Healing Trauma With Epigenetics, EFT Tapping, And Meditation

Introduction and shared appreciation 0:00

Hello to you all. My name is Isaac Eliaz, and I'm delighted today to interview and have a dialog with one of my closest hard friends, Dawson Church. And many of you know Dawson, and he's the host of the Trauma to Transcendence Summit. But Dawson has been a pioneer in bringing to the public's awareness the relationship between genetics and epigenetics and our emotional state, how different peak performance is mind over matter, and also research on beliefs bring about states of bliss, states of meditation.

And how is it all reflected in research? Dawson is an acclaimed researcher who collaborates with many people, and he's also developed the the Tipping techniques EFT, which is really it's really a simple and and profound system that really is able to release emotion and help with trauma, and we'll touch on it. But this is really all secondary, at least for me. In my experience, because really what Dawson is about is expressing his activities from a place of true love and compassion and kindness. Kindness to others and kindness to himself.

And we talk a lot when we have when we chat about this Inseparability. So this is really not only the gift that Dawson offers to all of us, but it's really the big grounds in milieux, the environment from where he functions. It makes life easier for him, and it makes life more blissful and happy for people around him. And for this, Dawson, I truly commend you because you know, if your light was next to the sun, nobody would see it because the sun is so luminous. But at times of divisiveness, of struggle, of inability to listen to another opinion.

And when we are all boxed with social media through the speed of information, every small bit of light makes a huge difference. When it's done in your light, it's really shining. So as we start reading my prayer and wish with your activities and your pure intention really flourishes because we all need it. And you know, it's a journey. It's an amazing journey. So with this, I want to welcome you to this interview. Thank you so much for those kind words. And what you're saying about joy and light is so powerful.

And we are beings of light. We are beings of joy. I know I have a lot of grandchildren, and when they pop out of the womb and you have them for the first few weeks and months, they're just beings, a complete spot, a deity and bliss. And after that, those things happen to us all and tended to get on top of that and repress that for most of us. But we all came out that way, and a lot of our job as adults. Isaac is getting back to that state of laughter and bliss we were in at the very beginning. Yeah, it's.

True. It's really a journey of unlearning, you know, and going back to, to to really where we are. And you see it. And remember when I did my residency in family practice to really hold the babies when they are born? You know, it's it's remarkable because they have to check the eyes and they have to look at their youth. So the doctors open the eyes and they are and they are very aggressive with them. And I just took the babies and I would just dance with them. And there's an inner rhythm that is all bliss.

And once you do this, they just open their eyes and you can change them. And then, my colleagues never noticed this because. But the experienced nurses, they look to realize, what are you doing? And I would tell them, oh, you are just imagining there's nothing happening. But this was really connecting with this quality that is within us. And it's a quality that is full of bliss and full of happiness and full of joy.

Joy, babies, and human energy fields 4:17

So yeah, it's so true. And it's changing the energy because, that's an energy environment in which the child is being welcomed. And it's powerful to do that. It's powerful to welcome a child welcoming to you, being into that energy environment. Well, for the people around you, it's an energy environment as well. You have an energy environment and there are these wonderful devices now that are used to measure the human energy field. I know that the, the, the previous generation of that could measure that field for about three meters, three yards away from the human body.

Newer ones being developed can measure it from much, much further than that. And we know that people have an energy field. We can feel the energy field. And so when you're in that energy field and when you're welcoming another person where there was newborn baby or friend into that field, if you can make that field compassionate, kind, attentive, present moment, it makes an enormous difference. And that's the ability we have as human beings to really welcome each other into these heart space. So I'm so grateful for those babies you brought into the world that way.

I know it probably was a powerful message. I sometimes I when I'm walking through the grocery store and I see a little baby or a child, I'll send that said. So that feeling of compassion to that little soul, I'll just take a moment, look at its eyes, smile. And I want to welcome babies into the world that way. So now I wish we all welcome that way. Rather than, as you were saying, the doctor. Well, the nurses saw it as his or her job to just yank open those eyes and peek into those crevices. And so much of our lives are like that.

We go through school and we experience all these requirements. We have to meet. We become adults, we have to learn a job and make a living. And so for so many people, that reduces their scope and impacts their human potential. And so you find sometimes people like I'm really curious at the other end of life too, when you read books or hear nurses and doctors tell you about the regrets, the people who are dying. And one of the big regrets is that they accepted those stories. They accepted those limitations that others put on them.

They didn't let the magic, the potential inside of them out. So we, Isaac and I just want all of you listening and watching and being part of this summit to question any books you put yourself into, in your in your mind, in your thoughts, in your self-concept, we know you are greater. We know your potential for joy is as infinite as those babies that Isaac held when when they were little. And we want you to question any self-talk that you experience that's putting a limit on that. We know you are whole, perfect, and complete.

We just long to see you discover that and live from that place as well. Tell me, one of those people who's at the end of their life and is saying, oh, you know, I so regret that I wasn't myself. I try to please other people. I didn't really please me. And so there are these regrets people have at the end of life, and they have to do with not reclaiming and not being that person they were born to be. Be that person you were born to be and start right now. Today I'm going to assume a true. And you actually made a very small come into side comment that I wanted to jump in. And because I just had an interview and I was interviewed for an anxiety summit, and I gave this example about the electromagnetic field.

So you said that previous devices where we're measuring three meters and that was that new devices. And I wasn't aware of that new devices. But what I was telling the person interviewing, I was telling me, we limit the electromagnetic field to three meters because that's what we can measure. But the electromagnetic field is limitless. One day dose and they will have measurements. You will feel it millions of miles away, thousands of miles away. We are not capable to get to this level of sensitivity.

And this is very important. The energy, but mainly the quality of life, the quality of openness is is vast is space and space is endless. It's our conceptual limitations that put limits on this. And in this example you brought an example of a device, but you also talk about the box. So people really have to understand, we say to people, get out of the box. When people ask me about it, I always say, I don't get out of the box. I never had a box to go box, you know? And the thing that you said about this is profound.

I do a lot of work with death and dying, but we have to understand living our body is the ultimate letting go of this life. But every day is a letting go. Every breath is a letting go. Every thought. When it fades away is a letting go. So we get to practice this in a very minute way, all the time, continuously, and every time we let go of reactivity, of contraction, of judgment that we all have, you know, every human being is we reconnect with who we really are and who we really are is this boundless, infinite love and compassion.

We actually wired for this, you know, it's really our evolutionary gift. And so in this sense, I really love, you know, when you pick the name from trauma to transcendence, it's really, from my perspective, it's really not. There's one state and you push it away and you go to another state you are describing. We are describing a journey, but the journey doesn't start when we end it. A result. The journey happens every second, every second, every second. And with this, I wanted to ask you, what is your view about the idea as a concept, the term of transcendence.

Transcendence is a powerful concept, an idea and it's best illustrated by the famous hierarchy of needs of Abraham Maslow. So Abraham Maslow published that in the 1940s it became a dominant meme in culture in the 1960s and 70s.

Transcendence beyond self-actualization 10:51

And pretty much everybody has been exposed to the concept of this hierarchy of needs, with survival at the bottom and then at the very top of that, Maslow placed at the pinnacle placed self-actualization. And so he studied people who were self-actualized, who were not limiting their potential. And in that wonderful analogy used of is an expansive list contracted. These were people who had developed their full potential. They had developed expansively. They had they were living at expressing their full potential.

And so Maslow's pyramid became the dominant theme for the human developmental journey. And then in his last year of life, he'd been president of the American Psychological Association. He'd also just had a heart attack, and it was pretty clear that he was in his last innings of life. He realized that his pyramid was wrong. He realized that there was a higher state, and he was then meeting all these people who at first he called them transcendent, self-actualized, that they were self-actualized, that moving towards something greater than self actualization and self-actualization is to do with the human ego, to do with the human life.

Transcendence is moving beyond your limited sense into a connection with something greater than yourself. And these were people who had who were meditating, who were having experiences. And then Michael sent me how I came along after him. And he called those states below. And what they are is they're the ability to plug into and be aware of something greater than oneself. So now you aren't just try to self-actualize and become a a happier ego. You're letting go of a lot of what has made you you.

A lot of the limitations that are made, made you who you think you are, and you're moving into a relationship with something larger than yourself. You're transcending your own limitations, your own boundaries. One selfhood. And if you meditated, you will have had these experiences. Even if you haven't meditated, maybe you were standing on the shore of the ocean one day, and you're digging your feet into the sand and looking out over the blue waters, and suddenly there was a magic moment in which nature transported you into a sense of oneness with the all it is.

Or maybe you were in a, a church or a cathedral or a synagogue or a place of worship, and you had this transcendent experience of God or divinity, or maybe you were making love, or you were close to another human being, and maybe you were holding a baby. Maybe you're holding the hands of a dying person, and suddenly you came face to face with the reality of what we live in. We're like fish in water, and we don't see this transcendent cosmos we're in, but we live in consciousness. We have individual local consciousness, but we also have this remarkable ability that I don't think any other animal has to actually become one with the all it is.

And so mystics tell us that they have that ability to transcend that self-actualized state, that little local self, and move into oneness with something infinitely greater than themselves. And when they transcend, when they move into those self transcended states, all kinds of things start to happen. Number one is the brain changes. The brain changes. So much in one of those moments that it actually never goes back to its old configuration. That's according to the work of Andrew Newberg in his book How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain.

And so, you move into these spaces and they produce an imprint on your brain. You'll remember that transcendent moment, maybe for the rest of your life. It also starts to produce epigenetic effects on your cells. Just the way, we know, for example, that stressed mothers produce epigenetic tags on the the cortisol genes of their unborn children. We know that we are producing epigenetic effects. We're sending epigenetic signals to ourselves. When we enter these self-transcendence states, we're producing neurological changes.

People who are in these states, they are shifting the way their brains and bodies work, and they start to slow down the aging process. They reduce that stress that produces radical shifts in genes, neurotransmitters, enzymes, hormones all over the body. So we we think about it as a mystical state. It is a mystical state. It's also a flow state which you can be in when you're not meditating or having any kind of spiritual experience, but you're essentially unplugging from everyday reality and you're plugging into something greater than yourself.

And when you do what you find, there is all the words on this beautiful poster behind me compassion, bliss, kindness, altruism. Joy. Ecstasy. In, studies of monks and nuns who are in this transcendent state, their brainwaves, the wave of of integration, of happiness, of all, of compassion, that brainwave kind of can go up 25 times, not 25% or 250%, 2,500%. I mean, a massive increase in those brainwaves of ecstasy and joy. And that part of the brain becomes highly active. So I what we really want to see you doing in the summit and in your everyday life is plugging in, is detaching from the lateral world around you.

We need to be plugged into that. I mean, when you do your work, I think you have to be a good physician and a good researcher. I need to be a good trainer and a good author and do the other things I do well. So we need that lateral world to be effective. What we also, though, if all you do is live at that lateral level, the level of local mind, local body, local self, you've missed the boat. When you plug into non-local self, then you are plugging into the information fields of consciousness itself, and then you have this ability to move into that local world with inspire passion and passion and wisdom and joy.

So that transcendent state, what might seem like something that is mystical and otherworldly, it leads to shift in your body, at least a shift outside of you. And so that's why we say, by all means, heal your trauma. But that's just a preparation for moving into transcendence. Well, it's there's so much to to discuss. And in one level, you know, you express things so clearly. There is no, no need to ask. Do we need to clarify for people listening? You'll notice it does. So in addition to his inspiring explanatory messages, he's dropping in chronological order of how things evolved in the 20th century for modern psychology.

So write down the name of his books. Will keep you busy. but you will learn a lot. But I won't say there are a few things that are fundamental, and I'm so glad to use this term because, you know, a discussion. You never used it. It's the essence. The deepest meditation really is the deepest state of enlightenment in the most ancient and esoteric, Buddhist text is flowing like a river. There is no freezing. The state of slow has no holding on it, because the moment we hold to something, there is no flow.

And that's really the amazing thing. So for people listening, this slow is not something that is out of us. It's in every cell in our body. It's in every second, every second within us. We just tend to because of the bottom of this pyramid, because of this survival response that creates reactivity. What survival is, survival is holding to something. It's changing. Ultimately, we live this badly. That's the biggest change. But with every thought that comes, it's going to fall away. We hold to the thought and we create a chain of thought.

So every time in the gap between the passive exhalation and inhalation, we have a moment to connect with every time. A thought for the way we connected. But ultimately, this flow that Dawson is sharing with you is as ordinary as anything you're doing in life. This flow is present in every action of our life, and the trick? The journey is a challenge and the amazing revelation that is it. We can wear different hats, but the flow is always there. And we tend when we practice more rigid methods of meditation, and we try to force our conceptual mind to freeze and be quiet, we tend to be in a meditative state and then we move to a miserable state.

Right? Doesn't. But when you connect with your heart, what is the fundamental difference between our brain and our heart? That our head, our brain is part of vigilance, of protecting us all the time. Looks, gets input from sensations. This is good. This is not good. This is great. This doesn't make sense. What does it do? The heart always flows. The moment the heart stops. The way the brain is, you give it 60s. And we are not here anymore. Right? So the whole heart, the whole how the mind connection is about getting the mind to function from the heart.

It's not about getting the heart to function from the head. It's really recalling. Knowing is the heart is our gift to connect with this transcendence. And really, you know, Dawson and you and I talk so much about compassion and loving love based practices is really what changes our brain, right? You you I mean, you wrote so much about it. So. Yeah. So it's really slow. Is a key and slow is it is a constant letting go. And our human tendency is our tendency is surviving. Being is to hold, to hold, to hold, to hold.

And if we can just remember to let go, to let go. You know, in Buddhist monasteries they write on, on, on the walls, don't let, don't give ordinary mind a chance. Don't give up. And, you know, being obsessive when you train is useful because I, I remember in my earlier training I would remind myself literally every five 10s throughout the day, no matter what I was doing. And then at some point, okay, die, you will learn it and you start letting go, you know? But this flow is key and so great that you tied this amazing,

Trauma, EFT, and Dawson's healing journey 22:08

profound state to such a simple principle of everything. It's flowing. Everything is changing. So in this sense, you touched on trauma, and dealing with trauma is the beginning stages. So it is such a big topic, you know, and you and I talked about it and we are so glad that it's coming to the forefront. And I think it's being unpackaged maybe not enough because people think that trauma is this major, you know, war related traumas and sexual abuse and, and terrible and no physical dangers. But we are all creatures of trauma because when we go through life, we have difficulties.

And anything that we can't completely let go of leaves a scar, leaves an epigenetic effect is really what trauma is. So maybe you can share with all of us. What is your view of trauma and why you were drawn so much to make it to a basic foundation of your work? Well, when I was growing up, my parents were missionaries and so they traveled a lot and I didn't have much time to connect with people around me. And so I wound up after a few years of this, and also a lot of, bad experiences in schools have been back in the 50s and 60s.

Schools weren't very nice places for the most part. And there's a lot of just, you know, stuff that went on there that wasn't wasn't good. And so I want to really depressed and, just to just a, I remember one day when I was about 15 years old, I was in a hotel and I was walking past a full length mirror. And Isaac, I, I stopped and looked at myself in this full length mirror in this hotel. And I looked at my I love I love long hair back then and, I just had a backpack of books over my shoulder and looked at this, this human being, and this thought flashed through my eyes, through my mind.

And the thought that flashed through my mind was, those are the saddest eyes I've ever seen. I was just looking at this wrecked human being. It was just incredibly depressed and miserable. I thought, I gotta, I gotta fix myself. I gotta do something about this. I mean, I can't stay in this state of being suicidal and miserable and depressed my life. I gotta do something here. And so I my first attempt to fix myself was to join a spiritual group. And so we began to read things like The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, all these great teachers, Paul Brunton, all of these mystics, Evelyn Underhill.

And so I learned all of these principles with that spiritual group. And, you know, I had happy moments and, you know, there definitely that that that framework of, Western mysticism was really informative for me. And I got, you know, somewhat more, more functional in some ways, but not very happy still. And then I discovered psychology. I thought, well, you know, spiritual tea isn't really moving the needle. Let's dive into psychology. So I spent a lot of years studying psychology, learning about psychology, especially Gestalt therapy, which is really present moment centered therapy.

And I learned lots of valuable lessons in the study of psychology. But then I made the decision one day. It was actually 45 years old. I had, I had kind of a lot of things going on in my life, some very nice things, some very not nice things. I had two kids at home. I stay a stay at home dad and, I've gotten divorced recently, so I was having to deal with my kids at work and everything else. And, I remember making the decision to meditate every single day without fail. Because before that, I'd been a occasional meditator, and I made that decision.

And within a few weeks, every part of my life began to change. It was remarkable how quickly it changed. I then got into energy therapies, energy medicine, energy psychology, EFT, emotional freedom techniques, tapping on acupressure points and using the body's energy systems. And I found myself changing much more quickly with energy that I had with either psychology or with spiritual ity. And that was a revelation to me. So I then got involved at the professional level with the Energy Therapy Association.

I began to do research. I pulled together research teams to start to do initially very simple studies and, what I thought we needed to apply these energy therapies to first was trauma. Now EFT tapping, acupressure, energy medicine. It doesn't work as well for everything. It works extremely well on some things, and it works only marginally on other things. But one of the things that works on Spect back really well is trauma. Like, I remember working with a young veteran at Omega Institute, and this guy had been in in Iraq.

He'd been deployed there several times. He was highly traumatized. And when we were talking just there in the safety of Omega Institute, where I teach every year, somebody in the room took a plastic water bottle and just sprinkled it, made the sound crushing the water bottle. And this young man was ready to dive under the table because it reminded him of small arms fire and highly, highly a hair trigger stress response. And I tapped with him. We tap on acupressure points while he remembered the events in Iraq, and he became completely calm.

Within a few minutes, he could hear somebody crackle that water bottle again and have zero emotional response. It's like magic watching. Watching traumatized people who were assaulted, who were involved in even complex PTSD, just lose that whole fear response. Within a very short amount of time. We published two sets of clinical guidelines one in the Kaiser Permanente journal, one in the European Journal called Health Care in Switzerland, and they both recommend ten one hour sessions. But in ten one hour sessions, all the evidence shows that nine out of ten people lose the flashbacks, the nightmares, the intrusive thoughts, the hypervigilance, all the other characteristic symptoms of PTSD that is gone.

And ten sessions is a lot. Many for many of them. With our younger veterans especially, we have them do 2 or 3 sessions often, and they're able to just clear out a huge amount of that traumatic imprinting. So it works incredibly well with those people. So I began to study it. I began to do research on it. Eventually we were doing randomized controlled trials. Then I thought, well, if it works that well psychologically and reduces anxiety and depression and traumatic symptoms, what's happening to the genes?

What's happening to stress hormones? So I did a five site clinical trial of cortisol, and people got either one session, about one session of talk therapy or one session of rest in the clinic. And we compiled the results for five sites. We found that the tapping at a single session brought down anxiety and depression twice as much as talk therapy or rest. We found cortisol dropped precipitously, and that study was then replicated by a colleague of mine. A few years later. And replications are important because that means there's really something going on here if you replicate the results.

So I then after that, we did a study of veterans with PTSD. And we looked at their epigenetics. We looked at whether EFT had epigenetic effect and what was going on with gene expression. And we found that it dramatically dialed up their, their, their immune systems, and it dramatically dialed up their anti inflammatory markers. So they were able to to club the bodies that much more easily regulate inflammation. And were were hadn't there much higher levels of immune function. Immune genes were more highly expressed.

Another kind of a study, another epigenetic study found 72 genes were affected by a one hour session of AVF t so, I did this research. I then founded the Veterans Stress Solution and now it's treated over 22,000 veterans free of charge. We worked in all kinds of other countries with our training. For example, we're training therapists in Ukraine. We trained a lot of people at Israel where you just came back from. We trained a lot of people in Palestine. There are a lot of people in conflict zones.

We've had teams of volunteers go into places like school sites of school shootings in the US and work with the survivors, the parents, the community. And it's just amazing the Rwandan genocide. We have teams now that have been going to Rwanda for 20 years, working with genocide survivors there, and even people who literally watched their parents get hacked to death with machetes before their eyes in 1994. And I've been having flashbacks and nightmares ever since then. We do the acupressure, the energy therapies with them, and they start to smile. They start to laugh.

They find their life even in the face of these devastating tragedies. So, the good news here is that PTSD is terrible, PTSD is curable and usually has to take between 4 and 10 sessions. It is not take a lot of time. We're now training thousands of people every year on this. We're training hundreds of coaches and therapists to use this. We also just got our very first contract to do this within the VA system. When our training therapists in in the VA to apply this. So that's what trauma is. It's this, this looping this, this looping memory where you're just involuntarily going back.

That's what a flashback is. You don't want to think negatively. You want to remember this, this terrible event. And the flashback means you're just going there without trying. An intrusive thought means you'd rather not think about that thing that bothers you. And you do all of those symptoms we find are simply disappearing in these veterans and these school shooting survivors, in these Rwanda genocide victims and even people who are going through the horrors of war, like some of those places I mentioned.

So, we now have this, these tools, and they'll be used by, we estimate, about 40 million people worldwide. And also many, many thousands of therapists are using them, often in hospital systems like Kaiser and at the VA. So that's just a sort of a quick tour, PTSD, the wonderful cures we have for it nowadays. Well, really amazing. And I'm going to get back to, to EFT because I want to get some more data. Then I want to look a little bit at a Chinese medicine view of who I can really do it. It's a unique it's a unique way of looking at it.

But really I want I want to go back to your process because when you looked at the mirror, mirror, you recognized where you were in recognition is the first thing you you were willing to face where you are. That's really important, which means you were not hiding. But then what happens is you really had a equality of acceptance. You accepted that this is where you are, which is really the basic quality that drives the heart. The how to accept dirty blood from everywhere. Physiologically, we are built to survive, to resist through the membrane, through boundaries, and the heart is wired as part of its flow to accept.

So this was really, really a pivotal moment. And for me, the other part of your story is that you tried different mystical studying methods and you tried different psychological methods that were useful, and it gave you tools. But it's really it's a meditation for people who are listening. I know from my own journey to study meditation very early in life, when I was 15, and for many years, many, many years hence your day of meditation. Every day of working 20 years, 2 to 3 months in the mountains.

The meditation is what takes our recognition, our understanding and just releases it, right? Frees it, and we get this sense of freedom and this combination of meditation and inner work, and capitalizing on the understanding of physiology and psychology that the West is bringing. This is a true east west integration. This is really the future. And also that, in my opinion, the future of the traditional Asian method, where we're going to put all this, all this information about it. And the last thing that you really mentioned is this idea of looping, because it's what we do with trauma.

We pick the trauma and the trauma keeps looping. And we need to put energy to keeps it looping without triggering us. But for this event, the noise brought in back to this box of looping drama that is so loaded, we then immediately spontaneously transitioned into the moment. And he was he was just hiding under the table, right? It was so really strange. The looping. Emptying is a looping is not about pushing the looping away. When you tap, you're really emptying the loop. You are disconnecting the loop because you are using the exit points of the channels.

So can you share with us a little bit for people to understand? Because it sounds what it is. Can you just even point to the different points in the sequence of the tapping, just so people can understand them? Yeah. And so what you are tapping on is the end points of acupuncture meridians. And we're all familiar with the acupuncture chart that is 360 or so points all over the body. We know a lot about them now that we didn't know even ten, 20 years ago. We know they're highly conductive. That they conduct energy and information.

And they, they they are able to communicate that throughout the body. And so what you have looks like is just finding those points. Like, right now I'm finding the endpoint of the kidney meridian on my chest over here. And that's a really useful point. We begin by tapping rubbing the small intestine meridian on the side of the hand. Over here we do the governing meridian on the top of the head. We do the bladder meridian, which is over here under the eyebrow. We do bladder two rather than bladder one because it's not a one is inaccessible.

Gall bladder stomach end of governing beginning of conception vessel kidney. And there are a bunch of other optional places. We we do spleen as well. There are some other, points we can use on other parts of the body. And what happens is really remarkable. So like this young man who had been deployed in Iraq, he is just telling his story. And as he tells his story, he is tapping now the the difference between telling the story and staying stuck at the trauma loop and telling the story and healing is that when you're just telling the story, you're firing all the neurons that were being fired during that actual event.

Your body can't tell when you're stressing yourself out by telling an old story that that is not a proximate trigger for fight or flight. Your body doesn't know readily that your story you're explaining to somebody else about how you were abused, or some terrible thing that happened to you. Your body is getting triggered by that memory, and those neurons are firing. When you do that and you tap, a whole different sequence of events happens in your, your brain. And, when we have people hooked up to an EEG, so we have an EEG hooked up to their, their scalp, we can read their brain.

And we know that when you're in the trauma loop, when you're telling your trauma story, your emotional brain, the midbrain is highly, highly active. It glows. It glows red on the EEG readout because we see that it's getting activated by remembering that trauma. The moment people start to tap that is still telling the same old story, it sends a second signal to the body, and that second signal says

How tapping works and memory reconsolidation 39:28

you're safe. Now the brain is getting two very different signals one saying, freak out, go to fight or flight, one saying you're safe and the brain has to decide which signal to prioritize. And it prioritizes the physical one. The very first psychiatrist to make a long study, a deep study of, PTSD was he was commissioned by the US government during the middle of World War one, and they had these these, these people coming back from the front in France and World War One. And they were highly traumatized.

These young American soldiers coming back from from the war. So they they hired a psychiatrist to study them. And he called it a physical neurosis. He recognized back then, 110 years ago. It's physiological. And so what, what what he's doing is giving you a physiological remedy. It's telling your body, hey, Europe. Hey. You're safe. If you really were on that field in Flanders right now, you wouldn't be sitting there tapping. So the body gets these two conflicting signals. One saying, go to fight or flight, one saying become.

It prioritizes the physiological signal of safety. It then removes all of the emotional tagging from the memory. And afterwards the person says, oh, yeah, you know, and I, I fought in that. I was at the Battle of Fallujah and it was terrible. And these things happened, and many of my friends died. And they'll tell you all of this and you can tell just watching them, they are no longer triggered. So the memory is intact. And this is called this is a new field of psychology. It's called memory reconsolidation and extinction.

So that memory really consolidates, but it extinguishes the emotion. And that's the inner workings of how EFT works. That's remarkable because memory consolidation changed my life. But just through meditation, you know, and that's how I overcame, you know, my Holocaust trauma intensely. But it's really interesting. So you're using different points. some are action points, some are connecting points, some are connected to different energies. But, you know, as somebody who is highly trained in Chinese medicine and listened to acupuncture, he studied classical Chinese for years, etcetera.

You really ask, how can it work so powerfully? Even acupuncture, acupuncture sometimes can do it in very skilled hands. Why? Is it because when you look at acupuncture from a limited point of view of energy, not mind, you either strengthen the point or you sedate the point. When you tap, you are getting both things. You are stimulating the point and you are releasing the energy and doesn't describe to us this looping. And we have an ongoing looping between all the channels in the body. You know, every 14 minutes, every 28 minutes, all of them circulate.

And then and then they go on going. So if you have a trauma, it's caught in your looping. And what we are doing here is we are breaking the loop. So I'm so glad that you brought it to a memory reconsolidation because I was going to tell you dosing what it's doing. It's wiping out the scarring, the trauma and allowing to body to reprogram in your memory memory reconsolidation. And that's really the powerful effect on it. And the classical thing it's going to effect is trauma because trauma gets us stuck in time.

So this is this is kind of amazing. The simplicity and the profundity. And, you know, we can see the profundity because this has been this has been substantiated in research. And there are so many popular therapies that may sound more sexy and more complex that really don't have research behind them. It just have, you know, you know, a public opinion behind them. But really, it's really the the ability to really allow us to really re consolidate our memory. And, it's it's it's remarkable. And I'm so happy that you brought this to a memory reconsolidation because it's really at the root of healing from traumas.

And often when I talk to a psychologist into a neurologist and to tell them what memory reconsolidation does for people listening, it's an instant cure. You don't need to work at changing the pattern. The pattern is gone. If you do it properly, especially in a meditative state, it's not there anymore. I mean, if you get rid triggered many times, sometimes some traits can come back, but it's really gone. It was doesn't is talking about you because memory is recreated every second, every second, every second.

So in this sense, you know, neurology, psychology, we say, well, it's like behavioral therapy. We have to work at it. You have to work it in little or no, you don't have to work in this. You rewire this, you put the system into sleep. And when it woke up, it woke up a different system. The tapping does it. You are cutting the wiring. You think about it. You are cutting the wiring, right? And you're doing enough of it that it stops. And once you stop, it rewires in a different place. Now that's the other cool thing is we've done a follow ups for many studies and so we go talk to those veterans.

Then three months later, six months later, a year later, some of our longer term study is two years later. And we find that the effect holes, they, they, they normalize and they the effect holds. One cool study. Two that I did was a veterans. They did not have clinical levels of PTSD yet but were at high risk. So they were near the clinical cutoff for PTSD. They weren't over the cutoff level of PTSD and this is important because PTSD is unlike anxiety and depression, in that it's one of the few psychiatric diagnoses that gets worse over time.

PTSD does usually not fade with with time. So like the Veterans resolution will have people often yes, sometimes emailing us saying, hey, you know, it's been, 20 years since nine, 11. Daddy's getting crazier. What do I do? And what happens if those loops go uninterrupted for years and years and years, they become more pronounced and the neural tissue builds up. So, for example, in a study of 911 responders, they found that a year afterwards, not a lot of them, but PTSD symptoms five years afterwards, many of them that didn't initially had them, now did had them.

And so PTSD tends to progress and get worse over time. If you get interrupted, it's powerful. So that's why we took this group of, veterans. And they did not yet had the symptoms, but they were high. They were going up in that direction. We tagged with them and we then found in six one hour sessions, they drop way back down. And again, the follow ups three months, six months, a year, they were were fine. So when you break that cycle, it's really interesting. You break that association between the memory and the fight or flight response one time and this brilliant learning and memory system in our hippocampus realized this.

Oh, that's not a threat to my survival. And when it remembers it, the same memory again a year later, it still recognizes it and they are no longer triggered. So it's a great way of building resilience. You and your wife, you have to think about your problems. You have to think about the trauma. And research shows that you can't do this if you dissociate, if you're not in the here and now, really remembering it, really in touch with it, in your body, it's very, very hard to work on those issues.

But you remember them one time and then you tap and then you break the trauma loop. And then you tend to be fine in the the in the subsequent months. Now, we do find that one time in ten the person doesn't change the veteran or the the survivor, whatever it is that they were traumatized by does not change. And so there are exceptions. I want to make that sound like a panacea. It works for everybody. We find that that one person in ten, it has about a 90% success rate and dropping people below that clinical threshold for PTSD one time at ten.

It doesn't. And so in our clinical guidelines with Kaiser, we say if the person doesn't make progress with the EFT, here's what to do. And we have another set of procedures. We recommend that doctors and nurses and therapists try. And for these 10%, are there any, certain traits or characteristics that you can or. It's hard to know. My guess is that their trauma has become embedded in their self-concept. And I remember meeting a guy at a veterans event once, and he walked up to me and shook my hand.

He said, hi, my name is Bob. I'm a disabled Vietnam veteran and I was going to start talking to him. He turned away to the next person. He shook their hand and said, hi, I'm Bob, I'm a disabled Vietnam veteran. Hi, I'm Bob. He was like a robot, doing this. And so that his to him, his name is Bob, a disabled Vietnam veteran. It's become so fundamental to at least six years. We actually have to train our therapists. I think this is a very I don't know, any of us was trained therapists to do this, but we sometimes have people self concepts collapse in a single session and it's highly disorienting for the client.

Because what if, you know, Bob has been saying that now for 50 years since Vietnam, and then we do some tapping with him and he loses a disability. You know, I mean, people just lose fundamental planks of their identity. And if those are the planks of their story about how bad their life is, one woman was telling me this week said, you know, I have told my story and I get so much sympathy when I talk about the abuse I suffered, sexual abuse as a child. And she says, you know, but I've just been tapping now.

And that old story I used to have to repeat and was so was so invested in it just doesn't have the emotional resonance for me. It used to has have. So you your self-concept can change. If you're meditating and tapping then you're not only removing all of these impediments to your well-being, you're replacing them with this vision of self that transcended self. I am pure consciousness, any human body. now you've got this powerful approach. And so we teach both meditation and we also teach tapping.

If you just meditate and try to hit those transcendent states without healing trauma, we found that it tends to trigger various a risk, a various things, one of which is a dark night of the soul. Dark night of the soul is often you're hitting those red states. You have it heal your trauma, and that can produce dark night of the soul. It also can produce the dark side, the shadow self. So if that trauma is lurking there in the background, I mean, like a lot of these gurus we read about who have scandals in their communities and they're not limited to eastern gurus, the Western gurus, and they're in Judaism and Christianity there in Buddhism, there've been a whole bunch of recent scandals, but they've been scandals going back.

These people have hit these elevated states of consciousness. They're transcending, but they've never gone and healed that trauma. So you have to do the both. You can't. Just what I was drawing when I joined that spiritual community as a teenager, the teaching was we move into this elevated version of ourselves in which were these glowing beings of light, and we just leave behind the old self. Research shows that you have to go and work on that old stuff if it remains buried unacknowledged, if you're just moving into that.

People care about spiritual bypassing, toxic positivity that's going up there and not acknowledging these, this, this inner wounding. So you need both. You need the trauma release. And then that opens up the possibility of moving safely into these self trance headed states. Endorsing, you know, this is you come from the research, but I come from the meditation experience and we discussed this and I actually talked about it in this talk, the transcendent is not just this amazing experience. Right? I started with this.

Transcendence is in everything. It's in good experiences, in it's bad experiences, everything has this quality of freedom. And that's a very common mistake in meditation, where we try to force a certain state of mind. And for me to be interesting, when you look at these groups to see if they have another place where they are holding and what do I mean? You're really talking about people with self. The identify with the issue. They are grasping the issue. And also in a physical skull, an actual skull that relates to the time of trauma allows them to hold to the trauma.

Would be interesting to look if you actually treat the skull like put it an esthetic into a skull. We do it in neuro therapy. This council gets a trauma and it gets smaller ugly. At some point it almost disappeared. It's remarkable. This is 100% of the time it gets smaller. That's similar because you're really talking about melting our skulls of survival.

Using EFT safely and finding resources 53:18

The skulls that are really it due to a looping that didn't let go. And you're right, is every time we loop the loop, get thicker and thicker and thicker and thicker and thicker until it feels. So this is really remarkable. And I want to touch on if a little bit more. When you say ten sessions, do people have to do it with someone or do, oh, it's a and people do it on their own. How, how how did it work both end. And so you have to use toad as a self-help technique. And on my website I have courses I like, I have an insomnia course, I have an anxiety course, I have a trauma course.

I have various courses that people just take by themselves. But we recommend that if people are doing with dealing with trauma, that they work with a practitioner for a number of reasons. One is that trauma is sometimes overwhelming. I remember being one Gestalt therapy workshop many years before. I learned a lot, and I was one of the leaders of the workshop, and I was doing fine. And then suddenly I had a traumatic memory surface, and I found myself in the fetal position on the floor, crying my eyes out.

So that's just being overwhelmed by by trauma. And so we recommend that people who work with trauma, they work with the practitioner to avoid the possibility of being being overwhelmed or having an ab reaction. You can go into a a place where you get completely overwhelmed. I worked with one woman. This was we have some methods as well for prenatal and perinatal trauma, and I had to use these with her. She sat down to work with me in front of a big group of people and we began to tap. She began to talk about her issue, which was her teenage son who was not doing well.

He was in jail, and, we had to tap on him. And within two minutes of starting this demonstration session in front of a big crowd, the woman began to cry and couldn't speak. Could even tap. Just sat there staring at me. Now again, we we have specialized techniques to deal with this, and we we train all of our practitioners how to how to work with these people. First of all, you, you you you never break eye contact. She was staring at me. I was her human lifeline to sanity. And so I just was there with a compassionate expression on my face.

But I kept on tapping. And one of the techniques we teach is that you just keep the session moving and you keep the energy going, even if it's terrifying. This person is immobilized. Now, if I had her in an EEG, I can predict with which parts of her brain that have shut down, probably part of the parietal lobe has shut down. Part one of the temporal lobe, a shut down Broca's area that governs language totally off line. She can't explain, can't say a word. So, I just kept on tapping with her and saying general statements.

This is a tragedy. It should never have happened. I'm so full of grief about this. I was tapping on myself. No, we don't tap on people. Even when we're in live sessions in person. We always have the client tap on themselves. And you just sat there watching me, but she's watching me. And I know mirror neurons are firing in her brain, so I'm tapping only on myself. But I know those mirror neurons are firing. And after a long time, eventually she began to tap. And then she had to talk. And then she began to talk about child and sexual abuse and all kinds of other things, of which her son's current predicament was just the trigger.

So, there are these powerful ways of working with people, and we just don't recommend people who are traumatized or know they have PTSD or know they have very trauma. They try and go their work with a practitioner. They know what they're doing. The highly trained, our practitioners go through a grueling one year education process. They have to pass a lot of tests. They have to have a lot of live, in-person training with certified trainers. we we only certify people if we're confident that they have these skills. Then they go up on our website as a certified clinically, every practitioner.

So that's for trauma. If you have a minor issue, just tap yourself. You know, if you have a like I remember someone saying, I fell off my bicycle the other day, I just be able to tap right away on myself immediately. So, you know, anything like that? A minor annoyance, stuff going on in your life? Tap. I tap pretty much every day. I say, I just like to balance my energy system. So there's a lot of self-help you can use and have your practitioner in your back pocket. So if you do get overwhelmed, you've had work with a seasoned professional who who knows, knows your issues.

And the other thing I'll just add to that is that I, for example, weight loss we have I don't know how many clinical trials you have for weight loss at this point. probably over a dozen. And they are just spectacular. People take one of our online programs and they do the weight loss tapping that we recommend, but we follow them up. Then year six months, sometimes two years later, and their weight falls a little bit while they do the tapping program over the course of 6 or 12 weeks. So their weight will go down maybe 5 pounds, maybe maybe 10 pounds in a year.

The average weight loss after they finish the program. So now they're not even doing the program anymore. They finished the program a year ago. They drop an additional 22 pounds on average, ten kilograms on average. They just keep on going down because they're curbing their cravings and addiction. So you want to do that great work with a practitioner who's skilled at weight loss. You're going to get there far faster than just shooting in the dark by yourself. So certainly the online programs are effective and they do work.

And the research shows that. But if you're dealing with anything systematic or longstanding, if you have if you sabotage your relationships, sabotage your career, sabotage your money, sabotage your health, have any kind of persistent behavior, try to figure it out by yourself. You might get there. But if you just hire somebody and spend some money and time and focus, you'll find you'll get there much more quickly. That's amazing. You know, it reminds me. And then I just want one more question to ask you how people can find you.

In the 80s, I was already in medical school, but I was learning. I was already doing Chinese medicine, and there was, again, Italy. And people would fly from all over the world and they would pay me $100 in cash when they came in, and they would do one session and they would stop smoking like 60, 70%. And what he would do, he would do tipping in a few points for like one minute and send them out. He actually is tipping to change the habit. Now that I think about this, is like mid 80s. So this is 40 years ago. It's really but I want so doesn't how can people find out more about the FDA in your work and how they can benefit?

Well, where should they go. So the easiest place to go is just the website Dawsongift.com and go to dawsongift.com So just just my name dawsongift.com And when you go there you'll get a free copy of the EFT mini manual. they'll have you tapping yourself. In a few minutes you'll get a free meditation. And again, that's a meditation track that in one study, we found boosted immunity in people's immune systems. And through that you can then find our live courses. Our online programs are certified practitioners, thousands of stories written by people who've written into us and said, I used EFT for whatever their issue was.

And it it really helped or it cured it. I was on a program yesterday with, with a woman and she said, I just I'm just really I'm just so moved when I think about the size that actually said, thank you, Dawson, thank you for EFT universe, your website. And I did your fibromyalgia course. I had fibromyalgia for 46 years and I got better, she got better in about three months of tapping, doing our five mile course. And so we have these stories of people just overflowing with gratitude. They use the insomnia.

Insomnia, because I think we probably had well over 7000 people take that little course, just a brief ten session course. Most of the sessions are ten minutes long, very, very short evidence based methods for insomnia, primarily tapping and meditation. And just the the reviews people write in, they say, you know, I downloaded the first episode I you to tap. I got the first full light sleep I've had for years after that. So, evidence based stuff. That's why I just love science. Because both of these things.

Against what? What's effective. And then you you do the effective stuff. And that's why our weight loss programs work. They aren't someone's good idea about what to do about this. They're evidence based. They're clinical trials based. And they really, really, really work. And we can quantify how they will work for you. So yeah this Dawsongift.com that one website. And then download the manual download the meditation track. Find a practitioner look for the virtual programs and just just believe know that science shows that these things are curable.

Fibromyalgia I went on the website of the Mayo Clinic a while back. I looked up there their entry for five myalgia and the very first sentence is fibromyalgia is an incurable condition. I love it and I'm like, is it? A woman told me yesterday that the chief cure that we have a couple of clinical trials showing that most people who who do tapping get better. So you say the. Science is there, that this stuff really works. You know, whatever you're suffering from that reducing your stress, opening yourself to those transcendent states is going to rock your body and rock your world.

Yeah, this is really awesome. What we talked, you know, the the Mayo Clinic, however you went. It's really they are fixating. They are looping on a concept and then they don't let go of it. And, you know, for the people listening, those are so excited about his work because it's his way of expressing and sharing, you know, his decades of learning and wisdom. So I want to thank you and everybody, participating in our, summit wants to thank you. And I want to thank you for the friendship and for the connection that it's just going to grow.

We also geographically neighbors. Oh my God, it's amazing. So looking forward to give me another big hug in person and big, big hugs. And I'm looking forward to seeing you soon. Thank you for your wonderful, huge heart. And thank you all for joining us for this wonderful event. And we're so grateful that you're here and that we're able to meet in the heart and meet in the head and in practice and shift our lives. Thanks for being here. Thank you.