Download - Winter of Wellness - Amazon S3...Gregg Braden Robyn: Welcome everyone! We are so glad that you're joining us today. I'm very excited to introduce our special guest and someone who's

Gregg Braden | January 16, 2018 | p. 1

Winter of Wellness™ Human by Design: From evolution by chance to transformation by choice

Gregg Braden Robyn: Welcome everyone! We are so glad that you're joining us today. I'm very excited

to introduce our special guest and someone who's been part of the Winter of Wellness for several seasons because he's so loved, Gregg Braden. Hi, Gregg!

Gregg: Robyn, it's great to hear your voice. I'm absolutely thrilled to be back on this

series. These are really important series that you do and I never like to assume I'm invited and I'm always honored when I see my name come up and you invite me back, so thank you.

Robyn: You're welcome, and this is our seventh season, so we're rocking it, 2018. This is

a very exciting lineup and people have requested to learn about all the things that you're going to be sharing today. So for all of you that are meeting Gregg for the very first time, he is a five-time New York Times bestselling author and is internationally renowned as a pioneer in bridging science and spirituality in the real world. His discoveries have led to 12 award-winning books now published in over 40 languages. The United Kingdom’s Watkins Journal lists Gregg among the top 100 of "the world’s most spiritually influential living people" for the fifth consecutive year, and a 2017 nominee for the prestigious Templeton Award. So today, I am so excited to talk about your latest book. This is really exciting, Human by Design: From Evolution by Chance to Transformation by Choice, and you're going to talk about the big question that so many of us ponder and that is, who are we? So let's start our conversation with that big question.

Gregg: Well, thank you, Robyn. The book, it is new. It was released October 10th of this

year and I'm now in the midst of doing interviews and I'd love to hear you say the name of the book. It just sounds really good for me, Human by Design. I'm going to tell you, it took 32 years to write this, Robyn, because it's taken that long for the technology to catch up with what so many of our ancient and most cherished spiritual traditions have always told us and what the science is now showing us is that evolution is a fact for some forms of life, for some plants and animals. The evidence breaks down when it comes to humans. Evolution is not our story and that leaves a big question mark as to what is our story and I'm going to start very honestly saying we don’t know. We don’t know the answer and I think it's important to embrace what these new discoveries are saying so that we can free ourselves from being stuck in an old story that is no longer supported by the evidence, free our young people, young people in school right now and the scientists who are about to embark upon a lifetime journey to discover the deepest truths of our existence, freedom from the shackles of those


old ideas and the old beliefs so that we can move forward and answer this question. But what I can say is that the new evidence, the physical evidence is never supported, the story of evolution for humans. When you look at those charts that they show, they're called the Evolutionary Family Tree, is when you see the humans, modern humans at the top branch and you see other branches of these other forms of life, Lucy and Australopithecus and the names that we've given these other forms of life. If you look closely, if you go to the Smithsonian website or the encyclopedias or Discovery or whatever it is, if they're honest charts, what you will see is there's a dashed line that connects us with those other forms of life. It's not a solid line. And when you look into the legend on the map, that dashed line says that these are inferred or speculative relationships that have never been proven. They're believed to exist. However, they've never been proven and it has been that way for almost half a century now, so there's no surprise there.

There are new discoveries and what made it possible for me to write this book in

the way that I have. This is so very cool. Our listeners, if you saw the movie Jurassic Park, what used to be science fiction has now become science fact where in Jurassic Park, they pulled the DNA. They extracted DNA from the fossils of ancient forms of life. In the movie, it was dinosaurs. In real life, we are now extracting the DNA from ancient forms of life that were believed to be our ancestors, so we can really do this stuff that used to be science fiction and we can now compare their genome to ours and what is now being shown is that we are not descended from these other forms of life. Neanderthal, for example, we are not descended from the Neanderthal. We actually walked the earth with them and we interbred with them. We did not descend from them, as well as a number of other forms of life that we've seen in the past. So this, it's telling us who we're not, so we're not the descendants of Neanderthal.

[0:05:09] What it's also showing us, Robyn, and this is a real mind-blower, is that we

appeared what are called anatomically modern humans. The acronym is AMH. Anatomically modern humans appeared on earth relatively suddenly in terms of forms of life 200,000 years ago and we haven't changed since we showed up, and that is not Darwin's idea of evolution. When we take their DNA and we compare it to ours, our genome is the same. They have the same potential that we have in terms of our neural network, in terms of our abilities of empathy and sympathy and compassion and self-regulation. This is what's fascinating for me, the implications for human potential. The new discoveries are showing us that we are literally wired to self-regulate in a way that no other form of life is and that self-regulation runs the gamut from our immune response. We're the only form of life that can sit down in a moment in time and say, "In this moment, I choose to enhance my immune response." Or anti-aging enzymes that are on every cell of the human body or to deepen our intuition, our connection to all life or to create greater resilience to the changes in our lives. All of these things


are now implied and we know they're possible, but it's implied that we have had these abilities all along, Robyn. They didn’t develop slowly gradually over long periods of time and that strongly suggests that we are intended to embrace this tremendous potential that exists within us. It's not simply relegated to yogis and mystics and monks and nuns sitting on a mountaintop or the monastery half a world away. You can do this stuff in your living room and that's what makes this new body of information, for me, it's very exciting. So that was a long answer to a short question. I wanted to lay that out and we can now tie into that for the rest of our conversation here.

Robyn: Well, this is so positive and I couldn't help it when you talked about freeing

ourselves from our old story. We're talking about the big story, the macro story of who are we and then looking at, for all of us that are listening, this is a time to really unshackle, to release some of these old stories that we have believed about ourselves to transition into a healthier, better version of what's possible. So why did you write this book? And I'm just curious, why is it so important at this time in history?

Gregg: Those are two questions that you just asked and the first question, why I wrote

it. I'm just going to share with you. I had an experience a few years ago. I had taken a group in to Peru and I was out of touch, out of the loop with news. I didn’t watch any news or listen to any news for about three weeks. So when I came back to the states, I had no idea what was going on in the world. I connected from Lima, Peru through the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport and I was walking through the concourse to connect to my domestic flight to take me home back here to Albuquerque, New Mexico and as I was walking down that concourse, Robyn, and it was gate after gate after gate, every gate had a television program and news program that was on and they're playing different stations. I was getting a fast-forward of everything I had missed while I was gone. By the time I got to my gate, I felt pretty caught up on everything and it was pretty scary. It was everything from the social unrest, racial riots in the Midwest, hate crimes based upon religion, hate crimes based upon sexual orientation, atrocities of humans against humans in the Middle East and ISIS. I sat down on my seat in my plane and I'm just reeling from everything I just heard. And what I realized was this that as different as each story was from one another, there's a common theme that ran through every one of them, that bound them altogether, and that common theme is simply this. Everything I just heard on those news broadcasts was based upon the way we answer the question, "Who are we collectively?" And the way we answer that question, "Who am I individually for ourselves?" The way we think of ourselves determines how we solve our problems. It determines who we create our relationships with and how long they last once we create them determines how we treat ourselves, how we treat one another, how we treat our relationship to the earth. So all of the big issues that are up for us in society in the world right now. Whether we're


talking about war or suicide or assisted suicide or abortion or right to die or gay rights, hate crimes based upon the color of our skin, social unrest, as different as they are from one another, they all come down to the way we think of ourselves.

[0:10:17] We in the Western world are steeped in a story. It's 150 years old that began in

the mid-1800s. It's a story, Robyn, that's based upon separation, competition, conflict, struggle and insignificance. We are taught that human life is insignificant. That's part of Darwin's theory. We're the result of this very fortunate series of mutations, these random series of mutations that makes us who we are. And that insignificance, it filters down to our everyday lives and it's reflected in the value of human life. There was an author in the 1960s, those of our listeners that remember back that far, one of the first environmental authors, her name is Rachel Carson and she wrote a book entitled Silent Spring. One of the first environmental books about the pesticide, DDT, and the harm it was doing in the world. She made the statement then that applies -- it's just as current now as it was in 1962. What she said was we only destroy the things that we do not value and we can only value the things that we understand. And we know we are seeing human life being destroyed in an unprecedented rate. It is being devalued and destroyed in an unprecedented rate. It's happening right in front of our faces. It's on the six o'clock news. And because we have lost that value, the value of what it means to be a human, a value of what human life actually means in our lives, because we have been steeped in the story of insignificance, powerlessness, separation, and as we embrace the new science to the 21st Century, we have the potential to turn that story around. Because what the science is telling us very clearly, I don’t know where humans came from and science cannot tell us that right now, but what the science is showing us is that there were genetic mutations. They are so precise, Robyn, that gave us, for example, the neocortex in the brain, the biggest part of our brain that allows for regulation of emotions and empathy and sympathy, compassion, self-regulation. At the same time in Chromosome 2, at the same time in Chromosome 7, there was a very precise mutation that gave us the ability for complex speech in a way that no other form of life has.

I was a musician long before I was ever an author and one of the questions I

always ask myself as a musician, we share over 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees and I always wondered why can't a chimpanzee sing. How come a chimpanzee can't sing Stairway to Heaven? That's a very real question and the answer is because just this really very concise and precise mutation in the FOXP2 gene as what it's called that gives us the ability, the muscles in our mouths and the way our tongue works and the connection to our brain. It happened exactly when the time that human Chromosome 2 always had genes that were mutating to give us the complex brain and the nervous system that we have that no other form of life has. All these things happened in the same period of time. They did not happen slowly or gradually over a long period of time as the hallmark of


evolution. So what scientists are actually saying, they say there appears to be an intentionality underlying these mutations and science has to stop there. Science can only tell us what happened. It cannot tell us why and I don’t know the answer to the why, but I know the story we're being told today is not the story. There is another story, a beautiful, new, powerful human story that is emerging. It's a story of self-regulation and of the ability, our ability to connect so deeply, Robyn, to one another and to all life and to the earth and our ability to regulate our bodies so that we can thrive, not just survive, but thrive in the extremes that the world is showing us right now. So if we were ever going to awaken this tremendous human potential, I cannot think of a better time to do it than right now and that's why I wrote the book. So the first part of the book is the science that tells us, not highly technical, but it is the science that tells us of the discoveries. The second part is the instructions that tell us, that give us step by step instructions. How do we awaken these potentials in our lives? If I can't be with someone in a live audience, this is the next best thing. So that's why I wrote the book and that's why I think it's important right now.

Robyn: You know, some of our other speakers on this series have been talking about this

time of extremes and have really shared with us that I think in the next 20 or 30 years that we might not even be able to reproduce. What are your thoughts about that that the toxicity levels are so high? It's kind of scary to hear some of those thoughts and beliefs that that's where we're headed.

Gregg: Here's the thing, Robyn. All things are possible and you and I and all of our

listeners know that. We are on a trajectory right now based upon what we have come to believe about ourselves in the past. Our current trajectory is based upon the story that we have told ourselves. An amazing author, Scott Turow, who's a 20th Century author, he's still living today and he says it beautifully. He says, "Who are we but the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and believe?" So it's not enough just to tell the stories, but who are we but the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and believe? We have believed this story of powerlessness and of separation. And because we've lost the context of the value of life, we've been taught that life is just this random thing that just happened and it's not true at all. So in a world of randomness, we lose our respect for our environment. We lose our respect for our own bodies. We put things into our bodies like the vaccines that are full of the contaminants that we now know are causing a lot of problems because of the lack of respect for our bodies. And a lot of our listeners, I know this is a hot topic of conversation, but as we learn more about the nature of our origin and we learn more about how finely tuned, how delicate and finely tuned our body is in relationship to our world, the less we would want to pollute our bodies with those kinds of things. So we're on our trajectory right now based on what we have been taught in the past and if we follow the trajectory, I think we could see some really bad things happening. That's why now it's such a powerful, precious, pivotal moment


because at the same time that our choices have led to unsustainable lifestyles, and that's exactly what's happening now, the science is giving us new reasons to think differently about ourselves and change the way we think and the way we live. So the question is do we have the courage to embrace the new story that the science is telling us and the strength to change the way we think and we live in our lives and in our world?

There was an author in the 20th Century, early in the 20th Century who wrote a

series of books and one of those books was entitled The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran and I know a lot of our listeners are familiar with his work. I love these books because each chapter was like a page or a page and a half, so very short, but it was just so profound. And there was one chapter that stuck with me from the time I was ten years old when I read the first book and it was a chapter on work, and what Kahlil Gibran said is, "Work is love made visible." It said, "Work is our love made visible" and the reason I'm sharing this now is it takes a tremendous amount of work to change the way we think and the way we live, and I agree with that. It does take work. That is our love for ourselves made visible and I think we're worth it. I think this planet is worth it and I think our lives and our world are worth that work. And I think people are willing to make those changes if they see a reason to make the changes and the science is giving us that reason. It's telling us that the old story simply isn't true. I'm a geologist. I'm a degreed geologist and I have to tell you, this is very, very different for me and certainly what I was taught in my academic training and even in my community. I was born and raised in a very rural, very conservative community in Northern Missouri and this is like the farthest thing from what I was brought up with, but if I'm honest with myself, I have to be honest with myself and say, "What is the science actually telling me, the real science?" And to a large degree, science has been hijacked, Robyn, and our listeners know this. Science has been hijacked by politics. You're seeing this in climate change. It's been hijacked by religion. It's been hijacked by corporations and people cherry-pick the science to support their story.

[0:20:05] So we have to look beyond the cherry-picking and look beyond the ulterior

motives and agendas and go to the core of what is called peer-reviewed science and see what the earth is telling us. What is earth telling us about her story? What are the fossils really telling us about the human story, not the interpretations from those that have these agendas? And when we do that, we're given the reasons to make the choices in our lives to think and live differently. So I think we're at this pivotal moment in human history. It's not just about Americans. It's not just about Europeans. This is a planet-wide phenomenon and our planet is making a choice right now where are we going to go. And the science, we've asked science to tell us who we are and science is doing that. The problem is some people are saying, "Oh, we don’t like these answers." So we have to have the courage to embrace what the science is telling


us and also the commonsense to know how to apply it in our lives. I have tremendous faith in the human species. I think we're going to be just fine and I think we've taken a very circuitous path to get to that point of fineness. We have gone to the extreme of technology and pushing the boundaries of technology because of greed. And now we know that that greed has carried us very close to the unthinkable, to war, to extinction. So now I'm seeing that pendulum move back the other way and this seems to be the way we learn. Robyn and I can't explain it other than saying we seem to learn by first experiencing what we don’t want before we know we don’t want it. That's not just for nations. That's for us in our lives. How many marriages do we have to go through to find out what it is that we really choose in a partnership and how many jobs and careers do we have to go through to find out what it means to be fulfilled? We experience what we don’t want before we know we don’t want it rather than simply saying, "This is the way I choose to live my life" or "This is where I choose to put my energy." We just don’t seem to learn that way. It's really interesting, so that was a long answer to another short question.

Robyn: I like it and I just love this common theme of all of our speakers, the call to action

to everyone who's listening that this is a time of extremes and to really make those changes that you know you need to make in your life. The science is proving it that we just can't get away with what we got away with even five or ten years ago. So getting back to your book, can you share a little bit about your background and where does this book fit into the books that you've already written in the past?

Gregg: You know, that's a great question. Can I tell you a story? Can I share a story to

our listeners? Robyn: Sure. I love your stories. Gregg: Thank you for that. I was doing a radio interview and it was with an interviewer,

it's what I sometimes call a hostile interview. It just started that way. There was no "hello" or "welcome" or "Good morning, Gregg" or anything like that. Just right off the guy was all over me. He obviously had a problem with the message of the book and he asked me, well, the first thing he said, he said, "Gregg, why can't you stick to one topic like everybody else?" He said, "You're all over the place." He said, "Are you writing about magnetic fields of the earth? Are you writing about ancient civilizations? Are you writing about human potential, spiritual traditions?" He said, "Why can't you just stick to one topic?" I was taken a little aback. There was no way I expected how the interview would begin, and I said, "Well, yes, my books have covered a lot of ground. However, each of those topics represents one facet of human experience, so it's all about relationships, our relationship to the earth, our relationship to our bodies, our relationship to our past, our origin." So I said, "In a very real sense, I have stayed with one topic.


It's just a big topic that has a lot of facets," and he didn’t like that. And then he goes, "Okay, so now you're talking about evolution. What gives you the credentials to talk about evolution?" He said, "You're not Charles Darwin." He said, "What gives you the ability to have this conversation and write this book?" He said, "You're not qualified to do this," and I asked him. "First," I said, "have you read the book?" He said, "No." I said, "Okay, so we're not talking about the book because you haven't read it. Number two, do you know what Charles Darwin's profession was?" and he said, "No." I told him. I said, "Charles Darwin was a geologist and I'm a geologist." And when he heard that, he said, "Okay. Let's go to break." So he went to a commercial break and he came back and we never talked about it again.

[0:25:07] So my background, I am a scientist, a degreed geologist. I've got a strong

background in life sciences and biology, molecular biology, chemistry, physics, math, and it all worked together for me to really embrace what the new discoveries in science are sharing and hopefully to distill those discoveries into something very simple that I can share with my audiences. And myself as well as a number of other authors, and I think some that you have probably had on this program, Dr. Bruce Lipton for example and Dr. Joe Dispenza. We've all chosen a similar path and we've made a similar choice in our lives that we move from academia in their cases and in the corporate world in my case when we began to understand what it is that we now understand. We had to make a choice. Do we stay in academia and corporations and share the information through the traditional route? So do we go write the white papers, circulate them for six or eight years through a peer review process and have them published in some obscure journal, which we could do, and we each independent, we didn’t know one another when we made these choices. We each independently chose to take very well researched material directly to the general public and bypass those obscure scientific journals that very few people read. And we felt it was important to do that because where we are in the world, the world's changing very quickly. We don’t have six or eight or ten years to understand some of these things. It's important to embrace these new discoveries now, so that has been my path. I am trained as a scientist. I worked in corporations up until the late 1980s.

And in the 1980s, I was actually told, Robyn, I had to make a choice, but at that

time between science and spirituality, I was told they were mutually incompatible, mutually exclusive and that I had to make that choice and I chose to leave the very successful career in the corporations. At that time, I was problem-solving in the defense industry. Originally, I was problem-solving in the earth sciences industry and I'm still problem-solving. We're living a time of crisis, so it's about new ways of thinking and living in our time of crisis. So I made that choice and a number of my colleagues did as well. I'll give you a beautiful example. In 2006 to 2007, I wrote a book. It was entitled The Divine Matrix and


it's a book that describes the science that has not trickled down in the mainstream yet at that time, but it was the science that tells us everything is connected. We're bathed in the field of energy. We communicate with one another. We communicate with the earth and all forms of life through this field of energy. At that time in '06, it was a very controversial topic. It wasn't accepted, so I wrote this book, The Divine Matrix. It was a New York Times bestseller and now, we are in the year 2018 and it's commonly accepted. Everybody said, "Sure, of course there's a field." What was considered for in science in 2006 is now, that book is a required reading in college physics classrooms and some universities in Canada and some here in the US, not all, but in some. So that tells you how far we can come very quickly and what the impact can be of taking rock solid science, peer-reviewed science to the mainstream public in a way that is very accessible. So that in this case, science had to catch up with what people have already accepted in the world. If you ask anybody, they'd say, "Sure, there's a field that connects all things." And even the science now, the existence of the field is no longer controversial. What is controversial is how deep that connection goes, how much influence do we really have when it comes to that field in the world around us and even within our own bodies. That's where science is going now, but the fact that the field exists, that isn't controversial any longer. It's very well accepted. So that's an example of if we had done this through peer-reviewed process, it'd probably still be in peer review in some obscure technical journal somewhere, so that's just one example of the effectiveness of the path and why I've chosen to do this the way I'm doing it.

[0:30:03] Robyn: I love when you talk about the power of the electromagnetic field of the heart

and when we talk about everything is connected. When we're living more from our heart space, how much that can impact everything that we're experiencing. Can you just share with everyone listening some of the science behind that and how we can live more from that space and enjoy life at a much deeper level?

Gregg: Absolutely, Robyn. When I was at school back in the '50s, '60s and '70s, I was

always taught, as I'm sure you and many of our listeners were, that the brain is the master organ in the body. Of course the brain is important. We all know that, but what the new science is showing us is that the brain receives many of the instructions that tell it what to do from the heart. So you and I in the circles that we're in and new thought and healing circles, there are a lot of people that say the heart is where the action is, forget the brain, and there are other people and my engineer friends that say the brain is where the action is, forget the heart. And what we now know is that both the brain and the heart are important and they work together. They're two organs, but they actually work together as a single, very potent system in our lives. And where the new discoveries support the ancient traditions is that we are born with the ability to self-regulate this potential. We're born with the ability to choose how our heart and our brain


work together and we do that through the qualities of emotions that we create, our belief systems, all of those things. So the science behind this is fascinating to me. We now know that every moment of every day there's a conversation between the heart and the brain. It is a very low frequency electrical signal. You can measure the signal with conventional equipment so that we're not talking about the aura or the prana although they may be related. We're talking about a conventional electromagnetic field and electromagnetic signal. When this signal is optimized, it's 0.1 hertz. You can't even hear that. It's the frequency actually the whales communicate with in the ocean and military submarines use the same frequency because it's such a fundamental frequency. It's why it's a problem for the whales. They're using this. It's a very low frequency and when we can feel the feelings, create the emotions in our heart that generate this 0.1 hertz, we're actually communicating between the heart and the brain. We're sending very healing signals into the brain and harmonizing is the term that's used. Harmonizing the heart and the brain through what is called coherence, its heart-brain coherence.

So we are the only form of life that can sit down and choose to create this

coherence when we want to at the moment in time and experience all the benefits that come from this harmonization. And I listed some earlier in this conversation the ability to self-regulate our immune system, to self-regulate the anti-aging enzymes within every cell of our bodies. The ability to create a greater resilience to the change in our lives, deep intuition when we choose to have that intuition and much more. All that comes from this harmonization of the heart and the brain, so this is one of the places where the science now is paralleling our most ancient and cherished spiritual traditions. They did not use the scientific language, but they taught the techniques of how we accomplish this harmonization.

So when I spend time with indigenous people in the monasteries of Tibet, for

example, in Nepal and India, in Peru, in Bolivia and in the mountains of Egypt and the shamans and the healers and the curanderos in the Yucatan throughout the desert southwest, one of the things I found is that these people, almost universally they use this heart-brain harmony to accomplish what had been considered mystical experiences in the past, but they're doing it by generating this 0.1 hertz signal. And once they're in this space, it opens the possibility. It opens the door to all of these extraordinary potentials. I talk about these in the book, as well as the instructions for how to harmonize the heart and the brain in the book, in the second part of the book, so that is one part of the discovery. The second part is we all know the brain has an electrical magnetic field. It was in the 1990s that scientists discovered that the heart has an electrical magnetic field that is much more potent in the brain. The heart is about a hundred times stronger electrically and about 5000 times stronger magnetically than the brain, so it's not one or the other.


[0:35:07] It's the two organs harmonizing, working together to open the door to empower

us for these tremendous potentials in our lives, and because life doesn’t happen in a vacuum. These discoveries aren't happening in a vacuum. They're happening within the context of this world that we live in that's changing so fast, Robyn, faster than I think any of us ever believed, certainly faster than we have been prepared to accept. And that change can be hard unless we have the ability to create the resilience in our lives to embrace the change, and resilience actually begins in the heart. What the science is telling us is that resilience is directly correlated to what is called heart rate variability. So when we see an electrical printout of our heart rate, when we see what's called the QRS complex, you see some little wiggly lines and you see a big spike and then some more little wiggly lines, that big spike is the R-wave. And the time from one R-wave to the next to the next to the next. When we look at those, we always think we want a regular heartbeat, that we think that's what we want, but the reality is that's the last thing that we want. You don’t want the time from one spike to the next to the next to be exactly the same. Each spike you want to vary and that variability is called heart rate variability. And the more heart rate variability we have, the more resilient we are to change in life.

When we're young children, for example, kids have tremendous heart rate

variability because they have to learn and respond to the world very quickly. And as we age typically, and I'm not saying this is true for everyone and there are probably a lot of exceptions in this phone call and exceptions in our listening audience. But typically what happens is as we get older, the term is we become set in our ways. We set in our ways expecting the world to behave a certain way and expecting people to respond to life in a certain way. And when people don’t respond, that's frustrating to us, and change is typically hard for older people. However, all of that can shift literally in a heartbeat as we embrace the techniques to increase our heart rate variability. What we do is we give ourselves the gift of resilience to change and you can do it at any age in any state of health. You can begin to change your heart rate variability and become healthier within and have a healthier response to the change in our lives. So here we are, the big picture. The world is changing. We're living what's called the time of extremes and in our time of extremes, we're learning the science that parallels our most ancient and cherished spiritual traditions so that we can respond and be resilient in a really healthy way to the change that we're exposed to. So there's a beautiful symmetry to what I see happening in life if we have the wisdom to step back and look at the big picture and not get stuck in the minutia of the six o'clock news, which is pretty scary.

Robyn: Very scary. So the brain, what I've read and what people have talked about is

that we have evolved in so many significant ways, but that primal brain, that amygdale, that fight or flight hasn't evolved as much. Is that true?


Gregg: It's true, but here's the thing. We can no longer think of the brain as an isolated

organ or our experience as an isolated location. One of the things I did not share in the interest of time just now and now I will, is that in the human heart, in 1991, so this is relatively recently in terms of our knowledge about human heart. We've been doing heart transplant since the 1960s relatively successfully. And scientists attribute that success to the thinking that we know pretty much everything there is to know about the human heart. So in 1991, a discovery was made that wasn't published until 1994. It's very recent in the game. Scientists discovered approximately 40,000 specialized cells in every human heart. They're called sensory neurites and they're essential brain-like cells, but they're not in the brain. They're in the heart and they function very similar to the way neurons in some places in the brain do. They think independently of the human brain.

[0:40:02] They remember independently of the brain. They feel and they sense

independently of the brain. And so what that means is for all of us, when we have an emotionally significant experience, the most ecstatic joy in our lives or the deepest hurts and betrayals and disappointments, what it means is we are registering those experiences in two places, in the heart and in the brain. And these cells are actually concentrated in such a way in the heart. They're called the little brain in the heart. Our listeners can Google that term and see what it's all about. So what this means, the significance of this and the relevance is that we are all accustomed to, we know about working with the subconscious, with the primitive brain, fight or flight, and when we're trying to heal hurtful experiences of loss or betrayal working with the subconscious in the brain, sometimes that's effective, sometimes it's not. And when it's not and we ask ourselves why, it may be because we have yet to address these memories that are now linked to the cells in the heart. So we can think our way and subconscious our way through part of this, but the heart is playing into that subconscious as well. So this is why it's important, I think, to learn about this harmonization of the heart and the brain and the role that the heart plays in the subconscious memories. And that's something typically, there are people that are working with this, but typically it's not taught certainly in mainstream medicine, mainstream psychology. They're not talking about the heart memories typically. I'm sure there are exceptions, but typically people in our audiences, the professionals, they say we were never taught about these things.

Robyn: And these heart memories can often be the source of dis-ease and literally

disease. Gregg: Absolutely, Robyn, because the body is the outpicturing of, there's another

discovery that I didn’t share in the interest of time here, 2004 the discovery of a specialized kind of neuron in the brain that is called a mirror neuron. I was just in Milan, Italy sharing this presentation. In Milan, Italy is where the discovery was


made, so the Italians love that we were talking about a discovery that was made right there in their own backyard. Mirror neurons are really a curious class of neurons because they fire both when we have the direct experience and when we witness an experience that is either someone else is having or that we're seeing through some other media. This is why we can lie on a couch, for example, Sunday afternoon watching a football game or a soccer game, we're lying down in a restful position and we're watching that game and our heart's beating fast, heart's racing. We can be perspiring, we can be agitated, but we're just lying there and you say, "What's that all about?" The mirror neurons, they fire both when we have the experience and when we watch the experience. They don’t know the difference between these two and this is why it is so powerful the way we think of ourselves and when we create visualizations of ourselves. Our body will respond to our own visualizations. What we are creating in our mind, the brain doesn’t know the difference between having the experience and watching it.

So if we are seeing ourselves and embracing ourselves fully enabled, fully

capacitated, healthy, vibrant, vital beings, the brain doesn’t know the difference between visualizing that and actually having the experience. It will begin to produce the chemistry that matches what we're visualizing, but the important part of that is the emotional component. It's feeling the emotions as if those things are happening as well, so it's more than just the picture. It's the emotion that goes with it. So these are among the new discoveries. They're relatively new, but they change the way that we've been led to think about ourselves. They're very empowering discoveries because when we put these altogether, our ancestors did this in their way, scientists are doing it their way in the laboratory, and I share a combination of those techniques because I think we learn from both ways and I talk about them in the book. This is where we become empowered, and I've used this term many times in this conversation, to self-regulate. We're not waiting for the world to give us the reason to have the feeling. We're doing it because we choose to have the feeling. We wake up in the morning and we choose to create a powerful immune response in our bodies.

[0:45:05] I keep talking about the anti-aging, but I should just call them longevity enzymes

because it's not about anti-aging. It's about enhancing the longevity that we ourselves are wired to heal. The DNA is wired to repair itself, to heal and actually reproduce the markers of aging that we look to for senescence in old age. Those all now are documented and is being reversed at any age based on the way we think and we feel and these mirror neurons are a big part of that. So this goes on and on, but the bottom line, Robyn, is there are new stories, a new human story that's emerging. It's a beautiful story. It's a powerful story of hope and possibility, self-regulation and resilience and it's all happening within the context of a world of extremes that is changing very, very quickly and I think we're being


pushed to the limits. We either have to embrace these capabilities so that we can thrive in the new world or you and I, in both of our professions, we're seeing what happens when people don’t. We're seeing right and left. It's showing up as health issues. A lot of people are leaving this world. I've lost more friends in the last two years than I have I think in my whole lifetime and a lot of them are young friends, 40s and 50s. Well, it's all attributed to stress.

Robyn: I know. It's crazy. I can't help but think about our youth and what would happen

if the science in your book was really taught as a science of our young people. Gregg: Well, one of the things that you mentioned in the, I think you mentioned in the

bio that you're reading, I've been nominated for a prize. It's called the Templeton Prize, the Templeton Award. It's a standing nomination, so it was from between the year 2015 was the first nomination and 2020 is when it's over, so every year I am an active nomination for this award. That's a very prestigious prize and it comes with, there's a cash award that comes with this and should I be blessed with this award, that cash award is earmarked to developing the curricula to bring to our young people based upon the new science that we're talking about now. The science, number one, it tells them that nature is not based upon competition and conflict as Darwin suggested. We all know that happens, but the fundamental nature of our nature is cooperation, not competition. That nature actually likes us and that mutual aid is the bottom line when it comes to nature. And the more competition and the more conflict we see. I mean, we all see it and we're not denying it exists. The more of that we see, that tells us how far we have strayed from the harmony of the truest laws of nature, cooperation and mutual aid. We can begin teaching people those things if they're connected to themselves, not separate. They're connected to one another in the earth, not separate; that they are not subject to the whim of the universe in terms of when they have illness and disease. Their bodies are born to regenerate, born to rejuvenate, born to heal. And we teach them how to engage consciously in those things. What would it look like to have an entire generation of young people who think that way? I would love to see the answer to that and I think we have that potential, so we're building the curricula and if this award comes through, it gets kicked into high gear. If it doesn’t, it's still being built, but it just takes longer.

One of the things that we're finding, Robyn, and this is why I think this is so

important for all of us, this is all about knowing ourselves. The better we know ourselves, the less we fear change in the world. The better we know ourselves, the less we fear change within ourselves and the less we fear one another. So in a world that is being forced into a global community faster than we've ever seen before, we're being forced. The religious traditions are being forced together, the economic traditions, the ways that we think about sex and marriage and children, all those things. We've been polarized and separated in the past. It's all


being forced together. The better we know ourselves, the less we fear those changes.

Robyn: That's so true. Gregg: That fear is at the core of everything that I mentioned at the beginning of this

program. The hate crimes, they're happening between individuals, the way that we're solving problems between nations, and we're watching this play out right now in a global stage. You look at the US and North Korea as a perfect example or look at what's happening in the Middle East or look at what's happening in North Africa or between the US and China, perfect examples. These are examples of a world that changed but leaders that are still solving problems through the thinking that they have come to understand 15 to 20 years ago. So I'm not saying it's right or wrong, good or bad. I'm saying the world changed and we've outgrown those old ways of thinking and there's a lag time. We're seeing a lag time as individuals and leaders learn to catch up and they are learning. And I'm encouraged by what I see, but also I think it can happen much quicker. Behind the scenes, what I see happening behind the scenes when it comes to politics, when it comes to the UN, when it comes to a lot of the stuff you don’t see in the mainstream, you have to really, really dig and research to find this stuff or know people that are working behind the scenes. But I'm encouraged by what I'm seeing and I'd love to see it personally. I'd love to see it happen much quicker.

Robyn: Thank you so much, Gregg, for sharing all your, gosh, years and years, decades of

research with all of us and your message of hope and the call to action to really be aware, to be active in all the ways that we know we can. We're connected to everything and the little difference we can make is a big difference. So I just so appreciate everything you've shared today with all of us, the Shift community. Where is the best place for people to find you in all the great work that you're doing and your trips around the world?

Gregg: Well, before I even get to that, Robyn, I just want to say thank you again for the

Winter of Wellness. I think this is a unique series. I don’t see anything else like it anywhere. I think it's an important series. It's a much needed series and you do an awesome job of bridging so many, everybody learns differently and that's the beauty. Everybody learns differently and there's something in here for everyone and I want to thank you for that and for inviting me to be a part of them. I'm honored to be with you here today.

Robyn: Thank you. Gregg: You're very welcome. My new book, all my books, you can find them wherever

books are sold. You can go to Amazon, Barnes & Noble. You're welcome to go to the website if you like, greggbraden.com. That's all one word. You can see the


events listing, our trips to Peru and to the Holy Lands. We're doing events throughout the world. That's all right there as well, so I look forward to seeing you. Come and say hello to me if you see me at a program. Robyn, until next time. Thank you so much again. This went by really fast. I'm speaking quickly because I knew it was going to go by fast.

Robyn: I know. I can't believe it. It seems like five minutes. And for all of you that are just

dying to learn more, learn more about the teachings and some of Gregg's books, go to YouTube. Gregg, you have some amazing YouTubes with some of your colleagues and a lot solo really talking about the power of beliefs and feelings and our emotions that I just think are so relevant for people that are living in these challenging times, so thank you for all that too. It's all free to you on YouTube. So Gregg, you're awesome. I love you! Thank you so much for being with all of us today at The Shift Network Winter of Wellness 2018.

Gregg: Thank you and thank you, Shift Network. We love you all. Take good care. © 2018 The Shift Network. All rights reserved.