Deep Meditation: It’s Impact On Your Health & Disease

Hemal Patel, PhD

Yes, no, we’re looking forward to sharing some of this amazing data we have.

Ann Shippy, MD

Yes. Do you mind just starting a little bit about your story? I mean, you’ve done such incredible research at the molecular level of how things work in the body to understand important illnesses. This is a whole new area for you and those last couple of years that I know you’re super excited about it.

Hemal Patel, PhD

Yes. I grew up with the notion that I’d become a physician. Interestingly, as I went through college, I decided that was not the path I wanted. I’m the only PhD in a family of MDs, and so they all work with patients. I work with mice and cells, and now I have human samples in the lab as well. I trained as a cardiac physiologist and pharmacologist,  and then this was at the medical college in Wisconsin, and I moved to San Diego. My wife did her medical training through the Navy, which is why we ended up in San Diego. This is one of the most amazing places in the world to do science. As a postdoc here at UCSD, the goal was to move outside of large physiological systems and start to learn more about molecular and cell biology. We hit upon the idea that the membrane of cells has unique structural properties that then create resiliency to stress adaptation, as we discovered that this adaptation is amazing for heart and neuronal cells that don’t survive stress stimuli like heart attacks, strokes, and other things. But it becomes sort of this double-edged sword where cancer uses the same mechanism to grow out of control.

The research then focused on these membrane microdomains called lipid rafts and caveolae. Well, my lab discovered, and this is how I started my independent career at UCSD, that the membrane becomes this conduit for regulating energy balance in a cell. How the membrane ultrastructure behaves sits close to mitochondria. This relationship becomes the key to stress adaptation. For the heart and the brain, this relationship becomes key to maintaining energy balance. When you’re deprived of resources, when you have an ischemic event in your heart, or when you have a stroke, this relationship creates a protective element. What we then figured out was that this relationship is augmented in cancer, so cancer cells use the membrane as a way to store oxygen and potentially adapt to hypoxic environments. This is why cancer is so resilient. It grows in crazy, weird places where it shouldn’t and doesn’t have the resources to do it. The research in these two areas in the lab focuses on two main sorts of topics: how the cell survives. Once we figure out that survival process, how can we kill cells that we don’t want to grow?

That’s been the major molecular focus of cell adaptation at this esoteric level of the membrane. About three years ago, we started moving into this new area, this meditation research, and so on campus. I shared an office with a pain anesthesiologist for almost a decade, and the idea at the time was a Ph.D. in the same lab or office as an M.D. At the end of the day, you talk about your day. You start working together, invent some crazy amazing stuff, and off to the races. Toby and I became good friends, but we never worked together. He left the university, started his pain service, and was very successful when the opioid crisis hit. People stopped prescribing opioids, right? Then they had to come up with alternative ways to manage pain. One of the alternative practitioners in his clinic, Hilary Hamilton, was proficient at Joe Dispenza’s meditations. She said, “Do you mind if I try some of these with our patients? “They saw some amazing benefits. Toby then went to a week-long event, was completely blown away, and saw some stuff that you just can’t explain.

It’s people walking out of wheelchairs. Cancer is disappearing. Just amazing stuff at this week-long intensive event. We went up to Joe and said, We need to study this and Joe’s course. Yes, we do. Toby is like, I know Guy. You remember all this stuff. I would tell him when we were sitting in our office late at night after a long day. That’s how it all started. It’s crazy. It seems like it’s been 20 years that we’ve been working on this, but it’s only been since the pandemic started in March of 2020 when we started engaging in some of this work. It was slowed due to the pandemic. It’s just taking off astronomically.

Ann Shippy, MD

It’s been so fun on my side to see it work. I knew about Dispenza’s work because I’d been hearing from patients and friends who had done it, and I didn’t dive in until April 21.

Hemal Patel, PhD

I think we were at the same event that it was in earlier.

Ann Shippy, MD

I got to meet you for the first time then. Yes. I’ve been to five weeks long.

Hemal Patel, PhD

I resisted for quite a while as well. Joe had called me multiple times and said, Dude, are you working on this stuff? You should come to experience the event. Being a busy academic, I just couldn’t find the time to do it.

Ann Shippy, MD

Seven days is a huge long time.

Hemal Patel, PhD

But then we saw the summary data, and it was unbelievable what we were seeing in the blood of meditators. Then this is like, I got to go see what’s happening at an event. I went, and it was a transformative week-long experience.

Ann Shippy, MD

I’ve been a long-term meditator, and I’ve done, I would say, at least six or seven other different kinds of meditation. I’ve been a strong believer. I just didn’t think I needed to take a week to learn how to do this particular type of medicine. But I’m so committed now because of what I’ve witnessed, both in my own body and then with my patients, who have done it with some incredible stories, and then just with the people around me at the conference. Now both of my children went on their own accord, just as they witnessed the changes that they saw in me.

Hemal Patel, PhD

One of the things we’re learning is that it’s not the standard run-of-the-mill meditative experience. There’s something unique that we still haven’t figured out that’s happening at these events that goes way beyond just closing your eyes and mindfully meditating.

Ann Shippy, MD

I think it has something to do with the environment that’s created there. The level of teaching, like not just having the experience of meditation, but the teaching that Joe does to help explain how it’s working, He’s teaching quantum physics to a group of over a thousand people and helping people understand what’s possible.

Hemal Patel, PhD

Yes, it’s not one of these things where it’s like, go in the corner, close your eyes, and something will happen magically. You’re taught the process and how to go through it. The process is different than I think a lot of other things because there are a lot of introspective components to it. The ones that go deep into this have a mystical, contemplative experience that leads to a reimagining of who and what they are.

Ann Shippy, MD

You started the experience about the same time as me, but then you have this data in hand that you’re like, Wow, there’s something here. There’s lots of data on meditation and its impact. It used to be thought of as something; well, it’s not real, but now you’ve accelerated that scientific understanding to an even greater level to share a little bit about that.

Hemal Patel, PhD

Yes. For me, it’s been this curiosity. I go to events now, and I just meditate once in a while to stay balanced with everything. But a large portion of my time at these events has been just observing my thinking about what people are experiencing and how I could get a better handle on that from a biological perspective, with the idea that it would satisfy my curiosity about what’s happening. But then also, can we learn from this to help people who can’t achieve or who won’t achieve? Were there some barriers to that achievement in some unique way? The ultimate goal is to scale. It’s tough to get to an event. As you said, seven days is a long time. It’s tough to get them to sell out very quickly. There just isn’t the scalability that we would want. The idea is: could we use this research to think about chronic diseases from a perspective where we could potentially identify control points and where we could go? That’s what we’re all after about the research: to understand mind-body connections and see if there’s a unique approach to taking this to the next level.

Ann Shippy, MD

I truly believe that this can help the individual down into their innate ability to heal.

Hemal Patel, PhD

Yes.

Ann Shippy, MD

Yes. If you want to dive into.

Hemal Patel, PhD

Yes, let me show you some, for a scientific sort of analytical mind like mine. It’s good to see some visual data to sort of wrap your head around what we’re thinking and where we’re headed. Let me share some of that so we can just get a sense of where we’re at right now and what we’re sort of thinking about. I’m sort of a tongue-in-cheek title. These talks that I give about the evolution of species This idea is that thought can empower who and what we are. If you had asked me this three years ago, I would have said no way, right on this thing. That’s a puzzle for all of the things that it creates. There are problems in the world, and these are ways to solve these external problems. I would have never thought of the mind as a way to solve an internal problem that you’re having with your body and those kinds of things going through all of the data that we’ve captured over the last three years. I think my mind has shifted to this idea that the thoughts that you have to create the body, that you have, I think there’s a way to take control of that. We’re looking at it from a very molecular sort of level, but also from this high 10,000-foot view as well. Tobi has been quite involved in all of this. He’s the clinical arm of everything we do, and then we’re sort of the basic science arm. He’s involved in helping set up the clinical elements of all of this. Then we do all the work at UCSD with lots of collaborators that we’re looking at.

Ann Shippy, MD

Is a massive undertaking.

Hemal Patel, PhD

It is.

Ann Shippy, MD

Believable. The amount of data that you’re able to collect through this, it’s just it doesn’t exist any place else because you have.

Hemal Patel, PhD

I’ll give you a sense of the scope of how many people we’ve helped. Before the pandemic or around the pandemic, in the first year of 2020, we were looking at maybe 150 subjects that we were looking at from then until now. I think we’ve probably done experiments in some capacity on over 6,000 people. The data from all of those individuals is going into a larger database that will be mineable. We can look at all the conduits of that data and see how meditation and the mind are impacting the body in unique ways. Each data set creates other endpoints that we can then incorporate into the system. This is one large data set that we’re working with right now. This was part of it. Imagine a study we did in San Diego, and this was to integrate a structural, functional understanding of the brain and how it connects with the body. Being in San Diego, we had access to fMRI machines on campus as we brought 20 people onto campus and did fMRI imaging with them before and after the event. We saw some amazing things.

This is not meant. You can understand what I’m showing, but it’s just the enormity of the data sets that we’re looking at. There are truly effects of meditations that were coming out of our dataset. The most exciting is this notion that there are regions of the brain that shut down when you go into a weeklong experience. These are regions that look like they should shut down when you’re on psilocybin. By closing your eyes and going into this deep meditative state, you’re creating a state that you can create by taking an exogenous substance. The big sort of conduit for this is that you can do this yourself. You don’t have to rely on something from the outside to change who and what you are. You can functionally create this yourself by going into this contemplative state. There are true effects of the retreat as well. It’s not just that you can meditate away, but if you’re in the presence of other individuals like you talked about, something happens. There’s a community of individuals that develops in this community. The effect is dramatic.

This is something that I’ve been curious about: whether you have to be at an event with a couple hundred thousand other people to get that effect, or can you get this effect if you’re sitting alone in your room at home going through that same experience? We’ve got some interesting things that we’re dreaming up to do and test this year. Early next year, we’re going to put this to the actual test. What happens when you’re experiencing the weeklong at home versus when you’re doing it in a room with other people?

Ann Shippy, MD

Oh, that’s great, because it may be kind of like the four-minute mile. Once you see someone getting up from their wheelchair after ALS or a chronic neurodegenerative disease, then that might even just open up the pathways, and you don’t have to be there.

Hemal Patel, PhD

Yes, true. What we were shocked at finding were these sorts of foreign things—that there were whole brain changes that we were observing. It’s not just one part of your brain that’s being engaged or altered, but the fact that you’re in regions like the default network shutdown seems to alter every aspect of your brain’s connectivity. This is something we’re interested in looking at. The other sort of thing that we were shocked to find is that there are changes in people who are advanced meditators. There’s a region in their brain that has a higher volume. It’s like any muscle. If you exercise it enough, the muscle grows. There’s a region of the brain in these advanced meditators that they use day in and day out that starts to grow. Interestingly, it’s a region that controls their perception of their body in space. One of the big things that a lot of these experienced meditators go through is that they have these mystical experiences where they have these out-of-body kinds of things. Curiously, it’s that region of the brain that has this larger volume. This is something we’re very interested in following up on.

The big question for us has been: I think the brain is important, and we’re studying in unique ways. Every group that’s looked at meditation has looked at how the brain is impacted. This is, I think, a known thing that everyone is interested in or that we want to expand if we know that the brain is impacted. But then what is the impact of this expansion on the rest of the body? Creating this brain-body connection kind of stuff To get to this, we had to look at it on a larger scale than what people are looking at. Most studies that you’ll see in the published literature have maybe 100 subjects, and they’re separated either through a retreat or they have unique interventions that they go through at separate times. They’re not in a community experience. We designed these quantum studies, and so they’re called quantum studies because they’re meant to analyze a thousand humans meditating. We did these smaller studies at events, and they cost a lot of money to do, and they have a lot of resources that need to be presented to do them. Our initial studies had 30, 50, or at most 60 people that we were looking at.

We had this in Joe Dispenza’s communities. Amazing. I think he creates this amazing environment for people to come together, learn, grow, and become the best versions of themselves they can be. When we solicited for a study, we would have six, seven, or 800 people volunteer to be in it. We’d have to turn the majority of them down, and they were upset. They’d come up to me and say, “I knew I needed to do something to get into your study. I’ve tried three times now.” Quantum was designed to cater to the larger group, given that we had this outpouring of individuals who wanted to be studied. But let’s design a study where we turn no one away. Quantum was sort of born. The only buy-in you had to have was to agree to wear a biometric device for the week. 978 people agreed to do this in our first quantum study, which we were just floored at. They gave us self-reported health surveys before and after, and then we looked at their biological input. We did microbiome and epigenetics.

Ann Shippy, MD

This is like, I think it’s pretty amazing when you get that many people to give and start to sample. I was at this event with my 25-year-old son. At first, he was like, “I don’t want to do that.” But then he went and saw, like, heard what was going on. He was like, “Oh yeah, I’m in.”

Hemal Patel, PhD

We were taking beds. How many people would give us microbiome samples? This was not a time when you just got a stool sample and looked to see what was there. This was a couple of years ago, and we got 800 matched samples before and after the event, when we were in Florida, and the majority of individuals agreed to give us this sample. We’re starting to; we have all the sequencing done, and the data is astonishing. The predictive ability of the microbiome before the event to tell us what diseases you have is insane. It can predict anxiety up to almost 70% confidence. What’s even more exciting is that when you look at the microbiome at the end of seven days, it’s completely transformed by these chronic diseases. This shouldn’t happen. Most outside interventions suggest outside antibiotics, which would kill your gut and change it in days. lifestyle interventions like diet, exercise, and a new environment. It should take about three to six months to see a dramatic shift in your microbiome. We’re seeing this at Joe’s events in seven days. Something is happening where your brain is now communicating with your body.

We’ve got some ideas of what that is. We think it’s tied to vagal nerve stimulation. The vagus goes into the heart, and it goes into the gut. By creating this element of higher mental activity, we think you’re impacting those two organs. There’s a huge connection between all of the meditations that you learn and heart-brain connectivity. Well, we’re starting to learn that when you get that vagal stimulation, we think you’re probably altering your gut dynamics as well. We’ve got some cool studies planned for the next year to look at those three organs, their electrical activity, and how it’s altered by meditative states. The first quantum stopped here. It was the Garmin survey’s microbiome and cheek scraper epigenetics. We then started to think, if this many people are interested in doing this, how could we evolve quantum to the next level to get more information about an individual? It’s all we’ve learned in all of our assays: the blood carries a lot of information. One of the thoughts was that when someone has these elevated emotional experiences throughout a week-long experience, they’re changing.

They’re creating new information in their bodies. Is there a way to track that new information, move it to other systems, and see if there’s a way to harvest and mine that information uniquely? Blood becomes the conduit to do this. For the second quantum, which we launch later in 2022, we asked people if they would agree to do blood collections. We’re getting more and more invasive in asking people to do their time, effort, resources, and those kinds of things. The Second Quantum had about 810 people who signed up to do the study. 750 agreed to give us blood samples before and after the event. They’re sitting in my freezer. We’re salivating at what’s inside them, and I’ll show you why we’re so interested in this because we have a paper that just came out that just blows the doors off of what is potentially possible. We’re starting to capture these video diaries at these events because we’re very interested to see them, and we talked about the scalability, we could learn from something very easy to capture, like someone’s use of words that are their facial features, their intonation, their sound, and their connectedness to global change as we see in the microbiome, in their blood factors, and other things.

Then we can move away from doing these expensive things and just record a video diary and get their insights into what their experiences are like. While we’re at it, we’re like, Well, let’s just collect some tears. We have lots of tears in the lab from an emotional experience. We’re starting to do studies with continuous glucose monitors and diabetics. Urine contains a lot of information as well. We have bags and bags of tubes of urine samples stored away from this second quantum study, which we think we’re going to get a lot of ideas from. Eventually, the idea is that as we expand quantum and think about the next phase of this, we will incorporate large-scale brain mapping into all of this analysis as well. Where has quantum sort of led us? We have about 1800 subjects that have enrolled in Quantum over the last year. The happy sort of thing that we came upon is that we’re looking at 60 diseases that are represented. I knew that we were going to get a pretty deep capture of what the human condition is and what we’re dealing with. But I never thought we would have 60 diseases represented. This graphic looks at some of these diseases. The bigger and redder or something, the more people we have that are represented in the population with that disease. As it gets smaller and different colors, we have less and less of those individuals. These are the biggest sorts of things that we see: depression, anxiety, and PTSD.

If you look at mental health, 50% of Quantum has some sort of mental health issue that they’re dealing with. I think this is on par with what the world population is facing. I think, especially coming out of the pandemic, we’re in a different world. I think there are so many more stressors that lead to anxiety and depression that we’re suffering from, and our children and others, as well as our work habits and other things, have completely changed. I think that leads to this. The thing that we’re interested in is those diseases—the mental health components tied to other chronic diseases that we’re suffering from.

Ann Shippy, MD

We’re certainly, I mean, this is so relevant for this summit because these are all things that we see with the small micro-toxin exposure, especially the brighter the category here, the more often we see it. This is perfect to be talking about.

Hemal Patel, PhD

Yes. I’ve jokingly said In most drug studies that run clinical trials, they’ll look at one drug in potentially a thousand people or so. We’re added at Joe’s events with a lot of help from Joe to get a lot of this infrastructure and stuff put together. We’re looking at one intervention and how it impacts 60 diseases at one time. This is, I think, the holy grail of finding out how the mind impacts the body. There are two possibilities that we’ve been thinking about. All of these individuals that come to an event and have all of these things that they’re dealing with either are having unique experiences, and it’s changing something unique in every single individual to create an effect that then leads to an endpoint, or what’s happening at these events is that there’s something common that’s happening that then is impacting all of these diseases. My bet and I’ll show you data for it. I’m sort of hedging it; I know that it’s, and I think it’s a common feature that’s happening in all of these things that are creating that then leads to this endpoint of effect.

The positive element of that is that if there is a common feature, then there’s the potential to create ways to stimulate that endogenous effect in a much more profound way across these chronic diseases. This information came from these self-reported surveys that we had. Lots of these individuals do. 1800 people responded before the event about what they were dealing with, and then 1800 people responded at the end. When you start analyzing this, something unique comes out of it. One of the surveys we do is this SRF 36 survey, and we’re looking at the differential change between what they reported pre-and post-survey. It looks at eight parameters of physical, mental, and emotional health. One of the things that I’m happy to report is that if you’re a healthy individual and you come to Joe’s seven-day event, you leave as a healthy individual; nothing changes.

Ann Shippy, MD

That’s important.

Hemal Patel, PhD

For this. One of these things is that people worry about these intensive meditative experiences, and will that leave them with this notion of sort of this uneasy feeling of who and what they are? The evidence suggests no. If you go to a plant medicine retreat, take ayahuasca, psilocybin, or some of these other things, there are side effects. You are going to sometimes see things that you don’t want to see. Even if you’re healthy, you’re going to have these negative experiences. It’s amazing to see that all of our healthy subjects have no reported major changes, and they sit in an internal circle. What was shocking to me is that these are diseases that we see at a high level in our population that we’re looking at in Quantum. But irrespective of disease, you would think some of them do have lots of pain modalities that they’re dealing with, others not so much. Every single one of these diseases has this gigantic shift in body pain as a conduit. What this suggests to us is that what this global experience is doing typically for every one of the individuals that are there is impacting their perception, their feelings, and their intensity of pain.

This now starts to get us thinking about what the common feature is. We think that this meditative experience—this immersive, weeklong experience—is profound. It leads to brain changes that look like you’re on psilocybin. It leads to changes in your biology that are just amazing in terms of the microbiome and everything else. You’re creating an internal pharmacology and an internal change in molecules that target pain, and pain becomes a primary feature of all diseases. If every disease, I would suggest, has some component of pain and fatigue that’s tied to it, if you can eliminate pain and fatigue, your perception of your life dramatically improves. This is what we’re seeing in this large population of 1800 people, and everyone is seeing this dynamic shift in that one category I want. The data is coming out, hopefully very soon. But we have data to suggest that there are not just molecules that track with this phenotype that we’re seeing and that we had sort of predicted, but it was unexpected that we saw such high levels of these things in circulating blood samples. Where this has led us is what I want to reveal, and we’ve started revealing this, so we had a paper that was published last week. The first one is the work we’ve been doing with Joe at his events.

Ann Shippy, MD

Congratulations. This is amazing. What number of papers is this for you? I know you’re highly published.

Hemal Patel, PhD

This is almost 250 and one of the hardest to publish. But at the same time, one of the ones that I think should and will have one of the largest impacts This is the primary paper that we were working on that lays the groundwork for what we’re trying to show: this idea that the brain can impact the body and that information we can trap, capture, study, and identify. What we did in this paper in the title sort of tells us that meditation induces a variety of factors in your blood that work as a way to treat COVID-19 disease. The big highlight of this paper is that we did a global survey, so we asked people who are in Joe Dispenza’s community to respond to surveys and their experience with COVID during the pandemic phase. What we noticed is that if you are an experienced meditator, such as someone who’s been meditating for more than six months, your diagnosis of COVID is 50% reduced compared to someone who’s never meditated.

Ann Shippy, MD

That’s pretty profound. It was like that’s like the most impactful statistics that I’ve heard.

Hemal Patel, PhD

It was nuts. The other aspect of it was that the more you meditated, there was a dosing effect. If you meditated once a week versus twice a week versus every day, there was a bigger effect from meditating every day than once a week. This suggests that you’re creating an environment that then needs to be maintained. As you would in normal traditional 3D medicine, where you’re taking a drug to treat a disease, if you don’t take that drug and you’re supposed to take it every day once a week, you’re not going to see the same effect as if you take it every day. The dosing effect was dramatic as well, with the profound stuff that came out of the surveys. We know that it doesn’t work for everyone. People meditate, yet you’re in a toxic environment, and you’re surrounded by people who may have COVID, and you may get infected. In meditators that were infected, we saw that there was less symptomology, so they had less brain fog, less congestion, and less loss of sleep. More strikingly, the resolution of the disease was completely accelerated. If they were meditating, they had a COVID-19-positive diagnosis, but they resolved their symptoms very fast, and the disease sort of escaped them. What we then thought was, if this is happening in a global population, in a practical setting, could we identify something in the blood of meditators that limits this infectivity and the creative biology around it?

The rest of the paper focuses on the blood plasma from these meditators we had during the pandemic. We looked at three events. It was Indian Wells before the pandemic started, like literally a month before the pandemic started. Then, at the Orlando 2021 event, we had about 30 or 40 subjects that we looked at. Then, a couple of months later, we looked at a cohort in Denver. It’s about 111 people that we looked at as controls, and our controls in this population were people who were at the resort site but not actively participating in the meditation retreat. They were spouses of those attending. They were true relaxation controls. They were not working, they were not stressed, and they weren’t doing the meditative retreat. We had novice meditators, these people who were first time to an event, and then we had experienced meditators who’ve been to multiple events and know what’s up. We saw that, compared to controls, both novice and experienced individuals created stuff in their blood that prevented the virus from entering a cell. We identified this factor in a five that limits this virus from entering the cell. The biological function of this enzyme that we discovered is completely in line with how COVID-19 enters. When the SARS-CoV-2 virus enters the cell, it creates disease, and magically, a meditator elevates this specific factor in their blood that limits this infectivity. Full circle, whatever the community is experiencing at the global level, we see that there’s a molecular explanation for this as well.

This is why this paper is important. I think that people are going to spin this and think about it as a COVID paper. But I would hope that what they do is think about this as a paper that enlightens us on what meditation can do. COVID is one of the stories that we’re telling around this, and it gives us an opportunistic thing to talk about the meditation aspect of modulating biological processes in a living system. Where we’re heading with this is that if this is true for COVID, we think that we’re going to be able to mine factors in the blood of these meditators that could potentially create the cure for cancer, which we have a lot of data for right now. We’re working on the paper for this, which says that there may be elements of neurodegeneration, autoimmunity, anxiety, depression, and PTSD—all of the factors that meditators are creating, and they’re creating resilience by the end of that week against a lot of these diseases. It’s just a matter of setting up biological systems to test these things and then isolating those factors to say, What’s the causative element of all of that? That’s what we’re really

Ann Shippy, MD

I think that’s important for our listeners to understand that the things that you’re looking for are not like what you get if you go to do something like your annual blood test or if you’re sick with something. These are things that we don’t have access to test in our general laboratory. Maybe at some point, we will be able to test the 75 and say, Hey, we need to get this buildup because it’s important. But I’m just so impressed with the things that you’re discovering and how you’re making them all happen.

Hemal Patel, PhD

Yes. Knowing the goal is part of this integrative approach. This meditator is a conglomeration of all of these different aspects. To get at the answer of how to study that experience of the mind to body, you have to break it apart into all of these things, study all of it together, and then start to put it into some conduit. Then the big aspect is the individual versus the community. All of these changes occur. I think you’re going to see differences, but there’s also going to be a lot of similarities. The goal becomes how you scale those similarities to identify products that will bring this to the masses. We suspect that we will eventually reach a stage where we’ll be able to identify factors in the blood that could be targeted. 

The far-out thinking of this is that if the mind creates the body, can you create the body to then recreate the mind? We’ll probably know in about two years how to target what the brain has created in the body through a meditative experience. We’re already starting to get to this. We know probably four or five control points of metabolites that we could give people supplements that would recreate the entire blood environment in terms of the metabolic state. We also know bacteria that the gut makes after meditative experience that we could repopulate that gut with those bacteria. If you then create that body, will that then send a signal to the brain that says, Hey, this no longer looks like cancer, I need to fix cancer, and will the brain do it? The thought of where this could go is just insanely exciting.

Ann Shippy, MD

Well, and with what we’re seeing, I think more than anything, what’s happened the last three to four years has just shown us how broken our medical system is and the trouble that we’re in, like how chronic diseases are just escalating. It’s there; I don’t think there’s going to just be a drug that fixes any of this. Your research is profound. What is starting to show are some of the answers that are affordable and doable, like how we can all learn to meditate.

Hemal Patel, PhD

Yes. 

Ann Shippy, MD

Then, in different ways, hopefully having the additional supplements, probiotics, and other things that will augment the results of the meditation is super exciting too.

Hemal Patel, PhD

Yes. I mean, I think one of the big questions I get is that people don’t think that they can achieve what we’re saying they can achieve. A lot of people are like, Yes, I sat in on that meditation. I didn’t feel anything. I don’t think I’m any different now. I think one of the things that our study is showing is that even if you don’t think you’re changing, you are. We can quantify this. Where we see the biggest shifts in metabolites, genetic factors, and other things we’re seeing are in the novice meditators, and these are the skeptical people that go into a week-long event with Joe. They’re kicking and screaming because someone’s brought them, and they’ve said this is going to be transformative for your life. You have to go; you have to experience it. They’ve gotten so sick of saying no, they finally just said, Let’s do it. They shut up, and then when they’re there, they’re nitpicky in questioning everything that’s happening. Why are they doing this? What is this about? What is that about? 

They don’t go mercifully into this. But what we see is that when they do, and this typically happens midweek, they have these deep, profound experiences that change their blood chemistry and their biology. We’re tracking this. It’s not one person who’s doing this. We see this in a large majority; 80%+ individuals have these shifts in their biology, even if they think they’re not having these shifts. This is where I think a lot of the stuff that we’re working on is: can we come up with ways to provide some biofeedback to individuals who are working on ways to come up with markers that we can test and do? We can tell you if you’ve had that experience or not. One of the big questions has been about this mystical experience. Some people see visions and other things, but is it truly mystical? Some of the algorithms we’re developing may get this right. We will be able to tell you if you had a mystical experience by just looking at your blood. That’s where we’re headed with some of the marker testing that we’re doing.

Ann Shippy, MD

I’m curious about that. Can you elaborate?

Hemal Patel, PhD

What we’ve done is imagine the first data set where we collected a mystical experience survey that was tied to fMRI, EEG, bloodwork, and those kinds of things. We have their self-reported ideas of whether they saw visions and other things. What we then did was go into their blood and look at a correlation between who said they had a mystical experience and various aspects of blood chemistry and biology that we could test. One of the things that the ephemera reveals and what the default mode network reveals is that the default mode was discovered by mistake. They were looking at this system of integration in the brain, which was only discovered in the early 2000s. It hasn’t; it’s not even that old, and it’s exactly what the name sounds like. It’s this default mode that’s constantly working in the background. It’s like when you’re working on your computer, you’re like, Why? What is this battery drain that’s sucking all my energy from my battery?

You open it up, and there’s some program running that you didn’t even know was running that’s sucking up all this energy. The default mode was discovered when people were asked to do nothing. It was determined that their brain was still consuming a lot of this energy. There is this network that’s constantly running in the background that’s creating this loss and this use of energy. The brain is a glucose sensor. It’s using glucose as the fuel to do all of these things. Well, we’ve noticed in the blood of meditators that when they have these mystical experiences, we see these dramatic shifts in metabolism and their blood. We think that by coupling a blood test that looks at their metabolic fate, which ties to how the brain processes energy, we could get this mystical experience. When someone has a mystical experience, their default-mode network essentially shuts down. We’re trying to build the conduit for doing that. The correlation is not great. I think it’s about 50%, but we think that if we can time it right, it gets even better.

Ann Shippy, MD

That’s beautiful. I just had one of the most amazing moments of my life on the beach on Marco Island, doing a walking meditation. There’s, what, 12, 1,500 people out there walking on the beach, and I very clearly heard the words and the standing part of the meditation team humanity is assembling. I just felt such a cry of audible relief. Yes, I was just bawling. I opened my eyes, and Joe stood in front of me. He just grabbed me and gave me the biggest hug. I feel like the work that you’re doing is part of Team Humanity, like helping to understand what our human potential is with this mind-body connection. I feel like we’re still in our infancy.

Hemal Patel, PhD

I mean, this is, I think, truly an evolution of species. When we get this right and figure it out, we’re going to be something completely different.

Ann Shippy, MD

Yes. I like the way that you are developing technology and using technology to better understand this mind. Body connection is just such a guest.

Hemal Patel, PhD

Yes. Now that it’s been, it’s been a fun ride, and every time I think about this from my mind perspective, it seems like I’ve been working with Joe and Toby for 20 years, and with the time scale, it’s three and a half years max. What we’ve done is just amazing.

Ann Shippy, MD

It is. I think for our audience today, just the hope and the healing, and that there are some simple, straightforward things that we can be doing to have massive alterations in our bodies. Capacity to heal.

Hemal Patel, PhD

Yes, the takeaway is that I think Toby says it best at these retreats that negative thoughts lead to negative emotions and lead to negative body kinds of things. Why can’t we think of the opposite? This is what we never think of. Positive thoughts lead to positive emotions and have positive health benefits as well. I think this is the message: do things that lead to these positive thoughts that will then lead to a transformative element. That’s what we’re after.

Ann Shippy, MD

Anything else that you want to share about what’s coming up with your work?

Hemal Patel, PhD

We’ve got lots of papers we’re working on. The goal is to create this body of science that starts to get the skeptic to understand that something’s happening. I think there’s a lot of noise from people thinking that this is still woo-woo. For all these meditation practitioners, there is this stress and immune effect. But beyond that, there’s nothing that the body’s impacting. Where we’re headed is to create a body of literature that suggests that the mind can truly impact the body, and we can teach people how to do that effectively.

Ann Shippy, MD

I think the best way for people to follow along with what’s happening is obviously to ask Dr. Joe. But in our science research, all of this research is being done on donations from us that are seeing such profound impacts in our lives and the lives of our patients and friends. I just want to make sure that people know about innerscienceresearch.org, so if you want to follow along, join the newsletter. Then, if you want to donate, there are options to donate on the page because this may move human health along faster than anything I’ve ever seen.

Hemal Patel, PhD

Yes, no, inner science has been amazing, and they’ve given us resources so that everything we publish will be made freely available to the world.

Ann Shippy, MD

That’s incredible. I guess because of this type of research, to have so much data and, like, I know you double, triple, quadruple, like, everything is your standard for research. But yeah, I think it’s

Hemal Patel, PhD

It’s slow, but we want to be careful. I think we’re in a space where lots of critics are going to come at this. We want to make sure we get it perfect.

Ann Shippy, MD

Yes. Do you want to talk a little bit about the challenges of getting anything about COVID or cancer?

Hemal Patel, PhD

Yes. In this initial paper, there were a lot of, I think, political issues that go around this. It’s understandable. We were saying that this was a potential way to solve the problem in a way that other people are not thinking about. The message in the paper is not that this is the only way to do this. We looked at a lot of vaccinated individuals in the paper who are non-meditators, and what we discovered was that there are completely different pathways that are activated in those two systems. Vaccines do something, but they don’t do it by creating this resiliency. Meditators create Serpin A5 to create a workaround to create this non-infectivity potential. I think one of the things that we’re hoping with all our research is that there isn’t this antagonism with Western medicine. I think alternative medicine should go hand in hand. 

There’s this old story in this joke about God not listening to people. There’s this person who is in a flood, and there’s a guy that comes by on a boat and says, “Hey, come on, I’ll save you. He’s like, No, no, don’t worry, God’s going to take care of me.” Then there’s this helicopter that comes and says, Hey, we will rescue and not worry God’s and take care of me. Then something else happens, and then the guy ultimately drowns and is at the pearly gates and says, ‘I trusted you, and you didn’t come to save me.’ God’s like, ‘I sent you a boat, I sent you a helicopter.’ It’s this perception of what we don’t see. I think that what we need to do as a society is take advantage of every resource we have available to increase our health. This involves not only alternative medicine or Western approaches. If we don’t, it’s our fault. We have lots of things that are available; lots of knowledge is out there, and it’s our sort of job to learn what is best for our bodies and how to navigate the diseases that we’re dealing with. I think that the message is that there isn’t this antagonism, but we want to try to bring everything together and give people as many resources as they have to improve their health.

Ann Shippy, MD

Well, beautiful. Well done. Thank you so much for everything that you’re doing. I feel like there’s such an acceleration going on with your work like we’ve just met you. I think what you’ve created is just amazing. I’m excited to get to be part of it as much as I can to get the word out because I think it’s so important.

Hemal Patel, PhD

Yes. No, we’re excited about the future of all of this.

Ann Shippy, MD

Well, thank you so much. Yes, I look forward to more conversations and continuing opportunities to share what you’re up to and leave hope with our listeners.

Hemal Patel, PhD

That sounds great.

Ann Shippy, MD

Thank you so much.

Hemal Patel, PhD

All right.