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Dawson Church,1 Ph.D., is a leader in the energy psychology movement, one of the most common forms being the Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), which I have promoted for years. Church investigated and built on the EFT techniques developed by Gary Craig2 in the 1990s (which in turn was a derivative of the founder of energy tapping, Roger Callahan’s, work3).
While Craig was not a clinical investigator, Dawson's work has led to over 100 clinical trials on EFT. In this interview, Church shares insights from his experience, which he has also documented in the books “Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality” and “Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity and Joy.”
This information is particularly timely in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. While the infection itself has been shown to be far less lethal than initially suspected, government responses to it have undoubtedly led to an epidemic of fear and stress, which can have serious health consequences. As explained by Church:
“The stress we feel in our minds and bodies can often do far more harm than pathogens. I've done several randomized controlled trials of cortisol.
When you think a negative thought, when you feel stress, when you have a fearful belief, your cortisol level rises within three minutes. Chronically high cortisol produces all kinds of ill effects in your body, including depressed immune function and increased inflammation. The fear will get you even if the virus doesn't.”
As noted by Church, our brains are hard-wired and evolutionarily adapted to pay attention to potential threats. Failing to notice a threat can get you killed, whereas there’s no evolutionary reward for failing to notice the good stuff. As a result, most of us need to train our brain to notice the positive, and to feel gratitude.
“We're subject to a constant barrage of bad news, so it takes meditation, it takes tapping, it takes time in nature,” Church says. “You really have to be deliberate in your efforts to redirect your attention and not have it hijacked by all the bad stuff out there.
What I do in response is to read positive blogs, news and media. That doesn't mean I never read any bad news, I stay informed, but I make sure I read positive things. I'm reading Marcus Aurelius right now … I meditate for an hour every day. And I anchor myself in what I call in my book 'Mind to Matter,’ Nonlocal mind.
Tune into nonlocal mind, look out the window and see the roses and the bees and the sunset, and then it's a lot easier to stay centered when confronted by difficult local events. I also focus on compassion.”
In 2008, Church attended a conference where he presented with Roland McCraty,4 head researcher in how the heart and mind interconnect from HeartMath Institute, and Joe Dispenza,5 whose fields include mind-body medicine and brain/heart coherence. Curious about what would happen if he combined the best evidence-based methods, he came up with what eventually became known as “EcoMeditation” — a conglomerate of techniques proven to rapidly increase positivity and well-being. They include:
According to Church, when you do them together, they reinforce each other. “The whole is more than the sum of its parts,” he says. EcoMeditation has now been empirically tested and refined, showing that it can lower baseline cortisol levels by one-third in as little as a week. And, when stress chemicals like cortisol and adrenaline decline, the neurochemicals of repair and rejuvenation such as DHEA, serotonin and dopamine increase.
In one trial, Church looked at the effects of EcoMeditation on immunoglobulins, antibodies that bind to and neutralize corona viruses. In just two days, participants who did EcoMeditation had a 27% rise in these antibodies in their mucous membranes.
“You produce a huge shift in your immunity by lowering stress,” Church says. "Meditate, tap, use your favorite methods to lower your stress level. This automatically upregulates your immune system.”
The year 2020 has been challenging for most people. The drumbeat of negative news can overwhelm even the most resilient among us. In Chapter 2 of “Mind to Matter,” Church talks about a phenomenon called “emotional contagion.” In a nutshell, researchers have shown that emotions have an impact similar to that of infectious disease. They’re contagious, and affect those around us.
He cites one study in which they found that the next-door neighbor of a happy person is 35% more likely to be happy as well, and the neighbor twice removed is 15% more likely to be happy. That person’s neighbor, in turn, who is 3 degrees removed from the happy person is 6% more likely to be happy. The same contagion rule applies when the emotions are negative.
“We're in the middle of this mass contagion of fear,” Dawson says, “and it is depressing our immune systems, rendering us less resilient, affecting us psychospiritually, making us less able to cope. That’s when we need a bigger dose of positivity, joy and gratitude. We need to do that deliberately. That means meditation, it means consuming positive media. It means not exposing yourself to needless negative emotions.”
One of the reasons Dawson recommends meditation is because of the distinct biochemical effects it produces. He explains:
“Mystics describe this experience of oneness with the universe. When they meditate, they lose any sense of as isolated beings. If you look at MRIs of Tibetan monks, you find that the part of the brain that constructs the sense of self — the mid-prefrontal cortex — downregulates. They lose themselves.
Another part of the brain that downregulates is the part of the parietal lobe, the temporal parietal junction that handles 'proprioception', the location of our body in space. When they're in this deep mystical experience, their sense of self has turned off and their brains' ability to locate their bodies and space is turned off.
At the same time, oxytocin, the love hormone, floods their cells. They experience this ecstatic bliss as anandamide, serotonin and dopamine flood their brains and they've lost the sense of who they are and where they are, and they're literally feeling one with the universe.
Do that each morning using EcoMeditation and you're one with what I call nonlocal mind. You have that experience of mystical unity. Then, after meditation, you come back into your body, come back to your local mind, your mid prefrontal cortex turns back on, you’re a local self again, your parietal lobe comes back. You know where you are in time and space.
You then bring all the resilience of that contact with nonlocal mind into local reality and you're then far more effective … Over time, these parts of the brain start to shift into this function as the neurological wiring changes, and then it becomes a trait.”
To show you how effective meditation can be in daily life, Dawson cites a 10-year-long study of high performing people by the McKinsey Consulting Group. It found that those who are able to enter this flow state are five times as productive as ordinary people.
Another study by DARPA described in his book "Bliss Brain" found people who meditate improved their ability to solve complex problems by 490%. “That's why meditation is a powerful antidote to dealing with all the chaos of the world around us,” Dawson says. These and many other studies can be found on www.eftuniverse.com/research-studies/eft-research.
As mentioned, EcoMeditation incorporates several different techniques, including EFT tapping, breath control and meditation. To download a free EcoMeditation audio track that guides you through each of the steps, see EcoMeditation.com. Step 1 involves tapping a series of acupuncture meridian end points. Dawson explains their relevance:
“Over 100 clinical trials have shown that [tapping] regulates the body. It downregulates your stress. It improves your mood, it decreases anxiety and depression very, very quickly ... The research shows that symptoms of trauma, hypervigilance, intrusive negative thoughts, depression — all of these things are regulated by tapping.”
When you’re doing EFT, you first focus on a target problem by formulating a statement. The target problem might be ‘I'm afraid of catching the virus.’ It might be, ‘I'm afraid of dying.’ It might be 'I've lost my job, I don't know how I will cope.’ However, in Eco Meditation, you tap the points without defining a specific target problem.
“We know that general tapping produces an effect,” Dawson says. It basically regulates your energy system in a general way and helps you enter a space of calm. Next, you add in heart coherent breathing, muscular relaxation, neurofeedback techniques and meditation on compassion.
“There are several things that move the needle in terms of neuroplasticity in the brain quicker than others,” Dawson says the one that changes the brain the quickest is compassion … a response to the suffering of the world and just a sense of acceptance of people just as they are.
We get people to this compassionate state and then they start to feel really centered, really resilient, really happy. Focus on a person who makes you feel unconditionally loved. That might be a Saint. It might be a historical figure. It might be a childhood hero … Focus on that person and then … expand that compassion to every atom in the universe.
That's the very general conceptual framework we use to keep people out of trauma. We've had to really refine this thing over the years because a lot of people traumatized and it's very easy to trigger traumatic memories.
If you go into that altered state without adequate preparation, it can be produce what's called retraumatization. The instructions for EcoMeditation have been very carefully calibrated to avoid the possibility of retraumatization, which of course is the opposite of resilience, which we're trying to produce.”
Emotional intensity is also important for optimal results, and the emotion of gratitude typically generates this. As such, compassion and gratitude go hand in hand and work very well together. Lastly, you need to recenter in your body. So, at the end of the meditation, open your eyes and take in your surroundings. You feel the weight of your body in the chair or on the cushion as you re-anchor yourself in the here and now.
“We don't want people to bliss out and then not be able to bring it back down to the immediate issues of their lives,” Dawson explains. “We want to have them experience that mystical state, and then come back and be effective in their daily lives.”
When California issued its first round of lockdown orders, Dawson and his wife agreed to use that time of increased togetherness to be extra nice to each other — to literally shelter in love. He explains:
“We realized we would be together a lot more than usual. We said we're going to use this as a crucible to really be nice to each other. We weren't not nice to each other before, but we knew we’d have tension.
We used this as a way to shelter in love, get to know each other better … I began to learn things about her. I began to be fascinated by her. We used the crisis to strengthen our relationship. Families are systems. When you change one element of a system, you change the whole system.
That's why, in a marriage, in a family, not everyone has to change. People think that ‘Oh, my husband has to change. My wife has to change. My kid has to change. My parent has to change.’ Actually … your chances of getting them to change are approximately zero. The only person you have leverage over is yourself …
We know, through that new science of emotional contagion, that your emotions are contagious. So, make that choice to work on yourself, to find your negative emotion, to release it, to be this agent of positive emotional contagion all around you and soon you'll find it spreads far beyond you.
Be proactive. Do the things it'll take to shift your mood. When we shift psychology, we shift biology. People don't realize how dependent their biology is on their psychology. For example, in study of a weekend EcoMeditation, anxiety went down by 26%. Depression went down by 32%. PTSD symptoms went down by 18%. Pain went down 43%. All of these are psychological shifts people are making as they tap and meditate.
Average resting cortisol went down significantly by 29%. The resting heart rate went down by 5% and their immunoglobulins went up by 27%. These are your leverage points and you can decide proactively to meditate to tap and to release all that negative emotion you have.
Fill your mind with positive thoughts. I'm not saying don't read anything negative. You can't avoid it. You need to be well informed. But be informed and see it through the lens of that positive being. Tune into nonlocal mind every day. That's something you can choose to do.
EcoMeditation is about 15 to 20 minutes long. It doesn't take long and you're making a powerful declaration that you are choosing to be that agent of positive emotional contagion. You then enter your day after that morning meditation as a resourceful person, a resilient person.
Are there still problems — financial problems, medical problems, family problems? Sure. There might be all those problems. But now you are a resilient person who is facing those problems and bringing five times the problem-solving ability into that situation.”
For me, personally, the COVID-19 pandemic has probably been one of the best things that's ever happened to me. I have never been healthier, I think, in my life as a result of this forced discipline to stay at home and pursue a healthy lifestyle, many of which are detailed in Dawson’s book. It’s a great toolbox.
Again, to learn more about the scientific underpinnings of tapping, visit www.eftuniverse.com/research-studies/eft-research, and for a free eco meditation audio track, see EcoMeditation.com. If you want professional EFT help, you can tap with a practitioner, live via the internet, on tappingplace.com. Free tapping resources and meditations are also available on DawsonGift.org
Also consider picking up a copy of “Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality,” in which you’ll find 30 different practices that will help reprogram your mind and energetic system, including yoga, Chi Gung, Tai Chi, spending time in nature, grounding and much more. The book is available on Amazon, but you can also get it free — just cover the cost of shipping — if you order it on mindtomatter.com.
“Pick the ones that fit your lifestyle and love yourself enough to do that,” Dawson says. “Make a practice of doing them. Be that proactive person and then you'll find your whole lifestyle to change.
One of the problems that meditators have [is that] we really have to calibrate ourselves when we meet other people because they're not here, they're not full of love, joy and laughter. They're full of anguish, stress and doubt. [So] you listen to people, you hear their grief and pain and sorrow and loss.
Then, by the end of your time with them, they've been affected by your positive emotional contagion and we then can change the emotional tone of our whole world. One of the cool things about those studies is that positive emotions travel out to affect those around you. So, do negative ones, but negative ones only affect people 2 degrees of separation out.
Positive ones affect people 3 degrees of separation out. We're actually more effective as agents of emotional contagion if we’re positive than negative. So, go out there and meet people where they are. Listen to them if they're suffering, but then bring the power of joy and beauty and all those benefits of nonlocal mind into your local world and be that powerful change agent …
Do things to love your mind and body, and then be that vibrant person who helps those around you shift. A suffering world needs us now more than ever.”
Dr. Mercola Interviews the Experts
This article is part of a weekly series in which Dr. Mercola interviews various experts on a variety of health issues. To see more expert interviews, click here.
Thomas Lewis, author of “The End of Alzheimer’s: The Brain and Beyond,” is a microbiologist with a Ph.D. from MIT. He’s done a lot of work on diagnostic testing, and in this interview, we explore how retinal assessment and other laboratory tests can be used to stratify your risk factors for chronic disease and COVID-19. Lewis recently published an excellent paper on this.
We first met almost two years ago at the Academy for Comprehensive Integrative Medicine in Orlando, Florida, where he gave a presentation on how assessment of the retina can be used as a diagnostic tool to evaluate your risk for a wide variety of diseases.
As just one example, glaucoma and Alzheimer’s disease are often linked together, with glaucoma occurring first, as they did in Lewis’ father’s case. His dad developed glaucoma several years before he developed Alzheimer's.
Lewis goes so far as to refer to glaucoma as “Alzheimer's disease of the eye,” and Alzheimer's as “glaucoma of the brain.” Similarly, cataracts are a manifestation of your innate immune response against acute and chronic infection. If you are, say, 50 years old and you have early nuclear cataracts, it's a bad sign, as it’s an indication of a chronic infection.
The infection is what’s causing this unfolded protein response to slowly matriculate in the lens of the eye. According to Lewis, “If you have an early cataract, that's a bad sign for longevity. Most people with cataracts die of some vascular event fairly young.”
Lewis explains the general theory for using the eye as a biomarker for systemic disease:
“When you look at disease, in the allopathic system, you're either healthy or you're sick. But we really lie on a continuum of health. I say we live on four different continuums, determinants of health, lifestyle, risks, things like that. For physiological health, we measure blood, stool and urine …
For pathology, which is largely ignored, we do ultrasounds, MRIs and CT scans that assess tissue changes. The eye happens to be particularly good at that because the eye is transparent, and the methodology used to measure the eye is low-cost and noninvasive but highly precise and accurate.
For example, optical coherence tomography (OCT) is much more precise at looking at micro vessels, capillaries, compared to MRI because the wavelength of light they use to create the interference is a much shorter wave length. In other words, it gives much more detail than an MRI.”
OCT is a type of tomography that uses safe, nonionizing light waves. At a cash price of about $50, it’s also an affordable diagnostic tool that can tell you a lot about what’s going on in your body.
I was intrigued with the test and found a local optometrist to perform it for me. I hadn’t had an eye exam for a few decades so thought it would be a good checkup. Well, I had no glaucoma, 20/20 vision, near and far without glasses, and my OCT was totally normal, like that of a young adult. It’s great to know that lifestyle changes work. Next month I will share an article on what they have done for my physical body.
Again, because the eye is transparent, OCT allows you to see all the micro vessels, and whatever is happening in this carotid tissue — the vasculature in your eye — is also happening in the rest of your body, as the carotid is the most vascular tissue in your entire body.
“Whereas the brain uses 10 times more oxygen than most tissue on a per mass basis, the retina, which is constantly converting photons to electrons, uses even more oxygen on a per mass basis. If you're vulnerable, the eye is potentially a canary for that vulnerability,” he explains.
“That's why we use this test. It's so simple to see if there are life risks that are translating into physiological risk and then changing into pathological risks. When you're changing into pathological risk, a bad ending is getting closer because you have tissue damage, basically.”
Many common lab tests can also tell you a lot about your health and the state of your immune system. When COVID-19 broke out, Chinese researchers reported patients had elevated ferritin and erythrocyte sedimentation (SED) rate, among other things. Lewis compared the COVID-19 lab panels with the work he’d been doing for the past 15 years, and found they matched up nicely.
“It's not about treating COVID-19, it's about measuring how full your vessel is towards these markers that create the cytokine storm, high inflammation, and kill you, and try to modulate that,” Lewis says.
"Why does the Z-Pak treat COVID-19? It doesn't. It treats bacterial infection, but we all have a subclinical bacterial infectious burden, and that burden is taking up immune system bandwidth, which makes you less able to fight something as virial as COVID-19. That's why Z-Pak works …
There's nothing really special about COVID-19 and our immune response, because our immune response is innate and adaptive. It's [about] being able to more accurately measure your immune compromised status. And almost everything we measure is reversible through very simple processes, supplementation, lifestyle activities, treating the infection, treating the pre-existing virus.”
One of the most lethal aspects of COVID-19 is the cytokine or bradykinin storm that can develop. A cytokine is a short-lived signaling protein that has regulatory properties on nearby cells. It could be beneficial or it could be detrimental. It could be proinflammatory, or it could be anti-inflammatory.
So, it's not so much that cytokines are bad — they're absolutely necessary and you'd be dead in a few heartbeats without them — but when they get out of control, they can kill you. That's what’s known as a cytokine storm, which I have discussed extensively in previous newsletters. It is one of the reasons why vitamin D works so well; it aborts most cytokine storms through its modulation of your immune response.
What the retinal assessment and various lab assays can do is identify a brewing problem, which can then be addressed using strategies such as nutritional supplementation and lifestyle changes.
“For the average person, knowing where you are on that continuum would be extraordinarily valuable,” Lewis says, “and that's the testing we're doing and trying to promote more broadly.”
The key, however, is not to be within the “normal” reference ranges for disease markers, examples of which include fibrinogen, D-dimer, SED rate or C-reactive protein. What Lewis has done is determine the point at which there’s a statistical increase in early mortality. “That sets a completely different set of normal ranges for biomarkers, which is what we use. These ranges are much tighter compared to normal reference ranges, so you are amplifying the signal your body is projecting about your health. We're not diagnosing people, we're risk scoring people,” he explains.
Screening tests that can help assess the state of your health and immune system include:
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1-25 Dihydroxy vitamin D — This is the activated form of vitamin D. Vitamin D increases antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) and improves the activity of neutrophils (white blood cells that fight bacteria). |
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RBC magnesium — Magnesium is an important cofactor for the activation of vitamin D. Taking magnesium can actually reduce the amount of oral vitamin D you require to optimize your vitamin D level. |
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Neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio (NLR) — This marker alone determines prognosis in most solid tumor cancers. Neutrophils go up when there’s a bacterial infection, while lymphocytes are suppressed by viruses. As explained by Lewis, “The NLR is sort of an amplified barometer for your stealth infectious burden. The absolute count should be 1.5 or below.” Anything above 55% neutrophils is indicative of a chronic, likely bacterial, infection. |
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Red blood cell distribution width (RDW) — Red blood cells are born small and die large. If your RDW is wide, you likely have plaques and inflamed carotid arteries. Above 16 or 17, RDW could be a sign of anemia, but between 12.5 and 16, it’s a pure sign of inflammation. |
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C-reactive protein — A marker of inflammation. This should be 0.6 or below. |
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Fibrinogen — As a signaling molecule for tissue repair, fibrinogen is a good marker for how well your body is able to repair itself. If your fibrinogen is between 150 and 285, your repair and recovery is probably meeting or outpacing wear and tear, allowing you to properly heal and recover. Above 285, you are probably deteriorating more rapidly than you're repairing. Fibrinogen is also a clotting factor marker, so in COVID-19 and sepsis, for example, high fibrinogen is indicative of a cytokine storm. Pre-cytokine storm levels are also indicative of several chronic diseases, including heart attack and cancer. |
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Ferritin — Ferritin is an iron transport protein that becomes elevated in COVID-19 and other serious illnesses. Iron catalyzes growth of bacterial pathogens. Typically, when your blood cells are under attack by a pathogen, your body responds by hiding the iron from the antigen (the infection) in the ferritin protein, thereby resulting in anemia (low iron) and high ferritin. If you have elevated ferritin, the iron may not be available to the pathogen, but it is still available to the cells of your body. Iron is a powerful oxidant stressor that will radically increase oxidized species, reactive oxygen species (ROS) and reactive nitrogen species, which activates the NRLP3 inflammasome and radically increases inflammatory mediators and cytokines. The solution for high ferritin is to donate blood. If your ferritin is above 100, consider giving blood periodically. |
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Fasting insulin — Insulin resistance is a foundational contributor to most chronic disease and significantly increases your risk of complications and death from SARS-CoV-2 infection. Fasting glucose is also a useful test that you can easily do at home. |
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Uric acid — Uric acid is a multifactorial inflammatory marker. It also helps protect against hypoxia. |
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Homocysteine — Homocysteine is a vascular toxin associated with heart disease that is influenced by your vitamin B levels. As explained by Lewis:
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SED rate — The SED rate is a measurement of how fast your red blood cells settle in a test tube. Red blood cells have a repulsive charge on the outside of their membranes (zeta potential) that allow them to remain buoyant. When this repulsive charge is lacking, they settle faster. As explained by Lewis:
Ideally, if your zeta potential is good and high, your SED rate should be close to zero. The lower, the better. The higher your SED rate, the worse off you are, as this means the “battery” of your red blood cells are discharged, which will result in systemic problems and overall low energy levels. Typically, your SED rate will improve once you start to heal and rebalance your gut. |
Your primary care doctor can order any and all of these lab tests for you. However, they may not be able to thoroughly guide your treatment based on your results, which is what Lewis and his team specialize in. So, for testing and a comprehensive analysis, consider turning to www.healthrevivalpartners.com.
“Come through us and we'll help you solve your problem,” Lewis says. “Under our services tab, we have a COVID-19 service, and there we have five different levels of panels, from just a population screening to a very deep dive. Basically, every marker we talked about today, and more.
Looking at the lipids, the chemistry, liver function, metabolic, all that stuff, is included. We don't take insurance, but I can order these labs. My team can order these labs anywhere in the country …
We couple the lab test with a highly functional intake survey. What we've done, and we were publishing a paper on this, is we've created a risk score for every single question and answer that is typically on a functional intake questionnaire, and made it digitized, so it's online. You take it.
We give you a letter grade, which is sort of a reflection of your total risk portfolio, and then subsections of grades. Then we give you a very detailed color-code report, which really turns into your treatment plan, if you will. We want to ameliorate these different things. And we have health coaches to help you organize them because some things you want to do in series, other things you want to do in parallel. We call this the hierarchy of health.
Anybody who does a blood test gets that. And then our team is trained on how to help you understand your labs from a very detailed chronic perspective, but also look back at the risk factors and show you what risk factors could potentially have led to an elevation in that lab. So, you see a very clear one-to-one correlation.
We give you a letter grade, but there's a score underneath it. And then we give you what we call our chronic disease temperature, which is the amalgamation of 20 of these important biomarkers into a single score. We have a plot of our chronic disease temperature versus our chronic disease assessment.
It's a fairly linear thing, showing you that your risks are tied to your physiological health. And then we've shown, in populations that we work with, that when we lower their risk grade — just the lifestyle things, cleaning up the teeth, improving the gut, cleaning the diet up, detoxification — as their risk rate goes down, their physiological score goes down, which is a good thing because we want your score as low as possible.
That's the essence of what we do. We have functional doctors, regular doctors, health coaches.”
While most health problems can be successfully addressed with nutritional and other lifestyle changes, it’s important to manage your expectations of how long it’s going to take. As noted by Lewis:
“I have a very simple explanation to set expectations up. If it took you 10 years to get into something chronic, it's going to take you at least 10 months to get out of it. And that's with diligence, consistency and the proper treatment. When we have really compliant people [working on healing] rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, brain fog, we get this major inflection of health improvement at five months.
Why is that? Because everything in nature is log linear. We are wired to understand that implicitly, but society has taught us instantaneous gratification. We think if we do one thing, we'll get one result. But really everything is an asymptote, going into disease is an asymptote, so you're incubating, incubating, incubating, and then suddenly things go wrong.
While getting out of that state is the reverse of that, it takes you a long time to move the needle and start feeling better. Then all of a sudden, you reach that inflection point and you feel better.
Everything in nature, including health, it’s a log linear relationship to get to where you want to be … When people understand that and buy into that concept, then they can stay the course and we can actually make them better. It's not an overnight thing. That's the only point I'm trying to make.”
Again, HealthRevivalPartners.com is where you can sign up for your biomarker panel and receive the guidance you need to address whatever problems you may be having. For more information about the eye-brain connection and what your eye health can tell you about your Alzheimer’s risk, which we touched on at the beginning of this interview, see RealHealthClinics.com.
