[Music] let's applaud the curious the bold the ones who have the courage to stand up and speak out brave enough to question the way things are let's embrace the seekers celebrate and encourage them to look beyond the easy answer and never stop searching for truth because it's the free thinkers those who question and aren't afraid to embrace life with an open mind [Music] that often change how we experience the world [Music] stay curious [Music] we live in a world that's changing and it's changing in ways that we've never seen before we're in uncharted territory in
many respects we don't have a good guidebook to tell us how to navigate through the waters of change that we find ourselves in today some people are talking about how do we survive the changes i don't know about you but for me i want to do more than survive i want to thrive and that's precisely what these changes do they allow us to thrive in an environment that's shifting because we've embraced the fact of that shifting environment the the topics some people talk about diet i prefer to think of it more as nutrition a diet
brings to mind some kind of a regimen that we do for a period of time to achieve a goal and when that goal is achieved maybe we stay with it maybe we don't that works for some people but for me i prefer to think of it as a way of living and the nutrition that i give my body every day so i want to talk to you about nutrition exercise supplements and about the heart brain connection that we've talked about in missing links when it comes to nutrition what the scientists are now telling us and
they think is new information parallels very closely the wisdom of our most ancient and cherished spiritual traditions and that is simply this the closer that we can gather our nutrition from living foods plant-based diets specifically the more nutrition and the better quality of nutrition it creates for our bodies now for a lot of doctors i know they're saying it's like it's something new but i want to share something with you i mentioned in previous episodes that the nog commodity library for example the gnostic texts that library was edited in the 4th century by the catholic
church and there were at least 43 books we know that were either removed altogether or condensed and replaced among those books the gospel of thomas thomas being the scribe that recorded the words of the master teacher jesus as he spoke to his community so this isn't about a religious man this is about a master teacher answering for his community many of the same questions you're asking me they were saying master what is it that we should eat to to bring strength and health to our bodies how do we bring healing to our own bodies what
he said to his community was this he said the things that give life to your food will give life to your body also and the things that destroy your food will destroy your body and about you that cannot be any clearer to me and the eloquent masterful words spoken over 2000 years ago he's telling us what the best science of our time is found for today that when we cook our foods overcook our foods when we hydrogenate them with oils when they're processed through art artificial ways of of creating substances that really aren't food if
the food that we're eating does it come from a garden in the earth where you can identify it it's probably not food and i think this this is so true so the closer we can get our food to its natural source the better quality of nutrition that we're going to find almost universally scientists have agreed that a plant-based diet is optimum uh doesn't mean that we shouldn't eat meat if you're going to eat meat it has to be really clean cleanly grown fed with the kinds of nutrients we all know the terms free range grass-fed
all those kinds of things but here's here's the thing and i know this for myself when i travel it's hard to eat well every single day and i know people that beat themselves up when they can't honor that commitment so i'm going to share with you the promise i made to myself a long time ago i'm living in the real world i'm walking in this world doing the best i can to be the best person i can to share with you what i know to be true and the promise i made to my body is
every meal that i ingest in that moment i will give my body the absolute best that's available in that moment and if it's not what i typically eat that's okay because that's the best i have in that moment the next moment the next opportunity i have for a meal if i'm given a choice between a beautiful meal of something that i would typically choose and some tasty snack that the airplane is offering me this is where the workshop of my life begins because the promise i made to my body was to choose the best that's
available in that moment and i'm going to do that every single time so this is the promise i made to myself i don't typically eat a lot of pasta for example when i'm home on the road it's possible you can be a non-carnivore and starve in some of the most beautiful hotels in the world that have beautiful food but it's it's not the kind of food that is grown uh in our father's garden for example so uh i'm gonna invite you guys to think about those things if you can give yourself the the highest quality
of nutrition at every meal that's key number one number two movement our bodies are designed to move we typically think of exercise in the way that we do as a diet that it's something you do in a moment and then and then you're done with it if you can think of exercise more as a way of being throughout the day and every opportunity that you have move parts of your body if you were living in the jungle ten thousand years ago parts of your body that you would need to to move and to use so
it can be simple things when you're walking through an airport you have a choice between taking a moving stairway and moving under your own volition take the walk you've been on a plane or you've been in the car it's good for you to do that but the whole definition of exercise is changing exercise physiologists now are telling us that what we used to think of as exercise 15 20 years ago high intensity aerobics distance running and things like that here's the key they can be good for us however what they mean to our bodies changes
as we age so at different points of our life different ages of our life our body interprets different kinds of exercise in different ways for example high intensity aerobics distance running for a man or woman under 40 years old these uh are examples of of where we can optimize uh the way our bodies are functioning after 40 as the hormones begin to change our bodies interpret that kind of exercise completely differently so what does that mean it means after 40 we are looking for the kind of exercise that is high intensity short duration intervals so
maybe 30 seconds of a very high intensity cycling running push-ups anything 30 seconds all out as hard as you can resting for 15 seconds and then going into another interval of another kind of movement and what the studies are showing is if we can use multiple large muscle groups simultaneously that's we have the greatest benefit to balance the hormones for both men and women over 40 so our hormones begin to change we're both talking about estrogen we're both talking about testosterone progesterone dhea levels the precursor to every one of the hormones in our bodies we
need to optimize these and our bodies will interpret exercise differently after the age right around 40. it's different for everyone but but generally right around 40 years of age so that's why people i know in 50s and 60s they're on the treadmill they're doing the cycles they say man i do i do this every day and i seem to be gaining weight and and i seem to be out of shape my my muscle tone is gone it's flab our bodies after the age of 40 interpret that kind of exercise is the need to pack on
the weight to prepare because the body says i don't know how long i'm gonna need to do this or when i need to rest so it's a completely different signal to the body i'm inviting you now to to check this stuff out for yourself do your due diligence on what works for you but the idea of exercise is changing that's number two number three supplements a lot of controversy about supplements in an ideal world ten thousand years ago the food that we get from the garden that we grow in our backyard may have had all
of the nutrients that we need to sustain our bodies and the very sad truth is right now even the best home-grown gardens where we cultivate our own mixture of soil the tests are showing it does not the food that comes from that does not have the density of nutrients that our bodies were accustomed to over 10 000 years ago that means it's a good idea to supplement there is no one size that fits all everyone needs different supplements and this is where where medical science can help us pinpoint this uh you can't beat medical science
for diagnostics so when you do your blood test you can find out the annual physical what is it that's optimized what are you low in uh and and you can supplement accordingly with high quality therapeutic dosages of standardized supplements and you can do an internet search they're really really good supplements that we can buy not necessarily stuff off the shelf at the neighborhood grocery store because the quality of what we find the tests have shown it varies it's not always what's on the label so you have to be really aware of these things but a
couple of key ones coq10 is an enzyme every every cell in our body is using coq10 and especially our hearts and our hearts are undergoing a lot of stress emotional stress because of the uncertainty in the world right now physical stress for for many of us emotional stress translates into physical stress coq10 is is an absolute everyday uh the the vitamins um see for example what studies now showing is that our bodies actually need much higher doses of seed than what we've been led to believe the fda you know recommends at least one to two
thousand milligrams a day here's the key vitamin c in the past has meant rose hips which are not tolerated well by the human body they upset the stomach digestion your body doesn't know what to do with those there's another form of vitamin c that's called ascorbic based vitamin c what that means is it is giving your body everything your body needs to create its own sea this opens the door to a really interesting conversation humans are one of the few mammals that do not create their own vitamin c most mammals create their own vitamin c
if you've ever been a pregnant woman your body kicked in the enzymes it needed to create vitamin c and you actually created your own vitamin c while you were pregnant when you at the end of your pregnancy when you gave birth that system begins to shut down again and what it tells us is that we have the capability that there are uh there are genetic programs within us now that seem to to not be activated in the way that they may have been in the past that's why it's important to supplement with c a good
b complex vitamin k is one that is often left out uh in the multi supplements and vitamin k people think well that's all about blood clotting well there are different kinds of k there's k1 there's k2 here's the thing vitamin k is necessary in our bodies to transport the magnesium and calcium into our bones that people take as supplements women especially after menopause begin taking a lot of magnesium and calcium thinking they're strengthening their bones if the vitamin k is not present it will never find it into the bones it builds up as plaque in
the arteries people that that are taking these tremendous amounts of calcium magnesium and they're finding hardening the arteries and high instances of stroke and they just attribute it to old age it's not old age it's because they're taking supplements that can't be utilized so they're building up this plaque and another one vitamin c if your body is low on vitamin c your body will adjust to that by creating cholesterol to strengthen the inside of the arteries in response to the lack of vitamin c so the flip side of that is an increase in vitamin c
creates lower cholesterol and actually is healthier for the arteries these are connections that aren't often made in our society today the fourth aspect heart brain coherence i've talked about this uh in depth in one of the episodes in in missing lengths the ability to harmonize our heart and our brain two organs into a single potent neural network in addition to the spiritual implications of intuition deep intuition on demand um direct access to the subconscious super learning like jason bourne where you have total recall of everything because we're in the gamma state those all come from
harmonizing the heart in the brain in addition to all of that if you're not into any of those things harmonizing heart in the brain is good for us what it does is it kicks into high gear our immune system our anti-aging hormones and it kicks into high gear our body's ability to create the dhea that's the precursor for every other hormone and what the laboratory studies have shown is that three minutes of heart brain coherence where we optimize this conversation between the heart and the brain increases our dhea levels over a hundred percent a hundred
percent these are the precursors for all the other hormones that we need and that increase will last up to six hours without doing anything else special simply from allowing this heart brain coherence to come into place so at a very high level these are four categories of conscious lifestyle conscious change that i have found personally that i've shared with friends when they ask in our audiences what do we do to fortify ourselves in the time of extremes in the presence of the greatest change of 5 000 years of recorded human history technological change social change
economic change all coming down in the single generation how do we strengthen ourselves to embrace and thrive and that kind of change the four things i've shared with you are very high level categories that give us insights into precisely things that allow us to thrive in our time of extremes there is a medical model that has been in place it's a story that's part of the scientific story that is in place uh it was built uh the early late 1800s early 1900s and even though the new research has shown that part of that model is
obsolete there's a fight to hang on to an obsolete story and sadly and honestly a big part of that is the economic incentive to hang on to an obsolete story if we continue to to live according to some of these old beliefs it assures a constant market and the need for for new medications new drugs to offset the side effects of unhealthy choices and lifestyle and these are all lifestyle choices this is the beauty of what we're talking about everything that i have just shared all comes under the heading of choice lifestyle choice and more
often than not now new new studies i've seen a number of studies were published in journal of american american medical association and some of the scientific journals are saying the diseases that are taking the most lives are lifestyle based diseases and i have personally been in cultures in south america in the andes in asia where the incidences of cancer breast cancer prostate cancer uterine cancer alzheimer's and dementia they simply do not exist in these people's lives even though they are living advanced ages so to call these diseases a product of aging makes no sense at
all it's not about the aging it's about how we live as we attain those advanced ages and the fact that there are societies and cultures that don't reflect any of those kinds of diseases tells us it's about the way we've been conditioned to think and live our lives today one of the a perfect example of this i spend a tremendous amount of time in the high andes of southern peru and i have since the 1980s the capital is cusco and cusco is over 400 year old community surrounded by native villages recently fast food chains have
come into cusco giving burgers french fries and chicken making it available in large batches hydrogenated oils fried foods and now for the first time ever the young people the incidences of diabetes are on the increase with children because they have made this a constant diet it's we've seen this within a span of only 20 years you can see the change and their ancestors never had these kinds of these kinds of they ate meat but they ate clean meat that came from the environment guinea pigs mostly that come from the environment so so it's all about
lifestyle the choices we're making and i think we owe it to ourselves to embrace these deep truths but it all comes down to the first thing we said in this episode and that is simply uh the things that give life to our food give life to our bodies and that is so eloquent so simple so powerful and i think about it every single day every time i create a meal is this the best i have to offer in this moment so in the missing links series there were a couple places where i talked a little
bit about the discovery of telomeres number one the very special pieces of of dna at the end of each chromosome that determine in large part how long the chromosome lives and subsequently how many times that cell can divide so i i talked about that a little bit um i want to tie that into this conversation that we're having about diet and exercise because everything i just shared with you plant-based diet foods that come from the earth rather than come from a machine that's produced them supplements than the supplements that we need in very specific proportions
or ratios the exercise in our lives that mimics the movements we would go through if we were living in a little closer to the earth if we were living more active environments outdoors heart brain coherence every one of these things that i've mentioned is now being shown to have a direct effect upon our dna in general and specifically on the telomeres at the end of the chromosomes so let me talk to you just a little bit about what that effect is the purpose of the telomeres it's very similar if we think of shoelaces i'm wearing
boots now so i don't have the shoelaces to show you but if you can imagine at the end of shoelaces typically there's a little plastic cap that keeps the ends from fraying as long as that cap is there those laces are easy to lace up on our shoes telomeres serve a very similar function on the end of the dna every time the cell divides the chromosomes divide and the way the division without getting really technical the way the division happens the ends of the chromosomes will become brittle and break off and will not go through
the complete division intact and that's okay nature has accounted for that by putting the chromosome or the telomeres on the end so when the incomplete breakage happens it doesn't happen in the juicy stuff where all the information is it happens in the telomeres that are designed to be broken and shredded so that's the good news the flip side the good news is every time the cell divides the telomere loses a little bit of its length that's okay because it divides again it loses a little bit more but that's okay there's still some there divides a
little bit more but you can see where this is going over time it will lose so much the telomere will become so short at the end of the chromosome that it cannot protect that division and when that happens we call it old age we call it senescence we call it death so this is the determining factor for how many times a cell can divide is how long those telomeres are in 2009 carol greiter and elizabeth blackburn two nobel prize winning scientists received the nobel prize in physiology and medicine for the discovery of an enzyme and
if you haven't seen the episode that talks about this you're going to love the name of the enzyme okay so telomeres are what give the cells the longevity the name of the enzyme is called telomerase and that tells the whole story the sole purpose of the enzyme telomerase is to heal rejuvenate and lengthen the telomeres the catch is something has to activate the telomerase the reason i'm saying this now is because everything i said at the beginning of this episode activates the telomerase nutrition exercise supplements and specifically heart brain harmony it's called heart brain coherence
when we tune our heart and our brain so that the signal moving up through the vagus nerve and down through the spinal cord so that signal is optimized at 0.1 hertz very low frequency when we can tune our heart and brain to 0.1 hertz that is an optimum conversation and one of the effects is it triggers the telomerase in our bodies it activates that telomerase and can actually stop the aging process reverse the aging process and make those telomeres longer no matter how old we are so this is the beauty of of how the science
is tying everything together and it it helps us to understand some of the traditions that i've studied where where monks and nuns have have lived uh exceedingly long lives 120 years and more but they don't look like they've lived 120 this is the key there's one way of thinking that says we come into this world as a vessel for example a vessel of life and we have x amount of life that we begin to use up from the moment we're born and you've probably heard this term that we begin to die the moment we're born
that's a way of thinking and it's embraced by a lot of people but the science is showing something very different it's more accurate to say that we begin to heal the moment we're born that the vessel of life it's not a finite vessel that would begin to use up over time it is a vessel that's being constantly replenished and we replenish it through the choices of lifestyle that we make every day nutrition movement supplements heartbreaking connection what we call spiritual practices all contribute to filling this vessel so here's why i'm saying this when i am
with an indigenous person and i talk about these in some of the books and the exercises i was with the tibetan nun for example i had the entire conversation with her as we hiked up the side of a mountain to a monastery and was only after she went indoors that my tibetan guide asked me the question he said did you enjoy your conversation with the geshe he said how do you think she is i said i would guess she's probably in her early maybe mid 80s he said the woman you just talked to is 120
years old the key is our thinking when someone's 120 years old we think about raiders of the lost ark or the chalice where you find a knight hovering over an ancient secret that looks like he's frail and fragile but if an individual has learned to embrace these principles and the body keeps replenishing itself you don't look like you're using up that last droplet of life from a finite vessel you look like you're constantly replenishing and the nun did her skin colors were skin color was good her eyes were good her walk was great i mean
she was walking ahead of me up the side of a 16 000 foot cliff and i asked her a question i said what do you attribute your longevity to she pointed like this she goes to the monster she says what do you think we do here she says i live within these texts i live within these practices the practices are compassion compassion is a factor of heart brain coherence it is the end product first we have the experience of sympathy for others and other forms of life and from the sympathy we develop empathy for others
in other forms of life sympathy we can recognize the suffering empathy we can identify with the suffering compassion is the ability to witness the suffering without getting lost in the hurt and that experience is directly linked to the heartbreaking connection that triggers longevity in the cells that releases the telomerase so why do we see so many people of advanced age in these monasteries and nunneries because they are living in their lives the principles that science is now developing and in all fairness they don't have to deal with the challenges of life because they are protected
buffered in a bubble of that monastery you and i live in the real world the monastery for us is the world around us and we have to find a way to live our truth in a world that's constantly changing and challenging our truth and one of the ways that i've found to do that is by embodying every one of those principles that i've shared to anchor the deepest truth of who i am in the world so when i walk into the world and i'm challenged that's my rock i call it my rock and as long
as i know what my rock is that's what i know absolutely to be true in my life as long as i can hang my emotional body and my physicality on the rock of what i know to be true in my life i find the strength to move into any unknown situation any changing world any audience any challenge and i know i'm going to be okay because i know who i am and i'm learning more about who i am by sharing this and by exploring these these episodes when it comes to the accoutrements of spirituality uh
everyone learns differently and that's why it's good that there are so many different tools to help people learn if a crystal placed on a third eye or worn around a throat chakra a tourmaline around the throat chakra or an elixir coming from a mushroom fermenting in the back of the refrigerator first thing in the morning if that is useful to you and your spiritual path then i i think it's it's good for you to follow that as long as it's useful here's my caveat these are tools that can help us achieve a state of awareness
and a way of being the ultimate goal is for us to become those things without the tools so if the tools help us to reach a state of being and then we can let the tool go it has served us if the tool is something that we feel we have to have every day and the moment we feel stressful he said oh god where's my crystal god where's my you know people hooked up to the computer for biofeedback oh god i gotta have my bio feedback if we get to that point then the tool has
become a crutch and only you know when your tool crosses that line is it still a tool for you that helps you to become the most empowered being that you can possibly become or have you given your power away to your tool and allowed it to become a crutch in your life if you don't know the answer that ask yourself if i'm out in the world if i'm walking down the street and something crosses my path and it throws me into an emotional chaos can i deal with it without having my gadget and if the
answer is yes then it tells you that your tools have served you and if the answer is no it tells you in that moment that your tool is a crutch not right wrong good or bad you're just being honest it's a crutch for me right now how can i move from this place of a crutch to an empowered state where it's nice to have and if i don't have it i'm okay without it and this is the way i feel about everything in our world including medicine i think medicine is an amazing tool to help
us restore a health and a feeling to our body and once we know what it feels like to be healthy once we know what it feels like to be well when we can claim that feeling in our bodies there's a facet that i didn't get to talk about of our existence i didn't get to talk about in in the missing link series mirror neurons in our brain mirror neurons are a special kind of neuron when they witness something happening our brain can't tell whether or not we're seeing it in someone else or experiencing within ourselves
so when we listen to music that we like for example it will light up very specific places in our brain the studies show that when someone is playing the music the same places light up in their brain light up in our brain even though we're not playing the instrument so simply by having the experience are the same places in the brain light up whether we're witnessing or whether we're having experience this is important when it comes to healing if we can claim the feeling of healing or if we can witness that healing in others if
we can appreciate what a whole complete fully enabled fully capacitated human looks like and behaves like and claim that for ourselves our brain will begin to release the chemistry in our body that matches that because our brain doesn't know that we're witnessing it in someone else so all of this is my way of saying to you whatever you do in your life to move you along in your growth and in your spiritual progression i think it's it's a good thing to do be conscious and aware ask yourself is this my tool or is it my
crutch and your answer will tell you what your next step is so we've covered a lot of ground in this episode and we began talking about factors of lifestyle to empower us to help us to thrive and in the changing world if i had to mention a single word that encapsulates everything that we have done today for me that word would be choice because it is all about choice there are people in the world in our families around us that will never make that choice that you and i are talking about making and and that's
a choice for them and i want to be very clear it's not right wrong good or bad it is about what makes our hearts sing where we find our greatest joy in life so i'm inviting you to honor the choices that you make for yourself and to be conscious and aware that every moment of every day you are making the choice [Music] you
