
An Unparalleled Model of Mind Body Medicine for Health and Healing

Founder of bVital

Founder, Amitabha Medical Clinic
An Unparalleled Model of Mind Body Medicine for Health and Healing
Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc
Full Transcript
Introduction to Dr. Isaac Elias and the Survival Paradox 0:00
Welcome back, everybody, to the bioenergetics summit. I'm your host, doctor Greg Eckel, and I have a second part interview with Doctor Isaac Elias. This one is titled, An Unparalleled Model of Mind body Medicine for Health and Healing. I want to give you a proper introduction, Doctor Elias. He's an expert in the field of integrative medicine, focusing on cancer detoxification and complex conditions. He's a respected physician, researcher, bestselling author, educator, and mind body practitioner.
Doctor Elias partners with leading research institutes including Harvard, the NIH, Columbia, and others to coauthor studies on integrative therapies for cancer, heavy metal toxicity, and others. He's founder and medical director of Amitabha medical Clinic in Santa Rosa, California, where he has pioneered the use of therapeutic aphorisms as an adjunct of blood filtration treatment for chronic degenerative conditions. Welcome aboard. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me again. 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. Yeah. Of course. So the survival paradox really is the book. It offers a new paradigm to paradigm shift of how we look at health and disease. We all are familiar with the idea integrative medicine for many years. And they know Western medicine much more with the with the Covid, the cytokine storm, that inflammation drives every chronic disease or so acute diseases.
But inflammation really is an expression if inflammation is not the cause. What drives inflammation? What drives it to generative process is this survival of produce. And what do I mean? Why is this such a fundamental paradox and really is the journey of our life? Because we as it is people as a being, our societies, our communities, every organ in our body, every cell in our body is programed 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's it has to be automated. We can think about it's immediate and we do it with the autonomic nervous systems, with the sympathetic system. So when the body feels in danger between survival and response, respond by fighting, which equates to inflammation struggle, or by flight, by hiding, by running away, creating isolation, creating fibrosis in both drivers of inflammation and fibrosis
Galectin-3, Inflammation, and Disease Mechanisms 3:00
is expression of the survival response is actually what shortens our lives. What really degrades the quality of our lives and drives every chronic disease. And so when we understand this, we understand it's very immediate where this is 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 this system will come 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 starts the biochemical survival response by, by utilizing a compounds called alarm means. And the key one that I've been researching for almost 30 years, that has about 10,000 published papers is a protein called galectin three. And galectin three serves as a bus. It's a detector that find signs, oh my God. So is there is a struggle in the kidneys. It it immediately gets expressed by the immune system, by macrophage. It drives to the kidneys. It binds to itself in clamato a compound hyper viscosity compound growth compounds.
It creates a pin to the pin to attach to each other. And it creates a shield and microenvironment where oxygen doesn't get well. We're body doesn't function normally. And this is what happens 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 in each cell, in the body is a part of a community. It knows it has a role. And at some point it's going to let go and another cell will come.
But when a cell goes into a survival mode and decides it's not going to die, it wants to leave. However, it creates its own environment. It doesn't listen to the body. And how do we call this cell cancer cell? So cancer is a great example of an inappropriate survival. Responded 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 roll that we're going to talk today. And it also was the person who developed the first galectin three blocker picked up on modified Introspecting.
And when you look at motivated respect, then you will see, wow, it is 80 published papers that relate to kidney, to heart, to brain health, to narrow inflammation, to oncologic. 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 three, when you address a 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 more effective, respecting and more research. I'm doing now with some large a grant on removal of Bill 83 through a few visits and on a spiritual, emotional, psycho spiritual, physiological level. Shifting from a reactive survival mode to a to a place of balance, of harmony.
And we'll talk about and that's really the topic of today. Love it. So in that you share some unique and highly compelling stories in your book about the role of meditation in 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? Yeah. We'll talk about meditation in detail, but the idea of the catch 22 of positive thinking is, is very important. And because before we try to change something, before we try to heal ourselves, 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 meditation. 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, nice 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 interesting, I know you are, this is the importance 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, tension is medicine. We see 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 this system kind of a little bit touching the bioenergetics for, for the 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?
Honesty, Positive Thinking, and the Catch-22 of Meditation 9:00
Are we functioning at 100% of our being practically never exist? Are we functioning at 10% of our being? Most people function at less at 1 or 2%. So even if you're 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 in 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 we dealt with ourself and what happened with the kids went to a positive thinking. And you see it a lot with cancer patients and 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 to things. Sure. 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 to create. It created this genuine 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 things that have changed our health and our being. And that's the beauty of understanding it is, is the more we connect deep, the better we can heal ourselves.
Now this has profound implications in meditation. You name it, we are naturally, we have a tendency to be a little bit jumping. It's not, but it's I'm getting excited. That's good. That's there. You know, in meditation we are very much attached to experiences, you know, and because we attach 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 offers solutions.
I talk about the the issue. The solution of the survival paradox is to let go of our grasping. Because what is grasping, resisting is holding to something which is actually changing. Everything changes. You and me are not the same now. Like ten minutes ago you heard new things. I said new things. I will, I will chemistry change? Some cells just gave up. Some new cells were just created. We are different, but we like to fix it. All of this 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 and letting go by creating space and letting go by melting the fixation.
I'll talk a little bit about it. So what happens is it is we start to meditate. We have experiences now. If people have awful experiences, like they feel restless and knowing the pain in the body, it's actually easier to let go of them, right, because it's going to hold them. But when people have an 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 in the meditation is people start having a great experience and they start holding to it and holding to it.
You know, it's like, oh my God, I meditate and then I get this headache so strange, you know? Well, you are 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 it. 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 come is okay. And the gap between positive thinking and negative thinking starts to melt away. So what does what does one do with that? Like, I like I mean, because this is 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 possible for a miracle cure or spontaneous remission absence. And but to be in that integrity of your being in 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 what? Ugly. What you said is beautiful. It's true. There's nothing wrong about being having a positive attitude is great. I'm like an eternal, optimistic person. You know, I'm. And people who know me, I mean, people say, Isaac, you know, we know your your way thing is going to 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 truth. 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? It's quantum physics, like time and space, it change. It is 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. 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 you. I'm not for for positive thinking. Of course it's. It's profound. But for example, if you if you broadcast the positive film, it's the 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's just in my throat? Do I feel it in my cells in the first layer? Can I feel it in the depths of my heart? So when I see every cell of my body is getting this energy, when we get to this place, anything and everything is possible.
And so that's the idea. So the catch 22 is like one paragraph in a 200 pages. And for some people who desire. But on my interview decided, I think you had to talk about we like this point, this is it. But yeah, yeah, he did it. I'm saying right now is the reason why I teach meditation and healing. I mean, it's a great meditation masters, you know, that have spent decades. There are many people who teach meditation because it 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 is they don't talk about it from a very early age, 14 years old. But I wasn't drawn to it because they had a traumatic life. I had a great childhood and my father was a civil engineer. We traveled all over the world, you know, born in Israel, and they grew up in Africa, in Brazil, in Korea. I practiced Ecuador with the national Korean taekwondo team. I was very fortunate, but I was always drawn. I knew there is a bigger reality than when I got together. This was like late 80s with very like serious Buddhist practitioners, and we started talking.
And then most of them came because of the trauma. They were trying to find a solution. It wasn't my journey, you know. I didn't come because I did trauma. I came because the head and knowing that there is something bigger, you know, so, you know, trying to to to look at it from a point of solution. And this has been and this has been my journey. And I was fortunate to be to study and to be the doctor
Open Heart Medicine and the Physiology of Giving 17:00
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 to get one on one teaching from really from the people, really the legend to and in the same time they told me, you know, Isaac, you in the future are going to connect meditation with healing. What are they talking about? I mean, should we see any guy? I mean, but anyway, they had 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, 2 to 3 months, a year in the mountains, ten years half day retreat like, and one day full retreat for ten years, 6 a.m.
to noon. And one night, I would say we sleep in the forest. We have a cabin. And so I spent know tens of thousands of hours. They paid my dues, you know, and 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 and what I've done is it is a preface for what I'm going to explain, what my contribution, I think, is that I've, I've taken what I'm going to talk about now. And I connected with physiology, with biology, and with a multiple medical system that I've, I've learned and I'm a licensed acupuncturist less economy opened the Tibetan medicine Center right to do. 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 right. Because 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 being upset it would be fine. But we don't because we hold to it. That takes a long, a long time.
And it'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. It's stuck, 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 made the ice into water. And this is a very profound process. And surprisingly, it's much easier for us. White 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 hard to change, but if you said it's hard, you know, but we are built physiologically to have an open heart and I will get to it a bit later and I will explain why in this really moment. And we have a choice. Are we going to be in our heart? Everything is amazing. Are we going to be in our head? Constant struggle and what is life, right? As you and I know, everybody listening knows, we go back and forth, back. 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 only time, but the 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 100 times bigger, and the electric magnetic field of the brain. So every cell in our body is affected by the quality of the energy. Scientifically, it's it's not like ooh, and food that's that scientifically that gets to from the heart to every cell in the body.
But more than these people, you know, five, six, ten 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, 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? Yeah. You come to somebody who's like, depressed and angry. You can feel it also. Right? So that's the power of the heart. And that's what I call open heart medicine.
That's really what what I want to share, because it's a simple explanation of a very complex path that I, I journey this life, you know. That's beautiful. Open heart medicine. Yes. Let's hear more about that. So if we want to, if we want to look if we look at our physiology, we go back to the survival palette and we look at our body. And I'm rounding up a little bit I don't know why they say the 37 trillion cells. I mean, what if they're 38? But let's say they are 50 trillion cell. So 50 trillion cells, not million, million times a thousand is a billion times a thousand.
Okay. So it's like ten. It's ten to the 12th power. And the 50 trillion cells, each cell has between hundreds of thousand and 1 million reactions a second. So it is a number we cannot comprehend exactly. 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 is one being, if this is not a miracle, don't tell. I don't know what isn't right, I so agree, I mean, it is. It is miraculous when you get into that understanding.
It's like, wow, this is it is phenomenal. Yeah. And we tend to to undermine the miracle of being alive. Right. Then we should already have positive thinking, you know. Yeah. And so if but because we are driven to survive, everything in our body wants to survive. So if we go down to this to the cellular level, we have a membrane that's our boundary. Like our body has a skin, but the skin can absorb certain things, right, and can let go of certain things. We have to 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 is the mitochondria. I don't want to get into this right now because some of it's more biochemistry. So the cell decides what goes in. It takes for example, it has to keep potassium inside and sodium outside. It takes out the nutrient. It insulin comes in insulin. It uses a amp, a Ampk. We get that cell monophosphate kinase.
We get normal, right. We glucose metabolism. Mitochondria produces energy in a very relaxed, efficient way. We are healthy. The cell have three things it doesn't want. It releases it. So we take what we nourish and we let go of what we don't know is that's a basic act of survival. We have a boundary. We know what we want. We know what what we don't want to eat. Every organ behaves like this when the organ doesn't get enough, it rebels and we need to rebels. It damages itself and others take the kidneys.
The kidneys. If an example is an example, I feel like they don't get enough blood. They feel deprived, right? Like we are holding for the kidneys. Not to get enough blood is like we are holding our breath. The struggle. So what is the kidneys? Do they use the winning angiotensin system and they increase blood pressure. Right. Blood pressure gets increase the how it works. How do you get more materials? You get more damage to the renal artery. The kidneys get less blood. We get blessed blood to 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 problem. There is one. And this is a reactive reactive. If the kidney could think it's the oh my God, this doesn't make sense. Just relax. Just relax. And until we do will actually expand. Right. But they don't have the responsiveness if the reactivity. That's actually Greg an example of the survival paradox. It's on on on a on an organ liver. There's one organ to do that behaves differently.
It takes everything we don't want. It doesn't say I'm going to 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 came at a time of trauma? Did it came because it was reactive to a poison? Did it come because the person it 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 get the dirty blood. The liver gets both. It's really interesting. It's the way it relates to past and future. But I'm not going to touch. So the heart gets dirty. Blood infective. That doesn't accept everything. We are in trouble, right? We get swollen edema, and the sewage picks up to the liver. And the scientists and we are in real trouble. So the heart connects, takes all everything the people know. The heart connects to the universe through the lungs. So the universe, the infinite possibilities, the infinite space is our filter, the lungs.
Let's go. The lung serves the heart, and then the blood comes back, gets oxidized. You know, the air comes back because that is the blood. The heart get clean blood. And what does the how do now? It gives the blood everywhere without discrimination. The altar 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, the sympathetic comes into play with the alpha receptors. Beta receptors which arterials 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 well. It 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. Actually, I'm saying I don't like you. I'm going to throw you out and I'm going to push you away. Oh, and I really only really want this blood. No, the heart except open heart.
That's key. Understanding. I'm emphasizing it today because that's the key for meditation. So the heart just accepts it. Move some reactivity to responsiveness. Why? It accepts all the drama of every cell. Z, 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 does epigenetics support it, the how to connect and how it keeps?
And who does the heart nourish? First, it nourishes itself through the coronary artery. It's not narcissistic nourishment that's nourishing and loving ourselves is part of loving others. And in order to love others. And one more thing amazing physiology that I've observed.
Clinical Healing, Retreat Practice, and Closing Reflections 28:00
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 atrial right. It's already clean. It's already oxygenated. The heart could have created the entrances. Know that 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 in something. You see it in professional meditators. You ask them, can you help me?
I'll just say, no, no, I need to meditate. Okay? Oh, really? What meditation about? Right? People are not giving. They becomes very rigid. They're not willing to give. They will have a rigid heart, you know, like in galectin three will drive. By the way, you say presence of the heart. So the heart gives is part of giving to others in order to give to others. Now when we understand it now, this is our physiology compared to thinking. Now we can think all the time, but we don't think a few minutes.
We won't die one way or another. But you. But you stopped the heart from giving for two minutes. We're gone right? Yeah. You know our life. Yeah. So this our survival. The heart's 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 the source and it generates love and compassion to the suffering of every being, including ourselves.
Right? When everything ourselves, which is really the physiological part of taking all the stuff, all the dirt the self 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, but really where the mind flows, where the heart intention flow. This was the blood flows, and that's where the energy flow in. 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 that heart is still working to our heart is still doing the work. We're 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. I love that, you know, it really is in that Chinese medicine component, the heart is the emperor or empress centered. I to one, I want to 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 of the rigidity and the the closing of the heart, where it's meant to just freely give and be open. You know, a lot of times I'll, I'll invite people to become professional love beamers of just opening the heart and allowing, allowing that light out because it is really what we've come here for. Yeah. It's true. It is what we come here. That's what, for example, in Judaism. No, it's on rotation in Judaism. In Kabbalah, we talk about the fixing the beacon and like, what do we do with this life when it comes?
It's really reconnecting, you know, with the divine within us, which is expressed as love, loving compassion. Yeah. It's an amazing thing. Yeah, it's absolutely right. So it's part of my unique training and understanding, you know, these decades of meditation, understanding physiology and certain insights from meditation. Then I developed a unique system where a very basic practice that is called toggling, 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 going to be in my second book. It was going to be my first book was going to be called Open Heart Medicine. It will come at some point. I wrote it in Hebrew. I have to write it again in English. But this idea. So when you do this, it's amazing what happens from things like severe PTSD. You can get people like somebody who was shut down in Vietnam and they really when they were flying the helicopters, it very low density 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 shut down.
And so all these traumas and then to come to a place where you 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 dramas are very, very deep and other trauma, too, of course, chronic fatigue and all the infections. But sometimes you can objectively see within 3 or 4 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 yeah, 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 well, well developed and we are connecting with 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 in to this we throw any tools we can. We throw a dietary we throw herb with or qigong, we throw yoga and we throw changing the environment.
If we go away for a few days to really do, do retreat. So in this sense, I found this formula that, I mean, I developed over years and years of teaching where you can put these 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, it's important for health providers. Yeah. Will change the way you do medicine. You hold, interaction will change. And it's a journey.
You know why? Because we are human beings. We survive. We have unexpected things 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 is 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. I'd say we really move from conceptual area where maybe our mind is not too sharp mentally to non conceptual area, always 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. And very important. I mean, that that refinement. That's a really awesome distinction. So thank you for that. The so what are your general guidelines for deepening and enhancing that mind body connection for health and healing. 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 on somebody else. The basic principle, 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 just put your hands on your chest and just feel the warmth of your hand and know it's kind of it's kind of amazing how people suddenly connect with the heat of the heart that they've never knew is there. If 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's it's just it's just an example that you kind of settle into it and just just feel what it does for you.
So that just as an example. So I think we just want to make this awareness and practicing it part of our life. And there are tricks 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 going to sleep with more. An open heart and awareness. Wake up. We set our step for the day is a different flavor. And I know I've taught in the last decade, mainly in Israel, used to teach here in in Israel. But then they kind of dedicated myself to Israel, aware of thousands of students.
But I'm shifting my focus. Starting in 2023, I will offer more and more retreat, and I hope to develop the first one to be a free zoom zoom retreat for a few days. It's so easy for people, but people really have to understand that anything and everything is possible. It's 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. 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 from my own experience, from my own the healing traumas from the Holocaust when my grandfather time named after which which I write in the book, you know, 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, to be aware of it and and really put, put time into it. It's such a great investment of time.
You know, I, I do thank you, Doctor Elias, 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. Thank you so much for having me. I mean, for, for and for making this conference happen.
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