Neuroscientist Proves Manifestation Is REAL (4-Step Method To Hack Your Brain!) | Dr. Tara Swart

you know that feeling of I'm trying to manifest but nothing's happening manifestation is not creating a fantasy and then waiting for it to come true with no action from yourself leading neuroscientist bestselling author Dr tesw we cannot undo a negative thought pattern we have to overwrite it with a new one your brain is 2 and a half times more strongly wired to avoid risk than is to get a reward wow the number one Health and Wellness podcast J sh J the one the only Jett for so long ancient wisdom and the wisdom of the East

especially has been seen through two lenses I think there's been a lot of enthusiasm towards it and a lot of value and reverence and at the same time I think there's been as you say skepticism and cynicism around it and so to have someone with your of your caliber your research your Insight and communicating in the way you do I think is such a great blessing and benefit for for the industry in and of itself so thank you so much for the work you do really means the world but let's let's dive straight in uh

and and if you hear me and Tara lock into some uh what would I call them inside jokes because we're both north londoners then just please roll with us uh but Tor I wanted to start off with where did you and why did you get so passionate about this work and finding the parallels between ancient wisdom and modern science and why did that work call you as you know I grew up in North London and I was the oldest child of first generation immigrant parents so I always felt like I was bridging Two Worlds you

know I went to school I didn't have any Indian friends and um I just wanted to fit in with my friends and then I would come home and obviously we would have like the altars and the incense and the ceremonies and the rituals and everything and so yeah I would say for most of my childhood I was living in Two Worlds and then at the age of 18 I went to medical school and I think I moved very much away from our cultural heritage and just lived like a teenager andone in their 20s at University

and I was at University for most of my 20s because um I did medical school and a PhD so nine years at University around the time that I became a doctor yoga was becoming quite popular in in society so I sort of returned to that and I would say that reignited my interest in our cultural heritage and but then still I would keep it very separate from my work so I was working in the NHS you know that really wasn't very holistic um but at home I was eating in an aoic way and doing yoga

and some time past and these things came more into our culture anyway but still at the time that I wrote The Source it was a risk for me as an MIT Professor to start speaking about manifestation and visualization and meditation and things like like that but writing it really for me actually brought those two things together and and made me think I don't have to keep my personal life separate from my professional life and I have to say thank you to everyone that the response to it then you know took that even further as we

were discussing you know we both had books out around that time couldn't really do World promo because of the pandemic but very early on in the pandemic I thought oh no there's going to be a huge Mental Health crisis and it was so unprecedented I thought what can I offer that isn't already available to people but I will caveat that by saying I think all of the ancient wisdom knowledge that I try to apply to Modern mental health problems is it's just things that we've forgotten it's not anything new but it's about bringing you know

finding those things it's like gold mining and bringing them to people and saying this could really help you it's fascinating that all of these things have been practiced for thousands and thousands of years and ironically also had mental health and anxiety challenges for much longer than we believe we have and I often think of the badita and arjin which you know was spoken 5,000 years ago but that experience that he's having on the battlefield is anxiety stress he's having a sense of a loss of identity he's worried about the surroundings and the impending War that's

about to take place and so you see that in a text that's 5,000 years old and then you have all of this wisdom that surrounds it but being able to translate that into into what's happening now is is so needed and and I guess that's why you had that positive response yeah and what I found really interesting is that it would be one thing if you and I sat here and talked about our own cultural heritage but what I found is that if you look at the ancient Greeks ancient Egyptians Babylon and you know all

sorts of other ancient cultures the first Americans that there are so many similar themes of the things that keep us Y and such new science as if it's just been discovered in the last year or two like things like connection to Nature I mean how are we not understanding that for so long you know I think because there were no planes in the sky and less traffic and our time in nature in this country anyway was limited people were allowed like a 1H hour walk outside during the day at some points the appreciation of nature

grew and then suddenly as if from nowhere comes out the science that time and nature helps your mental health your physical health your longevity it boosts your immunity that there's just a an impact of that all inspiring sort of feeling of being in beautiful nature um on the way that your brain works so like so much modern science that is actually not one of those things is new yeah absolutely it's not new at all this this idea then that we have the power to change our destiny this idea that we have the power to propel

Our Lives whether it's careers whether it's relationships we have the ability to shift and pivot a lot of people will hear that and they think to themselves well that doesn't happen to me it happens for those people they hear that and think yeah you can't really think your way into anything or people hear it and say no I tried that once and it didn't work for me how do you approach that conversation of helping people realize the power that they hold and the power of what's possible for any one of us I love the way

you've kind of segwayed that from nature into manifestation because a few things here one thing is if you just observe nature you see manifestation all the time you know you see a flower grow growing from a b to a fully formed flower and then its petal starting to fall you see trees growing you know all sorts of things and the other connection there is that creating the environment within yourself and around yourself to allow things like manifestation to happen and that basically means at the simplest level that you set a goal you say this is

what I want my life to be like or this is a specific thing I want in my life and then there's a process that leads that to potentially manifesting in the real world but I do agree with one of those skepticism points which is that you can't sit at home and think about it so I've been really really clear about saying that it's manifestation is not creating a fantasy and and then waiting for it to come true with no action from yourself so I actually renamed vision boards action boards as if to say that yes

create imagery that represents what you want but then you have to be doing something every day to move yourself closer to that whether it's being healthier just so that your brain's in a better environment or it's networking or dating or you know saving money whatever it is that's going to get you let's say the house that you want you know a great example is people might say I of course I'd love a house in the Hamptons but if that's not realistic for you in the short term then you'll only reinforce the fact that you're failing

at manifesting so it's better to say I'd like to be on the property ladder and start there and then obviously build bigger did you find a difference and I want to get into the science and research part to show the validity of what you're saying did you find a difference in the science of measuring extrinsic and intrinsic motivators because I feel like manifestation is still always about what do you want where do you want to be and as you know honestly I can only speak I can only really speak for myself but when I think

about it for me I've if someone asked me what that was I've always wanted to just wake up and do what I love every day like that's that's really all I care about and so it's all I care about is I want to wake up and do what I love every day and hopefully improves the lives of other people and if those two things can go together and I find that a lot of manifestation stems around like what kind of house do you want and what what kind of car do you want and what what

kind of Life do you want and and it gets very extrinsic and so I wonder whether I'm I'm intrigued I'm really curious to know what the science suggest about when you're having an action board towards an intrinsic motivator or an extrinsic motivator there's a lot to unpack here please um I'm I'm All Is I'm here as a student to just listen because I'm so fascinated so in terms of the motivation to make it really easy for people to understand I called it magnetic desire which is something that is so emotionally driven for you personally and

aligned with you know what's logically doable in your life and what your intuition tells you and you know what your creative brain can help you to achieve that if you have magnetic desire for something then you know I always say if you follow your passion you will be successful but I'm mindful that that statement and even you're one of I just want to wake up and do what I love are extremely privileged statement so with manifestation one of the criticisms is that you know that's luxury for people who already have you know more than what

they need and then they can say oh well I would love you know to do this or have this and so I think what I've learned in where I have ever felt slightly defensive around that statement is that whoever you are wherever you are there is one tiny thing that you could do to make your life better and it's the micro changes that build you up to getting to a point where maybe you can actually do something that you love rather than do what you have to do to put food on the table for your

children but having said that if your ideas for what you want to manifest are things like well all my friends are getting married and having a family so I want to get married and have a family rather than I've really thought about what I want to do and my passion and purpose might mean that I have to delay having a family and that's okay it's more likely to work out with the second one than the one that's kind of too Guided by parental expectations societal expect ation career you know aspirations so I do think people

have to dig deeper for manifestation to you know really work well yeah walk me through some of the science that and the research that validat some of these claims because I think that's your that's your unique perspective and that's been the unique angle that you brought to it and I feel like it's great to understand that this stuff is actually being researched tested discovered it's not just being said because it not just sounds good but that maybe there's a couple of case studies but there's more than that so there's two main sort of um areas

around that one is the sort of six themes that I narrowed down from the 12 laws of attraction that I could explain with cognitive science which is neuroscience and psychology so when I first started that research I saw that there wasn't even agreement over what the laws of attraction were or how many there were so I thought okay let me distill this down to to like something that makes sense to me and then like see what we can do with it so the first one is abundance because one of the strongest gearings in the brain

is loss avoidance so to survive when we lived in the cave we had to stay safe rather than take risk now for most of us who are lucky enough you know to live in the modern world and have basic safety around us it's healthier for us to be willing to take risk so you actually have to override that ancient wiring of the brain which said no no don't go and like you know fly to London and try to have meetings with lots of different people who may not want to meet you stay in La cuz

that safer and you've got your community around you and you know you know you've got a big Network so for you to say well I'm going to go to a new with I know it's not it was your home but in terms of like recent work you know kind of take a bit of a risk take a week out there you know see who I can interview that is you overriding that part of your brain that might say it would just be easier for me to stay in La so it's it's as simple as that

it can obviously be a lot harder than that as well but it's understanding that your brain will do quite a lot to stop you from taking risk it's two and a half times as strongly wired to avoid risk as it is to gain reward and say that part again that's it's two and a half times more strongly wired to avoid risk than is to get a reward wow it's about believing that there are enough resources out there for everyone and that by you know perhaps entering a new career pool or a new community of people

that it doesn't mean that you're likely to fail if you've managed to be in an abundant State CU what that does in the brain is it moves the brain away from the fear and shame kind of states which correlate with the stress hormone cortisol to the love and trust and joy and excitement states which correlate with the bonding hormone oxytocin now when your brain is in that state it's much more likely to take a healthy risk it's much more likely to ask someone for a favor we were talking about you know asking each other for

favors before you wouldn't do that if you thought well don't ask Jay cuz he'll just shut you down then you would never ask anyone but if you start a conversation and someone looks like they want to be generous and help you then you know you go into that oxytocin mode but you need to be pushing yourself into that mode as much of the time as you can so the second one is manifestation which is believing that with your abundant resources you can do things in the real world that mean that whether it's that feeling of

I do what I love or it's an actual house that you have it in your capability to make that happen because of course if you believe it will never happen for me one of these common statements that's likely to become true that's manifestation too it's just negative manifestation um and it's important to say that both manifestation and the process of NE neuroplasticity which I will describe in detail which is how your brain changes to allow you to grow and grasp New Opportunities they both have a good side and a bad side and the classic example

exle of a bad side of neuroplasticity is obsessing over an ex after a breakup because what you're saying to your brain is this is what people do you know you trust them and then they leave you and you just remind yourself of all the times that you should have like seen the signs and then you know all the times that it went wrong that's also inducing neuroplasticity and potentially manifestation in your brain because if you don't make a change after that your relationship pattern will stay the same and you'll rein force it further with more

breakups and more you know sort of choices of partners aren't ideal for you the third one is the magnetic desire that I already discussed which means that it has to be really authentic to you but also aligned in simple terms in your head your heart and your gut but in the source I talk about six ways of thinking which are logical emotional physical intuitive motivational and creative so if you think of something that you want and you ask yourself in six different questions you know why do I want this logically why do I want it

intuitively and you can get a really good answer to those then it's likely that you know you will be able to manifest that then there's patience which has to do with neuroplasticity so until we had sophisticated scanning Technologies a lot of this work cognitive science work was all thought to be psychological rather than neurological so it would kind of be like oh you know Jay you're not mentally strong enough you gave up too quickly and it would kind kind of infer an intangible psychological weakness that is kind of your fault and I think that's another

criticism of manifestation as well that if it doesn't work then there's something wrong with you if you understand that it's actually physical work when you're changing something when you're striving for something you're actually connecting up neurons or nerve cells in your brain that weren't connected previously you may even be growing new nerve cells from Little embryonic you know baby nerve cells that then connect up with ones that already exist and you may also be adding an insulating coat around existing neural Pathways to make them faster um to make them more efficient so the patience piece

is because a lot of hard work goes on you know that feeling of I'm trying to manifest but nothing's happening that's in the patient piece because when you get to a critical mass of neurons that have created a new pathway that is stronger than the pathway you had before so let's say it's just the things like that never happened for me pathway changes to a well actually I've seen Jay do it so maybe it could happen for me pathway that takes a lot of effort but once you get to the critical mass of enough neurons

suddenly it feels like everything's easy and everything's manifesting and I do feel like people have to get a taste of that before you know at least once with a quick win to have the courage to take it to the next level M and the last two which um I didn't expand on too much in the source are are um Harmony and Universal connection and Harmony is kind of also to do with the fact that you're aligned in yourself but it also means that it should be aligned like with the world like you're not doing some

harm to get what you want and Universal connection is about the fact that you know we are all interrelated if you believe that you can achieve something because there are enough resources in the world for everyone then you should also be generous and Pay It Forward you've kind of Forgotten what you dreamed of when you were a child you know maybe you've just given up your real passion and often it does take a later disruption like a divorce or a bereavement to really make people rethink that if you around people who were only doing what

you do who also had self-limiting beliefs who you know had maybe some things even against being entrepreneurial you might have stayed stuck where you were wealth can be having a lot of money but it can also be waking up every day and doing what you love nobody needs help spending money sometimes it feels like the whole world is trying to spend your money your social media feed is full of ads your mailbox is full of credit card offers and then there's all these hidden fees and extra costs and Rising prices that keep eating away at

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to I'm just thinking that so much of our psychology has been made so limited and scarce when I think about the way we talk about our relationship with money you may have grown up in a family that says we have just enough to survive or we don't need more we have we have all we need and those things become so hardwired and therefore as we get older it becomes really hard to change them right and so that also applies to love it's like oh if someone says oh my parents had a bad marriage like I

I'm just scared I'm going to repeat it and then that becomes their narrative when we're talking about changing those does every thought count does every thought matter like talk me through that yeah absolutely every single thought matter matters and that's why there's an old Buddhist saying that is replace every negative thought with a positive thought and neuroplasticity completely backs that up because the way we rewire our brains is not that we so basically we cannot undo a negative thought pattern or a negative relationship pattern we have to overwrite it with a new one so rather

than focusing on the negatives which is you know to do with that abundance piece it's better to work out what do I need to do differently to not keep repeating this obstacle or challenge that keeps coming up in my life so the way that it physically works the process that underpins neurop is underpinned by neuroplasticity is a four-step process and it starts with raised awareness which is kind of what you've already said which is really monitoring your thoughts understanding what the beliefs are that are underneath driving those thoughts and making you make the decisions that

you make in the real world and I would suggest that people spend at least a month monitoring that with journaling maybe talking therapy maybe talking to a friend as long as you know you're very clear that they that their agenda for you kind of doesn't you know affect that and then the second stage is focused attention so that is then let's say you notice a particular pattern that you have let's say it's around money notice the next time again for a month probably that you don't buy something because you don't feel you deserve it because

you think it's too expensive or you wait for something to go into the sale and then you miss out on getting you know so things like that so any any money behaviors or love behaviors whichever and at first don't try to change anything but just notice it like maybe straight after it happened then try to in time get yourself to notice when it's happening and see if you can reframe it maybe you can maybe you can't and then to try to get yourself to the stage where you think normally I wouldn't buy this because I

don't think I deserve it but today I'm going to treat myself because I believe in abundance and I believe that I will achieve the you know career aims that I have that will make me able to afford that the third stage is deliberate practice which is that you regularly practice the new desired behavior until it becomes so ingrained in your brain that it's actually easier for you to do that than default to the old Behavior and the last part it's not really one of the stages it takes you through the whole process is accountability so

how do you hold yourself accountable some people have a coach or a therapist or a partner that might hold them accountable if you don't and you need to do it by yourself then a vision board is a really good way of doing it because you've clearly stated what you want you can see if you've you know got it or not at the end of the year you can say I manifested 60% of the things that I wanted and I also use an app called habit share where I I record 12 micro habits each year and

I can track them I can share them if I want to I found that was better for me the New Year's resolutions because I could just take two or three of them and try to like bring them into my toolkit each quarter of the year and then by the end of the year I would find like eight of 10 of or 10 of those were habits already so I kind of do that alongside my bigger goals I find like when people think about this one of the things that kind of keeps tripping them up is

J I can say it and I can think it but I don't believe it yeah right and I'm sure you've heard that a million times that fear of like okay well you know I don't believe I can start living my passion and I don't believe that I can do what I love for work or I don't believe that I have it's it's possible for someone like me to achieve whatever else it may be and then I can say it to myself before I go to bed but I don't believe it because I don't believe it

I stopped doing it after two to three days what's the difference between someone who's practicing this in a way that it works and we'll get on to action in a second but at least practicing the belief change because I'm I'm fully with you by the way like I remember I had a mentor that used to constantly would say to me he'd say Jay you're an entrepreneur like you're an entrepreneur you're you're an entrepreneur and at this time I was working a full-time job 9 to5 and getting paid whatever it was and he'd keep telling me

be like Jay you're an entrepreneur and I'd keep telling him I'd be like no I'm not no I'm not no I'm not I'm I'm an artist I'm a creative I'm definitely not an entrepreneur the last thing I want to do is run a business like that's just not who I am and if you asked me I would have said I'm a very self-aware person at this point in my life it wasn't that I didn't reflect enough I felt like I really knew who I was and I was like this is and then it was only

when I was required to have to be an entrepreneur did I have to shift into that gear and become one but if you still ask me today I'm like I an entrepreneur but I much prefer being a creative and an artist and and a thinker that's that's where I thrive if you ask me yeah but I did something when I was required to do it so I see you smiling and so I want to I want to hear your reaction to what I'm sharing four things there so I hope I can remember them all the

first one is that there's a step before what you said which is that some people aren't even aware that they don't think they deserve it so I discovered something quite by accident which was a theme of people selecting images for their vision board placing them onto the board even spending the time to like shuffle them around make sure it all like looks and feels right and then telling me that they never stuck them down wow and I just had a light bulb moment and I said you haven't stuck them down cuz you don't believe you

deserve them and the person just like you know had a bit of a meltdown and so every time I've I've heard some someone do you know a variation on that theme I've I've talked about deservingness so some so like even that has to be known in the first place right we think it's too ridiculous or too out there or right next I do think it's about who you surround yourself with so I started smiling when you said I had a mentor because that already means that you've sort out someone that's going to challenge your thinking

that's going to push you to be your best and and my version of that is that like I said I spent 9 years at University to become a medical doctor in the NHS I did not believe that I could do anything else I didn't I had a vocational degree I didn't have a more General Degree where I could say I could go and you know apply to do something else my best friend whose kids I was just babysitting um she had read biochemistry at Oxford she'd worked in the dotom explosion and then she just announced

to our sort of closer Circle one day at dinner I'm going to give it all up and go and uh study a masters in sculpture and I remember thinking that that's incredible but I could never do that and it was only kind of like one and a half or two years later that I then said I'm leaving medicine and I remember my brother said to me I'm really proud of you but I could never do that so it's almost like there's a chain of totally yeah and if you around people who were only doing what

you do who also had self-limiting beliefs who you know had maybe some things even against being entrepreneurial you might have stayed stuck where you were and then the next stage is a lot of people try and then give up right and I'm not saying this is for everyone but when I changed career I went from having a you know not very high but stable salary to having nothing and that was the case for quite a while and a few people said to me please just go and like work in the hospital for one weekend you'll

be able to pay your rent and like not you know kind of worry about money so much and a lot of people hold down a parttime job when they're becoming an entrepreneur but I said if I do that I will feel like I failed so for me I had to burn my boats like there was no way back I had to succeed and like I said I'm not saying that's right for everyone but everyone will have their version of of the thing that will really make them say I I cannot fail that initial challenge of

like you're saying that even becoming aware that we don't believe we deserve something or something's meant for us it can be such an uncomfortable discovery because it almost starts indicating towards the fact that there are past experiences past traumas past relationships that you now have to go back to and uncover and unlearn and understand because you've almost been living in a sense of darkness in that area of your life and I think that can be really disconcerting because it requires so much time to actually and and energy to actually go back there and excavate and

look at it and and face it head on what does science have to say about how can we look at our past how can we look at our wiring in a healthy way rather than a judgmental way because we could just turn around and say I'm the worst that I've been thinking this way you start criticizing yourself i' I've wasted so much time I always hear even sometimes I hear people and they're like I wish I started when I was 18 I wish I started when I was 25 and there's this regret that's underlying that

feeling even if they did change how do we look at our past and look at change in a healthier way rather than a negative way I think one of the things that you're talking about is this idea of having really in-depth Psychotherapy and having to like uncover every trauma in your life to like get to the point where you're healed enough to move forward I am obviously a fan of therapy you know for many reasons but I don't particularly think that you have to uncover every trauma in your life to you know be able to

move forward the career change that I made in fact was to coaching so coaching tends to be more forward-looking more you know sort of positive looking unless there's you know some kind of major trauma I don't think it's necessary to dig everything up in like years of psychotherapy um but there are some sort of models in science that can be quite useful for people whether you know it could just be self-discovery so there's one called ghosts in the Executive Suite and that talks about the childhood systems that you grew up in and the fact that

the wiring that was embedded in the first seven and then also the first 14 years of your life are likely to be very non-conscious now in adulthood but still driving a lot of your behaviors and so the business side of that is called in the Executive Suite because it's looking at CEOs who are behaving in a certain way um because of those but it can apply to anyone's life and it looks at things like the boundaries and the values and the secrets and the sort of identities that you had as a child so you know

you may have had a home where everyone was welcome to drop in and they would just be added into the family meal and they could stay the night and I may have been you know grown up in a home where you had to plan everything in advance if someone was coming over then you know people would make sure there was enough food and make sure that a bed was made and advance and all this kind of thing and then um you know values tends to be a lot around money so you know you may have

grown up in a household where people say money is a bad thing um it's not good to have too much of it you know even in many religions they say that if you're excessively wealthy that your chances of going to heaven are kind of lower so you know there's a lot of that rhetoric in our society um identification is about things like oh you're just like your father or you're just like you know your uncle used to be um Secrets is we never talk about that alcoholic Uncle kind of thing and roles includes things like

were you The Peacemaker were you the goete and all of those sorts of things may influence you later in life Without You realizing it but there is self exploration and you know other work that you can do with people to help you uncover that and also the really good news is that Freud talked about stages of child psychosocial development and things like trauma neglect abandonment separation from parents illness and described in great detail what would go wrong with you for the rest of your life if you experienced any of those things and then later a

psychologist called son came along and talked about the vice and The Virtue so he said if you have a childhood trauma at a certain age then this is what could go wrong but this is also your opportunity for something to go really right and what I find is that a lot of the CEOs or really successful entrepreneurs that I work with had their first childhood disruption between the ages of five and seven where the vice and The Virtue are inferiority or industry and Industry meaning hard work so being industrious so that means if you did

have a trauma at that age then you could either spend the rest of your life feeling inferior and undeserving or you could say I'm going to work so hard I'm going to get myself out of this situation of poverty forever I'm going to be self-sufficient I'm going to be financially independent you know and there's several other there's trust mistrust and you know other kind of viic and virtues that people can look up it's all on the internet yeah that kind of opening of the idea that you went through this but it could also be an

opportunity or this impediment could also be an invitation like that kind of understanding I find to be really powerful and I would agree with you I think the most purposeful people I've met are people who went through a paino and now they don't want other people to go through that pain or they want to help people through that pain and that's what created their ability to do that whereas someone else who may not have had that pain or may not have had that challenge almost can it sometimes feel less clear or a bit more lost

because they don't know what the meaning of their life is or or where they stand well I think what often happens with those people is that you know life's just okay life's fine you're married you know your kids are healthy you're going to this you know sort of regular day job and you've kind of Forgotten what you dreamed of when you were a child what you're you know maybe you've just given up your real passion because it's fine to have this kind of quite easy life and and often it does take a later disruption like

a divorce or a bereavement to really um make people rethink that and so you know a big example that affected a lot of people is the financial crisis so a lot of people in financial services lost their jobs and then said actually I always wanted to be a teacher or a journalist but I also wanted a more expensive lifestyle so I didn't make that choice and now I have the opportunity to do what I really want to do so I guess it depends on how you define wealth CU wealth can be having a lot of

money but it can also be waking up every day and doing what you love what happens in this life and in this physical world and on this material plane can't be the B all and end all of everything and if it's not what does that mean about how I want to live cortisol correlates with five emotions which we will experience if we're under stress so that's fear anger disgust shame and sadness and then the bonding hormone oxytocin correlates with love trust joy and excitement and in between those two is so the more you have trained

your brain to go into the oxytocin mode the less of the time it can possibly be in the stress mode I feel like we live in a time right now where and you alluded to this earlier and I'm kind of going back to it we live at a time where there's a lot of projected goals and expectations and a lot of people can feel like they're so far away from their own goals because there's goals from other people around them now my mentor I'm still good friends with him knew me very well and so he

wasn't projecting his entrepreneurial thing he was seeing something that I couldn't but a lot of the times there's like Society like oh let's live in Hustle culture everyone needs to be an entrepreneur everyone needs to be a CEO everyone needs like there's there's a lot of performance culture out there and productivity culture and I find that a lot of people either struggle with that weight of that expectation or they actually curl up into a ball and kind of don't want to go anywhere and do anything and it makes them hide from that as well because

it's almost like everyone's just pushing them to be more ambitious and be more driven at the same time I would love to understand the psychology of being needing to open up to more challenges and more opportunities is just a healthy way of living so if someone's stuck in that space of you know and J I'm just you know I'm I'm kind of stuck because I do want more I I'm trying to get there that I believe I deserve it but then I don't know if it's that's what I really want or if it's what my

parents want or what social media wants me to want or what my friends are doing um I just want to go back to something because I only actually twigged when you said Tara and Jay that my brother's name is Jay oh no way yeah and I had put it together like that and I wanted to say something that he said to me when I changed career and I was like in my mid-30s then he said the best time to plant an acorn was 200 years ago but the second best time is now so for anyone

that's saying it's too late you know I regret things I think that's a really amazing saying and then before you started really like posing your question and I understood like where you were going with it I thought oh I wanted to tell you about um at the start of the pandemic when I said I sort of like saw that I thought there could be a really big Mental Health crisis quite quickly I would say within like a month or two I thought this is also an opportunity for a spiritual Revolution or Evolution and so in

all the research I've done since kind of the end of the pandemic the official end I guess um which is more about ancient wisdom and neuroesthetics I believe that returning to ancient practices like chanting humming drumming singing and neuro Aesthetics is is neuro Arts it's the science of why Beauty and art and creativity and nature are so healthy for us so if you immerse yourself in nature if you spend time making or beholding creative things like either singing or going to listen to a concert or sketching or going to an art gallery Etc that actually

opens up your mind in a way that the modern world and all that noise around you that you've just described doesn't let us so that allows a level of introspection and there's so many other things in that category that you know one can do but that really helps you to separate your inner voice from all the words around you that are telling you what you should do and I also always say there's a certain age and it could be different for different people where there there's no more should you know you've got you've got to

an age now where what your parents should said you should do or what you think you should do or what your friends are doing is not it cannot be applicable forever because that is probably the one thing you'll regret on your deathbed right so taking that time but it is so hard because you know I still hear people saying oh I go for my nature walk but I listen to a podcast at the same time that's not giving you time for introspection um and I'm sure you're one of the few people that will agree with

me that we aren't doing it like enough or any being we're just always doing I I often say to people when do you sit down and actually do nothing and I think that people maybe not if they know me well but if they look at my career would say she's she's she probably never sits down and does nothing I do a lot of sitting down and doing nothing me too yeah um I think you know to access yourself nature is a massive mirror for us so time and nature you know and the science for that

in the last few years has just rocketed um interestingly at the same time the science around having a purpose that transcends yourself so not one that earns the money that you need to just live your life not even one that just makes you happy and satisfied in yourself but one that is more altruistic is actually very um expanding for our Consciousness and and I think that's probably what we're really getting at conversation that I don't have with many people but I feel like I could have with you which is that we need to sort of

be able to access Altered States Of Consciousness to really understand what our Soul's purpose is in this life and breath work is a great way of doing that too obviously there's a popular sort of trend at the moment for plant medicine and and you know I'm watching the research on that at John's Hopkins really carefully and and there's a lot of positive stuff around it but what I'd really like to say to people is it's nothing that you can't achieve through time in nature breath work meditation nourishing your body with really healthy food sleeping really

well and crucially having that really like positive meaningful Community around you what what's your understanding so far about the Soul's purpose of what you've been able to discover and uncover on on this journey I did do some research into near-death experience es and terminal Lucidity and dark Retreats the original scientific interest in that was to understand the nature of Consciousness more in terms of how separate it can be from the body so if we look at the research on near-death experiences then we see that people who had the physical signs that as a medical doctor

I would say they were dead so whether it was the amount of time that your heart had stopped beating or your brain waves had um gone flat have then somehow which we can't explain been able to become conscious in that body again and and describe an experience that they've had whilst seemingly not in their body what's really interesting about that research is you don't have to have had that experience yourself because people will say well you know okay that's great for those people if it made them understand their Soul's purpose but we can't all have

that although you actually can if you go and do a dark Retreat which is why I then looked into those and you know in the um ancient cultures like the Greeks and Egyptians they used to bury people for days to um mimic death and then when they uncovered them they were the people that became like the mystics and the seers of those communities so again just things that we've forgotten but if you you know there's an amazing book called after by Dr Bruce Grayson um or if you just like look into the research around near-death

experiences most common themes that people say are I feel more compassionate I feel more connected I feel more grateful I want to do things to help people and I just see beauty like in everything that's around me and that that's supported by the modern science of neuro athetics we can all choose to do that you know we don't have to have a near-death experience to do that if we're living more like that then I think we get a greater Clarity around the reason that we were put on this Earth I mean I think the biggest

blessing any of us could have is to wake up one day and think I know why I was put onto this Earth I know what I need to be doing and it's not always going to be necessarily the thing that just gives you personal satisfaction action you know it could be your calling could be something quite different to that terminal Lucidity is super super interesting as a I mean I did my PhD in Neuroscience because I thought I wanted to become a neurologist but then I became a psychiatrist which is also super fascinating in terms

of things like you can hear voices that aren't there and you know your mood can change like you know not in your control but inter terminal Lucidity is when people who either have had dementia for a significant period of time or have had a stroke and so parts of their brain physically altered or damaged chemically or physically and they have lost the personality and level of Consciousness that their closest friends and family knew in them can suddenly become completely Lucid so we've got stories of you know parents who no longer recognize their children and their

grandchildren just suddenly saying one day oh Jay darling come here I want to like you know give you a motherly message and it's usually a sign that they will pass away within 1 to 20 24 hours but there's no physical explanation for how they could know the names and react in a completely maternal or paternal way towards an adult child that they didn't recognize for several years so that starts to make you think are we actually that connected to our body and if we're not what does that mean um and I don't have all the

answers but it's fascinating yeah no please sorry car well I was just I was just going to say it makes you think that what happens in this life and in this physical world and on this material plane can't be the be all and end all of everything and if it's not what does that mean about how I want to live and to me that brings me back to I want to live a life that's Guided by love and you know I don't mean romantic love by that necessarily although that could be included if I've got

a dilemma if I've got a difficult decision to make if I'm feeling like I'm in a really challenging situation then I always go back to to love and and gratitude and I've now included uh observing Beauty as part of that too because what they're all doing is moving us into the oxytocin state which is our highest state and really the only state from which we can live our best life so it's really about doing everything that you can to move yourself away from stress and towards love and overly listening to that chatter around you is

pretty much going to do the opposite so it it is a little bit about liberating ourselves from that I think at least for moments when you talked about spending time in nature you talked about chanting you talked about humming you talked about the art class the the kind of more analog tasks as well what do those tasks have in common from what's Happening scientifically inside of us like biologically like chemically what's happening that's similar across those or is it different well you know I have this thing about if I don't know the exact answer I

always take it back to Evolution sure so what we know about our ancestors was that they had scarce resources and it was all about survival and reproduction so in terms of like what was our life's purpose then it was literally live long enough to have children and pass on your jeans and then it didn't matter if you get got eaten by a saber-tooth tiger um but those same ancestors who naturally in their life to survive walked barefoot in nature sat around a fire at night looked at the stars in the sky at night also chose

with those scarce resources to make cave paintings to dance around that fire to sing um to hum to drum to chant and we don't know why but the only conclusion that we can draw is that there was a benefit to surv a survival benefit and what we know now is and again some of these activities are luxuries I completely get that but when we make or behold any of those activities that we in the brain becomes more hyperconnected we get the benefit of Novel experiences we open up more Connections in the creative parts of our

brain which actually allow us to solve complex problems better to think more flexibly to um override our biases and regulate our emotions better all of which are obviously you know survival advantages um because if you think about just you know on the very most basic level the implication of that in a relationship sh you know if if we were in a relationship and I was much more able to regulate my emotions to solve problems with you to like overcome any biases that I might have about the way that you're behaving it's obviously the relationship's going

to survive better and one of the pieces of research I've really looked into from the neuro Aesthetics is called shared trait vulnerability and it's about the fact that people with psychopathologies like schizophrenia also tend to be more creative than the um general population so so if you think about some of the symptoms of of psychotic illnesses it includes things like magical thinking Altered States Of Consciousness you know perhaps access to I want to put this really carefully you know sort of data and signs that we are choosing to ignore in the real world because our

brain is filtering out information to help us survive you know as people who have um don't have a mental health issue so one hypothesis could be that you could use creativity and all of those things are creative things to open up more of your Consciousness and if you have a high IQ and you're mentally resilient but you can also do that I just think it's so exciting to think about what we could do with our minds that again is probably stuff that we knew that we've forgotten but in our lifetimes or in the modern world

we haven't been practicing and that is also one of the um hypotheses that comes out of the research on near-death experiences which is that our brains are actually filtering down our minds rather than the other way around filtering down our mind's meaning so that our our our Consciousness is capable of a lot more than what our brain allows us to do to survive in this material world and would the brain ever allow for more or is it just so against survival that we couldn't experience it here well the easiest way for me to like demonstrate

that to you is it allows for more when you take psychedelic or plant ucation right right and we know that a lot of um like Crea breath work for example allows some Altered States Of Consciousness and so does other breath work time and nature alone can you know allow some alter States Of Consciousness or expansion of our Consciousness so so clearly it can and I don't know if we're afraid of it or you know there's some kind of survival or societal mechanism that prevents it I mean if you think about the tides in interest in

psychedelics and how it's been shop down every time it does make you wonder about the reasons for that it's so interesting to be in one of these Rising tides at the moment and see what actually happens yeah for sure yeah I mean I feel like as as you referred to earlier meditation has been such a powerful form of reaching Altered States Of Consciousness and breath work you referred to nature for sure I mean I've I've had the fortune of spending some time in some special special places both in India and just this year I got

to go to Bhutan as well oh wow and you know it was I definitely went to places that I felt they were it almost felt like there were places in the material world that were already in different Realms like it almost felt that way does that make sense yeah like places I went to in South India I definitely felt that because some of these temples are like thousands and thousands of years old and they were built with that I mean they're built with that kind of like vadic mathematics and just the way they the architecture

and everything kind of how we Marvel at the pyramids or the Mayan ruins yeah or the Mayan ruins it's that kind of those those I saw those temples in South India which I guess have less publicity in PR but when I went there I was like wow this is just you know there's this I remember this one kind of uh hallway and it's almost I forget the exact name they've given it but it almost feels like a portal wow and it's just pillars and pillars and pillars for so long but it almost is seen as

this transitionary portal and so kind of find these places in the world that have other worldly other realm aspects that you almost feel like an automatic sense of connection to a part of you that's beyond and having had those experiences it's it's amazing to me as well so many of my friends who've taken psychedelics or clients that have practiced that no one ever comes back and believes that this four-dimensional world is all we have that that that there is more yeah what what's the benefit of that or what is what do you believe do you

believe that's the next stage of human evolution is that spiritual Dimension or is is that what we're leaning towards hinting towards is is that how you see it progressing I mean that's the feeling I got you know when I thought that things were just going to go downhill for Humanity I kind of quite quickly thought there's an opportunity for it to like evolve to another level and personally being a medical doctor and a scientist I look at people like deepack Chopra Daniel seagull Bruce Lipton and you know CU they're quite a lot older than me

I remember thinking you know when I was still a doctor that how could they be saying some of the things that they're saying and like I don't think I would ever be able to say that in my career but I've just said some of the things that I've just said to you and um I just wanted to add that um again in my research I completely agree with what you said about certain places but apparently there's three ways of seeing like a thinning of the veil if you like you know let's say we let's just

hypothesize that we believe that there are spiritual planes or astral planes have you seen that Disney movie coco no I've not seen C you haven't seen it I thought you were going to say soul I've seen that but I've not seen Coco Coco is about the Mexican Day of the Dead okay so that's obviously an example of a time of year when the veil is thin but um a lot of people around the world believe that some of the places that you've described and AA and Hawaii of are vortexes where the veil is thin and

you can maybe like access a different spiritual plane in yourself or you know perhaps even more tangibly and then there are also certain people so you know obvious examples of the Del Lama and I know people who've been touched by him physically touched by him have said that they saw the interconnectedness of everything and it changed the way that they live their life so I think what you and I are really like saying here is that there are certain things activities that we can indulge in that can change the way that you look at life

and I mentioned dark Retreats which I don't think a lot of people have heard of but obviously silent Retreats are a way of doing that that more people I think you know have heard of yeah no no and dark Retreats too like I think it's it's interesting that all of it's trying to get us to just be like it all starts with this sense of just being but some of these activities I think for for a lot of people they seem so foreign right like I think dark Retreats seem foreign silent Retreats seem foreign obviously

they're they're quite big differences to the way people live and even things like chanting and humming and and being in nature like those I think coming from a Indian background like chanting is somewhat far more accessible or normal or a practice that you grew up with whereas in the in the western world that wouldn't necessarily have been a practice what has been the uh neurological impact of chanting I'm intrigued by that because that's always been something I've been fascinated by yeah so I will tell you that but um what I do now which is just

much more accessible to people is I just listened to chanting on I I found a YouTube channel I just listened to I have it on in the backgr I don't particularly chant myself now to be honest um but if you've got it on in the background then it's creating a certain like vibration and resonance just in your home which just literally you know it's nothing magical it's through sound waves is having an impact on we see that sound can have an impact on water and we're mostly made up of water so it's having an impact

on you and what we act what what actually happens in your heart and your brain is something called entrainment so particularly in the research shows that groups of people who are together who are subjected to either chanting or certain pulsations of light that their heart rates and their brain waves will synchronize and this makes them much more likely to cooperate to see themselves as not other and basically to just be in that oxytocin state of love and Trust more than well I didn't know about the science behind that it's so funny because one of my

teachers would always tell us he said if you have a conflict with anyone in the monastery you should dance and chant together really like that was literally what he would say I saw your face when you went like this he would always say that and he would always tell everyone that it's like if you're having a conflict with another Monk or someone in the monastery or there's something you should dance and chant together and he and we'd always thought it was like a nice cute thing like we didn't you know you don't realize just how

much you recognize their spiritual depth behind it but to even hear the idea that it's actually creating Trust on a chemical level is is pretty far out because well it's clearly creating coherence in terms of you wouldn't chant Out Of Tune with each other would you correct one of you will kind of fall and you know or you'll both do it same with the dancing but once you're doing that your heart rate and your brain waves will change accordingly and that simple Act of doing it even subconsciously is going to bleed into when you're trying

to consciously operate yeah that I mean that's fascinating from a romantic perspective too I guess and and from a from a relationship perspective of how often are couples spending time together in nature or how how often are couples spending time in the same frequency and vibration together is there any research around that that suggest the same for romantic love so those things I think are kind of given two examples that you've just you've just stated but um we know that now most of this research is done in vs little they're quite cute they're rodents but

they're quite cute but it it's also been done in humans which is for example that if you see your partner in distress your cortisol levels will go up your heart rate will go up you will start sweating I can relate um you will then seek to move towards your partner and soothe them with physical touch we know that people who are in hospital in pain that when their partner physically touches them that their heart rate decreases their blood pressure decreases and they are in less pain if the couple are you know a really like well-

bonded couple there's lots bits of research around that so it's definitely both the fact that if you you know do things together like time in nature or chanting or or dancing that that will make you more coherent it's also the fact that when you see or experience lack of coherence with you know and especially the partner who's seeing the other one kind of out of coherence that there is a move to to go towards them and soothe them and it's and it involves physical touch which like I said can reduce pain in your partner you

you kind of talked about these two ideas of and even what we're talking about now is this kind of spectrum that exists between stress and love and you were talking about how like you know you're you're trying to move towards love in your life and you said not simply romantic love just love as a force and as an energy source and you were saying that you know stress of course sits at the polar opposite of that and so much of our decisions today are based on stress naturally whether it's stress to pay the bills stress

to survive stress to take care of the people we love stress because someone we love has been diagnosed with a disease like there's so much stress and it's almost like how could you ever Infuse love with that what have you seen when is that even possible to measure what it's been like to infuse stressful situations with love so I just want to go back and just like clarify something so the stress hormone cortisol correlates with five emotions which we will experience if we're under stress so that's fear anger disgust shame and sadness and then the

bonding hormone oxytocin correlates with love trust joy and excitement and in between those two is um surprise which correlates with nor adrenaline and it can flip people from one side to the other quite quickly so like you know sort of you know when like someone jumps out at you from behind the door that but the the more positive side of that is that if you know you asked me a really surprising question and it made me think really differently then it could make me stop being nervous and think oh wow this is really interesting I'm

curious let's you know go down this road so the thing about those two ends of the spectrum is that they're like a seesaw so they can't coexist at the same time so the more you have trained your brain to go into the oxytocin mode the less of the time it can possibly be in the stress mode physical exercise is something that we see if we use heart rate variability technology that after you've done physical exercise you there's a time period where you're actually in a non-phase but you cannot be stressed so there are things that

we can do um I know you're talking about really difficult situations for people you know how do you infuse that with love but I wonder if that's bringing us back almost full circle to manifestation and visualization which is that with all the forms of loss that I see people going through loss of sense of self can't trust yourself breakdown of relationships at home at work in community and even lost through death if we believe some of the things that you and I have just spoken about like from near-death experiences and terminal Lucidity then I think

that's the reason that it's important to expand your Consciousness and have more spiritual beliefs because there is a choice there too to make a gift out of a really bad situation I can completely see why people's lives get ruined by a loss and they feel regretful and bitter for the rest of their life but I also o think that it's possible if you can find some kind of Legacy or learning or gift to make something good come out of the bad thing MH yeah no that reminds me of uh Edith eiger's book the gift and

the work of Victor Franco yeah and that idea of that future motion of how does how does what I do now how will that make me feel in the future and who will I be able to help and serve in the future even if I can't help anyone now and and I think there's another point from both of them and also Nelson Mandela which is about the mental prison that we create and you know I know that Victor Frankle spoke about that a lot but I really love the quote from Mandela where he says I

knew when I walked away from prison that if I didn't let go of my bitterness I would be in prison for the rest of my life and I find all of those things really inspiring and I've looked at the lot of the science that we've discussed today to help myself understand how you can possibly override that when there are so many difficult things in life and to try to bring that information to people and really and I'm not just saying this that that's why I was so thrilled when you invited me to come on to

your podcast because I think you know you've just got such an amazing platform and I and I'm just so grateful to you for letting me like you know share some of my findings I'm so touched now that the feeling is very mutual I was so excited to have a platform that I could have this conversation with you and that you agreed to it and I I want to make sure out of just my respect for your work that you feel you're being able to touch on the things that you really deeply believe in and talk

about yeah well I'm talking about some things that I actually don't normally really talk about that much that's brilliant okay good yeah good no I what is it I guess that you're most fascinated by right now like something that you're personally obsessed with I imagine that when you're in discovery mode just as when someone's healing not healed so in in a scientist sense it's like when you're just when you're learning not teaching like what what is that for you right now well I think it it's broadly covered by a lot of the topics that we've

mentioned but I think the the tension that I'm interested in is how far you take these things because as you well know you could take these things so far that you just like run off into the Wilderness and become a monk and then and just disengage from real life right yeah um I think what I'm really curious about is how far do you take these things things until you get to a point where you have some level of understanding or potentially Enlightenment where you can live this life to the fullest that I'm obsessed with at

the moment yeah and and and I am too when I'm listening to you I always think about how does something stop being a fad and a trend and the moment and how does it become a real shift in lifestyle and a commitment to whatever practice it is that you yeah feel is valuable because I find that as humans we're always looking for the next thing to entertain us and you can also have a lot of spiritual entertainment and you can also have a lot of purposeful entertainment and it just becomes another thing that you kind

of use in order to escape as opposed to no this is what I'm dedicating my life to and this is what I'm committing my life to if that sense yeah exactly yeah I think that's just another way of saying what I was trying to say yeah yeah no I was just trying to just trying to dissect and understand that because yeah I think for me it's been really interesting Having learned a very ancient philosophy and then grappling with trying to make it make sense in the real life that I Live Now has been such a

difficult beautiful graceful awkward path to walk and I don't think I figured it out I'm still walking that path and trying to make sense of it and but I know that underlying it and you talked about this you you alluded to this this idea of having a purpose for life based on service being a place that we're all trying to get to I think that's been the only Guiding Light like that's that's been the only thing that is the the light at the end of the tunnel that makes sense yeah and and I find that

when I'm I'm I'm deeply want to help people find theirs and I find that what distracts us me included from that is past desires future opportunities and ultimately I'd say the biggest one which is what I want to talk about now is this societal noise that keeps us bound and that could be new Cycles it could be entertainment conversations it could be uh like we talked about before the expectations of work and life and people around us and so like you're so swept up in all of that and naturally most of the people around us

including us are skewed towards negativity bias confirmation bias we're we're stuck and so to override going back to where we started to override that kind of primitive self to say no I'm going to find the answer I'm going to push is so rare if not impossible that how does someone kind of let go of those shackles and going back to your prison Point how do you how do you get out the prison because the biggest I can't remember who said this but there's this idea of like it's it's evaded concept but I think maybe it's

been said in a movie or something more recently the idea that the best prisons are the ones where you can't see the handcuffs right this idea that you you don't even know your trapped right again so much there Jay yes sorry we're unpacking like we're I'm just downloading on T because I'm like you're super smart T so I'm like downloading onto you and like figure it out for me that's that's kind of where this how how our relationship's working right now it works for me so well I think something I just picked up from you

that's I think is really really inspiring for me and I'm sure for many others is where you've talked about that beautiful but difficult journey I think if you were sitting here saying I figured it out and now I want to help others I don't think I would have had the same feeling towards you at all and it just made me think cuz I feel like I'm kind of interested in a lot of things at the moment and going down some rabbit holes and don't necessar know like you know where it's going to end up that

maybe that's the beautiful thing maybe that's better than me coming here and saying let me tell you everything I know about Neuroscience you know so yeah I don't know where I'm going with that but I know I'm going to think about that overnight because I'm very reflective that really touched me actually to to think that there isn't some Golden Nugget that you've got to come up with at the end it's actually you know what you delve into and are curious about and where you go and how easy or difficult it is I think that's actually

like what the thing is for people so now if only I could remember any of the other things that you said no no I'm glad you talked about that and and I want to touch on that too like I I do feel like I there was a point in my life where I believed I was teaching what I was learning and then I had to live what I'd learned and then it all changed like it just completely changed and even now that that's why I'm in that dance because you you don't know and the the

the situation is giving you as we said earlier each impediment is giving you a new invitation to learn live and react and respond and figure it out again yeah and then that happens again and again and again and so I think it's like you know that phrase healer heal thyself I think that I've never understood that phrase in the way that I have until what you said what you just said which is that you kind of create like an Elixir that you can share with others if you actually do that if you keep just trying

to impart know what you think you know I don't think that has I'm going to say I'm not sure it has like much effect at all but I think if you can impart a feeling of what you went through I think that has much more power wow um and I'm going to move on quite swiftly because I just remembered another thing I wanted to say so you were talking about the noise around us but also earlier we were talking about all these ancient practices a lot of which come from our culture and maybe don't come

from other people's cultures I'll tell you the one thing I do that expands my Consciousness the most that is the easiest thing that anyone can do from any culture do you want to guess what it is no go for it I have no idea digital detox mhm so I don't watch the news anyway but obviously I am aware of the most important things that are going on in the world because I've got people around me that make sure I stay informed and that does not mean I make other people watch the news it's just my

family will tell me if I need to like look into something but when I do digital detoxes which I usually do if I take 2 3 4 weeks off over like Christmas and New Year that is the biggest change for me in terms of my mental space my perception of time how creative I become at that time I may also be probably spending a lot of time in nature and um kind of you know doing more of the kinds of exercise I love to do like swimming in the sea and stuff like that but that

one thing alone makes a noticeable difference for me and it does take some time you know doing a weekend is great like please do that if you can't do anything else but if you can give it some more time I noticed towards the end I just become like super creative it's so true I I can relate to it completely I think that's probably one of my favorite habits too and it's it's funny because everyone's like no Jay I just saw you post yesterday I'm like no we've got to a point where we built the systems

where we can be online and offline at the same time and and I couldn't agree with you more I'm my best self creatively even productively if I'm if I'm not glued to do scrolling or whatever else it may be and I think it comes back down to that's what I meant by the noise and that is the that is the answer that's that's a great answer because I do think that you just have to switch the noise off there isn't a way to operate in the noise and hope that you won't be affected by it

it's almost like you walk into a restaurant you will walk out smelling like the food in that restaurant like you can't go in there eat enjoy it and walk out and and I used to often think I I could do that like I used to think you could engage Eng with an energy and not be affected by it and that's not true like no one's powerful enough to do that and and you will you will kind of absorb that energy and I do find that we're just losing spaces of high frequency and vibration that people

can go to to have that the other way so there's lots of places you could go to and we all probably know what they are where like I don't like going there there my energy gets drained I don't like going there because I don't feel my best I think we're losing places in society that have the opposite effect like where does someone go to and you're saying nature is is definitely one of them and that one free obviously to people and that one's free as well and accessible and it's it's it's become harder I I

read this article a few years ago and it was talking about how what we value as a society Has Changed by the tallest building in the town and so back in the day the tallest building in the town would be the church so you could see the cross from anywhere and that would be the center point of and then that Chang to the government building the capital building you'd see that building the State Building became the tallest building and today if you looked at any City Center it would be the the Commerce it would be

the business it would be you know the tallest building will be a bank cool yeah and it was just this idea of how Society shows what's important and what's powerful too I'd add that as well that it's also what we see deem as powerful and I wanted wanted to get your take on what is it your perspective on on God and and the source in that sense like what have you you discovered or seen from your research in that space I mean that's a very difficult question to answer I think you don't have to if

you don't want to no it's not that I don't want to I mean it's difficult for me because I have to put my scientist head on when going answer that question which is that clearly God brings a lot of comfort to a lot of people and probably You could argue that it can't be disproven that God exists but with the science that we have at our fingertips at the moment it can't be proven so I have nothing against people you know having that as their primary like source of comfort and guidance in life but I

can't give you any evidence that such a thing exists even even with the um experiences that people have had under psychedelics or things like that I've I've heard or met so many people who have had like God interactions or Godlike interactions and things I'm sure you have too yeah that's that's what I was trying to get at from from the research point of view but you're saying that that's still not you wouldn't count as proof in the scientific sense no I wouldn't count it as proof and I would say that the person who described that

in the biggest detail to me who's someone that I really trust who's a positive psychologist said I had what I can only describe as a Godlike experience I don't think anyone can really say more than that the people with the near-death experiences often talk about something similar as well and there are some common themes like a tunnel of white light you know a being that's like more full of love than anything you've ever experienced it does tend to hold archetypes depending on what religious or cultural background you come from um not always but mostly so

yeah again I'm Cur you know I'm curious but I'm always going to be that person that is very happy to go down a rabbit hole but will also say but this is the end of what we know like currently yeah yeah yeah no no and that's totally that's totally interesting and fair and it's yeah it's just been something I've been fascinated by from a scientific point of view because it's it's um yeah trying to understand the as we've talked about today the otherworldly or other realm is is something that's beyond us like we don't we

don't even have like you said the brain doesn't even allow us to go there that's what we think um but I I think if we even believe that hypothesis there must be more that we can do to try to go there yes and and I will say that science does say that a sort of a healthy moderate amount of religiosity or belief in God is is beneficial to our Mental Health Heth and none or fundamentalism is actually you know negative for our mental health we've talked about so much today like we've really gone there and

and it was more than I thought too I've like avoided I've avoided every bullet point my team sent me and thought about I love that because it's been so much more fun just diving into your amazing mind and research and just getting getting an inkling is there anything that we haven't talked about that you really want to touch on this on your heart and mind I'm like just making sure that to sit with someone and really really pick their brain and someone who can speak about so many different things in such a broad range of

topics it's so rare I'm so grateful to you for that because I love how much how curious you are I love how much you're willing to push the envelope I love how challenging you are of both sides of the idea whether it's spirituality or science and uh we we end every on purpose episode with a final five so I'd love to ask you these five questions some of them are things we ask everyone and some of them will be geared toward so Dr T these are your final five the first question is what is the

best advice you've ever heard or received there's a few but you can say all of them okay so one is particularly to do with writing because the first time I had to write up my PhD and then every time I've written a book since then which I'm actually doing at the moment I struggle so somebody said to me just write something and I think that's quite an important metaphor for life like you just have to start you have to put one foot forward you know and then it's much easier than looking at a blank page

um and then the other one I think which I didn't really understand at the time but is kind of where I am now is is follow your heart what what do you understand about it differently now I think at the time I was probably in my like late 20s or early 30s and I thought you can't live life like that you've got to do the right thing with your career and you know that I sort of worried about what my parents would think and um but now I just I believe that if you do that

you can't go wrong I love that uh question number two what is the worst advice you ever heard or received um I'm not going to say it's the worst advice but I'm I'm going to say that the concept around it is perhaps flawed in a way that again I understand differently now which is that when I was at school high school my English teacher said to me you're so good at drama that you should read English Oxford and go to rder and you could become an actress now in those days there were no like Indian

actors or actresses in like the Western world really and so my father said Over My Dead Body and you will go to medical school I've obviously had a very privileged education I'm very pleased to be where I am now but I just wonder what could have happened if I'd actually been supported in that because because I'm not doing medicine now and I'm way more successful now in something that you know my parents couldn't have imagined so I just think this clipping of the wings of of children I think is is bad advice question number three

is it possible to manifest love 100% I did how I did it with my vision Bo it walk us through it so I had been divorced for quite a few years and I'd basically become a workaholic and I'd had a lot of success with vision boards for my work and then I remember just slightly thinking I think I'm using my work to run away from love again and then I just pushed that thought aside then the following year I thought okay I'm going to put this tiny little heart on my vision board but it's all

going to be about business and travel and so nothing changed and then I really thought to myself okay Tara if you believe in this manifest estation if you really really believe in it you've got to prove it to yourself that you can manifest love so I put this like huge engagement ring on the top left corner of my vision board I never usually put phrases on it but I was looking through magazines and I saw this phrase that said Joy comes out of the blue it was actually a Tiffany adver I just loved it so

I put it like on the top of my board and various other things so I did that for 20 for 2015 and actually nothing had happened by the end of 2015 but February 2016 I met the person who was to become my husband on a plane so that's out of the blue in the sky and we got engaged that year and then married the following years wow I love that that's a great story that's beautiful I'm sure that give people a lot of Hope what are people doing wrong uh with manifesting love where are people

going wrong I think it's a lot to do with this noise around us that you talked about so I think a lot of it is at a certain stage of life where you just think that's what you should be doing and personally I will go with a theme that you sort of alluded to as well which is that I think people are going for a lot of external characteristics when they actually should be going for like values and you know what the human being is actually like and what the relationship would be like rather than

the material things that's around it absolutely and question number five fifth the final question we ask this to everyone who's ever been on the show if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow what would it be love everyone just give out so much love yeah so so needed yeah so needed especially now well Dr tus SW thank you so much for coming on on purpose uh the book is called The Source the secrets of the universe the science of the brain please if you don't have a copy already go

and grab one and of course if you don't follow Dr Tara on social media please go and subscribe and follow on all channels uh I can't wait to share this I want to hear what resonated with you what connected with you please tag us both sharing insights your favorite Clips things you're practicing your action boards I want to see it and Dr teras thank you so much for your time and energy again it was truly a joy so thank you it was amazing for me too thank you so much thank you hey everyone if you

love that conversation go and check out my episode with the world's leading therapist Lori gotle where she answers the biggest questions that people ask in therapy when it comes to love relationships heartbreak and dating if you're trying to figure out that space right now you won't want to miss this conversation if it's a romantic relationship hold hands it's really hard to argue it actually calms your nervous systems just hold hands as you're having the conversation it's so lovely