Mind-Body Healing: Overcoming The Survival Paradox

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

Thank you for having me again. I love our conversations, and they always flow. I think that together, we end up offering something useful to the audience. I’m excited about it.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

We sure do. Stay tuned very closely, everyone, because you’re about to receive a huge gift from Dr. Eliaz. He has so much world experience in helping people heal. Now, I want to jump right into this. Before we start talking about the power of the mind to heal, we have to set the stage. So this lends itself to the work that you’ve done throughout your life. You have a book that you wrote, The Survival Paradox, and you outline in that book the concept of how we have a survival drive. that survival drive is at the root of inflammation and aging disease. You call this The Survival Paradox, and it relates to our health and longevity. Can you explain that piece before we get into the power of the mind to heal?

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

Yes. We are all wired and built to survive. We are built to survive innately. We are built to survive for as long as we exist. We are built to survive as a whole person, as an organ system at the cellular level, and how it reflects in our metabolism. Because survival is innate in us, it’s so primordial. It’s not controlled. It’s come through an automatic response. The autonomic nervous system is through the sympathetic nervous system. It happened in a fraction of a second. We all experience it on and off all day long. So what it does is we either give a response of fighting or we have a response of flight in fear, which kind of group into one group. This response affects our breathing, our heart rate, and every organ in our body. then it can be regulated by moving to the parasympathetic system, taking a deep breath, relaxing, and coming to a place of balance between fear and more spaciousness, but we don’t feel threatened, which is our survival response. So fighting very much equates to inflammation, and if we have an ongoing survival stimulus we’re not aware of, it will create micro-inflammation, which will drive so many diseases. I want to understand the audience, and that’s the contribution of The Survival Paradox, because with the paradigm shift, there is so much about how to address inflammation, but it’s secondary. Inflammation is not a cause; it’s a result. The cause is this survival response. It’s much earlier. We can be a little bit more easily regulated through our autonomic nervous system, and that’s where the power of the mind is. obvious. We’ll talk about it. This is what has been my life journey since the age of 15. Pretty soon to be 50. My God, I’m not young anymore. But biochemically, it also turns on within minutes by producing survival proteins. The key one that I have researched for almost 30 years is Galectin 3. This biochemical response doesn’t turn it around so quickly. The problem is that even if it lasts for a short time, it sets up a cascade of events and immune stimulation and dysregulation, which we all know is the cytokine storm and an inflammatory response that can last for a very long time.

Later on, we’ll see the changes in the cytokines interleukin 6, in TNF alpha, and we start seeing organ damage in the drive into the other element of this of the autonomic nervous system, the fight, the flight in fear where we hide, when we isolate, where we create a shield that drives fibrosis and more long-term In my research, especially in the field of apheresis, I show that when I block galectin 3 early on in a very acute situation, even sepsis, we prevent the cytokine storm, we prevent kidney damage, and we prevent death. That’s a very promising area in the field of many diseases, including sepsis, which is the focus of my innate research. Now putting this aside, our interest today, and maybe one more comment, the simplest way to address Galectin 3 is by blocking it, but it’s only the biochemical part. It’s not enough in the long term, or it’s enough for a certain situation. But our goal is to provide a bigger picture, and we can block it with a natural blocker called Modified Citrus Pectin. I am the one who developed the initial one about 30 years ago. It has over 80 published papers, and if you look at the benefits, but if it was made to help a wide variety of conditions, from cancer to inflammatory disease to autoimmune diseases, you ask why? How? Because it addresses this very basic movement. That’s about the survival paradox. What we are interested in today is looking at where The Survival Paradox comes from. That’s something I just hinted at at the end of my book, and that’s my third act. That said, I’ve trained in this for decades and decades, and that’s what I feel an obligation to share because it is such a powerful tool for healing and harmony.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

It is. I want to explore this further. But one quick question, because I do get this a lot from my community. They want to know: Is it safe to take modified citrus pectin while they’re on protocols from other practitioners? I know you’ve been on many of my past summits, and we’ve talked about this many times, and people listen up and they listen in. Many times, when people come into my programs in my community, they’re already on this product because it helps them so much. So I always tell them to just take it right along with what we’re doing, and I just want them to hear that from you as well because it’s a big question.

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

Pectasol is great, which is a Modified Citrus Pectin in that research is a great addition and support for practically every treatment because what it does by blocking galectin 3 it peels off the shield, the coat, the coating, the lattice formation that creates isolation and allows that tissue to become inflamed in a very robust way. We see this symptom, or microinflammation, which we may not see for many years. We wake up one day, and we have cancer. Yes, and in my opinion, Modified Citrus Pectin is the most important supplement someone can take. It’s something I never miss. Now my focus has moved on to apheresis and to do my body medicine. I’m not focusing on removing Galectin 3 through filtering, which is for my preclinical approval. I’m doing the large animal safety studies. These are the columns that have a special antibody for the removal of Galectin 3. But I’ve spent decades working with this compound, and nobody initially imagined what it’s going to do because nobody knew about Galectin 3. Then over this journey, I discovered its role in inflammation and fibrosis. Initially, the focus was cancer, which is big enough.

So, yes, it’s an essential supplement, and it’s a supplement that has not gotten enough attention. It’s now finally getting there. It’s probably the most substantiated supplement, for example, in cancer, and it’s finally coming to the awareness of people at lower 30 years later, 33 zero, which tells you the value of something that’s 30 years later. Not only that, they didn’t die out. It’s fine becoming. Yes, it’s exciting, and I hope it helps many people, but beyond telling people to understand it, it represents my life journey the biochemical process. While my unique meditation training, treating, and studying from the greatest meditation masters in the Himalayas were also my patients, I realized that these survival responses to survival particles can be melted away in our minds and hearts. That’s where the infinite healing potential is. When this changes, then inflammation just dissipates because it doesn’t have the right or the conditions to exist anymore. So that’s what I want to touch on a bit more today. That’s why, slowly, over the next few years, I’m going to shift and offer these teachings and guidance both online and face-to-face, because it’s so inspiring to see somebody come for four or five days and then they’re just different people afterward.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I love that you’re in your third act now and that you’re focusing on this mind-body. Now, I want to get into that and make sure we have enough time to talk about what you call open heart medicine and the links between the mind and the body in terms of inflammation. But let me ask: do we need to talk a little bit more about the survival paradox, the paradox protein, and how it drives inflammation, including neuroinflammation? Do you want to talk a little bit more about that before we get into this next bit?

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

Yes, I can. Galectin 3 is a carbohydrate-binding protein. It binds to different molecules, either short chains of carbohydrates or sugars. Note to glucose, to glycoprotein, or glycol lipids. So it also binds with different ligands, inflammatory ligands. Whatever it does, it reacts to this survival danger. It’s the bus that takes these ligands to the area that is being infected. There, it starts to fight by producing inflammation. It’s part of this process. It creates a microenvironment that the body has less control over. What happens is that once it gets activated instead of one galectin 3, it creates a pentamer, and one pentamer attaches to the other, creating a biofilm atherosclerotic plaque. It disrupts the gut lining and disrupts the blood-brain barrier. It creates inflammation in the bloodstream, and it stimulates the microglia to create chronic neuroinflammation. The Alzheimer’s plaque contains 10 to 20 times more galectin-3 than normal brain tissue. What  Modified Citrus Pectin does, is break down, releasing this ligand, and blocking the damaging part of galectin-3, which is now in circulation. then the latest formation can follow it. Now the body can respond to the issue. For example, 90% of patients with recurrent prostate cancer benefit from biochemical recurrence of prostate cancer, either slowing down, stopping, or getting better. How is it possible that it doesn’t kill cancer? It’s not cytotoxic.

It allows the body and the immune system to address the cancer because it melts this inappropriate immune response. That’s the value of it. Galectin 3, as you remember, is a biochemical representation of our survival paradox, but it’s secondary. The first one is the response of our mind-defined nervous system to our innate primordial drive to survive. And this can be very robust. People are like, No, going crazy all the time. We’re very subtle. We just get stressed a little bit quicker than before. We don’t ask as quickly. Our path is a little bit higher, and we feel a little bit less happy. We see more empty cups. All of these are symptoms of being constantly on the grind of survival. Survival naturally means that the stimulus that causes the survival response is how to control it. Certain things are easier toxins will affect aren’t necessarily low level and will create a survival response when there’s a lower level. If we eat clean food, we’ll have less of it.

But we never know what’s going to happen in the next second. Outside it. We never know what thought is going to come or what feeling will come into sight. What we can learn is how we respond to this stimulus and then the journey of meditation. The journey of meditation has now begun. There’s a lot of research right now on the healing power of love, compassion, and an open heart. Meditation has now come to the forefront. Initially in the seventies and late sixties, Maharishi in transcendental meditation, and now with mindfulness. whenever you talk about it, it is mindfulness. When mindfulness is important, it’s an introduction; it has a clear benefit, but it’s also the first-grade meditation. No, you do. Well, you can get to fourth grade, but it’s both very beneficial and restrictive in opening the door to transforming the survival paradox. You cannot transform to survive a paradox with mindfulness, because as long as you are mindful of something, you are holding onto something, even if you want to be relaxed about it. While survival is all about holding, what is survival, right? 

Survival is not accepting the one absolute truth regardless of our belief system. Whatever arises, whatever expresses itself, has an ending. This is the absolute truth. A thought that comes and goes, a mindset begins and ends. A year goes by, our lives are still in our bodies. If we hold and can’t let go, that is an emotional, psychological, and mental process. If a cell doesn’t let go and wants to survive, it’s called cancer. We can see how it’s affecting us on a certain level, creating cancer. Of course, the same process has so many layers. So the reason why I teach this is because there are many great meditators in Masters. I’m not needed for this, although I have had very, very unique meditation training for decades, and I have complete confidence in my meditation training. I was lucky to train with amazing people and spend decades on an early retreat. I’m teaching this because, through my own experience, my insight, and my crazy connections, I have studied science with a Chinese doctor, a Western doctor, a researcher, a creative person, and an inventor. I made a very unique connection between our physiology, our cell biology, and the healing process in our mind and heart. This is what I call it; it’s a system that is very esoteric.

A lot of it is taught in great secrecy, one-on-one. I package it into a very simple package for people who are regular people who don’t have a certain philosophical belief system and equally open-heart medicine. The reason why I’m so interested in it is because a byproduct of it is that the survival paradox weakens and eventually melts away. It affects our health our healing, how we live, how we interact with other people, and how we die can affect everything. This effect is multi-generational. I give some examples in my book about my healing from my grandfather’s trauma from the Holocaust. But this is just my example. We all have our examples, and once we connect with the flow, then the sky’s the limit. That’s a little bit more about Galectin 3. But the Survivor paradox: at the end of the book, I talk about freeing the Survivor paradox, and I just give the last chapter, a very generalized introduction to the flow of our hearts and the ongoing heat and compassion of our hearts. But it’s a journey, and that’s what I teach a little more and more in line with because it’s reality, especially face-to-face. That’s where you see miracles happening to me.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Dr. Eliaz, thank you so much for this first part of our talk for joining us today and unpacking the power of your body to solve the part of your mind, part of your mind, and your body to solve some of this inflammation and connecting the dots to what’s causing this inflammation as well. To our audience, I hope you found our conversation insightful and helpful. If you’re a summit purchaser, stay right here, because we’re about to dove even deeper into this discussion with Dr. Eliaz. If not, click on the button on this page to get access to a continuation of this conversation and many others, and get the tools you need to reclaim your health. If you’re watching this continuation of my talk with Dr. Eliaz, thank you for being a valuable member of our community, and we’re going to dive right back in. Dr. Eliaz, could you please now go into speaking about the link between the mind and the body in terms of inflammation and aging and how open heart medicine, what you called open heart medicine and meditation practice helped transform that survival paradox that you talked about in the first part of this conversation?

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

Oh, yes. be happy to. We talked about the survival response, the response that we have when we aim, for example, in a moment of danger or stress. But it goes all the way to the cellular level. If we look at every cell in our body, it wants to survive as if it’s an individual. It’s about the community. It’s what you call the mutual support term in Hebrew after that, and so as part of this, the cell takes what it wants. It takes nourishment. It decides the cell’s bound boundary; the membrane and the member decide what comes in, and you decide what it wants to be put out. He decides what’s coming based on his own. It’s mental status, I look at the cell as a living being, and within the cell, there’s an energy production that reflects our state of mind, just like inside our body. The cell is very relaxed. Insulin receptors are working well. The gene that suppresses cancer, p53, is very dominant. AMPK adenosine monophosphate kinases, which produce ATP from glucose, are working well, and then we produce 36 ATP from one glucose slowly but efficiently, without too many byproducts. We can speed up the process. Our antioxidant system is balanced. We can use his message to push our ability to produce energy because it will balance out with more antioxidants.

As we talked about in the past, the reason why hormesis works in this harmony in metabolism is because we are challenging our body lower with the state of mind that we are doing it for our good when we’re going to this ice bath. But if we are challenging our bodies because we are in danger of somebody shooting at us, you will not get her message. You will get terrible damage. It starts with the mind. That’s why I’m happy we’re doing this delay, like a third of all this level of dissecting. I know not everybody listens to all of them, but for you and me, we are continuing our dialog. Now the cell is functioning in a normal way. If the cell is in survival danger, then it will immediately shift into glycolysis. It needs energy. It’s survival. A lot of energy is generated 100 times faster, but only five to six percent of the efficiency of ATP is for glucose usage. Consumption of sugars is a huge byproduct. Huge acidosis and the cell becomes a mess.

And our body becomes damaged. Now we realize that the cell can respond differently based on how safe it feels, and the cell gets a signal of how safe it is from the outside. What’s coming to the cell, what receptor is going to, and this is very similar in that, by the way, the first time making you send out a deal like this, that’s like, I get excited about this because every decade because now the cell has outside stimulus that it responds to. Then inside the cell responds because of its genetic makeup and because of its epigenetic makeup. Because of trauma over the past, my trauma of the past will affect the expression of proteins inside the cell. It’s just like, whoa. Now we understand that we should look at ourselves. We have things coming to our five senses. What we see, what we hear, what we touch, what we smell, and what we taste. We respond to them just like cells. We have our inner body sensations, thoughts, feelings, and memories that we are reacting to all the time. 

Like right now, if you think you are going in and you are reacting to your thoughts, it’s not the thought that is important in meditation. It’s not what we experience. It is important. It’s a common mistake. It’s our response to what we experience. Now that I’ve made this dialog between us, we are the whole being to the cellular level, so as a whole being, we will affect our metabolism vitally through our heart rate, how strongly the heart is contracted, how fast we breathe, and how contracted we are to expend another blood vessel on the cellular level. It’s more about the mitochondria and the blood vessels to the mitochondria, which are the metabolic pathways. The biochemical pathways. We realize we are wired to survive all the way, except if we can change our response. Can we survive by, but not by, feeling this sense of, “Oh my God, I can’t let go?” Maybe by accepting that everything changes, and then suddenly our response is more relaxed. Suddenly, the cell has a stimulus, and it doesn’t respond to the stimulus. The change now is that the cell is changing its behavior.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

What comes to mind is Viktor Frankl and his experience as a Holocaust survivor. Yes. As you speak about this, I think of his choice and his interpretation of what was happening to him. It is one of the reasons that he survived this, even though he lost everything. I mean, if you haven’t read this book, I know you have. But viewers, if they have not read this book, it’s remarkable what the human mind can do to survive it. That’s what I’m thinking of as you.

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

You could pick a better example. My name is our daughter, Lama Chu Lihui. She’s an ordained Buddhist lama. She quotes him a lot as an example of exactly that. That’s the wow example I’m trying to give here. I’m trying to make it more like what you and I do all the time. Well, we are more than ordinary people.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Well, I would say in my ordinary life. I’m a business owner. I’m a mom. I’m doing a lot of things. and every day in my business, I should just focus on that, not the mom piece. The business piece. Big decisions and big things are happening every day, and some things don’t work out right. Sometimes I make a business choice that flops, doesn’t work, or doesn’t have an intended outcome. So what I practiced in my mind is looking for the lesson or the gift in the experience, even when it didn’t turn out the way that I expected, so that we can grow and learn from that and find something good that came of it. I’ll give you one example. One time, I spent $50,000 on something that didn’t work. What happened was that I found the best copywriter in the world out of that. She’s my $50,000 copywriter. That’s the interpretation.

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

Give me the name. No, I’m joking!

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

She’s the thing. Like, it was like a beautiful gift.

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

Let’s look at this. Let’s use your example for the audience. Like a simple example, not my own. Now we realize how we operate. We have this system; we have a survival system. I mean, this is what keeps us alive. If, initially, in the Holocaust, the same person hadn’t worked hard to find food and shelter, they wouldn’t survive. Definitely. But then you give us a bigger, more explained Asian as a harmonious explanation. Then we are built to survive, but we are also built to transform our survival. That’s our true life’s journey. I’m going to use strong words if we don’t connect to this; we a little bit wasted our physiology. We wasted an opportunity. We spent our lives mastering this survival paradox—how to survive it. We’re on a good diet and we do cold baths and we eat good things,  great things. We live longer, and we are excited about it. Eventually,  everything comes to an end. No matter how we do it all, we say, Well, if you look at every spiritual tradition you see, they have something that they’re trying to express. Spiritual and religious are not always equal; sometimes they connect, sometimes they don’t. So I’m talking, there is something there is a journey for us to do here. If there is a journey, we have to be built up to do it.

Otherwise, we are inventing something that we are not. If we look at our physiology, we realize that the one organ that behaves differently than any other organ is our heart. Because our hearts don’t say no. Our hearts don’t say, I don’t want you. Our heart accepts everything. Our hearts accept all the junk that our bodies release. Your heart accepted your $50,000 expense, and it could have just floated through your heart without your awareness if you were not in the same way a person does business, it is only into the money. One day, when I lost this package of 50,000, there was a certain emotion that there was anger about how it would eventually get, according to Chinese medicine, to the liver and effective liver metabolism. Oh, if you’re fearful, My God, this person may squeeze another $200,000 from me. It will get to your kidneys because of the fear, and your lower back will squeeze, and you will feel a bit cold or maybe a hot flush, and you will feel that you are not safe. Then suddenly, you feel that your children are not safe. And then you don’t send your children to your friends to play. This all started with this sequence of how life works. 

Controlled clinical trials are important, and they are the biggest illusion because nothing is controlled in life. Or you will see, Oh my God, I can’t afford to lose the money. It will affect your lungs. Different organs have this relationship with different emotions, but your heart takes everything, and then you connect to the qualities of acceptance and gratitude. I’m going to find a lesson. Because of the heart, the heart accepts everything with open arms and an open heart. If the heart doesn’t accept blood with an open heart, it means that there is stenosis of the tricuspid valve, and then there is a big gap of blood, and you get right to heart failure, and it breaks into the liver, causing damage to the liver. You go to your venous system, and you get in trouble. Your heart accepted it. Then, once the heart accepts it, it can deal with it on its own. The heart still has its cells that function like normal cells. The heart connects to a bigger acceptance system, to a universal, infinite acceptance system that can take anything.

The heart never says no. He takes anything from the point of view of space but also takes in everything from the point of view of time. Anything outside of us is experienced. Everything that happened in the past, everything that is happening now, and everything that will happen in the future—that’s a big concept. We’re not going to be conceived this way through my third act soon enough. It’s a cause of unlearning, and we do it by exhaling. We share difficulties with the world, and if the environment is open and clean enough, global warming is a reflection of our energy in inflammation and global warming affects our inner inflammation. Just like the cells in the body, we have the body and the environment. Global warming is a good thing to try to deal with from a selfish point of view. Okay, so now the world has accepted it, and it gives us clean energy and clean oxygen. But more than this, the same molecule of air that is coming through your mouth is related to the filtration until it gets to the lungs and into the heart. It is connected, Laura, to anything and everything.

Everywhere I think about it, it’s an open space, and it connects us to information and photons that you’ve been there in the past and are going to be there in the future. We are connected to endless information that we cannot receive. We cannot comprehend it. We know it from science. We perceive it as a fraction of our reality. The only thing we can say is, wow, and be humble about thinking that we know everything, understand everything, and solve problems, and that’s very important for us as human beings, for people on healing journeys, and for us, the doctors, who went to the things they knew everything about. That’s because the more we can do it, the less we are bound by concepts. then the clean air comes to the lungs. There is an exchange of transformational stuff. Let’s go out into the air. Stuff comes into the blood, gets oxidized, and then the heart nourishes every cell in the body without discrimination.

It’s in. I know. I talk about it a lot, and you can see it. I told you this probably a few times, but every time I’m excited about it because the heart is rigid, it does not discriminate. The heart gives with an open heart; it accepts with an open heart; and it gives in only once. It gives it the ability to finally relax, and only once it relaxes will the coronary arteries expand and the heart nourish itself. The heart is also the only organ that nourishes itself after it finishes its work, and outside of the proper heart, no other organ does. The selfless giving of the heart is the survival of the heart. The heart’s survival is to maintain this system of survival and to give us the tool to connect with greater healing. That’s why the essence of mind, body healing, and miracles happening is shifting to our hearts because our minds and our concepts are built to stop and analyze. This is why we need so much training to calm our minds and our thoughts because we tend to hold, to hold, to analyze. 

That’s why it takes a lot of time for the heart; its survival is just to flow when the heart stops to analyze, like the way the mind knows that. We have a fixating mind and a flowing heart. In these centers and all the Tibetan Buddhist terms, it says the heart has no concepts, and a lot of it is bound in this term. I heard this term from a very great meditation master in the Himalayas, and when I was treating him, I was told, Don’t tell him that he has something bad; he will get it right away. Also, when he would go to very hot springs, somebody would have to be with them because he wouldn’t know when it was too hot on his body. He was completely beyond the concept of regular feeling. You could see him when you met him. I don’t want to go into other stuff. He’ll die in 24 hours in his late seventies from multiple diseases. Not because I’m like a great doctor, but because he had the flexibility of mind to just let go. Each of us has this physiology built into us. This way, connecting with our hearts is easier, faster, and very powerful.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

So can we talk about this a little bit? Because I know at this moment people are watching or thinking, I just want a supplement protocol and some lifestyle things to do. This is hard. The inner work—mind-body work—and trusting yourself that you can solve this. It’s a bit esoteric as well, as you already mentioned. In the time that we have left, could you give our listeners and viewers here some steps—maybe—to start tapping into this internal, innate healing capability that we all have? That is what I would almost say—silenced by the noise of everything we’re exposed to constantly, all day long. How do you quiet all this stuff that’s going on and go inward and start to be able to heal and trust your body? I think that’s a missing piece for a lot of people because it just seems too hard. I know it seems silly like meditation is hard, but your mind starts wandering and going to other places, and you think I can’t meditate, see? It won’t work for me.

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

No. Speaking as an erotic person, an overachiever type A. I know what you mean. First of all, it’s a great question, and thank you. What I’m presenting here is a non-esoteric power because I’m tying it to physiology, science, and physics. I’m not using any esoteric terms, and I’m just explaining how it always flows and how the mind always talks and analyzes that. It’s how we operate. It’s beyond the belief system. Yes. but what you brought is very important. The first step is to slow down the mind. This is the part that I introduced. Maybe I can find a diagram in my book where I talk to you, and I can even show it while. Well, what I explain is that the first step is to slow down.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

As you’re looking for that, something I always tell myself is that when my mind is racing and I’ve got a million things on my plate to do, I’m being pulled in a lot of directions. There are a lot of people counting on me, and there are deliverables that I need to give to either my team, my clients, or my family. I constantly tell myself to slow it all down. It gets to be easy. It gets to be easy. Like that, that lands for me because I tend to make things hard because I’m a perfectionist. I mind myself. It gets to be easy. I guess I don’t know. I don’t even know I’m doing it. But that’s the meat that I use to slow my mind.

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

I mean, every time you make such a comment, you open the door to a whole chapter in meditation. But the first thing is to slow down, and we slow down. Again, this is the basic diagram, which you can see, and then you can see it well enough.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yes, I can see.

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

Yes. In any case, we have a chain of thought that we can control, and once we slow down, that thing starts coming.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

What page is that on so people can refer to?

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

206.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Okay, I should have had the book with me here, the book is on my bookshelf.

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

The same with a paper copy, but in any case, it’s the same. When you slow down, you slow it down by working on your posture and being in touch with your body. When I guide, I give guidance in the book, and then, again, this interview will air after I’ve done my one-day retreat in January 2024. People can go to dreliaz.org and find it. But I will be teaching it. It’s what it’s, I mean, it’s like the years and years of training. I mean, when I say years of training, I mean 14 years. I did a half-day retreat and a meditation retreat from 6 a.m. to noon and a half day. I worked for 20 years. I went to the mountains for two to three months a year. I’ve done some training. So now, first, we slowed the body, and just by getting in touch with the body, the systems physiologically started slowing down and healing. We already have a healing component to the meditation that I bring in, and then we work on our breath. We use our breath to change the energy, make certain visualizations and inhalations and exhalations, and then we change the mind that is set up for meditation. 

The key set of the mind that is often missed is that we prepare the mind for meditation by moving our focus from ourselves to being part of the whole community. Just as we talked in the body, we are all in the same boat. We all want to be happy, and we all experience stress, struggle, and difficulty. Buddhists will say suffering. Why? Because of our response to what comes to our senses and the response to what we experience inside, We open our hearts to our struggles. You open your heart to your feeling that you may be a perfectionist, and you realize, Wow, everybody else is experiencing similar things, and you start opening your heart to people you love, to people you don’t trust, and then to people that you may not like. Because whatever they are doing comes from the same place, there is a certain distortion that causes them to react from a survival point of view. It’s at the bottom of everything; the people who do great things and the people who do terrible things are still driven by similar drives. Once we are less focused, then we start to meditate. The first step, just like you said, is to ground and slow down. 

We have to master it. We have mastered it; great meditators spent years just training in grounding, opening, and creating space. Then, once we create space, things start coming up—amazing experiences. We begin to see light in visions, difficult experiences, insights—whatever comes up, it’s just the next layer. Just like we don’t want to hold on to these intense thoughts, We don’t hold on to what comes up; the moment we do, we fix it. We turn the water into ice. We stop the flow. We move from the heart to the head. and there’s a process for how to do it. You have insight; you can write down seeing them, giving them some breathing, and stuff. Then the preparation comes open. Heart medicine, where we connect with the inner warmth of our heart. Simple way. You put your hands on your chest, and you feel, Wow, I feel so much heat. I never knew. If you connect to the internal, you can feel the heat going to different organs. The heart is its inner physiology.

The heart’s electromagnetic field is a hundred times bigger than the electromagnetic field of the brain. the heart’s the way the heart field affects every cell in our body. All the time and affects our environment. They say it goes for two, three, four, five, six, eight, and ten feet. But it’s a field. It’s endless. It’s just weaker and weaker. But if you are sensitive enough, you pick it up everywhere. The third part of the heart is our intention. That’s the key point that you brought up. Your heart took out the blood from all of it—all organs anyway. But you brought a certain intention with the mind part of the journey, the physical part of the heart, the blood-nourishing, the energetic part of the heart, the electromagnet—the field that we know scientifically changes with how we feel emotionally. There is the intention of the heart of the mind, our understanding of our reality. then the heart gets all the dirty blood and gives clean blood. What if we took all of our negative emotions and, instead of fighting our experiences, instead of fighting our anger, we transformed them into love and compassion?

Well, it’s the most basic Mahayana practice in Buddhism is called tonglen, exchanging, and suffering with love and compassion. But this kind of explanation is never given to life about taking it from the outside and giving love and compassion. It’s very healing for others and yourself. I am bringing through open heart medicine and inner body understanding, and then, within my unique insight into doing meditation, I discovered something that I call the inner and secret part of this exchange. This I teach only in retreats, and that’s where traumas melt away. Because remember, I’m kind of going, and maybe it’ll be a good place to close this. I know I’m throwing a lot at the new people. Listen to it a few times, and then I’m here. The people who are advanced and think they know meditation listen to this many times because you will find new elements. What has happened now? We talked about new elements, especially how to use meditation for healing. It is great for meditators, but not often there is disconnection and fear. It is a disconnection within me. 

We know how it can work and what you use. By the way, you use your weakness, the fact that you are a little bit OCD about being a perfectionist, to remind yourself to relax. That’s why being obsessive is a pretty good thing when you are learning to meditate because you remind yourself. In our hearts, we explained how it happens. How it gets the heart flows all the time. But it’s very different in the cell that because the cell is affected by its environment, by the cells around it, by the epigenetics, how can we change? How can we shift and transmit the experience we have in our mind and our heart to our cells in a normal cell, even with a certain illness that we still control a little bit easier because we have control over it? It responds to the sympathetic system. It responds to the biochemical system much more difficultly in cancer because. It has its autonomic regulation. This was the creative time of using sound, of using colors, and of understanding the relationship between colors, sound, and emotions. by letting go, letting go, letting go, letting go. What a journey! then sometimes you are in it and you’re cooking in it, especially in a retreat. I just met a dear friend of mine who came to a like-a-week retreat.

The engineer was it. I mean, it was so hard to let go. I felt like nothing was happening until I walked out of the retreat. He said, My whole life changed. I called my partner. I said, Wow. Well, my life has changed because it took them out of the environment of self-work to understand. Wow, they see reality differently. This is the birthright of all of us to have these experiences. In this sense, it opened the door to proof and healing. The easy benefits are that inflammation goes down, it prolongs our lives, and the healing is not necessarily geared toward overcoming it. This is geared towards connecting with deeper aspects of ourselves, of our connection with others, of our interdependence, and of the endless love and compassion for all beings. The side effect is that our health gets better. Galectin 3. You block it with a simple blocker, but you regulate it. It is a kind of process in one. To have a complete flow without fixation, we have to understand that everything is changeable, and once everything is changeable per definition, anything and everything is possible. That’s one way. One of Isaac’s favorites is that not everyone will be a miracle, but anyone can be a miracle. With this, I think it’s a good ending for this.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

It is, as always, possible that we could speak for another hour, but I want to make sure our audience knows where to reach you. If they want to attend your retreats or if they want to work with you in any way, how does our audience get in contact?

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

The easiest way is to go to dreliaz.com. DRELIAZ dot com and sign up for my newsletter, and when this summit is on, I will already be deep into teaching. I taught for many years abroad. I do nonprofit work, and now I’m finally teaching in the US at this retreat. My first retreat is in one of my favorite places on the big island of Hawaii, from September 18th to 24th. It’s limited to only 60 or 70 people. I promise, and some of the people who have been helping me for the last decade are flying in from other countries to help out. Am I excited about it?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

That’s in September. All viewers here have time to get access to it.

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

I will have monthly guided meditation, and I’m doing a one-day event happening in January 2024 and late January 2024. It will be out there. But the sky’s the limit when we connect to this kind of approach. I’m talking from my own experience and from teaching thousands of people. For me, there are a lot of things that people can say about me, but I’m not a lightweight. I’ve studied in practice for decades. I studied integrative medicine vertically, notably going to Western medicine, shiatsu, acupuncture, licensed acupuncture, urban medicine, classical homeopathy, and healing meditation for decades. I’m feeling a commitment and a responsible ability to share this knowledge and this fermentation byproduct. the people. Thank you so much for giving me this stage. Too good to share this.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Oh, it’s my pleasure. I just want to thank you for the huge contribution you are making to all levels of healing. You don’t meet many people who have studied at all, and it just blows my mind every time we speak. How many different modalities are you an expert in? And to our viewers, that’s a safe place to be with someone who has that vast knowledge. Even though you want to be in this third act of your life and you want to focus on this mind-body healing, you can’t unknow what you know. Everything from Western medicine—every piece of it that you’ve learned—has helped you be where you are today to help people. Thank you, and thank you for being a part of this conversation. Again. Until next time, everyone should take good care. Bye now.

Isaac Eliaz, MD, MS, LAc

Bye.