Ashok Gupta

Thank you Tom. Thank you for that wonderful introduction. And it’s great to be here with you. Thank you for inviting me.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. So tell us about your journey. You’re a young man. You’re in university. You come down with this fatigue symptoms and you figured it out though. How did you do that? Tell us about your journey and how were you able to figure it out?

Ashok Gupta

Of course, yes. So as you mentioned, I was studying at university. I was an undergrad. I had my entire life in front of me and I went on holiday to India and picked up some kind of stomach bug deli belly as they call it here in the UK. I don’t know if he called it that in the US. And I came back and I had some kind of stomach infection and went back to university, thought, I’ll recover just like your own story, but it just got worse and worse and worse until I hit a brick wall. Like I just couldn’t get out of bed. And often I was housebound. Sometimes I was bed bound thinking, this is it, my life’s over. 

What am I gonna do? And I go from doctor to doctor and they say, oh, you’ve got this thing called ME or chronic fatigue syndrome. There’s no cure. We don’t understand what causes it. And people have it for decades. Imagine being told that in your early twenties and thinking what is going on? And in that moment, I don’t know if it was some kind of universal inspiration or something, I said to myself, I’m gonna do whatever it takes to get over this illness. And if I get better, I will dedicate the rest of my life to helping others with this condition, because there are millions around the world who have this. And so, this is the days when the internet was very rudimentary. There kind of mid to late nineties. And so I researched medical journals. I read books on this subject. 

I studied brain neurology, and I figured out a process, a mechanism that’s probably going on in the brain and in the body and experimented on my own brain. Now let’s be very clear. I don’t believe these illnesses are in the minds, but I do believe we’re in the brain treating those as two separate things. And ad hoc I managed to retrain my brain through this hypothesis, got myself 100% better and then wrote a medical paper in 1999, which was then published in a medical journal, medical hypotheses in 2002. And then I thought, right, I really wanna help others with this. 

This is what my life purpose truly is. And so I set up a clinic to treat other people with the condition. And this was basically using neuro-plasticity brain retraining techniques applicable to so many different illnesses not just chronic fatigue, but fibromyalgia and many other illnesses we’ll talk about. And in 2007, I published my treatment protocol online. So we were the first neuro-plasticity program to have a kind of E program as it were. So yes, that was my journey.

Tom McCarthy

No, it’s amazing because like I did, you were going the traditional route at first, going to doctors. And I was going to alternative medicine doctors, people that I said, I’m not gonna go the most traditional route, I’m gonna get doctors at the end of the day. You were the one that convinced me though, the person that had to get me better was me. And that was so huge and so empowering. And that’s what I’ve always believed, my whole life I believed that I could do that. And then this thing hit me and it hit me like nothing else had hit me in my life. 

And that’s what a lot of people are going through right now. What’s the number one realization, people that are suffering from chronic fatigue or in Europe is called ME, a lot of the world’s is called ME, fibromyalgia. And also things like food sensitivities, you help treat food sensitivities or chemical sensitivities or electrical sensitivities. What’s the number one realization that people need to make to even start getting on the path of healing?

Ashok Gupta

For me, it’s really understanding that the core of this is in the unconscious brain. And we can certainly make dietary changes. We can make activity changes. We can do all the things that people normally do. Take the supplements, the nutrients and they will improve the downstream symptoms. But at the core of it, this black box, that is the brain that until recently has been this black box is the core of so many illnesses, which are very, very difficult to treat through mainstream medicine. And in fact, I’d love to share an analogy, which I first heard on an Anthony Robbins course, which really kind of summarize this, which is, often we’re standing on a bridge and we’re seeing all these people being chucked in the river and we’re saving them from the river. We’re giving them supplements. We’re helping them through their diets. 

Taking another person out of the river. But no one’s asking the question, who’s throwing these people in the river in the first place? Why is the body functioning incorrectly? Does the body just randomly go wrong? No, I believe that ultimately the wiring of the brain is very fragile. And when we go through certain experiences, it can create emotional disorders, which we traditionally look at PTSD and things like that, but it can also create conditions, traumatic physiological disorders, and 70 to 80% of the illnesses that present themselves in a doctor’s office, I believe come under this category, pain syndromes, anxiety, depression, fatigue, all of these things that a doctor gives you a few pills and says, right get out of my office in five minutes ’cause I can’t do anything else for you. Actually there are underlying reasons in the brain that can be accessed, we get our system back to optimal health.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, I love that. Why is it so hard? I mean that concept, like I’m a total believer in what you’re saying. When you go talk to people though, they still want to push it off to somebody else trying to fix them. Why is it so hard for people to understand the fact that so much of what we’re struggling with is created by us and can be changed by us? Why is that so difficult? Because I know you’ve worked with thousands and thousands and some people have accepted it maybe a little bit easier, but even people that intellectually understand it, they still resist don’t they?

Ashok Gupta

Yes and this comes down to our cultural conditioning based on what’s happened historically for the last 200 years. It’s a really fascinating, but we don’t have time to go into it now, but essentially in the kind of 17th and 18th century in Europe, the church and science split, so anything to do with the minds, emotions, spirituality, that was the confines of religion and Christianity, anything to do with hard science, so things that can be measured and tested, that was the avenue of science. So the two split and that split that kind of Cartesian separation as it were, still persist to this day in modern medicine. So medicine is about measurement let’s measure and test and scan what is going wrong and then create an appropriate either surgery or drugs or medicines, et cetera. 

So that’s how the system works. But of course the black box was the brain because it’s very difficult to measure what is going on in the brain and analogy is a car. So I remember in the seventies and eighties, when cars went wrong, there were pretty much mechanical issues. Something went wrong with metal on metal, but in modern cars, what is it that goes wrong? It’s the electrical system because cars are so complicated these days. So the physical body is what mainstream medicine is good at measuring and fixing, but in modern cars, it tends to be the electrical system that tells the components what to do. And so it is with our brains and our nervous system, that is the electrical system that is wired into every organ and cell that tells the body what to do. So traditional medicine and the way that we have been programmed is let’s fix the physical body. So if this enzyme is low, let’s boost this enzyme, et cetera. 

But now we’re saying what happens if it’s actually software problems, not hardware problems? And that’s a completely different way of looking at the body to say, yes, it could be a software bug just like when your computer malfunctions, it’s never normally the physical hardware, although that can happen. It’s often a software bug or some things not booting correctly. And you have to wipe clean the software system and start again. And so it is with the brain, when the brain gets stuck in these software bugs, what happens is it starts creating downstream symptoms in the body and get stuck in a lack of homeostasis. And the purpose of neuro-plasticity brain retraining is to bring your brain and your nervous system back to its factory setting, its default setting. So it resets all these little bugs and that in that state, we then our bodies naturally heal from so many different conditions.

Tom McCarthy

And the body can naturally heal. Talk a little bit about symptoms, because that was the thing that kind of threw me off when I was going through it. I was having some really weird symptoms, like blurred vision, like, oh my God, what do I have a brain tumor or something like stuff that I never had had before in my life, almost like fainting or dizziness, all sorts of things were happening to me that I said something really physical has to be wrong with me. And yet when I used your methodology, they all went away. All those symptoms went away, but the symptoms were what was scaring me. And I’m normally not that afraid, positive thinker. And I was still thinking positive. I’m gonna be fine, but it wasn’t helping, the positive thinking wasn’t helping. 

I had to do something even more, but talk about symptoms because a lot of people think, oh yeah, yeah, I know what he’s talking about. for some people it’s the brain, but I’ve got real symptoms. I’ve got all this stuff happening to me. Talk a little bit about the symptoms. And how they really are almost like an illusion for most people. I mean, they’re real, but they’re not the real problem.

Ashok Gupta

Yes now this is where we get. I’m so glad you brought this question up because many people get confused here. The symptoms in our bodies from so many different conditions are often caused by an overreaction of our own nervous system and our own immune system. So let’s say a condition we’ve all had flu. So when we have flu we think, darn it, this flu virus is inside me and it’s making me feel sick and nauseous, it’s making me feel dizzy. It’s making me feel exhausted, headachy. It’s all because of the virus. No, it is our own immune system responding to the virus, which is causing all of these symptoms in the body. And so what’s happening is as many physical symptoms as we may have, we may put down to something else going on. It is the response of our own bodies to perhaps a virus or bacteria infection or an injury. And so that means it’s highly empowering because that’s our own reaction. So if we can moderate the reaction, then we can bring the body back to balance. 

That is a key thing. And an example of this, which many people will be able to relate to is COVID-19. Now many people think that people are dying from COVID-19. What they’re actually dying from is the body’s own overreaction. What we call a cytokine storm, where suddenly the lungs become highly inflamed because the brain believes we may not be able to fight off COVID-19. So it over response creates the inflammatory response. And that’s why people are dying in hospitals. And many of the medications they’re prescribing are actually to moderate our own immune system. And if you imagine that nervous system and that immune system connects to every organ, every cell of our bodies, we can see how our own wiring, our own programming can completely throw us off track and bring up a whole host of different symptoms.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, amazing. And a lot of the work you’ve been doing lately is with long-haul COVID symptoms that people are having, helping them heal from that. And also pain. A lot of people struggle with pain. Talk about how pain is in the brain. It’s not even so always, oh my knee, my knee, talking about my hip with you earlier today, but pain can be created by the brain when there’s no real reason necessarily for that pain. Talk a little bit about pain to everybody. ‘Cause I know everyone or many people have struggled or are struggling with pain in their body.

Ashok Gupta

Yes, of course. Now the first thing is, it’s very important if somebody does have any of these symptoms, we’re talking about extreme fatigue, pain that they do get this checked out by a doctor.

Tom McCarthy

Absolutely, absolutely.

Ashok Gupta

Because there are many purely organic causes for many different symptoms and people come to us once they’ve exhausted all of, dare I use that word. They’ve exhausted all traditional routes and then come to us. So it’s very important if someone’s listening that they don’t just dismiss their pain as neurological necessarily. But once they’ve had that checked out and the doctor says, look, there’s nothing else that we can find or nothing else we can do. Then it’s the probable cause of these exhaustion or fatigue, pain is our own system creating it. And if I can just start off from first principles about my hypothesis to what causes these, and then I can explain how pain is is perpetuated. So I always like to ask the biggest question of all, why are we here? The big philosophical question. 

Now, luckily we don’t have to spend the next half an hour talking about that, but let’s say from a scientific perspective, why are we here? We’re here because over millions of years of evolution, this beautiful nervous system and immune system and bodies that we’ve inherited has refined itself through plants and animals to get us to where we are now and it’s designed to survive. So we are survival machines. That is the number one priority of this brain, this nervous system, this body. So we can pass on our genes to the next generation. Survival of the fittest, survival of the genes. Now, let’s take the example of long-haul COVID or ME CFS. 

Let’s take long-haul COVID. Let’s say somebody contracts COVID-19 and the body is fighting off the virus. The immune system is fighting off the virus. Now let’s say the brain is for whatever reason, erring on the side of caution thinking, I’m not sure if I can fight off this particular virus or perhaps we’ve got a weakened immune system because we’ve been working hard or we’ve been stressed out. So the immune system may be a little weakened and take longer to fight off the virus. 

Now imagine in that moment, the brain makes a decision that survival is more important than wellness. And even once it fights off the virus is left a legacy where the brain says, just to make sure I survive. If there’s any little symptom or condition or experience, which reminds me of COVID-19, I must trigger my immune system or my nervous system. So the brain is now overstimulating the nervous system. The immune system, creating those flu like symptoms in the body. And those symptoms in the body now become what we call Conditions Stimuli. 

Now it’s a very scientific term, it means, they’re just triggers the triggers for our bodies, our brains. And so those symptoms double back to a hypersensitive brain. The hypersensitive brain says, I thought we were in danger and now we have these symptoms in the body that confirms it to me. Perhaps we’re still in danger from that virus or that infection. Let me trigger the nervous system and immune system. So it triggers the nervous system and immune system creating muscle aches and pains, all the symptoms that we know, the exhaustion and the post exertional relays, the pain, those symptoms are then in the body, they’re detected by a hypervigilant hypersensitive brain and so on and so on. And we create that vicious cycle where the brain response to the body and the body responds to the brain. And for those of us who are math geeks or physics geeks, we know that symptoms when they’re often in cycles or waves, it’s because the inputs and the output of the system have become connected. So now we don’t need an external virus or infection or chemical to create this lack of homeostasis. 

We have our own brains and bodies kind of playing a game of tennis, constantly volleying the ball against each other, creating chronic illness in the body. And the way this relates to pain is that once we’ve had all the other things checked, it is likely that let’s say we have pain on our legs for instance, the brain may be detecting that pain in the leg, and maybe seeing it as evidence that there is some kind of potential infection or injury or something going on in the legs, which requires defensive response. That defensive response is inflammation, let’s send tightness into those areas. Let’s send inflammation often Th2 dominated. 

Let’s make sure we’re fighting off whatever’s going on in the legs. Which then creates the pain and the tightness and the inability to walk too far, which then those symptoms come back to a hypersensitive hypervigilant brain, oh there’s something still wrong. Let me send more of that defensive strategy to the legs, which creates more symptoms and pain. 

Once again, we’re caught in the vicious cycle and most importantly of all, both at a localized level and a centralized level, the pain signals get magnified and the pain networks become hyper-sensitive. So something which actually isn’t that painful may well be getting magnified in the brain and studies show that actually things like meditation, deep relaxation techniques, lower pain by reducing the sensitive pain networks. And so that’s how they have an impact. So pain in the body where it has no obvious organic cause and we’ve exhausted other routes. It may well be down to some neuro rewiring that is required to reset the body.

Tom McCarthy

And I can’t say enough about your program. You should be paying me as a testimony because it’s really true, your program was life-changing for me. So it’s amazing and to even just your explanation today, I hope people are really understanding the power of what Ashok is saying, because this is not an explanation that you get from many other people out there in the world, even so-called experts, they don’t quite understand it at the level that your hypothesis and your theory has proven out and work for people like me. 

I remember going to bed at night and I probably mentioned this earlier, but going to bed at night and sleeping 10 hours thinking, okay, I’m gonna wake up tomorrow morning feeling refreshed. And I would wake up feeling exhausted. Or even if I had a little energy, the first little thing, first little work I would do in my business, I would then feel exhausted. And I didn’t understand why until you explained just like you did earlier, my brain was hypervigilant. 

It was very sensitized. Any little thing was gonna start creating stress and just drain my energy. But I learned that from you. So thank you. And I hope a lot of people will take to heart what Ashok is talking about today. How can they find out, you’re gonna give them, I know a little bit of an exercise to do, but how can they find out more information about the Gupta Method, where can they go?

Ashok Gupta

So they can come to our websites, which is Guptaprogram.com. And on there, there’s lots of free videos that they can watch. There’s a 28 day free trial. So no commitment. See if this is the right approach for you. We even give away a kind of free meditation as well. So there’s lots of different things people can do there. And then if they feel that they’re ready to commit to our program, then they can purchase it online. So it’s delivered through the internet. 

There’s webinars with myself, there’s videos, there’s audio exercises, and a very loving, supportive community. Because sometimes when you’re going through this on your own, it can feel so isolating. But we’ve got like thousands of people working together, answering each other’s questions, buddying up to support themselves and through their healing as well. And as you probably know, we have done several scientific studies on our work. And until we have the large scale phase three trial, which is what we’re working on right now, we actually offer a one-year money back guarantee. So people can try the treatment, see if it works for them, if it doesn’t, get their money back, use it for something else. But the scientific studies are really important to us. And we’ve recently just published that what we believe is the first randomized control trial ever published on the neuro-plasticity brain retraining program. 

It was published in the journal of clinical medicine, which is one of the top 10 journals in the world. And it showed that just after an eight week intervention compared to a control, there was a close to a 40% reduction in fibromyalgia scores, but zero effects in the control group. And there was a having of pain a having anxiety and depression and a 50% increase in functional capacity. And that was just after eight weeks–

Tom McCarthy

After eight weeks, wow.

Ashok Gupta

This is a six month program. So we’re very excited that’s just been published. And it’s created a lot of buzz, a lot of interest from many different doctors who are now prescribing our program. But now we’re looking for the phase three trials. So we definitely want to go down the mainstream scientific route to proof it is an effective approach.

Tom McCarthy

Oh absolutely. This should be mainstream. This is medicine practiced at its most powerful and purest form, I love it. So people that are watching may have certain conditions and they know people in their lives that have conditions, what are the primary conditions that people come to the goop to method for?

Ashok Gupta

So the main ones tends to be any chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and long-haul COVID, which is the ones you’ve mentioned, but often it’s conditions which have been triggered by something external. So mold illness, which is a very unique and unusual condition, chemical sensitivities, food sensitivities.

Tom McCarthy

Talk about food sensitivity. So that’s an interesting one because lots of people are getting tested now, I know I’ve got a food sensitivity to this and that. And the other day we had somebody come over to our house recently they had to radically change their diet because of food sensitivities. Now, certain things you probably don’t wanna eat anyway, just because they’re not that healthy, but having not even the choice to eat certain foods that are healthy, like some of the food sensitivities are to healthy vegetables or things that normally would nourish your body, but people can’t eat them. How does a food sensitivity develop? That doesn’t sound like that would be normally like chronic, fatigue or, but it is pretty much the same thing right?

Ashok Gupta

Yeah, remember our brains are survival machines. They want to survive and they will always overprotect to ensure survival. So let’s say somebody is going through a very what we call a sensitizing event. So that might be a divorce or a relationship breakup, losing your job, financial worries, whatever kind of stress anxiety someone might be experiencing. Now, what tends to happen then, there tends to be alterations in our guts.For many people, stress goes directly to their guts and they feel tightness and tension in the gut. And then what happens is we may then eat foods, which the gut thinks is this good for me or bad for me in my altered state where I’m not feeling the best? And many people find that their food sensitivities keep increasing. So they eat one food they’re fine for awhile. 

Then that one becomes their bodies become sensitive to that. Then another one, then another one is because the gut is literally making decisions saying, no this is probably bad. No, this is good. No, this is probably bad. And therefore creates that sensitivity reaction to warn you not to have that food any longer. Now the challenge is even once your additional anxiety or stressful event has gone, it leaves a legacy in the guts, which is we must keep being sensitive to that food. And that’s what we’re retraining to say, hey, we no longer need to be sensitive to that food. And sometimes that can be because that food caused food poisoning for instance. 

So it actually was a dangerous food at one point in time, but it’s no longer a dangerous food. So we have patients who sometimes are down to three foods. They don’t eat three foods and anything else just sets them off. And step-by-step over the space of weeks using the brain retraining, they’re able to gradually introduce all of the foods that they’re sensitive to. As you say, we don’t say right, if you’re sensitive to a McDonald’s–

Tom McCarthy

If you’re sensitive to a blueberry that’s, come on now. Blue berry is not the problem.

Ashok Gupta

No exactly so, overtime, whether it’s chemical sensitivities or food sensitivities, they’re able to improve. And we believe we are on the door to the new medicine, what we call bio electrical medicine. So who knows in 40 to 50 years time or a hundred years time, if you have any of these conditions, the doctor can’t normally treat, you might go to a bioelectrical clinic and they’ll plug some electrodes in. And if you have hay fever or asthma, or any of the conditions that we’ve described, any, they’ll plug you in rewire the brain unplug you. Great you’re done your brains are on reset. But until we get to that advancement in technology we’re kind of in the stop gap, which is actually, we can rewire the brain using these novel unusual techniques and bring us back to the reset, the default setting.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. Well I’m a huge fan of your work. One of the guests that we had on the summit is Dr. Chang Ron good friend of mine, medical doctor. And the one was statistics he started off with was, I can’t even remember the number, but it was like this huge number of people that die every day from medication. They’ve got symptoms, they go take medication. The medication kills them. And they could be learning how to get over these conditions without any, the medication never was gonna help them. 

I mean, it helped relieve maybe some of the symptoms, but it was destroying other parts of their body or their immune system or their cardiovascular system. So, I love the way that you’re leading people. And like you said, you always wanna go get checked out and make sure that you’re under the care of a physician, but at the same time you wanna take some control over your health and you help people do that. So you say your program is six months. Is that about the amount of time it takes to truly transform the brain?

Ashok Gupta

We’d like to say six months because people become complacent. Yeah exactly. And then they say–

Tom McCarthy

I did it for five seconds. Why am I not better? Come on.

Ashok Gupta

And many people do get better within weeks. And they get up to generally, the passing is within a couple of months, they’ll get up to about 80%, but then they’ll become complacent and think, right, I’ve done it. I can throw myself into the stressful life that I had earlier on. And we say, no, we want to get you well, but we want you to stay well. That’s the most important thing. So we don’t want to become complacent, continue with these tools for at least six months because our system is still sensitive for a while. 

So you may have retrained it, but what happens if the brain suddenly experiences another stressor and then goes back into that altered state again, but generally within weeks and months, people will notice shifts in the energy level shifts in the way their body’s responding sometimes within hours. So we’ve had people within a few days. I had a lady last week, had a long-haul COVID for a year. Was bed bound for a year, within a couple of weeks of using our program. She’s up to 90% and walking five kilometers a day. So it can be quite quick, but we never want people to become complacent about it.

Tom McCarthy

Well and that was important the way that you pre-frame that and put that out in your program, even for me, who I’m used to committing and making sure I give it time. That was a great little reminder because when you’re not feeling well, you wanna get better super quick. And that’s why we’re going to all these doctors are trying, the magic pill and just you reminding people in the program, reminding me when I was taking your program, that it’s gonna take a little while, stick to it. It will happen though. It will happen. And your new program. ‘Cause I did it back when you had the DVDs, your new program is beautiful. You filmed it in Switzerland, like incredibly well done. So thank you for letting me experience that to your new program. It’s really, really cool. Love what you’ve done there.

Ashok Gupta

Yeah, we had a lot of fun actually filming that in Switzerland, the beautiful healing green mountains. Generally people and I found just by watching the videos, they start feeling healed straight away. So that’s always nice to hear as well.

Tom McCarthy

Absolutely. So what’s one thing everybody listening can do right now to start on this journey that we’ve been talking about. Can you give us a little exercise or something we can do?

Ashok Gupta

Sure, it’s a very, very simple exercise, which is just that body awareness that when we have a particular persistent thought in the mind. And just to say, obviously we’re talking about energy here. Generally when people have low energy, they think, okay, I need to change my diet or I need to exercise, but actually it’s understanding the power of our thoughts. That’s a worry is one of the biggest drainer of our energy. Somebody could be sitting at a desk all day, they haven’t moved or they’ve eaten a wonderful diet, but actually just by worrying, sitting in front of the desk at the end of the day, they’re exhausted. How did they get exhausted? It’s from that mental churning and that mental worry. 

And so I’d like to get people a technique. It’s not so much for physical illness, but actually just keeping our energy levels up when we’ve got a persistent negative thoughts and it’s called The New Groove Technique. We sound like a bit of a dance move, but it’s not a dance move. It’s just a way of rewiring the brain very quickly. And I’ll do the first few stages of it. And then in the free gifts that I’ve got, there’s a video there that takes you through the full process.

Tom McCarthy

Make sure you check out the free gift on the Summit webpage and then we’ll get started with right now, the very first part of it.

Ashok Gupta

Sure so the first thing is that whenever we are noticing a particular thought pattern, which is repetitive, let’s say someone’s called us an idiot, now they’re called us an idiot once, but how many times do they call us an idiot when we replay the tape in the brain again and again and again, right? Idiot, idiot, idiot. So in that moment, we need to have an Anthony Robbins and yourself talk about this as the kind of pattern interrupt. So that could be a stop. So we say, stop, stop, stop. Or singing out loud or laughing out loud or something to break that particular pattern and then a slow deep breath in. 

So that’s the second stage is taking a deep breath in. And then as we breathe out, imagining someone that represents love to us. So this can be a figure from your religion or spirituality. So someone’s a Christian. It might be Jesus. If they’re a Buddhist, it might be Buddha, et cetera. Or it could be a pet or a family member, someone that we connect with with a sense of love. So the first S is stop. The second S is surrender. We’re surrendering and letting go of our worries and our stresses and cares towards a representation of love. So let’s now imagine something that’s stressing us out. So might be–

Tom McCarthy

Before you, everybody do this whole exercise with Ashok, like don’t just watch him do it. Like he’ll lead you through this. Let’s practice it right now. I’ll do it too. Go ahead.

Ashok Gupta

Great. So let’s think of something that’s bothering us. It could be stresses about what we need to do later on or argument we’ve had with somebody. Let’s do this with our eyes closed so we get focused. So the first thing is we just become aware of that repetitive negative thought in our mind. So let’s just become aware of that. And during the day, as soon as you become aware of it in our minds, let’s do that first S which is stop. So in our minds, let’s just say, stop, stop, stop. Then we take a deep breath in, imagine a representation of love in front of us. So it could be a figure from your religion or spirituality and breathe out and imagining you’re surrendering and letting go of that emotion and that thought. 

And it’s being absorbed by a representation of love. So you’re carefree and relaxed because you’ve released and let it go. Okay. So let’s keep our eyes closed. The third S is Shift perspective. Some people call this reframing. Shift perspective is saying, how could I look at the situation differently? That would make me feel better. So if we had an argument with somebody or they said something that wasn’t very nice, we could say, well, I’m gonna shift perspective on that and say, well, maybe they were just having a bad day or, it’s not such a big deal what they said, maybe there’s something I can learn from it. Or the ultimate shift perspective is, hey, this is for my own growth and learning to reduce my reactivity, to what people say. So you think of a perspective. 

So now all of us let’s think of a new perspective on this situation, which can make us feel better and make us not feel this is such a big deal that we’re getting stressed by it. Let’s spend a moment just reflecting on our new perspective and keeping our eyes closed. Notice how that shift in perspective actually just begins to release our arms and shoulders, and we feel less tense and less stressed by what was bothering us. And the final S keeping our eyes closed. The fourth S is Substitute. How would we choose to feel in this situation, if we’ve absorbed this new perspective, how do we now choose to feel? So in the case of having an argument with somebody, we may choose to have an affirmation such as I am calm and relaxed about that person. I imagine I’ve let it go now. So in that fourth, S let’s think of a sentence and I am, I feel sentence, which summarizes how we choose to feel about that situation. 

And in a moment, I’m gonna ask you to take a breath in and imagine how you would feel if you truly had shifted perspective and let it go, whatever that situation was. So now let’s think of that sentence. I am calm about the situation, or I feel differently about this or whatever it is. Let’s take a slow, deep breath in and with a smile in our minds, we can say that sentence, that new perspective, that substitute, and imagine how our mind and body would feel if we have embraced how we choose to feel about it. Breathing slowly and deeply with a smile as you do so. And notice how you breathe in and out with a smile, how the body may relax a little more, just notice the contrast, if any, between how you felt at the beginning about that personal situation and how you feel now, what’s different? The quality of feeling is different now. Hold on to that good feeling. Let’s take a slow, deep breath in and breathe out with a smile. And when we’re ready, we can just gently open our eyes.

Tom McCarthy

That was awesome. Thank you so much. That was really, really cool. I hope everybody enjoyed that. Just recap those S steps again, the four Ss really quick for people Ashok.

Ashok Gupta

Of course. So the new group technique has four Ss. Number one is Stop. So that is stop and taking a deep breath in. Number two is Surrender. So finding your representation of love and surrendering the pain, the negativity, connecting with that spirit aspect of yourself. The third S is Shift perspective. How can I look at the situation differently that would make me feel better? How can I be more mature about the situation? And the fourth S is Substitute. So imagining a whole mind, body feeling of how do I choose to feel about this situation? And if I’ve embraced this new perspective, how much better can I feel about it and feeling it and imagining it in every cell of your body, and then opening your eyes and repeating that process each time the brain gets stuck in that repetitive thinking. And by repeating this process, you’ll find eventually something that you might’ve obsessed about for weeks or days or hours suddenly just dissolves away.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. I love it, I love it. And I especially resonated with the third step, find a different perspective because I know when I was going through my chronic fatigue, it was tough, but it was such an amazing learning and growth experience for me. And I tell people, now it’s the seminar you never would have signed yourself up for, but you got so much out of it. Like it just transformed your life. So, I love that you brought that up for people because people that are struggling with some of these illnesses, if they use it correctly, if they use this experience correctly, they’re gonna grow in ways they never would have grown. They’re gonna use your technique, which will create a whole new set of possibilities moving forward in their lives. So there can be a true blessing and any experience that we’re going through that we go, oh, that’s terrible. Or that’s bad, could be a gift. And I find it usually is. So I love that you brought that up.

Ashok Gupta

Yes, absolutely. And that’s definitely an analogy we use when people are going through chronic illness, because you say you shake your fist at the universe or God, or whatever you believe in saying, how could you make me go through this suffering? That kind of thing. But it’s only often, many years later, you understand the transformative effect of that particular condition. And we talk about the caterpillar turning into the butterfly. That when we go through these very challenging illnesses, it can feel like we go into this cocoon where literally we’re isolated from friends and family, and we feel tweaked and we feel depressed. But in that stage, it is a transformative stage because we learn about ourselves. 

We learn about our patterns. And it takes the butterfly struggling out of the cocoon during that transformation that strengthens the wings. So as we struggle out of that cocoon, as we learn what we need to learn, to be able to heal and get better, it strengthens the wings of the butterfly. So it can emerge and is completely transformed from the caterpillar it was initially, and now has a strength to fly and experience life in a whole new dimension. And for many people chronic illnesses is a transformation. It is a rebirth. It is often what I call a spiritual accelerator. It moves into a whole new stage of life. And we see it in that perspective, we don’t resist. We don’t challenge. We don’t feel upset by it. We see it as something that is gonna help us in our next evolution in life.

Tom McCarthy

Absolutely and the real gift is seeing it while you’re going through it, not waiting 10 years after and go, yeah, that was something that shaped me. Start to see it right now. Ashok, you’ve got a huge heart. I’ve loved having you on our Summit and being able to talk with you and have you share your wisdom. And thank you so much, not only for just being on the Summit, but thank you for your work and all the peoples whose lives you’ve changed and hopefully many, many more. I know it’s thousands you’ve helped so far. I hope it gets in the millions. So thank you so much for being part of this Summit and thank you for your amazing work.

Ashok Gupta

And I thank you Tom, for inviting me. And I sort of share anyone who’s going through these illnesses, just hold on to the hope there is a way forward. People do heal from this and you can do it too.

Tom McCarthy

Awesome. Thank you so much.

Ashok Gupta

Thank you.