An Unparalleled Model of Mind Body Medicine for Health and Healing

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

Thank you, thank you so much for having me again.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Yes, and welcome back. So in our last interview, we touched on your new book, ‘The Survival Paradox’. Can you give listeners an overview of what ‘The Survival Paradox’ is and specifically the survival paradox protein?

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

Yeah, of course. So ‘The Survival Paradox’ really, the book, it offers a new paradigm, the paradigm shift of how we look at health and disease. We all are familiar with the idea, integrated medicine, for many years, and now western medicine, much more with the C0V!D cytokine storm, that inflammation drives every chronic disease, also acute diseases. But inflammation really is an expression. Inflammation is not the cause. What drives inflammation, what drives the degenerative process is a survival paradox. And what do I mean? Why is this such a fundamental power doctrine really is a journey of our life, because we as people, as with being our societies, our communities, every organ in our body, every cell in our body is programmed innately to survive. We are built to survive. That’s what we do as people. That’s what our ego, that protects us. That’s what drives us. And because it’s innate in us, it has to be automated. 

We can’t think about it, it’s immediate. And we do it with the autonomic nervous system, with a sympathetic system. So, when the body feels in danger to its survival, it responds, respond by fighting, which equates to inflammation, struggle, or by flight, by hiding, by running away, creating isolation, creating fibrosis, and both drivers of inflammation and fibrosis is expression of the survival response, is actually what shortens our life, what really degrades the quality of our life, and drives every chronic disease. And so when we understand this, we understand it’s very immediate through this, through the autonomic nervous system. But we take a deep breath, we relax, we listen to music, we meditate, we can move to parasympathetic place, and the system will calm down. And of course, if we, all the time in a sympathetic flow, we are not able to go back into a parasympathetic flow. 

But within minutes, start the biochemical survival response by utilizing compounds called alarmins. And the key one that I’ve been researching for almost 30 years, it has about 10,000 published papers, is a protein called galectin-3. And galectin-3 serves as a bus, is a detector that finds, oh my God, there is a struggle in the kidneys. It immediately gets expressed by the immune system, by macrophage, it drives to the kidneys, it binds to itself inflammatory compound, hyperviscosity compound, gross compound. It creates a pentamer, the pentamer, attached to each other and it creates a shield, a micro-environment, where oxygen doesn’t get, where a body doesn’t function normally. And this is what happened in the body. And the simple example of survival in our body. We are made out of, you know, tens of trillions of cells and I’ll get to it later when we talk about the heart. And each cell in the body is a part of a community. It knows it has a role and at some point it’s gonna let go and another cell will come. But when the cell goes into a survivor mode and decide it’s not gonna die, it wants to live forever, it creates its own environment. It doesn’t listen to the body and how do we call this cell? A cancer cell. So cancer is a great example of an inappropriate survivor respondent. Eventually kills the host and kills the cancer. So, when I recognize this and in my own journey, I address it on a mind-body role that we’re gonna talk today. 

And I also was the person who developed the first galectin-3 blocker, modified citrus pectin, and when you look at modified citrus pectin, you will see, wow, it has 80 published papers that relate to kidney, to heart, to brain health, to narrow inflammation, to oncology. How is it possible? Because it addresses an upstream early, early cause that later on will drive the cytokine storm that will drive inflammation. So in medicine, including integrative medicine, we are focusing on attenuating the inflammation. But as we know it’s too late. When you address galectin-3, when you address the survival paradox, you’re going to the top of the waterfall. Instead of catching the water at the bottom, you are shutting down the water at the top. And that’s really the power of this concept. And that’s why it gives us a door for profound healing on a very simple level, biochemical level using modified citrus pectin and more research I’m doing now with some large in age grant on removal of galectin-3 through apheresis and on a spiritual, emotional, psycho-spiritual, physiological level, shifting from a reactive survival mode to a place of balance, of harmony. And we’ll talk about, and that’s really the topic of today.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Love it, so in that you share some unique and highly compelling stories in your book about the role of meditation and mind-body medicine and including what you call the catch-22 of positive thinking. Will you elaborate on that paradox in light of perhaps this is the turning the water off at the top of the waterfall?

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

Yeah, we’ll talk about meditation in detail, but the idea of the catch-22 of positive thinking is very important. And because before we try to change something, before we try to heal ourself, we have to be true with ourself of where we are. And some of us are happy and feel great, and some of us have a tendency to feel miserable or have problems and feel depressed and feel sad each person wherever they are. And so the first thing is to be honest with ourself. What’s going on with us? If we’re not honest with ourselves, we don’t have a chance. So there are different level of honesty. We can behave physically in a nice way. You can have people who teach meditations, they will dress in white with the long hair and look all peaceful. You see them as patient, oh my God, if you just knew what’s going in their mind many times, or you have people who speak very eyes and calm, you can bluff your physical behavior. 

You can bluff what you speak. But you can’t bluff what’s going on in your mind. So we have to be honest with what’s going on inside of us. And the idea is to have no gap between what’s inside and what is outside. And in Chinese medicine, for example, for the one interested, and I know you are, this is important of the channels. The channels in Chinese medicine connect our organs, the depth of our truth with the surface, right? We put the needles on the surface. So in Chinese medicine we say people think, oh, when the organs are not working well, it’s the end of the story. No, no, in Chinese medicine, when the channels are not working well, it’s the end of the story because you can’t create a shift. I’m kind of a little bit touching the bioenergetics for this sense. So in this sense, we have to be honest with ourselves. 

So when this is a starting point, we then go to the next level. How deep in our being are we? Are we functioning at a hundred percent of our being? Practically never exist. Are we functioning at 10% of our being? Most people function it less, at one or 2%. So even if you are honest with yourself, you’re honest with yourself at one and 2%. And you can see people that have complexity for different parts of life and their personalities and reaction will change very quickly, right? Like they’re accessing different depths of their being at different times and creating a little bit of a soup out of it, you know? So the first thing is how honest our with ourself and what happened with the catch-22 of positive thinking and you see it a lot with cancer patients, you say, oh, I really believe I’m going to heal. I have no doubt about it. And really what it is, it’s and why are they saying it some and many times? Because their family want them to think positive.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Sure.

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

Like it’s a crime to think negative. But what if that’s what you feel, right? So what happened very often, it’s a lot of negative thinking covered by a very thin layer of positive thinking, is very easy to shake. And what it create, it create a disgenuine way of living where what you’re putting out is very different from how you feel inside. And that’s a recipe for health disaster. Because as you think and you’re pretending everything is okay, you are disconnecting from your inner processes, which is affected by our physiology, our traumas, our genetics, our epigenetics, and the different survival driven thing that have changed our health and our being. And that’s the beauty of understanding it, is the more we connect deep, the better we can heal ourselves. Now this is profound implications in meditation. In meditation, we are naturally, we have a tendency and a little bit jumping. It’s not, but it’s, I’m getting excited.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

That’s good’s, go with it.

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

You know, in meditation, we are very much attached to experiences, you know, and because we are touched, period, we grasp to reality. I mean, usually I don’t talk about it. In the end of ‘The Survival Paradox’, which introduces it, talks about the biochemistry, then goes over, every disease and main disease and condition and then offer solutions. I talk about the issue, the solution of the survival paradox is to let go of our grasping. Because what is grasping? Grasping is holding to something which is actually changing. Everything changes. You and me are not the same now, like 10 minutes ago you heard new things, I said new things. Our chemistry change. Some cells just gave up. Some new cells were just created. We’re different, but we like to fixate, all of us. That’s part of ego clinging. That’s the driver of survival. So the healing journey is letting go of our holding, letting go of our fixation, letting go by creating space and letting go by melting the fixation. I’ll talk a little bit about it. So what happens is that as we start to meditate, we have experiences. 

Now, if people have awful experiences, like they feel restless and knowing their pain in the body, it’s actually easier to let go of them, right? Because you don’t wanna hold to them. When people have amazing experience, they see light and colors and beings and feel elated, wow. We really get attached to it. We want to hold to the experience. And what you see is the meditation is people start having a great experience and they start holding to it and holding to it, you know? And suddenly they feel, oh my God, I meditated, then I got this headache. So strange, you know? Well, you were holding to your experience. So when we go into our body and the certain experience comes, we just let go of whatever comes. Meditation is really accepting whatever comes up. And then slowly, slowly, deeper layers will come, will peel off, and we get in, we get in touch with the deeper parts of our beings. That’s what I mean, we go deeper into our being. If we accept everything that comes, it naturally lends itself to honesty because we are accepting, we’re not judging. Everything that comes is okay. And the gap between positive thinking and negative thinking starts to melt away.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

So what does one do with that? Like, I mean, ’cause that is a paradox and a trap that a lot of folks get stuck in is that positive thinking. There is a component of wanting your belief system, or at least allowing for the possibility for a miracle cure or spontaneous remission.

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

Absolutely.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

And, but to be in that integrity of your being and yourself of, you know, it’s being, I think you’re saying just be brutally honest of like, no, this is up. Like you can have discomfort, you could have suffering. It just, you have the choice whether you stay there or not. Is that what you’re saying with that?

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

Exactly what you said is beautiful. It’s true. There’s nothing wrong about being a, having a positive attitude is great. I’m like an eternal, optimistic person. You know, I’m, people know me, Yeah, people say “Isaac, you know, we know you, you always think it’s gonna work out”, that’s fine. But one of the reasons why I think that everything can work out is because everything is changeable. You can be optimistic from the point of view of realizing that since everything is changeable and everything is impermanent, So it’s an absolute true. Now, in Buddhism, we talk about the concept of emptiness. That our reality is empty of true permanent nature, which means it always changes. That’s an absolute scientific truth, right? That’s quantum physics, right? Time and space, it changes. It has nothing to do with belief system. 

So when we realize that everything is possible, when everything is changeable, then one of my favorite saying is, not everyone will be a miracle, but anyone can be a miracle. And why? Because everything is changeable Every second, we have a choice and it’s great. I don’t want people to think that I’m not for positive thinking. Of course I am, it’s profound. But for example, if you broadcast a positive field, let’s say right now I’m like sending it. Where do I feel it in my body? Is it coming just from here? Do I feel it just in my throat? Do I feel it in my cells in the first layer? Can I feel it at the taps of my heart? So when I say it, every cell of my body is getting this energy. When we get to place anything and everything is possible. And so that’s the idea. So the catch-22 is like one paragraph in a 200 page book. And for some reason, people who design on my interview decided, Isaac, you wanna talk about. We like this point.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

This is it, but yeah.

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

The idea that I’m saying right now is the reason why I teach meditation and healing. I mean, there are great meditation masters in order that have spent decades. There are many people who teach meditation because they’re an amazing experience, which is an innate flow because they equate the meditation with a certain experience. That’s always a flow. You know, like I, was drawn to meditation, usually I don’t talk about, from a very early age, 14 years old. But I wasn’t drawn to it because I had a traumatic life. I had a great childhood. My father was in civil engineer. We traveled all over the world, you know, born in Israel and I grew up in Africa and Brazil, in Korea. I practiced at taekwondo as a national Korean taekwondo team. I was very fortunate, but I was always drawn. I knew there was a bigger reality. And then when I got together, this was like late eighties with very like, serious Buddhist practitioners. And we started talking, and then most of them came because they had traumas. They were trying to find a solution. It wasn’t my journey, you know, I didn’t come because I had a trauma. I came because I had a knowing that there is something bigger, you know? 

So you’re not trying to look at it from a point of solution. And this has been my journey, and I was fortunate to be to study and to be the doctor of some of the most legendary meditation masters in the Himalaya. Only one of them is still alive now at 95. And so I got to get one on one teaching from, really from the people, really the legend. And in the same time they told me, you know, Isaac, you in the future are going to connect meditation with healing. I said, what are they talking about? I mean, sure is highly guy. I mean, but anyway, they had some insight. And the reason is what’s interest me, the reason why I talk on these talks is that what I’ve done through these decades and decades of practice, I mean, I’ve spent 20 years, two to three months a year in the mountains, 10 years, half day retreat. Like, and one day full retreat for 10 years, 6:00 AM to noon. And one night I would sleep in the forest. We have a cabin. And so I spent, no, tens of thousands of hours. I paid my dues, you know?

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Yeah.

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

And so really what I developed as an experience is to take the meditation experience and bring it into our body, into our cellular level. And then what happens is that you get this deep, deep sense of letting go. And with this, with deep sense of letting go, you get this amazing sense of compassion and love and an open heart. And at the same time, I, like anybody else can lose it in a second, you know. Every human being, we get upset. We get attached, we become reactive. So the meditation journey has two basic parts. And what I’ve done as a preface, what I’m going to explain, what my contribution I think is that I’ve taken what I’m gonna talk about now, and I connected it with physiology. We still allow biology and with the multiple medical systems I’ve learned, I licensed acupuncture, classical homeopathy, better medicine, et cetera, et cetera. And so what happens, one part of meditation is to get out of our thinking habit of holding and judging and being reactive. And we do it by creating space, by becoming mindful. 

That’s why mindfulness is so popular, right? So this is a lot of work. Why? Because we are trying to change our survival-driven reactivity. We react as part of self-preservation. If somebody talks very bad to us, we get upset. But if we could immediately let go of the being upset, it would be fine. But we don’t because we hold to it. That takes a long, a long time. That’s like taking the ice and cutting it into many, many, many pieces. So instead of having one big block of ice, we have many pieces of ice. It’s not a stack, but it’s still ice. The other part is we need to melt the ice and we melt the ice by moving from our head, from reactivity to our heart to responsiveness. And when we come to the heart, it’s like the sun that melts the ice into water. And this is a very profound process. And surprisingly, it’s a much easier process. Why it is much an easier process? Because physiologically we are built to do this. We are built physiologically to survive mentally and judge what’s best for us. Very how to change, right? As you said, it’s how you know, but we are built physiologically to have an open heart. 

And I will get to it a little bit later and I will explain why. And that’s really aha moment. And we have a choice. Are we gonna be in our heart? Everything is amazing. Are we gonna be in our head? Constant struggle. And what is life, right? As you and I know, everybody listening knows, we go back and forth.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Yeah.

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

But if we do enough of it, then even when we start thinking it’s coming from the heart, it’s no longer, like, there is not all the time, but there are sense, like my own experience when I talk to you now, I feel my words coming from my heart. I feel my thoughts coming from my heart. They don’t, I don’t feel them coming from my head. I feel them coming from my heart. And what happened, it is a different quality. And what people need to realize that the electromagnetic field of the heart is a hundred times bigger than the electric magnetic field of the brain. So every cell in our body is affected by the quality of the energy, scientifically. It’s not like woooo it’s all voodoo, that’s scientifically that gets from the heart to every cell in the body. But more than this people, you know, five, six, 10 feet around us. And then of course it keeps on going, but it’s not as strong. But it’s, you know, electric magnetic field goes, you know, goes everywhere, are affected by our heart. That’s why you come to a room with a very happy radiating person, you feel happy, right?

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Yeah.

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

You come to somebody who’s like, depressed and angry, whew, you can feel it also right away. So that’s the power of the heart. And that’s what I call open heart medicine. That’s really what I wanna share, because that’s a simple explanation of a very complex path that I journey this life, you know?

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Mm. That’s beautiful. Open heart medicine. Yes. Let’s hear more about that.

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

So if we want to, if we want to look, if we look at our physiology and we go back to the survival paradox, and we look at our body, and I’m rounding up a little bit, I dunno why they say there are 37 trillion cells. I mean, what if there are 38? But let’s say there are 50 trillion cells. So 50 trillion cells, not million, million times a thousand is a billion, times a thousand, okay? So it’s like 10, it’s 10 to the 12th power. And there are 50 trillion cells. Each cell has between hundreds of thousands and 1 million reactions a second. So it is a number we cannot comprehend. Getting close to Avogadro’s number, you know, to like, you know, an infinite number. So now this is happening every second in our body, and yet you and I are having a conversation as one being, if this is not a miracle, don’t tell. I dunno what is a miracle,.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

I so agree. I mean, it is miraculous when you get into that understanding, it’s like, wow, this is, it is phenomenal, yeah.

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

And we tend to undermine it, the miracle of being alive right there, we should already have pointed in thinking, you know?

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Yeah.

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

And so if we, but because we are driven to survive, every cell in our body want to survive. So if we go down to the cellular level, we have a membrane that’s our boundary. Like our body has the skin, but the skin can absorb certain things, right? And can let go of certain thing things, with the digestion, which is also like a tube from the mouth all the way to the rectum, it absorbs certain thing. It doesn’t absorb certain things. Same thing in other parts of the body. So the boundary on the lowest, on the smallest level in the body is the cell and the mitochondria as well. The mitochondria, I don’t wanna get into this right now because it’s more biochemistry. So the cell decide what goes in. It takes, for example, it has to keep potassium inside and sodium outside. It takes certain nutrient. It lets insulin comes in, insulin uses AMP-K, we get adenosine monophosphate kinase, we get normal, right? Glucose metabolism, mitochondria produces energy in a very relaxed, efficient way. We are healthy. The cell has certain things that doesn’t want, it releases them. So we take what we nourish and we let go of what we don’t nourish. That’s the basic act of survival. We have a boundary. We know what we want. 

We know what what we don’t want, right? Every organ behave like this. When the organ doesn’t get enough, it rebels. And when it rebels, it damages itself and others. Take the kidneys. The kidneys have an example, as an example, feel like they don’t get enough blood, they feel deprived, right? Like we are holding, for the kidneys to not to get enough blood, it’s like we are holding our breath, the struggle. So what does the kidneys do? They use the renin-angiotensin system and they increase blood pressure, right? Blood pressure gets increased. The heart it works harder. You get more arterial stenosis. You get more damage to the renal artery. The kidneys get less blood. They get less blood, they increase the blood pressure. Eventually the heart goes out, the kidney goes out and we end our life. That’s an example of a destructive survival paradox. There is one, and this is a reactive. If the kidney could think and say, oh my God, this doesn’t make sense, just relax. Just relax. And the arteries will actually expand, right? But they don’t have the responsiveness. If the reactivity, that’s actually Greg, an example of the survival paradox on an organ level. There’s one organ that did that behaves differently. It takes everything we don’t want. 

It doesn’t say, I’m gonna take it only from the liver, only from the kidneys, only from the brain. It doesn’t care where this molecule that was excreted from a cell came into the cell. Did it come at time of trauma? Did it come because it was reacted to a poison? Did it come because the person ate really good food? Whatever the body doesn’t want, it takes with love. It’s our heart. Our heart gets all the dirty blood from everybody. Every organ gets clean blood, the heart gets dirty blood, the liver gets both. It’s very interesting. That’s way it relates to pest and future. But I’m not gonna touch. So the heart gets dirty blood In fact, if the heart doesn’t accept everything, we are in trouble, right? We get swollen edema and the fluid backs up to the liver and the site and we are in real trouble. So the heart connects, takes all everything, the people. Now the heart connects to the universe with the lungs. So the universe, the infinite possibilities, the infinite space is our filter. The lungs, lets go. The lungs serves the heart, and then the blood comes back, gets oxidized, you know, the air comes back, oxidizes the blood, the heart gets clean blood.

And what does the heart do? The heart gives the blood everywhere without discrimination. The aorta is a rigid artery, right? It doesn’t flex, it doesn’t contract, it gives blood everywhere. It’s later on in the level of the organs of survival that the sympathetic comes into play with the alpha receptors, beta receptors, which arterioles gets expanded. You get more blood, which get contracted. You don’t get blood because we don’t have blood for every cell all the time. The heart doesn’t do this. The heart takes from everywhere and it gives with no discrimination. Now this is very important because it means that we are built physiologically to do it. Instead of the heart having a filter in the right arterial cell, I don’t like you. I’m gonna throw you out and I’m gonna push you away. Oh, and I really, I really want this blood. No, the heart accept, open heart. That’s key understanding. I’m emphasizing it today because that’s the key for meditation. So the heart just accepts. It moves from reactivity to responsiveness, why? 

It accepts all the trauma of every cell. That by the way, reflects our genetic and epigenetics and traumas and our relatives from the past that have affected our cells affected the physiology of the cell that now have released certain compound. It’s all interrelated. I mean, it’s not like we know it by science now, you know now the epigenetic to support it. The heart connect and then the heart keeps. And who does the heart nourish first? It nourishes itself with the coronary artery that’s not narcissistic nourishment. That’s nourishing and loving ourselves as part of loving others and in order to love others. And one more thing, amazing physiologically that I’ve observed. The heart is the only organ that nourishes itself after it finishes its job. Think about it, right? We could have had the blood come in the left atrium, right? It’s already clean, it’s already oxygenated the heart could have created the entrance in the… No, the heart finishes its work. 

The blood is out of the heart. It contracted, what is contraction of the heart? It’s everything I have I’m giving away. You know, people are very hard in giving and sometimes you see it in professional meditator that you ask them, can you help me out? They say, no, no, I need to meditate. Okay, oh really? What meditation about, right? People are not giving, they become very rigid. They’re not willing to give. They will have a rigid heart you know, like, and galectin-3 will drive, by the way, if I brought of the heart. So the heart gives is part of giving to others in order to give to others. Now, when we understand that, now this is our physiology compared to thinking now we can think all the time or we don’t think a few minutes, we won’t die one way or another. But you stop the heart from giving for two minutes, we’re gone, right?

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Yeah, you notice that.

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

Our life. So this, our survival, the heart survival is to give without a break. To give without a break, to give without a break. When we can connect with it in meditation, by transforming, by when things that are difficult come to us, instead of reacting to them with anger, with frustration. They just, we understand their source and it generates love and compassion to the suffering of every being, including ourselves, right? We’re nourishing ourselves, which is really the physiological part of taking all the stuff, all the dirt that the cell didn’t want, transforming it and giving clean blood. That’s really the act right of taking then it’s profound because the energy, the message change in Chinese medicine we say where energy flows, blood flows, where blood flows energy, but really where the mind flows, where the heart intention flow, that’s where the blood flows and that’s where the energy flows. So that’s an earlier stage and that’s really the profundity of connecting with the heart in such a profound way. And the reason why it can happen very quickly is because we are taking a ride on the physiology. So we may be people who are very selfish and inconsiderate and fight with everybody, but our heart is still working. So our heart is still doing the work. We are just not connected to it emotionally, psychologically, psycho-spiritually. But it’s happening. It’s much easier to connect other layers when you got a system which is already doing the same work. And as we said, very different than trying to change the thinking process.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

I love that. You know, it really is in that Chinese medicine component, the heart is the emperor, empress. It’s all heart centered. One, I wanna back up just a piece on what you’ve seen clinically regarding this open heart medicine and meditation, like the mind-body medicine to help overcome disease. And then I want to continue the train of thought of how do we deepen that connection with the heart? I mean, I think this is why heart disease is the number one killer because the rigidity and the closing of the heart where it’s meant to just freely give and be open. You know, a lot of times invite people to become professional love beamers of just opening the heart and allowing that light out because it is really what we’ve come here for.

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

Yeah, it’s true. It is what we come here. That’s what, for example, in Judaism now it’s around Rosh Hashanah. In Judaism, in kabbalah we talk about the fixing, tikkun, and like what we do this life and the tikkun comes, it’s really reconnecting, you know, with the divine within us, which is expressed as love and compassion. This amazing thing, yeah, you, it’s absolutely right. So as part of my unique training and understanding, you know, this decade of meditation, understanding physiology and certain insights from meditation, then I developed a unique system where a very basic practice that is called Tonglen, exchanging suffering with love and compassion. I take it into the cellular level. Usually it’s done with the outside world and I take it into the cells of the body in a unique way. And this I teach more. It was gonna be in my second book, it was gonna be, my first book was gonna be called ‘Open Heart Medicine’. It will come at some point. I wrote it in Hebrew.

I have to write again in English. But this idea, so when you do this, it’s amazing what happens from thing like severe PTSD. You can get people like somebody who was shot down in Vietnam and really when they were flying the helicopters at very low, it’s in my book, it’s a story, very low level. They could see the people in the eyes were trying to kill them and either they shoot them from the helicopter or they get shot down. And so all these traumas and then to come to a place where they see these people and they can send them love and compassion and they don’t have the PTSD reaction. You know, a lot of military based traumas are very, very deep. And other traumas to of course chronic fatigue and all the infections. 

But sometime you can objectively see within three, four days of such a retreat, you can see cancer markers going down, you know. Something, you can see even tumor starting to shrink. I mean this is objectively we’ve seen it in retreat. We are trying, hopefully in the future we will quantify it more. But the real power comes when we understand that everything is changeable. It’s about really melting our fixation. And you know, it’s much easier to melt ice with love than to cut it into many, many pieces. But you got to do both because when we are very tight, when we are holding to our thoughts and each thought chases another, we don’t have the opportunity to really have an open heart. We don’t have the capacity. So openness allows us to reconnect with deeper level and let our heart express itself. 

When our heart is really developed and we are connecting with it, the warmth of the heart will melt our fixation and then we experience more openness. So it’s really a journey of working on the open aspect, the spaciousness and working on the love and compassion. And these are really the two wings of the spiritual growth, but it’s the two wings of healing. And into this we throw any tools we can. We throw dietary, we throw herb, we throw qi gong, we throw yoga, we throw changing the environment, if we go away for a few days to really do the retreat. So in this sense, I found that these formulas that, I mean I developed over years and years of teaching where you can put this components together, create a very powerful healing tool. But it’s really, it’s not about me healing somebody else. It’s about giving people tools that they can take home and heal by themselves. And then as important for health providers, yeah. 

Will change the way you do medicine. Your whole interaction will change. And it’s a journey. You know why? Because we are human beings. We survive, we have unexpected thing that happen to us because it’s part of life. Everything is impermanent. And we react. And so it’s a journey for us. And as a journey unfolds and unfolds, we get in touch with deeper and deeper aspects of ourselves and with deeper way of helping others. And in this sense, aging becomes a process of refinement. You know, we really move from conceptual area where maybe our mind is not as sharp mentally to non-conceptual area, which connecting with these energies and qualities that are much bigger than us, you know, I think especially in the world right now, is this important, right?

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Very important, I mean that refinement. That’s a really awesome distinction. So thank you for that. So what are your general guidelines for deepening and enhancing that mind-body connection for health and healing?

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

So I think, you know, each person needs to find things that work for them, you know, and we can’t force one system on somebody else. There are basic principles, the principles that we outlined here. We need to create more space in our being and we need to create more warmth. You know, it’s very interesting. People can just put your hands on your chest and just feel the warmth of your heart and know it’s kind of amazing how people silently connect with the heat of the heart that they’ve never knew is there. We just relax into it, relax our shoulders, we can start feeling this heat, you know, traveling to different parts of the body and kind of like melting it. That’s just an example and you kind of settle into it and just feel what it does for you. So that just is an example. So I think we just want to make this awareness in practicing it part of our life. And there are tweaks for the busy people, the very good times to do it early in the day and just before bedtime. 

So we end the day and we kind of clean our energy and we go into sleep with more an open heart and awareness. When we wake up, we set ourself for the day is a different flavor. And you know, I’ve taught in the last decade mainly in Israel. I used to teach here and in Israel, but then I kind of dedicated myself to Israel. I have thousands of students, but I’m shifting my focus starting in 2023. I will offer more and more retreat and I hope to do the first one, be a free zoom, zoom retreat for a few days. Great, it’s so easy for people, but people really have to understand that anything and everything is possible. It doesn’t mean that it will happen, it doesn’t mean that what will happen is what we expect. That’s part of anything and everything is possible, but it means that everything is changeable. So there’s no doubt about it. That’s the basis of our reality that it changes all the time. So it gives us a really, it gives us a great reason for optimism. And I know for my own experience, from my own healing traumas from the Holocaust, from my grandfather, that I am named after which I write in the book and how it affected my mother without her knowing. I know from some health issues how I overcame them with this method. Anything and everything is possible and I think it’s important for people to be aware of it and really put time into it. It’s such a great investment of time, you know.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

I do. Thank you, Dr. Eliaz, that those distinctions, the awareness, the open heart medicine concept and the way that you describe the physiology is so poetic. And I really, I’m looking forward to your book and to your meditations in this next year. That is truly a gift that you are bringing to us. So thank you for that.

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

Thank you so much for having me, and for making this conference happen.