a discovery all of us have experienced flow often in nature we've had these elevated experiences and so there are two ways into flow one is performance, high performance the second way is meditation and so what we found in meditation studies is that you have to do something to anchor yourself in the body trying to do it in the mind is usually futile and counterproductive you can't think yourself out of stress I mean all of us have this experience of thinking ourselves trying to think ourselves out of stress we have a presentation we have to make them nervous we say don't be nervous and it doesn't work we can't talk ourselves out of anxiety depression and PTSD so what you need is you need something that anchors you in your body there's a famous psychiatrist after World War II who was working with stressed out World War II veterans and he looked for something that would help them relax he was a Freudian and he tried the he tried the talking cure and they would lay there on the couch and describe landing on Omaha Beach and what he wrote about later in his career he's a very famous guy in the 50s Joseph Walpe he said those types of techniques are not ineffective they're harmful and we now know what is going on in that kind of a brain you're reawakening all the neurobiology of stress and we now have a term for it we now know that it's re-traumatizing you to talk about that old stuff so what Walpe found was that one thing helped one thing helped those veterans drop in a stress level and that was staying in their bodies and doing deep breathing while they were called to trauma and that's counter-conditioning so we're conditioned to have these stressful responses what you have to learn to do is counter-condition them and this is the whole new field in psychology called memory reconciliation and extinction you're literally extinguished in fear response so you're still thinking like that young soldier who served in Iraq who was cleaning the uniform of his friend who died in combat and he described this scene in great detail about how it smells so bad he'd have to run outside the hut and take a deep breath of air and then run back inside and dip the uniform in disinfectant and run back outside and gulp the air again I mean all of these things but now as he was counter-conditioning that experience eventually a couple of days later he was telling the whole experience without emotion so you have the memory but you no longer have the emotion and that's what you do so in those flow states you are now providing a neutral and a positive Q context for trauma and if you can keep yourself in your body like Joseph Walthing's World War II veterans by breathing we also use acupressure that's what we use in my veteran stress project we use acupressure techniques of tapping on acupuncture points meridians to calm yourself down and you see people's stress levels just drop dramatically you see the limbic system of the brain just turn off so before they were stressed the limbic system their hippocampus their amygdala is very active now it just shuts off when they tap when they do diaphragmatic breathing when they do any of these stress reduction techniques and so you have to learn to do something that's body-based mentally try to talk yourself out of stress very rarely works stress is not a mental phenomenon it's not in your prefrontal cortex it's in your limbic system and your hindbrain it's in your amygdala it's in your hippocampus it's in your thalamus it's in all these midbrain structures to do with emotion it's fear and you can't tell yourself not to be afraid that you can tap yourself and you can breathe and you can meditate and if you use those techniques then these non-cognitive these somatic techniques are able to very very very quickly calm people down counter condition that old memory and then the person later on when they think of the memory remembers the details without the stress without the fear so in your book you talk a lot about tapping my good friend Joseph McCola has been into tapping for many years you're not saying I should bang my head against a wall that's not tapping described to our viewers and listeners tapping on an acupressure point let's get real basic and simple so there are 12 meridians in the body through which energy flows ancient Chinese texts show them parchment show them these lines of force with little dots on them where the meridians are at the surface and so they look to me when I first looked at acupuncture 20 years ago like this old oriental system of energy flows look pretty metaphysical and non-western but now that we have equipment like with a galvanometer we can measure the charge on the skin and it turns out I had these galvanometers I used in my live workshops we literally put a galvanometer on a person's skin run it over their skin and it starts beeping right at the point where those old 2000 old Chinese charts say the point is and these points are very, very small we can now measure them though scientifically so what do you have to you don't use acupuncture we don't use needles to put in those points we use tapping it's something tapping like I'm doing right now very lightly on these points again we use 12 of them and we tap on the end points of those 12 meridians and this balances out the body's energies if we say for example have somebody in an MRI or an EEG we'll see that when they think about a fear their midbrain their limbic system their emotional brain is highly active if they then tap tapping is a counter-commissioning stimulus that again is is somatically based like those World War II veterans using diabetic breathing they stay in their body if a person thinks about a trauma and doesn't have a way of staying in their body they dissociate they go into their mind they have what my psychologist friend at Jerry Wesh at Fort Hood where I did grand rounds said they go into this 1000 yard stare they're not in their bodies you have to keep them in their bodies and EFT tapping and any kind of somatic stimulation does that EFT though does it really fast and there are now over 100 studies of EFT showing it's very rapid so again it's thinking about the bad stuff while you tap the 12 points and what that does is it shuts down the fear part of the brain so you remember the event but minus that emotional tag of stress and fear so how long does someone have to practice these techniques to begin triggering neurologic changes astonishingly small amounts of time in this brain I talk about one study that showed that people in one experiment doing 12 minutes of a really effective meditation per day for 8 weeks already had neurological changes in their brains and I did a study recently not published yet that MRI study randomized controlled trial a fairly large group of people and we had them do either this body based meditation I developed called eco meditation or we had them do placebo meditation and it was the same as eco meditation but minus the body based components of eco meditation and we found that in only 4 weeks 22 minutes a day they were having structural changes in the brain their default mode network literally shut down it's like you look at the MRI wow this is amazing and if you looked at that MRI showed it to one neuroscientist not telling him what it was he said oh these are clearly Tibetan monks who've done 10,000 dollars of meditation and I said no they're volunteers just who came into the lab off the streets with no meditation experience most of them failed meditators some of them and they did this in only a month 20 minutes a day long retreat no going to the Himalayas no living in the monastery none of that they just did this for a short period of time so that's the answer in only a month just one month you start to show structural changes in your brain you literally I mean get this we're literally changing the anatomy of our brains with the software of our minds it is just astonishing that we have this superpower to do this hmm you know I've written about this in the longevity paradox and I want to just bring it back what do you think the effect of our gut microbiome and the gut microbiome gut brain access plays in any of this for instance we know that meditators dramatically change their gut microbiome for the better have much more diversity is there what's your experience with meditation and the gut I think that people need a holistic approach and I actually caution people I do a lot of training professionals and lay people and often they get really enthusiastic about one modality and that's fine I mean there are lots of great modalities out there but I caution them against going overboard on any one of those things so yeah we need all of those interventions and a balanced holistic approach use all of them and the remarkable thing is that like watching in one study the researchers had people tapping and they measured their gene expression and they found that 72 genes were upregulated by one hour of tapping and these were all kinds of cool genes these were metabolic genes these were cancer suppression genes these were genes that repair the axon genes and neurons all kinds of highly useful things going on just in one hour of this so what I recommend people do is they experiment with different energy techniques and then do all of the nutritional things as well and that way you get the best of all possible worlds so does that mean an hour of continuous tapping do I have to sit here like this for the next hour or can I break it up? normally tapping is used situationally you're getting into heavy traffic and you're getting nervous you tap you have a presentation coming up and you're feeling anxiety about that you tap you think about a past insult you tap you think about a childhood memory you taps and tapping takes about two minutes to do that particular study was people working with a highly skilled therapist who was leading them through dealing with childhood trauma so she was having them tap for that hour thinking about events of their childhood the beating the rape the bullying the panic attack all of those childhood events and really doing a thorough one hour therapy session with them before and after measurements of their genome so you either work with a therapist or you do it situationally to reduce your own stress with your book can somebody read and follow your book and not have to find a class and a therapist to get them through this? I assume that's why you wrote the book yes and no both and because we all have things that we can tap away really quickly like for example there have been four studies of performance anxiety and EFT and usually in a very brief treatment around 15 minutes people lose their performance anxiety in one sports performance study I did with Oregon State University athletes it took only 15 minutes and their free throw performance improved by 38% so that's situational it's super quick you can do it yourself but if you're suffering from a recurring relationship pattern where you get emotionally triggered in relationships and then damage your relationships by what you do if you are dealing with say for example obesity or overeating or emotional eating or binge eating and you haven't been able to help yourself you're far better off going to a therapist who's learned clinical EFT and working with that person rather than stumbling around and trying to fix it yourself so for simple situational things tap yourself like a Fort Hood the therapist there taught the veterans EFT their very first session because they knew between sessions the veterans would have flashbacks and nightmares and would need to use EFT but then they used it in the therapy sessions as well going really deep if you're traumatized you don't want to go there without professional help without a therapist you need a trained person to deal with early childhood trauma otherwise the possibility of an ab reaction of emotional flooding is too great and you can re-traumatize yourself as well so little things tap on yourself big things work with a professional okay so let's say that we're one of the people who did not have childhood trauma at least that we're aware of and we're a fine happy person where do these techniques will this help improve creativity will it help productivity or is it just for people who really need to get out of a hole one of the things I enjoy is when I have an argument with my scientific colleagues and I get proven wrong which happens fairly often I'm so hypothesis we'll test it experimentally and I'll be wrong and I was totally wrong about that I used to think that people who meditated were selfish like these people on the Himalayas going into caves and monasteries disappearing into Nirvana having those huge increases in gamma having all this ecstasy and then how's that helping climate change how's that helping the refugee problem how's that helping species extinction how's that helping any of the world's problems and it turns out so I was like pretty dismissive 20 30 years ago of those ecstasy seekers those new ages who were just like you know either the traditional spirituality or new age spirituality just doing spiritual bypassing going up into Samadhi or Nirvana and then how's that helping the veterans I mean we know here in the US we have like a million veterans with PTSD and that to me is what we need to be working on amongst many other social problems so I used to be one of those people who said ah you know those meditators what we now show and in this frame I talk about this in one chapter is that those flow states that you achieve meditation make us more productive more creative and give us greater problem-solving ability and the degree in which that's true is astonishing Teresa Amadele a researcher at Harvard she found in her lab that you go to that state for an hour you're more productive for 48 hours after that another study ten years study by McKinsey consulting group found that people who enter these states they are five times as productive as when they start in those states so in other words they're accomplishing in one day what normally takes them five days to accomplish a third study that there are several others like this by DARPA the defense advanced research agency found that people who enter these states have a 490% increase in their ability to solve complicated problems whether that's diagnosing a patient in your case whether that is doing an operation in your in your case whether that is looking at solutions for the 29% drop in the bird population that we've now measured recently in studies whether it's looking for a solution to artificial intelligence warfare and counter warfare I mean there were all these profound problems we have to face as a species and if we are five times as productive if our problem-solving ability has gone up by 490% like in that DARPA study when we go to work and we volunteer for a non-profit when we spend time with our family when we work with people in our jobs or in our workplace or virtually we're far far far more productive than we otherwise would be so it turns out the biggest leverage for working effectively and productively in the world out there is getting into these flow states mentally in the world inside here you got one quick tip on how to get into this deep bliss state at home or we got to read the book we read the book and the book also comes with 8 free meditations and so when you get the book which you can get free at www.thesprayin.com you also get 8 meditations and those 8 meditations put you into that state and they're each about 20 minutes long and we find that's kind of the sweet spot meditating for 5-10 minutes is okay but if you can do a deep meditation and spend 20 minutes there like in those 8 free meditations we have in the book that's when you trigger that neurobiological change in 4 weeks and the crucial thing is there you've then built enough neural capacity you've done enough neural firing to kick start the wiring process and people tell me we can't prove this experimentally yet but they tell me when they start to do this that they feel their brain changing and it's quite common people point to their prefrontal cortex and say I feel something happening here they'll point to their temporal parietal junction and they say I feel something going on inside my head over here and what that is possibly is the stimulation of those parts of the brain so you will begin to feel different often the very first time we had one woman called Tony Tombles and her wrote in and said I've tried other meditation techniques I tried a whole slew of them and I so failed at them when I first sat down to do your meditation I thought Tony it's a waste of time you'll fail too and then she said you have 7 steps you teach when I hit step 3 tears of bliss began to flow down my cheeks and I knew I was there at last and then she said I'm going to do this meditation every single day we find people are doing it every single day because it feels so good and it changes in your body from the very first time so we don't have to do a really hard sell on this we just have people do it once and twice and they'll start to feel so much better that will encourage them to do it again and again speaking of hard sell this year has been collectively probably one of the hardest years that anyone could have imagined predicted not wished for is it all the more important to try and get into this bliss state now or is it even harder now to get into this bliss state because of everything that's happened what we're doing is counseling people that are in this community in our community and meditators of TAPRS is to really ratchet up their level of compassion because if you're a meditator and you're in this bliss every day like after the election I had the day after I so wanted to turn on my TV and check the news before meditation that day normally I never think of doing that but that one day I got a look and I thought you know the news will be there for me in an hour I'm going to meditate first and then you meditate and become really calm but what you can side effect of that can be being really disconnected from those around you so you're walking around super happy nothing phases you and then are you relating to other people effectively so we train people to really listen deeply feel the pain of the world be compassionate do active listening listen to the people in your community feel their their emotions their pain and then become an influence for upliftment by just first of all connecting with them and then being yourself and sharing who you are and you don't have to do it overtly just being in that state, you being in that state will let everyone else up I've been on some Zoom calls with literally hundreds of people at the same time and you watch them and we have them post all of their worst fears in the Zoom chat room and they're saying I'm afraid I'm going to die in my apartment I'm going to find my body for two weeks I'm afraid my 95 year old mother's going to die I'm afraid my 10 year old son will get the virus there's so much fear going around there we sit, we breathe we enter compassion with the people around us we really are in that emotional space with them and then as we are who we are we find that we're able to really lighten the load at the end of those Zoom calls everyone's laughing, everyone's happy we start out like that you're just totally disconnected from the outside world so if you have a spiritual practice if you are using these techniques and attaining bliss frame it becomes even more important to really sit compassionately and lovingly and connectedly with the suffering of the world and the people around you and not just be this kind of disconnected, disembodied being out there that's not an effective way of being in the world or to do both I would think that if you learn to quiet your brain you're far more receptive to being able to listen and receive from others you are and this is a phenomenon called emotional contagion that's been studied extensively in the framing of heart study for three generations of people and the happy person the centered person the autistic person exerts an influence on the people around them and in the framing of heart study if you're happy your neighbor is 35% more likely to be happy and her neighbor who you don't even know is 15% more likely to be happy and his neighbor who you certainly don't know is 6% more likely to be happy happiness is highly contagious and in one Facebook study they tweet their Facebook feeds and that small group produced emotional contagion in 680,000 other Facebook users in one week so we are affecting people all around us all the time and the best thing you can do is love, accept and take care of your own well-being if that is contagious to those around you so any final thoughts on how you're going to make happiness contagious in this contagious pandemic? well for one thing I'm ratcheting up all of our efforts I put out a free immunity meditation that's been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times I was teaching a class in China in December 2019 when the first virus cases began I realized something was really wrong and so a month later I made a community meditation for the people in China which has been shared tens of thousands of times that's been translated into I think like 15 other languages now it's reached huge numbers of people so I'm doing that that have an impact we also looked at the results of research we did a few years back we found that as cortisol drops your levels of immunoglobulin antibodies which is your first line of defense against viruses rises dramatically in one EFT study people tapping at an intensive workshop for a week their levels of those antibodies rose by 113% and that result was highly statistically significant so we now have research showing that as you lower your stress those things rise and we're doing tons of free programs like the free giveaway of the book BlizzFrain free giveaway of the immunity meditation and we're doing paid courses as well where people pay us to go to a workshop or take a course but we're just really passionate about getting this to millions of people because we've seen the effects on those 21,000 veterans and their spouses and their families we know the stuff works and really all the suffering that is otherwise embedded in their psychies depressing their immune systems driving their cortisol high we know it's treatable and so we're just a big mission to get the word out there with the free meditation the free immunity workshop meditation free book we just want the world to know the stuff is out there and so we're doing our best to spread the joy well doctor church that's fan that's great I'm glad you came on the show how do people find you where do they go because this is a incredibly important service you're doing right now thank you I so appreciate and I appreciate you sharing with your community and that immunity that immunity meditation is at a website called Dawson just my name d-a-w-s-o-n DawsonGift g-i-r-t dot com and so if you want to boost your immunity that meditation is there and then the book is at blissfrain dot com shipping and handling and that linked blissfrain dot com is also on DawsonGift dot com so again get the immunity meditation get the book get the free meditations and then use those feel the changes in your body and that's what we recommend people do and for everybody watching and listening let's be careful out there but let's be happy and we're going to make that the latest pandemic the pandemic of happiness I love it why not I mean come on it's got to beat this one alright thanks very much for coming on the program good luck with it it's time for our audience question Jen Compton asks when exposing ourselves to the sun how much of our body do we need to expose to get adequate amounts of vitamin D in a 30 minute period and does it matter what time of day well I actually talk a lot about sun exposure and vitamin D and the other principal benefits of sun exposure in the upcoming energy paradox but unless you're my friend Joseph who walks in a speedo an hour and a half to two hours a day on the beach in Fort Lauderdale every day it's and he can get his vitamin D level up to about 50 to 60 in nanograms per a deciliter but unless you're doing that you really quite frankly are never going to get enough vitamin D in my opinion from sun exposure alone so please please please do not be afraid of vitamin D supplementation there are now six separate studies in humans showing that a low vitamin D level is inviting COVID-19 and worse complications if you get it whereas a high vitamin D level is very preventative of getting COVID-19 and if you get it it's going to act like it happened in fact this week one of my snowbirds came back to Palm Springs she's 88 years old she caught COVID-19 back in March and for her she sees me her husband doesn't we've kept her vitamin D levels at around 100 in fact her vitamin D level when I saw her this week was 113 her symptoms lasted 48 hours she said it was just kind of a mile cold her husband got it simultaneously he ended up in intensive care for 45 days had blood clots in his lungs the experience was totally different for the two of them so that's really a brand new recent example please, please, please take your vitamin D supplementation if you're an adult kind of bare minimum is 5000 of D3 a day and I have never seen vitamin D toxicity yet in 20 years Dr. Mark Hyman hasn't seen it yet so please take your vitamin D you'll really help protect yours alright, that's it for the Dr. Gundry podcast we'll see you next week because I'm Dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you before you go I just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes Google Play, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts because I'm Dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you