and here I am 3 million in the whole and I have nothing I realized that I was looking through the world through the wrong lens and while I was always a good doctor and cared about people it was all about me versus saying how can I be of service and that changed everything the experiences we've had even the painful ones are not something we should hide because they make us who we are they give us resilience they give us strength Dr James R Dodie is a Stanford neurosurgeon New York Times bestselling author and he's revealing
that manifestation is rooted in science his teachings provide us practices for neurological transformation by strategically targeting your attention your desires your obstacles intention passion and expectations so that you can consciously create the life that you [Music] want can you share how did you get initiated into this knowledge about manifestation and about being able to essentially be a Creator in your life when you started off in a very difficult situation can you can you share your story sure and uh from my first book as you know into the magic shop uh I talk about this but
uh I grew up in poverty my father was an alcoholic uh my mother had had a stroke when I was a child she was partially paralyzed she had a seizure disorder unfortunately chronically depressed attempted suicide multiple times s uh we were on public assistance um uh evicted from different places and of course this is not the ideal environment to succeed in society and it's really sad too because if you're reasonably intelligent you sit there and you go what's wrong why don't I have access to that now if you're not that intelligent uh you sit there
and go well I accept this this is the situation here and it's okay and you don't think about other possibilities for yourself uh but for me I couldn't understand I said well I seem to be as smart as these other people I work hard and um first of all it made me realize that um it doesn't matter often times how good you are how smart you are if you're in these environments and as you know from the first sentence in the new book mind magic uh can you say profan on yes absolutely I write this
sentence that says uh the universe doesn't give a about you and I don't mean that in a negative way I what I mean by that is that the Universe isn't looking at you it doesn't care about you uh things frankly often happen uh by accident uh as an example uh you look at some people and some people use the term they won the sperm Lottery right they grew up uh with uh wealth or position or access to resources that you may not have and it's not because they're bad it's not because they're good it just
that happens sometimes so uh for me though um because of my family situation frankly when there were issues uh I would get on my bicycle and ride as far and as fast away as I could and on one of those excursions I ended up at a strip mall and in the strip mall was a magic shop and I had had an interest in Magic I used to have this plastic thumb uh that I would use for tricks and I walked into this magic shop and there was a lady there and she was in her 50s
but she's one of these people who had this radiant personality a smile that just embraced you you felt okay and it turned out she was the owner's mother and frankly she knew nothing about magic she just happened to be minding the store uh because her son was off toing an errand but we began talking and the thing about her and this is something I think we all want is to have an environment of psychological safety where you feel you're not being judged people are authentically interested in you and they treat you like an equal they
don't look down on you and this was how she was and so we began a conversation and she asked me some questions that normally I wouldn't answer because you know if you're poor you're ashamed and in this casee though I did answer them and after speaking for 20 or 30 minutes she said to me she said you know I'm here for another six weeks if you come every day I think I could teach you something that could really help you now of course uh I'm not going to tell you that I had any degree of
self-awareness or Insight I did not at all I was a 12-year-old poor kid but the reality was though frankly I had nothing better to do uh she was very nice and she was giving me chocolate chip cookies and uh and promising something that uh I didn't understand uh but I thought uh uh why not and uh so I showed up every day for six weeks and it was uh amazing uh because I didn't realize and I think a lot of people don't appreciate it's one thing to talk about trauma and post-traumatic stress uh disorder associated
with soldiers but the reality is children who grow up in chaotic dysfunctional uh environments that is a form of constant trauma and many of these children uh grow up with post-traumatic stress disorder and they're not able to integrate into society uh their um sympathetic nervous system is chronically activated they're always looking around they can't focus they're tense and certainly uh that was my situation and so uh when I met with Ruth uh you have to remember this was before mindfulness meditation were common words at all um so when I started meeting with her I mean
to be frank with you uh I sort of thought she was full of I I mean because I mean you know you're a 12-year-old kid you've never been in this place where you're asked to relax your muscles or concentrate uh but that being said I showed up and I did it and uh I suddenly began experiencing that I was more relaxed she taught me uh technique of focus because the reality is to accomplish to learn you have to be present and if you're thinking about the past all the time of what could have been should
have been might have been or looking at a future that hasn't occurred yet you're not present so once I learned how to be present the next thing she taught me was that the narrative that I had going on in my head uh was not truth and what I mean by that is unfortunately so many of us tell ourselves we're not good enough we're not smart enough we're not worthy we don't deserve love and uh when you tell yourself that uh that becomes truth it's just like if you say the word I can't can't that becomes
truth and what people don't understand is as a result of this based on actually the power we have within our brains that becomes truth and that results in limited beliefs uh and the thing though is that it is within our power to liberate ourselves every time you say a negative comment it's like putting a brick down in a wall and a prison that you're creating for yourself and the wall s get higher and it gets darker yet within your pocket is the key to open the door it's the question is when you're going to realize
that the key was always there and you didn't have to Build That Wall and that is fundamentally how we liberate ourselves and how we take control of our lives and understand our own self agency uh to change our lives it's not from the universe and then this then once we understand this this gives us uh incredible power uh to improve ourselves but the other thing is that once you start stop being hypercritical with yourself it changes how you see the world because if you're constantly hypercritical then you look at the world through the lens of
being hypercritical of others and being judgmental and uh as a result it also limits your connection to people and what I tell people is when I stopped criticizing myself uh and how I looked at the world the world changed how it looked at me because if you're constantly angry if you're constantly upset if you're constantly thinking the world is unfair you give off this vibe to everyone around you and sometimes it scares people uh and also it allowed me to forgive my parents in the sense that it wasn't an issue that they didn't love me
it was an issue that they had their own pain and they did not have the resources uh to help themselves yeah there's two things that I want you to share so number one you just shared how our beliefs are going to essentially is going to change the way that we're seeing the world and also how the world sees us and you mentioned emitting A vibe but that's not again it's just not something that's kind of superficial or here say like there's a literal kind of emanation or a field that res that emanates from the human
heart for example no that's absolutely correct and this is why if you uh sometimes you look at somebody who is just standing there and you have an immediate feeling about the energy they're giving off and what people don't appreciate is whether it's the brain or the heart we emanate energy some people call it vibration some people call it oscillation uh but that's true as an example the heart itself emanates energy that's measurable about 3 to 5et away from you and they're in fact a number of conditions where your emotional state uh actually affects your physiology
and this vibrational energy uh so that's that's all really true and this is why there are people you can walk up to and you immediately feel goodness and that they're there for you they're listening they're present they don't have to say anything it's just how they carry themselves and then there are other people who you cross the street if you see them now I would temper that with the statement that there are implicit unconscious biases that are not truth and that uh are affected by the fact that our brain is a predictor of behavior and
it looks for patterns and whether the pattern is correct or not it still results in interpretation yeah and this can result in unfair biases or unfair judgments so you have to be aware of that uh and sit there and analyze yourself is this Truth Or Not truth and is it possible uh that the Judgment I just made is not correct and certainly uh this is something I've learned on more than one occasion yeah a good example would be you know you're around somebody that is uh uniquely good and helpful and somebody who uh you know
spires to be of service and all those things but you can feel uncomfortable around them because we might have a blueprint that you know is threatened by that it's threatening our safety because we don't want to change we don't want to to you know to be to to be altruistic or to you know challenge ourselves to do more and so we might feel uncomfortable around somebody that might challenge us to be better you know and yeah so it's like it's it's a both end thing you know it's the environment around us and the people people
their unique energy and also ours and how things resonate essentially well and that's uh that's really a good point I mean you have to appreciate that again um we don't have Insight often times which causes us to be afraid what are the causes it could it be somebody's stature could it potentially be a sense true or not that they're somehow more educated or smarter or more accomplished or you're afraid that you're going to be judged by them and you're not going to pass and uh uh and this is uh again with mind training and understanding
how your brain works you get a sense of who you are and uh I'm not sure if you're familiar with this concept of wabisabi and kugi uh but the point is that many people are afraid of um showing their vulnerability uh because they feel that somebody's going to use it against them yet if you look at the principles of kin sui which Dat Back to the 15th century Japan and how they repaired Pottery it used to be that they tried to hide uh the cracks in the pottery when they repaired it but ultimately uh they
understood that the experiences we've had even the painful ones are not something we should hide because they make us who we are they give us resilience they give us strength so they started repairing the pottery with golden glue so when you held the peace it was broken but you honored that Brokenness yeah that was repaired and I think that's a a wonderful metaphor uh for loving yourself and accepting yourself because there is not a human alive who has not made mistakes who's not messed up who uh has not been hurt and uh that makes us
unique and makes us who we are and there's nothing to hide from and unfortunately in modern society uh many people are terrified of judgment and this is causing a huge amount of mental health issues in terms of stress anxiety depression because people keep striving to live up to um levels that are are not fair for them they shouldn't be required to do that we should give people love acceptance and that is the greatest motivator and power to allow somebody to change their lives yeah and that's what she did for you she helped you to establish
those things and a sense of self value and from there gave you some direction on creating a life that you really wanted and so did she ask you to like actually like write out what you wanted to accomplish yeah and in fact uh I discuss some of these things in this new book mind magic which actually is a result of the first book and the reason I say that is one of the other parts of what she taught me was I call the visualization technique but in fact was a manifestation technique now you have to
appreciate I was 12 at the time and poor and not self-aware so when she asked me to write down things that I wanted I did it frankly from a perspective that uh many people would uh I thought that well I want to be a doctor and it wasn't so much I didn't want to help people but I was a doctor and people would see me as important and accomplished or I wanted a mansion or I wanted a Porsche I remember walking along one day and seeing a guy in a silver taret uh and I said
I want that and I did get it but uh and I wanted a Rolex and I wanted a million dollars which seemed like a lot of money in 1968 uh but uh I did uh this practice of visual ation but what strengthens that or does something which we call Value tagging is through intention and repetition and utilizing as many sensory organs because that's the information that comes in so it's thinking about it it's writing it down it's seeing yourself writing it down it's using your hand to write it down uh uh reading it silently reading
it aloud visualizing you being in that position and literally I did this hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of times uh and created this image of who I wanted to be the problem with it was that I got every one of those things but my motivation was out of a fear narrative it wasn't out of a love narrative and what I mean by that was I thought that if I just had those things they would make me whole I would be okay and everyone would see I was okay yeah uh but it didn't do that
it made me actually more and more unhappy because here I had all of these friends saying man you've done it dude you have everything you know I I remember I um there was a restaurant where I lived in Newport Beach and it actually was owned by Kevin Cosner's wife at the time it was called Twin Palms and it was this amazing restaurant in this uh Mall in Newport Beach and I would drive my yellow Ferrari there and I would park in front I knew the owner and and you know I would jump out of my
car and I had a tailor who made all of my clothes and I had a table there and I would sit there at my table and people would come up and I would just chat with them and invariably there were a number of women who would show up and you know all my buddies are going God that's amazing dude gosh you're living the life and yet I would go home and sometimes with a woman I met and I would wake up the next morning and I would have this horrible feeling that what am I doing
I don't even care about this person yet you know I'm trying to live up to an image but it's not me and it's not making me happy and it wasn't until I lost uh almost $80 million in 6 weeks and was 3 million in the whole that I sort of went back and uh reflected on where I was and one of the things I realized was that I had not really honored Ruth but I was 12 and when I went through everything and all of our conversations I realized that I uh uh was looking through
the world through the wrong lens and uh while I was always a good doctor and cared about people it was all about me versus say versus saying how can I be of service and uh and that changed everything uh and it uh resulted actually which is an interesting thing uh I had just started dating my present wife at the time here I am 3 million in the whole and I'm dealing with the banker who I borrow 15 million from who I have to pay back so I have to sell everything uh and my lawyers because
I created all these complicated trust because of my wealth and um one of the things that occurred was the lawyer when I was dealing with he said to me said you know Jim we were supposed to create this revocable uh charitable trust and we actually did not file the paperwork so all of the stock you were going to give away actually you don't have to give it away and I thought about this for a long time and here I am 3 million in the whole and I have nothing uh uh but at the end of
the day uh I told him to go ahead and give it away so that ended up being about $30 million oh man but what did it do in some ways it liberated me also uh because if you're poor uh it's like a monkey on your back right you worry about it how am I going to pay the bills uh what am I going to do what happens if XYZ happens and uh um so I went ahead and gave it away and but this allowed me to create uh health clinics around the world uh programs for
the disabled uh programs for adolescence affected by Aids HIV it allowed me to set up uh endowed chairs at different universities set up scholarships fund research uh uh at Stanford uh and um amazingly it allowed me to meet the Dal Lama who became the founding benefactor at the center I created at Stanford and who became a close friend and uh I became chairman of the Daly Lama Foundation this then allowed me to uh meet Desmond Tutu and tikn Han and a number of other spiritual and religious leaders atar tole Amma the hugging Saint sad Guru
Shri Shri Ravi Shankar and develop relationships with them now I mentioned my uh girlfriend at the time who's now my wife but uh the Wall Street Journal did an article and it said uh well what do you think about what he did and she goes I don't mind him being generous I just wish he had it given it all away keep a little bit yes but the other side of that coin though is that the first part was I truly did go from rags to riches but when I lost everything again my worst day scenario
is I'm a neurosurgeon who gets paid more than 99.9% of people so I was never going to starve but I still say I went from Rags to Riches in the sense of a spiritual journey yeah being empty because I was chasing things that meant nothing to uh leading a life of purpose and meaning that's the real riches yeah yeah amazing amazing thank you for sharing that um wow I mean that journey in it of itself is remarkable and um you know to to be able to put all this together for us and also you the
great thing about this book and looking at some of the things from the previous book this book is really more for us right the the first book was a lot more about your story and there were principles in there but this one is like this is how you do it and also learning from my mistakes that part that I missed out on essentially and I said this statement earlier it's the come from where are you coming from with your intention and your ability to manifest because you're manifesting all the time but where's your come from
and so I want to talk about this specifically because having you here in your experience and talk about the brain is really one of the greatest gifts we could get which is what are these parts of our brain what are these aspects of our brain that we are using for all this stuff let's talk about some of the different networks in the brain that are involved and that we can affect to create what we want in our lives sure so the first thing is and I talked about the sympathetic nervous system the parasympathetic nervous system
but this vagus nerve which has both of these uh nerves in it and are and these n nerves are distributed throughout the body in all of our major organ systems and it's a two-way street so you're getting information from them as well but they fundamentally affect the brain itself and I mentioned how I was able to manifest these things when I was 12 that led to uh uh on some level amazing success but it was from a fear narrative and when you're fearful actually often times it limits many of what we call our cogn brain
work or brain networks from functioning at their best but that doesn't mean you still can't accomplish or have those uh intentions manifest the problem is that for many people uh they don't appreciate the difference between the two the I want versus how can I be of help and uh so many people are able to accomplish if you will um selfish needs but it does make them happy and I'm sure you know a lot of very successful at least by uh our societal Narrative of happiness and success money power and position who frankly are not happy
at all and they keep striving to get more but it's not making them any more happy because they're confused they don't have that insight and self-awareness and they're all focused on everybody looking at them and saying how great they are so um the reality though is uh when you look through a different lens the lens of how can I be of service how can I be helpful and this is activation of your parasympathetic nervous system because that is how we evolved as a species to live events that stimulate our sympathetic nervous system hundreds of years
ago or even thousands hundreds of thousands of years ago were typically short-lived your sympathetic nervous system resol responded to the threat the threat went away or you were eaten but uh uh but then you were back at your Baseline that's where we're meant to live yet the nature of modern society is constantly activating our sympathetic nervous system but if you get into that mental state of activating your parasympathetic nervous system what happens is not only does your peripheral physiology work much better but your brain works much better these cognitive brain networks so one the process
of manifesting we talked about sort of how development affected our decisions oftentimes unconsciously also this idea the difference between what you think you need versus what you truly need and a lot of people get confused about that so that's one of the other things and then you have to understand how how do I embed something into my unconscious or subconscious and you do that through a process called value tagging and what I mean by that is you have to demonstrate to the brain that something is important to you now that can be done uh out
of fear or anxiety or uh a deep question that you fixate on um or uh defining an intention you want to manifest and the reason I use the example of something uh as an example fear as a neurosurgeon I see patients who have different conditions and um I may tell somebody as an example well you know you have this tumor in your brain it's benign it's called a menoma and they'll say I've never heard of that yet you see them among mon they're too late in they go it's the most amazing thing I've seen five
people who I met who have the exact same condition or it's like seeing uh I saw an orange Mustang uh the other day and I'm going God I've never seen that color and then within a few days I saw four or five of them and that's because you put that into your subconscious it got embedded and now you're attuned you tagged it you tagged it yeah and so your subconscious is always looking for situations like that where you would have normally ignored it before so if you have a intention that you wish to manifest you
have to make it Salient to your brain so the first part is and a lot of people don't appreciate we have 10 million bits of information through our sensory organs that are coming through all the time now 99.9% are related to maintaining homeostasis or bodily functions but there's about 50 to 100 that we can um have access to on a conscious level and when you embed an intention consciously through the acts we talked about thinking about it writing it down reading it uh Etc then it makes it Salient so what happens is this part of
our brain this network is called the default mode Network it is self-referential it's Associated typically with mind wondering or daydreaming but it's all about the representation of who we are or how we see ourselves or how we wish to be once that gets embedded there and activates that then it next activates uh and that's called uh a task negative Network actually but then it activates the task positive Network which is the salience network we've now made it Salient we've it's as if we took uh that intention put it in a file and embedded it in
a filing cabinet in our salience Network and said this is important to me yeah then once that happens then this activates our attention Network now we're going to because it's important we're going to attend to it with our Consciousness in the sense and uh as a result then you start looking around for any instance in the book I I use the example of The Blood Hound that once it smells what's in that file it has to find it so it's looking everywhere and this is the nature of coincidence or synchronicity you go that's amazing I
was just thinking about this now it's here and uh and this is how it works and once it's been Ted as important and your subconscious has looked around for it then your conscious uh through the executive control Network which if you will makes things happen uh you track it down and uh as an example I was at a coffee shop several weeks ago and there's a project I've been working on but it was very noisy and you can't hear anything yet in the dent of all of that I heard somebody talking about the exact same
thing I was working on and it resulted me in getting up and introducing myself but it's like you being at a party I mean parties often times are really noisy yet if somebody says your name in The Dent of all of this because your identity is so deeply embedded in you you turn to it right and it's the same type of thing you have activated these brain networks which work together to help you manifest uh your intention yeah those moments happen for us all throughout our lives and I think again we forget that that happens
you know and what do you think about the idea of having we'll say a magic notebook where you write down when those moments occur and you write them down so you remember how powerful you are and kind of co-creating these what we would deem to be magical moments what do you think about that no I think that's a good idea because again it strengthens your belief system right yeah and uh so I think that's really important it's changing your mindset and really that's what we're changing we're changing your mindset that many people have which is
a neg ative one which is it's not possible for me to one of oh it is potentially possible it can happen or it has happened and once you see it happen a few times you go yeah I can do it and in some ways this also brings up an important point which is the nature of habit uh habits are important and um you don't go out and say I'm going to run a marathon and wake up and run a marathon right it's like for yourself as you changed how you saw yourself and ultimately it wasn't
that you became a a stud with sixpacks the next day when you woke up and said I want that what had to happen you had to go to the gym every day probably and you had to look at the other guys who were buil and you go I don't look that good but you persisted every day and then suddenly over two months 3 months 6 months you're like going wow I look like these guys now that's amazing but it's because you created a habit where you showed up every day you did the work that's necessary
and this also emphasizes a point that there's no Free Ride it's not like okay Jim I read your book uh okay tomorrow it's all going to happen for me it doesn't work that way and the great thing I think about the book is that it gives uh a six- week program or at least six lessons you can do that help you change your brain through science uh to create a um plan to how to change your life now this speaks to a really phenomenal fact that I don't think a lot of us ever think about
which is no two humans have the same brain every single person's brain is vastly unique but we just kind of see it as this like squishy almost soft as butter organ but you actually in your work you you have seen many brains and you know that brain can be very functionally different but also this practice of entraining our beliefs changes our brain our physical brain and also different activities so if you could talk about how our thoughts can change our brain but also how things like playing an instrument can literally make our brain different well
uh that's absolutely correct uh every brain is different but that being said most people have the capacity which they don't appreciate to change their brain or how they think or their mindset and this is extraordinarily powerful and it gets back to this idea of self- agency many people uh frequently give their self- agency away as an example I remember uh when I was an undergraduate uh first of all I mean I struggled because I didn't have a background for going to college uh it was not a high priority at all in my family and uh
also here I had many quote unquote friends but almost all of them were from affluent backgrounds and here I was struggling in school I mean my grade point average when I applied to med school was 2.53 where the average to get into med school was 3.76 and my quote unquote friends would say you'll never get into med school it's a waste of time why are you trying you're never going to make it and this is actually also something that's horrible because while each of our brains are unique they're different they have different capacities the reality
is though that every brain has the ability to change and if you listen to people tell you what you can't do and you believe it that becomes truth or reality and I was fortunate in that Ruth made me understand that nobody had the right to decide my destiny and I think that's really true uh you know people will listen to friends sometimes they'll listen to uh parents or siblings or others who somehow believe that they have the right to tell you what's possible for you and nobody has that right in in this instance because you
know judging you off of your GPA none of these indiv idual understood where you were coming from and what you were dealing with in your life that was affecting what you were doing with school workor but they also weren't acknowledging your potential as well and so you faced somewhat of a board who kind of had had your fate in their hands with the decision of can this individual be um placed into a medical school and you were able to go up against that opposition can you talk about that sure well and this gets back to
the thing is that and we talked about uh implicit bias people make judgments about you of which there's no evidence that those judgments are actually valid judgments if nobody knows anything about you and we were talking about getting into medical school at my college you had to go to a Premed committee to get a letter of recommendation before you could even apply to college or medical school and so I went to the office to get an appointment and the woman looked at my file and she said I'm not giving you an appointment now imagine you're
20 years old uh this has been your dream and the woman says to me I said why and she says to me because it's a waste of everyone's time now how is it possible somebody would make a statement such a hurtful statement to somebody to a kid a young person yeah especially now fortunately uh for whatever reason I had the wherewithal to say well I appreciate your statement but I'm not leaving here until you give me an appointment and she did and so imagine what it was like though to go to this appointment and uh
of course I'm very anxious and I walk into a room and I'm sure you seen the photographs remember of Putin at one end of a long table these other people at the other end in some ways the was the same there these three individuals in their white coats and uh at one end of the table I'm at the other end and the guy in charge who's sitting in the middle he stands up he has my file he throws it on the table and he says say what you have to say so we can get this
over with I mean how brutal how horrible how mean and um fortunately uh I looked at him and I said' who gave you the right to destroy people's dreams I said you know nothing about me other than a grade point average and then I I went on to uh for about 20 minutes uh telling him that there's no evidence that Beyond an above average level of intelligence is necessary to succeed and that you have to understand people have different events in their lives that influence their grade point average and it's not fair and I refuse
to allow you to objectify me to a grade and the reality is once you force somebody to look at you as a human being and not as a great point average they cannot turn away from that yeah and as a result they all three of them uh ended up crying right so at the end of this um they actually ended up giving me the highest letter of recommendation um the secretary as I was leaving because she was in the back of the room she said listen I want to give you this and it was a
brochure for a summer enrichment program for socioeconomically disadvantaged students and minority students at tulan University in New Orleans and she said to me she said but I want you to understand the deadline has passed but I don't think that's going to matter for you so I ended up calling this lady she let me into the program I applied to one medical school and that was two line and I actually uh did not have enough credits to even graduate so they accepted they accepted me with a 2.52 or 53 GPA and no decree so um yeah
amazing but you have to also now come around and understand the rest of the story here and it gets also back to no one can judge anyone's ability so after her and Kate Katrina which had a huge impact in new orans the medical school was flooded it shut down for two years the students were sent off to Baylor um the library was severely damaged and so afterwards they were trying to find the dean actually the medical school resigned so they were looking for a new Dean and they had a fellow from Harvard but he wanted
an endowed chair now an endowed chair is typically a benefactor give several million dollars and it names a chair after them and then the professor then uh because it's endowed receives the benefit from those funds uh so they were looking for someone to endow the dean's chair so Lo and behold uh I ended up endowing the dean's chair and repairing the library so today uh the dean Remains the Dodie professor at the medical school I repaired the library and I'm also on the Board of Governors so you never know what one person has in terms
of the ability uh to manifest a future yeah and this is why never never underestimate the power of somebody to change their lives by changing their brain yeah oh man I this is amazing amazing um you know that's one of those full circle moments and also in those moments when when those individuals who you interacted with that was so impactful for so many students into the future you know but it was that moment of you standing for yourself and representing yourself and also I love that moment when she said it's it's probably not going to
matter for you like it it passed but she just saw what you can do and having that mindset come what may I'm going to figure this thing out I'm going to do what's necessary and having a little bit of that sprinkled into you know your mind magic and having the audacity to do that though it's working on yourself and and all the things that you learned early on from Ruth and just putting this formula together and you're going to have those moments of decision and wow this is is just blowing me away um there's so
many other things I want to talk to you about but I want to ask you again what I'm hearing is we're coming into this world we've got this amazing instrument that we're all endowed with you know the human mind the human brain and it sets out to start getting data and getting programmed a certain way and it might get programmed in a way that's not advantageous to the life that you want and what you're saying is that no matter where you are no matter who you are you can change your brain and that is going
to change your life automatically and doing so just to Anor this in we can physically change our brain our brain can get a different structure based on our choices is that adequate to say no that's absolutely correct and if you look at as an example uh monks Buddhist monks as an example they can control their body temperature they can control their heart rate or you look at Wim Hoff who another example through deep mental training uh he can be out in the cold and uh theoretically I guess he was trying to climb to Everest and
shorts and no shoes now I would caution that let's say an individual like whm Hoff um or even Olympic athletes that is a combination of genetics combining with intention as an example uh I was probably not going to become a uh marathon runner right because or at least a worldclass marathon runner because I may not have had the combination of genes that allow me to do that but that being said I could become a pretty damn good one and uh so yes there are people who just uh through nature end up having their activity whether
it's a sport or whatever combined with the right genetic makeup that makes them better than almost anyone else yeah but for most of us uh we can maximize what our genes allow us to do but it may not necessarily be world class yeah thank you so much for saying this is one of my favorite moments of this right now because this speaks to again it's not about being quote realistic it's about blending what your what Your template is your own genetic makeup which is already miraculous in in it in and of itself but for example
if you're coming into the game you know you're now you know a grown man you're 25 years old and you're 5 foot1 and you're just like I'm going to you know be the greatest basketball player of all time it's probably not going to work out like that but with your intention and you focus on you know the training or you focusing on you know learning educating yourself around basketball whatever the case might be it's going to land you somewhere in the stratosphere Fe of excellence in something to do with basketball right so that you might
be the greatest sports writer who ever existed for the NBA or you might be you might end up in some kind of ownership with the NBA you know and I've seen this literally happen with some of my friends and even people who've been on the show like Jesse ller for example he's now a part owner of the Atlanta Hawks and this is just one of those things that he was just he had this interest in basketball you know just growing up and it's something that he stayed connected to throughout all his entrepreneurial uh Adventures but
it was this love of this game and certain things unfolded to where he's now a part owner of this team you know what I mean well I would also tell you my actually my younger son who's 15 is a big basketball fat but he reminded me and there's a fellow who's 5 foot6 who plays professional basketball I guess and and so everyone told him you're never going to make it so even with many apparent disadvantages you can po reach a level of Excellence uh but again uh it takes work it takes practice it takes habit
formation and it takes an iron will to make that happen but I would also caution that when you have an intention or goal if you get so um engaged in it to the point where you believe you have to accomplish that and you SA sacrifice everything you have to then think okay now I'm at the top of the mountain but what have I sacrificed yeah what is this for because you know there's some people who get into their head that they have to do X Y or Z but along the way they sacrifice friends they
sacrifice marriages they sacrifice their children and for what and I think that's an important uh issue people have to confront because we get confused sometimes about what's really important and people again giving you external affirmation telling you how great you are doesn't take care of immense loneliness you have from discarding every person in your life to get there and uh one of the greatest causes of suffering for many people is uh attachment and craving and when you're so attached to an outcome it actually be uh very self-destructive yeah yeah this goes back to that ancient
tenant to know thyself and I don't think a lot of people's problem is thinking too big it's not thinking big enough it's not really knowing what what potential they really have and stretching oneself and so I want to give it that little caveat of being mindful to you know take into consideration what what is possible yes but also understand and you have so much more potential in you than you probably realize and with that being said the potential of this conversation has run its course and there are so many more things I want to talk
to you about so hopefully we can do this again can you let people know where to pick up a copy of mind magic sure uh first of all though just to respond to a comment you made use the term audacious and I think that's the way people should look at the world what is your audacious aspiration of who you want to and if you combine that with being of service because uh as I said earlier it's not a negation of materialism I enjoy having things but your focus needs to be on how can I be
of service and that gets you all the other stuff when or if you decide you actually need the other stuff and I think that's uh really really important one of the greatest moments in this conversation for me personally that really stood out was when you apparently sacrificed that opportunity to have some money when you didn't have anything when everything was seemingly taken from you and you had the the ventures with the stocks and all that stuff which end up being approximately $30 million in value and what that effectively was it was it was a form
of tithing you know you were giving something away that you didn't NE necessarily even think that you had and you know it's one of those seemingly um commands you you talked about how the I doesn't really give a but this command to the universe or or this um this signal you're sending out that I'm okay I have enough I'm going to be okay and as a matter of fact I want to do good and so seeing these things in a strange way coming back to you this has been a tenant in so many different spiritual
um Frameworks of tithing of giving even when you don't think you have a lot to give just that Spirit of giving and starting to embed that in your in your subconscious right so when you're doing that you're you're embedding this like Rhythm and this framework and this belief and I have the ability to give and so even as I'm aspiring to be great and to accomplish these cool things in my life this is going to be about service to others as well this isn't just about me it's about we no that's exactly right and I
think the other point is that that single action liberated me and what I mean by that is if you grow up poor what do you think is the most important thing yeah having money and and by doing that action it freed me that was no longer The Narrative anymore and that also then allowed me again to look at the world not from the I perspective uh from but from the we perspective and again if you look at the world through that lens you get everything you need everybody needs a copy of mind magic can you
let everybody know where to pick up a copy yes uh one of the uh uh places you can pick up a copy online is at bookshop.org and the reason I mentioned that is that is a group of independent book sellers uh which supports them but of course you can also get it at uh Amazon as well as at Barnes & Noble and frankly almost Dan uh bookstore awesome this is been phenomenal I was really looking forward to this conversation and you really helped me to just re-energize this awareness and I think one of the things
that I I took away from just studying your work was you know once you accomplished all these things you might get away from the practice and remembering what got you there and so it really helped to re-energize my practice and I needed that right now so I really appreciate you well thank you and you know uh I think one of the toughest things is uh humility and when you accomplish a lot uh there's always the danger of you taking yourself too seriously or thinking you're important and none of us are that important uh what's important
like I said be of service awesome Dr James Dody everybody okay my friend thank you hey if you like this video make sure to check out this video right here that Awakening process typically happens when people reach their lowest denominator they hit rock bottom because then they can see themselves Through The Eyes of somebody else you feel so altered you're not returning any tax that's when you start observing yourself I mean you can learn and change in pain and suffering or you can learn and change in joy and inspiration
