Gain Clarity: Meditation’s Role In Brain Health

Dawson Church, PhD

It is so good to be here, and I know that we’re going to have a wonderful time together as we share and connect. Thank you.

Heather Sandison, ND

It’s such a delight. Meditation is such a big part of my practice and, for me, the most important medicine I do myself with every day. But I want to talk more generally to people. Today, I want to share the science. This is where you shine. You’ve published so much. Can you break down, just in simple terms, the science of how meditation affects the brain?

Dawson Church, PhD

Yes, meditation affects the brain in dramatic ways. What happens when we meditate is that if we’re meditating effectively now, there are a lot of ineffective ways of meditating. Like the one I learned when I was 15 years old, I ran away from home, joined a commune, and got out of my fundamentalist Christian household because I wanted to have a different experience of life and different aspects of spirituality and psychology. I was so miserable at the time, that I had to give myself away. We learned to meditate there, quote unquote. The meditation master said Meditation is simple. Just sit here quietly, cross-legged on the meditation cushion, and still your mind. 

Now, what happened next? Because your mind races. It’s like someone says, Don’t think of a pink elephant, and you can think of nothing else. Our minds are not mentally still, and our minds wander constantly because that’s the way they evolved to pay attention to the environment and make sure we are safe. They’re hyper-focused on whatever might be going wrong. That’s what our minds do, and that’s why meditation is so hard for most people. But if you learn about the evidence-based meditation method, there are quite a number of them. Bliss Brain shines the light of evidence, especially MRI studies of brain research into what’s the factor. If you meditate effectively, it’s going to activate certain parts of your brain. There are four parts of the brain, especially those that effective meditation will activate. I cover these in my book, Bliss Brain, one by one. I also have a recommendation for which ones you engage first. 

The first part of the brain that we find getting active, the first circuit we find active in meditation masters like monks and nuns who’ve been doing it 10,000, 20,000 hours. We find that the first thing they do is turn on a part of the brain called the Emotion Regulation Circuit. It runs from the prefrontal cortex. Everyone knows that the prefrontal cortex is the thinking part of the brain, the executive brain. Most people know that the middle part of the brain, the limbic system, often called the emotional brain, is central to memory and learning. There’s a little sliver of tissue that runs between the two of them called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. That’s how they use master meditators like these monks and nuns. They use the forebrain, the prefrontal cortex, to regulate the emotional brain. They have good emotional regulation. 

The second circuit they turn on is attention—their superb ability—those that they’ve been looking at a candle for 2 hours. Now I can’t do that. You can’t, either. But you get the picture; you just get better at paying attention after a while if you’re using an evidence-based meditation method. The third circuit that we see turned on in these master meditators is that they can downregulate the circuit that handles self-attention. Most of us are self-centered and focused the majority of the time. It’s like I’m in mine—my money. How do I look today? What do people say about me on social media? What do I do with my time? How much money do I have in the bank? Blah, blah, blah. 

This part of our minds keeps us wretchedly unhappy. Our inner commentators are just blabbing away. You need to lose weight. You need to make more money. You need to get better and improve your relationship. You need to be better at your job. Just keep this part of our mind; it keeps us miserable and very focused on the past and future, not on the present. That part of the brain is the medial prefrontal cortex. It sits over here, behind your forehead. It’s called the mystifying frontal cortex. That’s what we see in these master meditators. That part goes dark. 

The fourth circuit that they activate is called the compassion circuit. It’s centered in a part of the brain called the insula. The insula handles gratitude, happiness, peace, and compassion. The majority of meditators appear brightly lit. They aren’t self-focused. They’re both focused. They are infinity-focused. These parts of the brain are kicking on, and they get better at doing this. You do it. You do an effective meditation a few times. Now you’ve done it three, four, or five times, and you do it more easily. Do it seven, eight, 10, 15, or 50 times. You’re doing it more and more easily; your brain has adapted to working this way. After a while, it changes the brain, and I end by saying this with the case history of a TV personality. A guy or two has a show called Catalyst in Australia. Its name is Graham Phillips. I talked about it in my book Bliss Brain, and he was interested in the potential of meditation to change the brain. He hired his TV crew to go into an advanced neuroimaging lab at Monash University, and with his crew. 

They filmed him being examined minutely. Every part of his brain was scanned. The neuroscientists measured the volume of each part of his brain, and then he began after that examination to learn mindfulness meditation, an effective evidence-based form of meditation. He found it after a couple of weeks. He was a much more patient human being. He started being nicer to other people around him who looked good. Compassion kicks in, and you are no longer as self-centered as you were before. He went back to Monash in eight weeks to work in the same lab with his camera crew. 

They filmed him. They recorded him as the researchers examined the volume of all the different parts of his brain again, and some parts of his brain had grown in just eight weeks. They’d grown by two, three, or 4%. Now these parts—these key parts of his brain—are getting bigger. His emotional regulation circuit is called the dentate gyrus. His dentate gyrus grew by 22.8% in those eight weeks. That part of the brain that regulates emotion grew by about a fifth, or 22.8%, in only two months. That’s the potential of meditation—to not just change the function of your brain but to change the structure of your brain, to regulate negative emotion. You start to become a happier person.

Heather Sandison, ND

Not just happy. Here you were talking about training attention and then also about growing certain parts of your brain. We can be specific about which parts, like the parts are going to support a positive mood. But what about cognition? Can we be smarter because of this? Can we be quicker? Can we use meditation to potentially avoid Alzheimer’s?

Dawson Church, PhD

I did a study, so being trained, I meditated 15 times badly, and I have been a terrible meditator my whole life as a pretty free meditator because what upsets me is that you get discouraged, you sit there, and your mind fills up with thoughts. You can’t push them away, and you feel like a total failure. You do that 10 times. You’ve now practiced feeling like a failure. 10 times, you’re 100 times you previously made it like a failure a hundred times. That’s part of those people. When I was 45 years old, I was in a real crisis in my life, and I had a lot of things going well and a lot of things going badly. I committed to meditating every single day. I worked with a life coach at the time, and I realized that she said, You meditate. I said, No, I haven’t meditated regularly for years. It’s hard. I realized I needed to meditate. If you had to meditate every single day, then. 

Then I began to look at the research on different meditation methods, and I realized some things are evidence-based. They had to use evidence-based pieces of this. I found that certain things are well-researched in the literature, and things like breathwork are effective. I used breathwork. I knew that heart coherence was important. I built coherence with this. I developed a meditation method called eco-meditation. Eco Meditation and I just threw it up on the web as a free website around 2009, and people began to use it and report fantastic results. Eventually, I ran several studies on eco-meditation, and then I eventually did a huge, ambitious study using MRIs. We had a control group doing mindful breathing and a second group doing eco-meditation. We had them do it for one month, for 20 minutes a day. When the results came back after a month, they were stunning. The meditator’s brains—those who did eco meditation—showed they had the same pattern of brain function as those Tibetan monks with 10,000 hours, 30 days after only a month. 

Their anatomy and their brain had changed that mid-frontal cortex that drives us crazy with a jabbering critic and a critic. It was just dark. It is God, and the piece of brain tissue is still there. It wasn’t turned on. The part of the brain that was highly active was the insula. Again, joy, compassion, and gratitude. All that part of the brain was lit up like a Christmas tree. It was a miracle to look into MRIs and say, You don’t take $10,000; it does not take a thousand-year-long period of study. You complete identical structural changes in the brain in a month. But the cool thing about cognition was that the left prefrontal cortex was running so efficiently that it was consuming far less oxygen and nutrients than before. That’s why this is a paradox. When your brain is working well, it’s like a well-tuned car engine. It uses less nutrients. 

There was a study recently of a guy who is a prodigy. He is a mechanic. He has no university degree. He knows over a hundred languages, over 30 of them fluently, and over 70 languages he is unfamiliar with. This guy’s a language prodigy. They put him on an MRI. They did a whole bunch of tests on him, thinking we’re going to see that the language center of his brain is going to be huge. and it’s just going to be revved up like a race car. Just the opposite. It was small and quiet. It’s just functioning hyper-efficiently. That’s what we found in that study—that 30-day study of eco-meditation—that the thinking brain, the left dorsolateral cortex over here behind your forehead, on the left-hand side, is that part that does all of these computations about the past, the future, what’s going to happen next, and how I set my goals in life. That part of the brain was running so smoothly that it was like a well-tuned engine. Yes, it affects cognition as well.

Heather Sandison, ND

Do we see any changes in the hippocampus? We think of this as the memory center of the brain. When we look at an MRI, does it stay the same? Does it become less active? More active?

Dawson Church, PhD

There is good news and bad news. The bad news is that I did a whole 20-year project studying PTSD, mostly in veterans. Initially, it was Vietnam veterans, and it was Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. We have a big nonprofit. We’d give free treatment to veterans. I’ve done several clinical trials to see what happens to the hippocampus in people with PTSD, like veterans. They’re having these shattering experiences during the war, with the same people around them dying; they’re seeing all kinds of horrendous sights, sounds, and just the smell of smells that veterans brought back from Afghanistan and Iraq. A very hot cut leads to decomposing bodies after a few days. It’s not something you want to be thinking about. These incredibly traumatized human beings that we worked with. What we find with them is that the memory and learning centers start to degrade, and the hippocampus starts to become less efficient. 

In those with long-term PTSD, like Vietnam veterans who have spent 50 more years since the Vietnam War. Those are the long-term PTSD symptoms that cause the hippocampus to start to atrophy. They aren’t learning. They aren’t picking up new skills. They aren’t developed into self-development; they are frozen in that terrible moment that they experienced in Vietnam. They have not been able to extricate themselves from those loops of trauma that affect the hippocampus. On the opposite end of the spectrum is gray and fills up the dentate gyrus, that part of his brain that grew 22.8% in eight weeks, and that’s at the base of the hippocampus. That’s to do with emotional regulation. It has tentacles going on all over the brain to help regulate negative emotions. That’s the part that grows. It grows in people who are doing well. It then does not grow in people doing well and even begins to shrink. The hippocampus begins to shrink in people who are traumatized. You may think your thoughts are just ephemeral and invisible. They’re directly modeling and remodeling your brain—every day and moment.

Heather Sandison, ND

Extremely impactful. This is consistent. I love hearing this from you because it speaks to how it fits into the model that we use—this idea that the brain uses quite a bit of energy. Yet when we’re defending against toxins, infections, negative thinking, negative patterns, or trauma, we’re using a lot of resources that aren’t freed up to create those new connections—those new neurons, those new synapses—that are going to allow us to have that greater cognition. But also, what I hear you saying is that when we’re stuck in that mode of trauma, fighting, or defending, then we don’t run efficiently. We don’t burn fuel efficiently in the brain. Yet when we’re meditating, we shift more into that pattern. This is that rest, digest, and heal state you’ll often hear, or that parasympathetic state.

Dawson Church, PhD

It’s either you or your brain is getting a certain supply of energy every moment. A very interesting thing is that the brain consumes 20% of the body’s energy, or only 2% of the body’s mass. That’s a pretty well-known fact. But the interesting thing is that it consumes 20% of the body’s energy. Now, that was a real puzzle because we thought neuroscience seemed logical. All seem logical. In the eighties and nineties, when we sleep, the eyes are closed since organs aren’t focused. What I support is still using 20% of the body’s energy, just like when we’re wide awake and doing stuff, and it’s the answer that came in the 1990s. We discovered that it’s using a stable, constant 20% of the body’s energy, but in different brain regions. The active region is the mid-prefrontal cortex, with its focus on the future threats of the future. Bad things happened in the past. Rumination and negative thinking. Is that the active part? Because that is the part that’s active in people who are depressed, who are anxious, who are filled with negative emotion, or are these monks and nuns? What you see is that part of the brain just goes dark. They’re using that 20% of their bodies, energy supply, and they’re lining up in these regions of gratitude and joy. If you do this for a while, Heather, and you get more and more into it. You get more and more habituated to running your brain that way. We find things like, in one set of studies, a seven-fold increase in the brainwaves associated with positive emotion and insight. 

Integration of emotion, integration of new learning, insight, joy, happiness, spontaneity, and creativity. That part of that brainwave, whose predominant brainwave is Gamma, is a fast brainwave. It starts at around 25 times a second that those neurons are firing and goes all the way up to hundreds of times a second. Gamma is essential to creative people. What we find in these monks and nuns is that they’re having massive surges of GABA. The average person is going to generate a little bit of GABA, maybe for one or two seconds, because monks and nuns start to meditate, their brains are flooded with Gamma, and they’re sustaining Gamma for 15 minutes. They’re hitting levels of joy. 

The Sanskrit word Ananda means bliss. It doesn’t mean a smiley face. It means you are blown out of this universe and in ecstasy. You see these monks and nuns, and they’re sitting there. They look blissful, and they’re connecting with something greater than themselves. They’re connecting with what I call the non-local mind, the one with non-local cognizance. They’ve left the realm of local cognizance where you’re embedded in my mind, my job, my body, myself, my blah, blah, blah, stuff. They have left that realm, their absolute ecstasy. What we measure in their brains are levels of Gamma that the average human being can only dream about—levels of ecstasy.

Heather Sandison, ND

Can we double-check, what you’re saying? Gamma is the brainwave. Gamma, Yes. Then did you also say GABA, the neurotransmitter GABA?

Dawson Church, PhD

That’s also accompanied by those neurotransmitters? GABA is one of those, but the main neurotransmitter is the Ananda mind. It’s called the Bliss Molecule, and their brains are flooded with it. In my book, Bliss Brain, I talked about seven neurochemicals that we find in the brains of people doing these bad meditations, things like an Ananda mind, but don’t mean your main motivational hormone. Get up and pursue your goal. That’s dopamine, and it’s linked to the brain’s reward centers. It’s triggered by cocaine, heroin, and other things. Chocolate can trigger a dopamine rush. You get a lot of doping in the brains of meditators. By doing this dopamine can go up by 65%. Now we’re getting this huge rush of motivation and energy for good things in our lives. Serotonin. Serotonin is our satisfaction molecule that awakens the mind. The brains of these monks and nuns are flooded with this ecstatic bliss molecule. It is affecting our bodies at the molecular level as well as the active brain regions.

Heather Sandison, ND

Many people listening will think, Oh, but I’m not a monk. then, and that’s not practical in my life. At Marama: What we suggest is that we give it a very easy, practical, and accessible way, such as 12 minutes a day of Kirtan Kriya. I’m curious what you recommend for someone at home who’s maybe starting to struggle with a little bit of cognitive decline, or maybe they’re in this stressful situation of caring for a loved one who is suffering from more severe cognitive decline. What would you recommend they do as a practice? Maybe if they’re just getting started and this is new, what’s a good entry point?

Dawson Church, PhD

Yes. that current increase study. But 12.1 is powerful, and I included it in my book Bliss Brain because it showed that a very small dose of an effective meditation like Kirtan Kriya can be effective. You don’t need an hour; you don’t need to be a monk; you’ll need 10,000 hours. Then, in the other study of eco-meditation, I mentioned that it was at 22. But I think it was a meditation track they were listening to. so it doesn’t take a lot of time to start to remodel your brain. start small. Start with something. Then normally I talk way too fast. Sorry. Just what am I yet? I would say the slow so everyone gets it far. 

Be consistent, and show up. Well, meditate every day, and the best meditation of them all is the one you can make a commitment to and do without fail. That’s what I did on that Tuesday morning when I was 45 years old. I said, I will wake up a half an hour early before my kids wake up, and I will meditate every single day. That is the consistency that does it. We’re all inspired. Sometimes we all feel like meditating. We all feel in tune and flow in harmony. Sometimes, at other times, we don’t show up when you don’t feel like it. There’s one of those Sufi analogies, and the Sufi story says the Gods descend from heaven every day with their arms full of baskets for human beings. They guide full baskets of blessings, baskets of all these wonderful things, baskets of love and joy, all these gifts for human beings that they guide, and they return to heaven every night with their baskets of blessings still full because nobody showed up to claim them. 

That’s what’s happening for most of the world when it comes to meditation. You need to show up to clean up your gift. You have to be present to win. You have to show up there and be there in that state of receptivity to those beings, to your higher self, to the universe. The universe desperately wants you to be full of love and joy and dancing through your life, and you just have to show up and accept those gifts. If you aren’t showing up, then the baskets are a gift. Just go back to hell every night, and they’re unclaimed. Find a practice you will do without fail every single day. Now, when you do that, magic starts to happen because repetition will condition your brain. You do something effective. Don’t just try any awful meditation. Find one that’s effective and evidence-based, and find one that’s scientific. But do that every day, and your brain starts to remodel itself. 

I had one lady, and I had people do a 30-day eco-meditation challenge just to eat meditation for 30 days straight. I’ve probably taught a thousand people to take the challenge up to this point. One woman walked up to me at a live workshop, and she said, Dawson, I decided to take your 30-day challenge and meditate every single day without fail, every day for 30 days. I was like, Yes, that is wonderful. What day are you on now? She said, I’m on day 147, so now she’s been meditating for half a year. What’s going on? Well, she’s getting a lot of highly addictive neurochemicals in her brain, such as dopamine. She’s getting as much dopamine in her brain as a dope fiend. She’s getting like they’ve got a lot of cocaine and heroin shot. 65% rise in dopamine in her brain when she meditates. That’s highly addictive. Serotonin is your feel-good molecule; oxytocin is the love hormone. You’re getting all these positive hormones, neurotransmitters, and good meditation like that, which is highly addictive. Do it for 30 days. The likelihood is that you will never stop after that.

Heather Sandison, ND

I want to describe the Kirtan Kriya just so people have a concrete sense of what we are talking about. The Kirtan Kriya is the Sa Ta Na Ma, and you repeat that using the motions of your fingers, tapping your pointer finger with your thumb, then your middle finger with your thumb, your ring finger with your thumb, and then your pinky finger with your thumb in sequence over and over and repeating the phrases to Sa Ta Na Ma. There’s a vibration that goes through your body as you do that. 

Now, I point people to YouTube. There are lots and lots of recordings that last for 12 minutes that you can follow and use as a guide. Again, it’s just 12 minutes, totally free, totally accessible. None of the downsides of a heroin addiction. I am wondering: is that a good description of what the Kirtan Kriya is? Then I want everyone to know what eco-meditation looks like.

Dawson Church, PhD

Yes. What Kirtan Kriya is doing critically is engaging a part of the brain that is on the sides of the brain, the lateral parts of the brain. When we are self-occupied, when we are in that default mode network and I, Me, Mine, and all of the ways people are when they’re thinking negative thoughts, the centerline of the brain is active, and I call it your Mohawk, your inner Mohawk, but a Mohawk haircut from here to here. There are a lot of MRI scans available. You can see where the default mode network is, and that part of the brain is active. What’s going on? When you do something actively, and that can be anything? 

Kirtan Kriya uses those syllables, but anything that engages what’s called the task-positive network of the brain will shift activity from the Mohawk to the headband this network of regions around the outside of the brain. Think about where your hat would have fallen so you could deactivate activity here in the Mohawk. You activate the headband. Anything that requires attention will do it. Any activity will do it. Counting breaths does that in the yoga symptoms of Patanjali. He talks about how just breathing and paying attention to breathing will do it. He wants you to. The third set of yoga was to pay attention to the inner breath, where it enters your nostrils in the very first place and time, over and over and over again. That’s that’s a task. It’s a job. It gives the task-positive network something to do, which turns off the inner mobile. 

Kirtan Kriya does the same thing, chanting the name of God. There’s a beautiful scene in the movie Gandhi. The very first scene with Gandhi is about an assassin who is shot by an assassin, and he dies chanting Ram, Ram, Ram. That’s the headband. That’s the attention network. Anything. We’ll do it. Kirtan Kriya will do it. Breathing will do it. Chanting the name of God will do it. Anandamayi Ma said she was one of the great Indian saints of the early 20th century. She was asked how she, became a radiantly holy woman when she was a teenager. She said that she had had no monastic training whatsoever. She said that when you chant the name of God, there is no room in your mind for anything else. It’s just that simple.

Heather Sandison, ND

The eco-meditation—you said 22 minutes—what does that look like? What are those? How do you spend those 22 minutes?

Dawson Church, PhD

I got into eco-meditation when I was looking at different kinds of practices, but we know, EFT,  the Emotional freedom technique is calming people, and we know mindfulness is useful. We know that self-hypnosis works. There’s a lot of research on that. We also know that things that activate that headband area are effective. I thought one day I was struggling with meditation, as I had been for 20–30 years. I thought, Imagine if I just layered all of these effective methods, one on top of the other, and did them all in sequence. How long would it take me? What would happen? It took me 5 minutes to tap to do hard coherence. The quick coherence technique marks that. It is not to do a self-hypnosis, biofeedback, neurofeedback, or mindfulness component. Suddenly, in 5 minutes, I was there. 

Since then, many people have done those things and found themselves there in 5 minutes. We had one veteran. Had he been in the war in Iraq, he would have written a beautiful, long essay for us, which I had in my book, Bliss Brain. he went. He mentioned how, after the war, he was just afflicted with negative thinking, intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, and nightmares. He had not had a good night’s sleep since coming back from Iraq, and he had all of these symptoms of severe PTSD. After he got back, he did all these things to try and improve and fix himself. It could be he just couldn’t heal before he went to Japan, joined a monastery, spent time as a Zen monk learning Zen, and even then struggled. 

Then, when he got back to the U.S., he was surfing the web one day, came across a yoga meditation, and just followed the very simple instructions from our website, and he suddenly found himself dropping in. Because if you do these simple things for 5 minutes, you just drop in involuntarily. They’re all physiological. They’re not mental or spiritual. They’re just things to do with your body that put your body in this deeply relaxed state. These are simple practices. In 5 minutes, you’re there. Now, what do you do while you’re there? For people, for example, who are sick, we’re having them focus on then going into their visualization and their imaginal realm and working on wellness. 

For people who are struggling with money, we may have them work on a money intention for people who want to focus on gene expression and healthy gene expression. We have to do that. You do a lot of things after the 5 minutes, and there are hundreds of eco-meditations out there, all over the web, done by me and other people with different focuses. But it always starts with these very simple practices: tapping, biofeedback, neurofeedback, mindfulness, self-hypnosis, and heart coherence. When you do those things, your body just drops into its natural state of relaxation. You bypass the mind. You’re in this wonderful place, you learn how to still your mind, and you are then having this addictive experience of just how good it feels to be in this relaxed but calm state, which is highly motivating to go back there again tomorrow.

Heather Sandison, ND

That sounds fantastic and very efficient, and I am a queen of efficiency if nothing else. Now, what about people who feel like maybe a meditation practice doesn’t jive with their religious practice? Is there some way to pray, or is there some way to square that circle of inviting people into meditation or the benefits of meditation and aligning with, say, a Christian faith, a Muslim faith, or one of the other common religions?

Dawson Church, PhD

That’s a very good question. What I recommend you do if you aren’t familiar with the meditative tradition of your religion is to take a look at it, because you’ll find it in Christianity. You’ll find the masters of the Far East; you’ll find them in the Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, and General Orthodox Eastern Orthodox traditions. You’ll find a long tradition of contemplative practices. If you’re a Muslim, you’ll find Sufism, which brings in these ecstatic states. The Sufis are the mystics of Islam. The mainstream versions and flavors of religions do not generally emphasize the mystical experience, but the mystical experience is the commonality of all religions. But it doesn’t begin with the 108 prayer beads I’m holding up here in the statue of the Buddha. I mean, these things were there when the Buddha was around; there are just artifacts, though. They’re meaningless. They all began with a mystical experience. 

Somebody said in a log that, I think about, maybe 500,000 years ago, some early hominid woman had found he was settled, fed, and warm. She sat there on the log, looking up at the stars, and accidentally engaged those four circuits of her brain. She had an ecstatic experience and was out there. When you get mystics together, whether they’re Jewish or not, they’ll be Cabalist; whether they’re Muslims or Sufis; whether they’re Christians again, they’ll be Christian mystics. When you get them to the mystics together and they start talking, they’re all having the same mystical experience, and their brains all look the same way. Their brainwave patterns all look the same. We call that the awakened mind, and I had the exact brainwave pattern, which I shared with you on Bliss Brain. The mystical experience is where all religions begin now. They then go places from there. 

Moses comes down from Mount Sinai. He has the Ten Commandments. The children of Israel are in the wilderness, and then it gets concretized in a set of religious observances. Muhammad has his night journey and sees all of the layers of heaven come back, and then it gets concretized in the culture and period of his time. That’s how the religions form and say, look, wildly different Hinduism, with hundreds of gods, Buddhism with its no God, and Christianity are monotheistic religions, they look so different at their core, at their origin, they all come from the same place. I encourage you to look for the heart of your religion. I also say that when we look at the research on the people who are going there for the mystical experience, they find love and compassion, they find Ananda Bliss, and they find Vishoka, the star of its joy. They find gratitude; they find love. They find all these amazing experiences at the core of their religion. That’s what religion is all about. It’s not about this at all. You can, frankly, do eco-meditation. It says it all the way.

Heather Sandison, ND

It says all the facts,

Dawson Church, PhD

We stop people from having MRIs. We know what’s going on. Just do this stuff. Then you can believe whatever you like.

Heather Sandison, ND

How inspiring that is. Dawson, it’s always. Your laugh is infectious. You have to share the insights, the wisdom, and the research. All that you have to share is so inspiring. I hope everyone will take away the inspiration to practice—to sit down and practice. I mean, the way you describe it, it’s just that there’s so much good on the other end of that. I just want it for everyone. I find it quite addictive. I hate missing my meditation. I make sure that nothing stands in the way of getting that each day, and it makes a huge difference in my life. I feel so different on the days that I do miss it. 

My personal experience aligns so much with what you’re describing. When it’s my space of love and compassion, I want everyone to have access to that. What I love about meditation and one of the reasons why I find it to be the best medicine, is that it’s completely free. You have direct access. You do not; there’s no gatekeeper here. There is no reason not to engage. Just 12 minutes a day; everybody’s got that as well. I think the world would be a different place if we all showed up the way that you’re inviting us to. 

Thank you for being here and for sharing your unique insights, wisdom, and perspective on this. Where can our listeners find out more about you?

Dawson Church, PhD

The best place to go is my website, Dawson, my name. It is D-A-W-S-O-N-S-G-I-F-T dot com,  dawsongift.com. That gives you access to a free eco meditation track, the free tapping mini manual, and then our whole ecosystem of practitioner-certified practitioners. We have online courses for anxiety, insomnia, depression, PTSD, and many other issues, and all of that is available through dawsongift.com. The free stuff is at dawsongift.com, but again, if you can work with a practitioner, you can learn many of these techniques; just apply them to self-help yourself. Then the main thing is to practice them. That’s what I encourage you to do. Take that 30-day pledge. Just say if you’ve been inspired today, I will do what Heather and Dawson recommend or only a short amount of time under a half hour. But I’ll do it every single day; make that commitment. What’s likely to happen is that your life will be so much better after 30 days. You’ll like us. You will never stop.

Heather Sandison, ND

You’ll be hooked.

Dawson Church, PhD

You’ll be hooked.

Heather Sandison, ND

Yes. Fantastic. Thank you so much for being here. It’s always a privilege and a delight to see you.

Dawson Church, PhD

It’s great to see the smile on your face too, Heather. Thank you.