Balancing Your Internal Environment for Better Health

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another amazing interview with Dr. Zach Bush. If you haven’t heard him talk, strap yourself in, but he’s gonna tell us and walk us through the kinda world that we’re living in now and how it has affects our bodies and how it affects our overall health. And he’s gonna bring just us up to where we are today and what we can do about making a big change. He is an educator. He’s a family man. He’s a philanthropist. He’s got an amazing background, triple board certified internist. And most of all, he’s my friend. And actually, Zach, I wanna share something with you. This was given to me by another friend that I haven’t seen in a while. And it’s a little box. I don’t know how well you can see this. But then inside the box, there is this little ornament. Can you see that?

Zach Bush, M.D.

Yeah.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

It kinda looks like a star, right? And the box says, “Friends are like stars. “You don’t have to see them to know that they’re there.” And that’s kinda how I feel about you because we don’t get a chance to see each other all that much these days, you know? Well, we’re all going in different directions, but it’s making it a little bit harder to see one another. But when I do, it’s sort of like an old pair of jeans that always fit. That’s how I feel about you and our friendship. So could you, for people that- Actually, what I wanted to start off by saying is that you’re kind of a man that needs no introduction. But for the few out there, the very few out there, that haven’t had an opportunity to experience you, your speaking, all the things that you’ve done, could you just walk us back a little bit, give us a little bit of a backdrop, and then kinda walk us forward to the kinds of things that you’re interested in these days?

Zach Bush, M.D.

Sure, yeah. My background was in originally heading into engineering and then I had an opportunity to take a year off and just went to the Philippines and had an experience of working with an international group of midwives there, birthing babies, and that really pivoted my career goals very rapidly. I realized after just early weeks of that experience, the incredible miraculous environment of children coming into this world and glimpsing the extreme resilience of human biology. Because we were birthing babies in the squatter villages of Quezon City around Manila, Philippines. And so this abject poverty, dirt floors, open sewer pits, burning plastic fires, and just like the most toxic of environments and yet watching children thriving at levels that I wasn’t seeing in the United States. 

I wasn’t in the medical field, but I was already pretty aware of asthma and autism and everything else in the U.S. environment, just didn’t seem to exist there. And these kids were so resilient in their biology and it wasn’t really computing in my young brain and I didn’t have any medical understanding to give a frame to it, but it was immediately interesting and it was immediately compelling that there was this drive for life within every human being. And I watched that manifest in these three-pound premature babies being born and things like that. That there was a will for life in the midst of seeming biologic impossibility, socioeconomic impossibility, social impossibility. It was just extremely obvious that there is a drive, there is a light within every human. 

And that became in some ways my North Star of curiosity of what the hell is driving this human experience? Why are we pushing to be alive so hard? And why are we here? Why are we showing up in the midst of seeming chaos and disaster and toxicity? Why are we here? What are we doing? What is our purpose? And so that was a little bit of a ethereal or high-falutin kind of backdrop to why I went into medicine. So it wasn’t really necessarily to help stamp out disease or things like that, that maybe a lot of people go into it for. It wasn’t out of just curiosity to know more information. I was actually a relatively mediocre student, and so didn’t see myself as necessarily capable of thinking about being a doctor or a lawyer or anything like that. 

When I was growing up, I spent most of my time under cars and building things in garages through junior high and high school and early college and all that. So it was not something- I didn’t see myself as an academician, that’s for sure. And so didn’t see coming the next 17 years in academia. But anyway, once I went into pre-med at the University of Colorado, I was a Spanish major as well as pre-med, and in that journey, I started to see the impact of socioeconomics and food systems on my patients. Denver General was where I did a lot of my work, and so you see a very large Hispanic and African-American communities in that space. And it was so obvious that they were suffering chronic diseases that simply were not being experienced a few blocks away in upper class, socioeconomic, entitled neighborhoods. And so it was so obvious right away that we had an ecological/economic environment that was predisposing us to severe disease that was really torturing the human experience. And that was again in very big contrast to the experience in Philippines. 

Why was this apparent toxicity and abject poverty expressing disease less severely than this American version of poverty and this American version of socioeconomics? And I think that will play into our discussion today around this issue of Lyme disease as a symptom of a dysfunction within biologic systems in that we are expressing disease that’s really never been seen before, endemically or epidemically, at the level that we see it today in the Western world. It’s certainly not limited to the United States. We have Lyme syndromes throughout Western Europe, and we have Lyme syndromes in Canada and Australia. But we really don’t have much Lyme syndromes in South America or other places like that. So we are very geographic in our expression of this condition, and I think it will play well into my journey as to how I come to be on this discussion with you Robby, as to why am I talking about this. 

I was trained in internal medicine then subsequently trained in endocrinology and metabolism. In the endocrinology and metabolism world, the word metabolism is really how does nutrients break down into energy for utilization, for vitality, and health? So that and the endocrine side is the hormonal world that dictates that metabolic energy potential within our organism. So in those two interplays, I got to study mitochondria really deeply. I became a cancer researcher. During that time, I was studying the impact of nutrients on cancer cells and triggering cell suicide in cancer through vitamin A compounds. And that research was really compelling to recognize that cancer cells being kind of the most damaged of human cells in their expression of disease, could not handle good nutrition. 

The good nutrition would kill these cells, and you have to keep them in a relatively depleted state for them to continue to behave like cancer cells do. And if you give them nutrients in a connected environment to resources, they tend to either kill themselves or reduce their cancer-like behavior. And so that was exciting kind of first glimpse into the possibility that we could lay a terrain in a human body that would be resistant to cancer. And certainly we see this in the developing world, places like China, that you’ve spent a lot of time in. In fact, the city that you did a lot of work in that kind of gave you the breakthroughs in Therasage, I think really identify this really well in that you have a city that is extremely industrial, has some of the highest air pollution and carcinogens that you can expect, and yet it remains a Blue Zone. 

These people are living beyond 100 years routinely. So how is that happening? How are people living long in squats of the Philippines and toxic industrial cities of China? You discover that there was, or became aware of that ion charge that was there around tourmaline, the mountain under them expressed. And so in this incredible way, the geologic, and not even the soil, but the geologic systems there were empowering a level of vitality in the human biology. And so I think all of this starts to lay this possibility that we are looking at Lyme disease very myopically, blaming a single organism, a spirochete, as if it’s capable of overcoming the entire complexity and beauty and intelligence of the human immune system and all of the reparations and regenerative capacity within every single cell. 

It’s frankly, mathematically and biologically impossible that a spirochete that’s natural to our system, I have like 12 species of spirochetes in my mouth right now. It’s impossible that that single organism suddenly overwhelms all of these mechanisms of checks and balances and behaviors of cooperation to suddenly create these horrible syndromes of chronic Lyme. And so it’s exciting for us as a science community and certainly as consumers that are starting to suffer these conditions of chronic fatigue, chronic pain, regional pain syndromes, Lyme disease, all these things being clumped together now. And I think we need to shake off the concern about a single pathogen and start to understand it as if there is a dominant spirochete that’s measurable in the system, it’s simply because the greater balance of the ecosystem has collapsed. And we can start to study the organism in relationship to a concept of balance rather than attack of an organism.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Wow. I think maybe in the Western approach, everybody kind of feels comfortable with and they show us on TV and what we see and what we hear on radio, we have a tendency to think there’s a war. A war against cancer, a war against Lyme disease, a war against a war. Everything is a war and we need to win the war. And also we have a tendency to sort of compartmentalize and just gonna focus or zero in focus on one particular thing as the root cause, when what you’re describing is really more about the body is a system and the system, various systems, and all these systems work in concert or in symphony with one another. And laying, focusing on the full body, healing both mind, body, and soul ’cause emotional peace is also a part of, I believe, a part of the full healing process. 

Certainly laying and focusing on the terrain and balancing your internal environment, making it sort of healthy for you but not so comfortable for the imbalance. And I always reflect on my mother, Zach. It’s kind of funny. She said to me, “Son, when you go off to college, “I’m gonna sell off all your things “and I’m gonna probably bring in an au pair “or someone to live in your room.” And I said, “Why? I love my room.” She goes, “That’s exactly why. “Because I don’t want you coming back from college so fast. “I want you to kinda get on your feet and “make a world for yourself.” So I think what we’re talking about now is not making your internal environment so comfortable to feed the imbalance, but just bringing it back to balance so that you have your natural resources and everything that our deliverers have given us to maintain our health and kind of live out our bliss, find out whatever our purpose is. 

And be in a paradigm where you’re actually healthy to the last breath that you take, which isn’t what we’re accustomed to here in the U.S. Certainly when you step outside the U.S., and you’ve traveled around the world, you can see how other cultures look at health. And even though I visited a few Blue Zones, so have you, and so clearly there’s other ways to approach healthcare. And that’s what I love about you and what you bring to the table, particularly today, is that you are showing us a global view and ways to bring us back. So why is balancing the immune system, why is the terrain so important to a Lyme patient, per se?

Zach Bush, M.D.

Yeah. So the immune system we’re used to and actually very much today continue to make the mistake of calling it the human immune system. This pandemic has focused a lot on the human immune system and has really, I think, disempowered us to believe that it works, you know? And so there’s been this big push to believe that we need a pharmaceutical solution to overcome a single virus, which simply is again, mathematically and biologically impossible, because right now I have 10 to the 15 viruses in my bloodstream at the moment. And so 10 to the 15 different viruses are different genetic codes that are there to be either expressed or not expressed based on something called the innate immune system. 

The innate immune system is taking in genetic information all the time and deciding whether or not that cell is gonna benefit from that. And it will either just chop up that segment of DNA or RNA coming in from a viral input, or it will go ahead and express it, repeat the genetic signal to get that out to the system, integrate it perhaps into its own nuclear DNA to be become integrated into the human genome. So that’s happening all the time, billions of times a day, as I deal with the 10 to the 15 viruses. And 10 to the 15 is tens of billions of viruses coursing through my bloodstream right now. So I am in an innate relationship to my environment at the cellular level. Every single one of my 70 trillion cells, making those decisions independently. Do I need this? Am I vulnerable? Do I need an immune reaction to be stimulated? If so, I’ll go ahead and express this viral protein. 

Maybe I need this protein to express a new receptor or a new infrastructure within me. We now know that through the last 20 years of genomics that over half of the human genome, which is relatively small in regards to the genes that I express. I only have 20,000 genes that I inherited from mom and dad. That’s a small number compared to a lot of other biology. A fruit fly, for example, has 13,000 genes and a flea has 30,000 genes. So I sit somewhere between a flea and a fruit fly in genetic complexity at the gene expression level.

And half of those genes that make me a mammal were inserted directly by a virus, and so I had gain of function from being reptile to bird, to human. The genetic sequences that allowed for those paradigm shifts and biologic expression and creative force from nature and God, this force that came to be is an expression of beauty, of extreme gain of function to allow for live birth to occur that it took five specific virus to allow us the underpinnings of live birth to occur. The form of a placenta. The main protein there is created by a retrovirus like HIV that got integrated into the genome that allowed for eukaryotes to move into this capacity for live birth instead of eggs. And so then we needed two or three different genes inserted by viruses to allow sperm to understand how to dump their mitochondria before injecting their nuclear DNA into the female ovum. So we had to have these extremely complex decision-making things at the protein and mechanistic functions of sperm and ovum and placenta and all of this to occur. 

So these were not just like, “Oh, now I can have brown hair.” These were like viruses that updated in the capacity for us to have life. And so, instead of embracing that knowledge of the last 20 years, we have maintained this very myopic belief of here’s the human genome being attacked by viruses. No, the human genome was built by viruses. And so in the same way, viruses are not living organisms, they depend on output from all cellular participants in the ecosystem. 

And the largest of these, obviously the microbiome, which is the bacteria, the protozoa, the fungi. And so we have just this massive genetic database of genes, for sure, but also viral extracts or viral exudates that are coming out of the microbiome to communicate with their environment. And we can see this in lots of different genes that are put out by exosomes or viruses that can cross species. And when you increase the stress on a species, whether it be bacteria, pigs, birds, humans, we express more and more viral mutations to try to find loopholes, to try to find adaptation in our capacity to survive threat. And so threats that increase the stress of an organism at the biologic level increase the frequency and effort towards new adaptation. And this is how we’ve survived. 

So in a nutshell, survival of humans and the creation of the capacity for mammals to exist were the result of biologic threats, biologic pressures that increased the speed of adaptation to induce increased biodiversity on the planet. And, therefore, we have the planet that we view today. We’ve been through five great extinctions on the planetary history where 95 to 97% of life on Earth disappears over a very short period of time, matter of years versus decades or centuries. So very brief glimpses of time and suddenly we have catastrophic loss of life. But in those moments, we dump so many viral opportunities for change in adaptation and gain of function that after every single one of those extinction events, we come back as a planet more biodiverse and with more intelligent life. And so, here we are in the sixth great extinction in our geologic record underway. 

We’re maybe halfway done with wiping out life on Earth and it’s accelerating every year currently. And so we’re 80 to 100 years away from this cataclysmic event at best. And a lot of scientists are suddenly realizing we’re probably logarithmically off and it could be much shorter than that. A series of a couple decades, perhaps, that we suddenly reach this tipping point where life collapses beneath us and we lose the capacity to harvest food, we lose the capacity of insects to pollinate food, we start to really collapse the entire biologic network that allows us to be here. And so we’re at that precipice, this tipping point, in a frightening way in some ways. And yet we see human knowledge and science catching up. And I think human consciousness enlightening to the point where we realize, “Wow.” In seeing ourselves separate from nature, we engineered a world that would destroy itself. We became the cataclysmic event that would engineer the sixth great extinction because of our belief of separation from nature. 

And so as a Lyme patient, you have been told a narrative that nature is attacking you. This evil thing has jumped into your system and this darkness is within you and it’s sneaking through your cells and you can’t clear it, your immune system doesn’t know it. I think that that’s an outdated narrative that hasn’t considered the complexity of an immune system that is not human. An immune system is ultimately a cooperative relationship, an ecosystem made of tens of millions of different species ultimately around us and within us that do this incredible dance of communication to figure out the optimal balance to allow life to occur. 

It communicates through the viral, the genetic sequences and library potential that will help you code who you are today. If any of you have had Coronavirus and recovered, many of you will have experienced a spiritual and emotional experience during that that you’ve never had getting flu or other things. This virus seems to be coming in at a moment of the tipping point to give us new insights. And so we see people get Coronavirus and immediately change relationships, get out of relationship, change jobs, start the company they’ve always wanted. It rearranges their whole sense of reality coming out of that experience. And so there is a gain of function that is being left behind. We are getting a viral update, we’re getting a genetic update in this Corona moment, and it’s being given to us by nature. And I know there’s a lot of theories that maybe military advancements allowed this virus to make a jump in viral infectious capacity, or is carrying some new dangerous protein, or whatever it is. 

I don’t think humans have the capacity to actually exit nature. I think it’s impossible. We can mess with nature, but we can’t supersede nature. Nature is the fabric of our reality. And so when we monkey with it with glyphosate and herbicides and all the Roundup in our food system, or we toxify it with mercury in our water systems, or we do endocrine disruptors in the plastics of the oceans and water systems, all of this is screwing with our capacity to be in a balanced state with nature. But nature always has a method for bringing us back in line and at the extreme end of that it’s, “Okay, that species is refusing to be in line with us “and so it’s gonna go extinct.” 

You know? And so that’s the extreme end of the checks and balances of nature, but it’s very clear that those checks and balances exist. We cannot outthink, out-engineer, outspend money to escape extinction. Extinction is inherent to the balance of life. And right now we’re losing about a species to extinction every 20 minutes is one of the probably most accurate examples of an estimate right now. And unfortunately, many of those species are in the microbiome and microecosystems that we don’t even understand their role in human biology. So we are extincting the very lineage of how multicellular life and mammals became possible on this Earth. And we live in a black vacuum that life is impossible to exist in, in outer space. 

And so we have this incredibly small Petri dish of life that’s been succeeding for four billion years and is resilient, and it will certainly figure out how to make life more beautiful, more biodiverse, and more complex in its intelligence if we actually do complete this great extinction. So we can be hopeful for nature that it will have its day and there will be something to supersede human existence in the future on this planet if we continue to follow the same course of biologic adaptation and explosive capacity for more intelligence. 

On the kind of selfish side of being human, I believe we have the capacity to rebirth, to transform before we see that extinction event happen. And Robby, I know that you and Melanie really hold that true is that we have the ability to see past our myopic behaviors and reintegrate into natural law and natural systems, and start to be regenerative in our innovations and regenerative in our health models and regenerative in our education models, regenerative in our industries of technology to come into this very rapid alignment so that we reinvent everything. Reinvent our socioeconomic systems, reinvent our industries of energy, and transportation and all these destructive and extractive processes that we’re currently locked in. We see this opportunity to open it up. And every time I’ve delved deeper into the spiritual realm and I just finished a spiritual journey this weekend, that was just massive deep meditative downloads of what’s happening on the other side of the veil, and many of the people that we’ve lost in recent years are working very diligently from the spiritual side of the veil to be with us and to engineer a change in the light energy that we’re able to express as a species. 

And I’m fascinated by that. I’m fascinated that it is actually all working. We are all playing a role right now that is fundamentally changing our awareness of our spiritual purpose. And as we bring our soul purpose and soul expression into alignment with our physical bodies, we create new form and function. We create new energetic capacity for light energy, which makes us more vital, which makes us more resilient, which makes us regenerative, which makes us a part of this future intelligence on the planet that would supersede the current state of affairs that we are now expressing. I think that is underway. I can feel it within myself, I can see it in my colleagues around me, I can see it in some of the patients that are coming through the clinic as we are learning to heighten the human experience. And we are needing to really pursue more and more of this collaborative environment around bringing natural systems and natural law into our innovation process.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Wow. You know, I so relate to everything you’re saying. And from an energetic point of view, through the loss of Julia, she actually reaches out to us almost every single day in one way or another. And in my own resolve, I kind of found myself in this place where we all resonate at different vibrational levels. It just so happens that in the human form, the way we are today, we see each other because we’re resonating at the same frequency and that people that pass, people that are on the other side, per se, they’re resonating at a frequency that we can’t see, but it doesn’t mean that they’re not influencing our thoughts and our own energies here. Which kind of dives right back into what you’re talking about in terms the planet and survival. 

Earlier, you talked about stress and stress sort of gets a bad rap in a way. Change occurs. Healthy change occurs through stress. We all think of it as, “Well, we’re being stressed out “’cause we have too much of that imbalance of stress.” But in fact, our bodies grow by stress. The environment changes and morphs because of stressors, different stressors. And what I felt when you were talking about just the evolution of catastrophic events, it’s sort of like I sort of felt that you were going to this place where it’s almost like a religion, like you have to have faith that nature is gonna prevail and that we don’t know what we’ll be like at the other end of the tunnel when we come out but it’ll be a form that is encompassing all the things of the past, getting rid of maybe the part of the world that couldn’t survive, survival of fittest, right? 

And then coming out emerging in a new form of you or us that will be more resilient and long lasting. And so I just love the way you put it all together. And certainly, more importantly, for many of the Lyme patients listening today, they’re always saying like, “Well, have I been cursed with this Lyme disease, “and/or the coinfections? “Why me? Why now? “How come I got it and the guy next to me “that also got bit by a tick,” per se, if that’s the way you got it, “isn’t showing symptoms but I am?” And you’ve done an incredible job in your thesis about glyphosate and how these various different chemicals and how the environment, the external environment has affected our internal environment, and also has affected our epigenetics. So the genetic forms in the way we’re expressing ourselves. And this is all rolled up in our whole talk about how even though we have all these external forces happening, we still can, if we focus on the end game which is creating that balance within, both our terrain as well as our spiritual balance and making that connection, I think that at the end, we all come out a much higher, elevated, emotionally evolved community and people as a whole.

Zach Bush, M.D.

As you speak of kind of this emotional, spiritual paradigm, as we start to kind of shift gears to like, what do we need to do as Lyme patients or as Lyme practitioners to change the paradigm? How do we start moving forward to, not recovery but actual transformation? I don’t want you to get back to some former state because that was the state that made you vulnerable to the very thing that you’re suffering from now. So how do we imagine a true metamorphosis of you right now? And I believe that one of the things I’ve seen over and over again is that the phenomenon of the second law of thermodynamics is expressed as a trigger for this vulnerability. And the second law of thermodynamics has been proven out more than really any other premise in physics. And it states that any system left in isolation or put in isolation increases its entropy or chaos, and life is inherently the opposite. 

Life is inherently centropy or the organization of chaos into organized function. And so what has moved you from centropy? Birth. You went from all this nutrients in your mother’s bloodstream into a fetus. How did that happen? It is the ultimate example of centropy is the development of a fetus and then maturation into a human capable of birth and going through the developmental stages of neural development and everything else that’s going on in your learning and your capacity to grasp the possibility of a spiritual realm that is yet unseen but is felt. You have a neurologic system that has five senses, but you have a physiologic center that knows truth. That’s different than your five senses. You vibrate. You might get goosebumps every time somebody drops a truth bomb and you know you’ve heard truth. What’s giving you goosebumps? Well, that’s not your brain saying, “Oh yeah, I checked with the data bank and that is truth.” 

Your brain doesn’t know truth. Your brain is a CPU chip that is just processing information, but it doesn’t have any resource that goes checks truth. You have a sole source of truth within you. You have an intuition that guides you, that I wanna connect you back to. Because if anything is going to heal you, show you your path to healing, it is that North Star. So follow your goosebumps when you have that moment of like, “Oh, that’s what I need next,” lean into that. I don’t care how crazy it sounds or how abstract it seems to your biologic journey, lean in. And so become alert and ask every night when you go to sleep and every morning as you wake up, “Show me the path. “I will listen at my core. “I will not pay attention to all of the neural input, “my pain, my symptoms of physical things “that are being sensed by my five senses. “I’m gonna listen deeper. “I’m gonna listen to my spiritual epicenter “and I will be guided by you.” And what you’re really talking to is future self. Your future self is already healed, whether it’s on the other side of the veil or right here in the biologic form, you are complete. You are in a vibrational coherence in the near future. And so ask that I am. 

Ask the I am to show you that path and lean in. Listen for that one little split second where you feel, “Oh, that feels good. “That feels good. I’m gonna open that door. “I’m gonna open that path. “I’m gonna walk that next step.” If technology serves to in any way in the healing process of Lyme, it’s because it gives you that opportunity to be on a journey. It gives you these finite little doors to open, to lead you down the path to you intrinsically healing yourself because you are the thing that ultimately is the only pathway to healing. 

There is no technology that can create a human immune system. We have never created something so complex. We can’t even conceive of what it is, let alone reengineer it. And so technology, pharmaceuticals, nothing is gonna fix you. There will be doors that will be opened and the closer you get to technologies that are being designed out of other people’s North Star, out of other people’s journey towards truth, the closer they come to truth, the more likely those are to lead you down your own truth path. Ultimately, we’re gonna just show you that you are a beautiful light being being expressed in a human body. And when you come into a deep knowingness of that and you can connect to that deep vibration of the soul, the biology that is expressed will be completely new. It will have not been seen in your lifetime. 

This is the metamorphosis we need to reach. So how do we get there? We need to do the opposite of the second law of thermodynamics, which is connect you. We need you not to be isolated. And interestingly, I would say the majority of people that I know who either in my patient population, my clinic, or out in the world that have suffered from chronic pain, chronic fatigue, chronic Lyme, whatever you wanna call it, these are in almost to the last one so obviously those that are the most conscious, the most intelligent, the most creative group of humanity is suffering at a much higher level than those that are having no sense of friction with the common narrative and they jump in, they do the thing. 

There’s a fear narrative, they pay attention, they do the thing. It’s the people that are trying to think more holistically in general. And this is actually an isolating event, especially around the college age, as well as kind of that pre-parenting or post-parenting ages. There’s these different points in life where you become very vulnerable to isolation because you’re thinking differently, because you’re starting to sense your sole path and your sole path seems to be extremely divergent with the common outline of you go to college, you get your degree, you go do your thing, you be successful, you sit in a cubicle, type the data. I don’t care what you think. I don’t care if you’re bored. Do the thing because then you can get the raise and then you can get the advancement. 

The intelligent people of the planet that are most ready to create the transformation and as the souls that are signing up to change the world have to go through this extreme friction point of they know they’re going in the wrong direction by following the common path and they don’t know their path yet. They don’t know that there’s a community around them already finding new paths. And so that isolation. And so I think Julia was a good example of this probably. 

She was so far beyond the common narrative and whether it be in our education system or not, this young woman was such a bright light that it almost necessarily isolated her in ways and it was stressful for the body to experience. “I know this is the path, “but everybody’s telling me I’m on the wrong path. “I know this is the path, “but everybody’s telling me that I’m failing. “I know this is the path, but this is my soul, “but this is my body, “and everybody tells me this is who I really am, “but this is my soul.” “But this is your body and this is who you really are.” And so it’s this disconnect I think that’s happening. And so if you are currently suffering with Lyme, I wanna honor you that you are likely experiencing a physiologic expression of this inherent stress between a body being pulled by the world and a soul that’s pulling you in the right direction. So

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Wow.

Zach Bush, M.D.

The faster we can surrender our belief that we need to be part of some social paradigm and the faster we can connect you to other souls that are thinking holistically about your journey, the faster you’re going to start to heal. And so the most important thing we can do as practitioners I think is connect people who have these chronic fatigues and chronic Lyme so that they know they’re not alone, they know they’re not crazy. They are experiencing physiologic symptoms, but they realize it’s not due to a Lyme spirochete or some retrovirus or whatever there is being blamed on. It’s in fact, the isolation event that is causing this vulnerability that would express the syndrome in the first place. 

So connect. Begin to connect. And if there is any unifying trait of all of these Blue Zones that we talked about, where people are typically live over 100 years and all of this, it’s the phenomenon of multi-generational community beyond the nuclear family. That’s the unifying trait of these cultures that have bred these Blue Zones. And so it doesn’t matter if you’re in Ikaria, Greece, or a Chinese village, the culture, the society, has created an environment in which you are always being stimulated by new community. In Ikaria, Greece, they say that they reason they live long is because they always set an empty chair at the dinner table, hoping that somebody new will come and eat dinner with them tonight. 

And they explain that they never ask each other, “What did you eat for dinner last night?” But they always ask each other, “Who did you eat dinner with last night?” This is what makes us live long. And they’ve shown that the more multi-generational that new community is, that new stimulus of input happens, the more likely you are to live longer. And so I would think about that. If you are a Lyme patient, you are isolated. That is the phenomenon. You are likely isolated in these social paradigms that I described earlier. That leads you up to it. But as soon as you get any chronic disease, it inherently isolates you more. You don’t have the energy to connect socially. You don’t have the energy to be creative in connecting to other people. You feel like there’s something wrong with you. 

Maybe you’re flawed, maybe you’re weak, maybe you’re- You could tell yourself all these self-defeating narratives in your head and you become more and more isolated. So your journey back to health is gonna be reconnection. And maybe you need to really appeal to the community and say, “I have this weird disorder. “Nobody knows what it is. They call it Lyme. “They call it chronic pain syndromes,” or regional pain syndromes, whatever they’re doing. Fibromyalgia. “But I know that it’s symptomatic of a disconnect “between my community and my soul path. “I’m looking for community on my soul path to advance me, “to show me more of who I am and what I’m here to do.” And just opening up that invitation is much different than saying, “I’m sorry, I can’t come to your party,” and all that. 

And so you think about if there’s not energy to make a meal or whatever ever it is, or have people bring a potluck, have tea in the afternoon and invite people that interest you, that stimulate you. Listen to that North Star inside of you, like, “Who do I wanna spend time with?” And it may be the people that you are spending time with are actually exacerbating the very phenomenon of your isolation. You don’t vibrate with them. You do not feel a part of their tribe. You feel outside, you feel like you’re an abstract version of life around them. 

You feel less empowered, not more empowered by being present with your immediate family or your partner or whatever it is that spends most of your time. So lean into that. Is this current community strengthening me and vibrating with me? Is it part of my future path? Or is it not? And then you have to make some very difficult decisions to say, “Okay, if it’s not, then what? “Where is that vibration?” And start looking out there. And fortunately, technology connects us through unique ways today. And so look for the podcasts that turn you on. Look for that make you vibrate that new hope, that new vibration. Tune into LinkedIn groups or whatever it is out there. Go to Kajabi and jump on a learning management system and take a course. See who else is in the class. We’ve created a “Journey Into Intrinsic Health,” which is an eight week program. 

And that eight week program has a one-on-one coach, or you can do the group coaching experience too, where you’re going through the experience of transformation with eight other people. And that can be a powerful way of watching other people be transformed by the information, by the adaptation of their way in which they make the rubber hit the road for them. It can give you a light bulb moment of, “Aha! “That’s what I’m capable of doing. “That’s what biology is capable of doing.” ‘Cause you’ll see transformation happening in front of your eyes. But we just launched an app for the program, which we’re very excited about, that builds the community. 

And so even after you’re done with your program, you now have connection to all these people that have been through the same program and know the same amount of information that are helping them express their sole purpose through biologic alignment. And that’s creating possibility for a sort of fertile soil. So I think there’s many, many programs that are starting to crop up that are allowing you to connect to like-minded community that are on a trajectory to healing or a trajectory to self-realization that you can be a part of. 

There’s never before been more avenues into meditation, prayer circles that are separated from religious dogma and really starting to be a group of humans that are coming together over like purpose to see more clearly. So get connected. Whether it be through technology or in person, there’s opportunities there for you to engage. And I would say that that has to be number one in your health journey here, get connected. ‘Cause I know it’s fundamental to the state of your chaos that led to this vulnerability of this expression of fatigue, brain fog, chronic pain that you’re experiencing right now. Get connected some how, some way. So before you swallow all the supplements and before you do all your technologies, am I connected to humanity? Am I connected to a humanity that makes me vibrate at a higher level? Am I inspired by the people I am around? Am I inspired by the voices that are in my ears? Change that environment till you are, and you will be fast on the healing process that will be transformative. And you will be a different person, not some iteration of some former person.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Well, I can relate to that on so many levels. And I think any Lyme patient, whether it’s just acute or chronic and/or any person that has a chronic challenge, feels that sense of isolation. “Why is this happening to me? “How come there isn’t a pill I can take “that can get rid of this tomorrow? “How my family “is rushing to my rescue, “yet they feel inadequate through their own process “because they can’t love me anymore, “but yet I’m not getting better.” And then, even through your own health or ill health, you find yourself becoming even more isolated. 

What you described earlier, I call my inner Elmo, by the way. It’s that voice inside of me. I started hearing it when I was about seven or eight. And then I did the age appropriate thing, which was I didn’t completely dismiss this little voice inside of me. Or it was probably a bunch of voices which I call my guidances, right? And then I picked it up again in my mid-20s, early 30s, and I just started playing a game within my own self, which was I just asked the question, “Should I go left or right? “Should I pick white or black?” And I’d ask my voice, I’d ask my symphony of voices, “Which way should I go?” And invariably, I mean, I’m talking about 100% of the time, in the beginning if they said, “Black,” I took white. If they said, “Left,” I went right. And I was always wrong. I was always wrong. And then somewhere in my early 30s, I said, “Okay. Dummy, ask the question, “start listening to the answer and take that leap of faith.” It’s really hard to do because it’s the unknown. And plus you’re going against the norm because the world, I don’t know if it’s just the Western culture, but we always here we have a tendency to homogenize. 

Everybody should go to gym class, everybody should go to English class, and all that kind of stuff. And what I’ve always enjoyed is sort of the Montessori approach. You should just sort of the Peter principle, just keep working it until you’ve reached the ceiling, if that’s even possible. And I don’t think that it is if you have the attitude that there is no ceiling. You just keep driving. But taking the risk of not knowing the unknown and moving away from the norm is very difficult for most of us. And I want to put it out there as you have, take the challenge. 

Everybody in the Lyme world that’s listening today, you’re okay with yourself and the way you are. And you’re not alone with that. And what I love about technology, chat rooms, and all the things that you’ve talked about, even the programs that you put together, is you’re creating that platform where people can connect. And it’s not just for the moment, it’s knowing that there are other people like you, like-minded people, people that are listening to that inner voice, that are that sense of new community, that kind of sheds back the old high school relationships and the material things that you thought were important before that really didn’t do, aren’t really serving you today. 

But this new community, that new life, that new breath of air that really will forge your future and create that vision of the new you and let go of all that other stuff that was keeping you down. So I applaud you. And I think I’ve always asked everybody that I’ve interviewed for those special tips that is gonna make a difference to you or to anybody listening for tomorrow. And if anything that I’ve heard you say today, among all the times that I’ve heard you speak, and together, when we’ve been together, clearly that sense of hope and knowing that you’re okay with self, however that’s defined in the moment is perfect within itself and its own subset. 

Even if you’re not feeling well and you’re on your back Herxing, it doesn’t matter, that’s all part of your process. And just having the hope. And you’ve seen this and I saw in your background that as you were going through your internship, you’ve also done a bunch of rounds in hospice and understanding the precipice of when you’re just at the end of your life, knowing that feeling, that essence of taking the last breath. What was the meaning of your life? Did you fulfill it? Do you have any regrets? So living in the moment and in the breath is all about that experience. And everything you’ve done in the past is in that breath and in that moment. And if Julia taught me anything in how fragile life is, it’s to live in the breath and live in the moment, ’cause that’s really all we have. 

So I love you for your time and your day. I know you’re busy as heck, so I appreciate so much. We’re coming close to an end of today’s interview and I know that you’ve got a huge day ahead of you. So I’m wondering, I mean, you’ve got so many things. You’ve got the Seraphic Group, you’ve got your “Farmer’s Footprint.” We spent no time on that. These are all game changers, by the way. It’s part of your philanthropic pursuits. People wanna know how they can get a piece of you, Zach, so what is it that we can focus on? Where can we send people to to support the efforts that you’re doing to make it meaningful?

Zach Bush, M.D.

Sure. I mean, really be supported by what we’re doing is a beginning point. So we have a lot of resources that we’ve built out in our companies and in our nonprofits to connect you. And the first company that really soared for me was a biotech company, Biomic Sciences, that we launched a product out of soil systems to reconnect the cellular system through a redox communication system made by bacteria and fungi. So in the same way that your social isolation creates entropy, your biologic isolation away from the microbiome creates entropy and you break down your regenerative effect. 

You lose the first two lines of your immune system and all of this as you lose connection with that microbiome communication network. And so that microbiome communication network is called ION. Now, ION stands for the Intelligence of Nature. So if you go to intelligenceofnature.com, there’s a lot of education there, there’s a lot of science about the roles of microbiome in your health. The ION product is available there at intelligenceofnature.com. You can also find it through my website, which is just my name, zachbushmd.com. There’s a ton of educational material on zachbushmd.com that is free, that we’ve got the Global Health Education Summit every month where I bring either a couple hours of didactic information to you through kind of PowerPoint presentation, or more commonly through a panel of experts on different topics. 

And we cover everything from death, dying, and rebirth to the pandemic. And our last one that was super successful and a huge hit was on mental health, and all of this. And so bringing unique and new perspective, I think through and giving you new optics to understand these phenomenon of disease. The heart disease one was really phenomenally well received too, and goes way beyond your common concepts of heart disease, as we start to reframe that scientific narrative and that biologic reality around the heart and what is the heart and what is it here to do within our biologic systems? It’s a beautiful journey. So free material there. 

Journeyofintrinsichealth.com is a website. You can reach it again through my website or through our clinic as well. But “Journey of Intrinsic Health” is that eight week program, both in group or individuals, resource for you. We have the clinic itself. If you don’t have a holistic team that’s thinking beyond the antibiotics and antivirals and all of this, that continue to isolate you more and more from the microbiome, if you don’t have a team that’s starting to reconnect you at that biologic level, you can reach out to our clinic. Themclinic.com can get you there. You’ll probably find that through my website as well. So zachbushmd.com can get you pretty much everywhere. 

In the nonprofit realm, farmersfootprint.us. And we also just have the parent org which is projectbiome.org. Working on soil, water and air systems, and we’re looking for partners and contributors to help advance projects, to make the universal adoption of regenerative food systems a reality. We are working with stakeholders across the entire food system now after just a few years of operations. We’re one of the biggest movers and shakers in the space of regenerative awareness and systems thinking. We just launched Project Biome Australia, another nonprofit there. So if you’re in the Australian community, you have an opportunity to participate in that nonprofit environment there with projectbiomeau.au. Or maybe it’s .org/au, I can’t remember. 

But you’ll find it there in Project Biome Australia. And that is a phenomenal group of storytellers there that are creating this new narrative and body of knowledge and awareness there. So lots of opportunities to engage. If you’re interested in kind of the big sociopolitical, socioeconomics platforms, keep an eye out on my website and on my social media. You can find me at Zach Bush MD on Instagram or Facebook. And you’ll see us rolling this out just in the next few weeks. We have a new 501c3 platform teaching natural law and governance and applying the biologic evidence that we are not alone. And if we continue to function alone and isolationists in our sociopolitics will continue to destroy the planet through consumer behavior and the like. 

So if we’re gonna prevent the collapse of the planet and the sixth extinction, we actually have to change macro-behavior at the socioeconomic and sociopolitical levels. And so the Natural Law and Governance Org will be an exciting one for you to participate, and we’re gonna be needing seed funding to get that off the ground and everything else. So lots for you to help us transform the world through, and it won’t happen unless you’re in community with us. And so stay engaged and stay curious. And we wish you the best of healing across all of our companies. We’re excited to be a part of that. The intelligence of nature has become a product line that has been really exciting in the Lyme community, and we’re excited for you to learn from that, and understand how your reconnection to your ecosystems around you can be a huge part of your healing journey.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Wow, you’re truly a man, I wanna say on a mission, but you’ve got so many missions now. It’s incredible to understand how many, how well thought out and how well planned this is. But you can’t do it alone. And everybody out there, it doesn’t take a whole lot. But if you learned anything today, it’s about the spark of life and how resilient we all are. And you just have to visualize it. You have to get connected to someone that resonates for you. And Zach, I don’t think a person that is listening to this interview will not resonate with you and what you’re doing. 

So we really appreciate your time and your love and attention to changing things and changing paradigms and not accepting life in the world that most of us just feel like, “Well, we just can’t do anything about it.” We can make change. And it is that old adage about a journey of a thousand miles starts with one step. So take the step, everyone. Join Dr. Zach Bush, any of the platforms that he has talked about in the last few minutes, and you’ll find value. And we so appreciate and love you, Zach. Thank you again for the time.

Zach Bush, M.D.

Thanks, Robby.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Hey, everybody. It’s Robby Besner. Thanks so much for joining us today. Please share this content with anyone that you think might benefit from it. And we’re looking forward to having you with us tomorrow for another great interview.