E199 - Dr. Caroline Leaf: How to Stop Your Brain From Holding You Back

Dr. Caroline Leaf is a cognitive neuroscientist and bestselling author who has spent over 40 years studying the relationship between the mind and the brain. At a time when neuroplasticity was still emerging as a field, she was already building clinical tools to help patients recover from brain injuries, trauma, and conditions that conventional medicine had written off as permanent. In this conversation, we go deep into a distinction that changes everything: the mind is not the brain, and once you understand that, you stop being a victim of your own biology. What We Dive Into: 1. The brain does not generate thoughts. It responds to the mind. Everything you think, feel, and choose originates in the mind and then gets coded into the brain and body. 2. Depression, anxiety, and other mental health labels are not diseases you have. They are signals pointing to an underlying thought that needs to be found and restructured. 3. You cannot change what happened, but you can change the impact it has on your present and future. Through a process of deconstructing and reconstructing toxic thought networks, the grip of the past loosens. Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself. https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com ✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS: https://www.bioptimizers.com/knowthyself Use code KNOWTHYSELF to save 15% at checkout ___________ 00:00 Intro 03:11 The Difference Between Mind and Brain 07:17 Why the Brain-Is-Boss Model Gets It Wrong 12:25 Consciousness Beyond the Physical Body 14:25 Quantum Physics, Microtubules, and the Mind 21:24 Science and Spirituality Converging 23:41 Early Research: Neuroplasticity and Traumatic Brain Injury 28:50 Mind-Driven Change: Telomeres and Cellular Health 31:56 Working in South Africa: Healing Through Mental Frameworks 34:31 The Origin of the Neurocycle 40:13 The Non-Conscious, Subconscious, and Conscious Mind 49:35 How Thoughts and Memories Build Into the Brain and Body 51:59 The Five Steps of the Neurocycle 57:01 Step One: Gather Awareness 01:00:24 Step Two: Reflect 01:02:10 Steps Three to Five: Mindstorm, Recheck, Active Reach 01:09:28 Community Questions: Fear of Losing Your Identity 01:14:32 Working Through Shame, Grief, and Emotional Signals 01:15:46 Retroactive Causation: Changing the Past Through the Present 01:19:28 Intelligent Design, Choice, and the Source Behind Life 01:22:45 Mindsets, Patterns, and Teaching Children 01:25:58 Stress as Intelligence: The New Book ___________ ✨MORE FROM DR. LEAF ↳Website (for books, courses, 1:1 coaching): https://drleaf.com/ ↳Neurocycle app: https://drleaf.com/neurocycle-app ↳Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-dr-leaf-show/id1334767397 ↳Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DrCarolineLeaf ↳Neurocycle Certification: https://drleaf.com/certified-strategist 📜MORE FROM KNOW THYSELF ↳Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9l ↳Apple: https://apple.co/4iATICX ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ ↳TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andreduqum ↳Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/knowthyselfbyandreduqum/ ↳https://knowthyselfpodcast.com/ 👁️MORE FROM ANDRÉ ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@andreduqum ↳Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/know-thyself-podcast ↳Book recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If you're feeling very anxious or stressed out, you feel that in your body. That's your mind talking, not your brain. Your mind is the superpower. A lot of people think the brain is boss, but there's no science to back that up.

• 0:10André Duqum?

  It feels like most people experience life as almost like a victim of their own brain.

• 0:15Speaker 00

  I had clients that were literally written off by neurologists as vegetable. Within eight months, they were finishing school, going on to university. That's when I really saw that, wow, mind really does change the physical. And yet, it was pushed aside as pseudoscience. Coming to mental health by medical models tied people into disease diagnoses that limit people. You can't have depression, you can't have schizophrenia. They are signals, there's a because of behind that.

• 0:40André Duqum?

  What kind of world would we live in if somebody knew how to regulate their nervous system?

• 0:43Speaker 00

  It's fundamental. I had to have something practical, and that's where the neurocycle was birthed. We saw significant changes, thirty five to seventy five percent. Once you start doing it, it changes your life. I wish I knew about this when I was at school. I wish I knew then what I know now. We just need sixty seconds. It creates enough of a pause to be able to stand back and observe. So the first step is gather awareness. The second step is.

• 1:11André Duqum?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know thyself podcast. Our guest today is a cognitive neuroscientist and bestselling author. For over four decades, she's been studying the connection and the differences between the mind and the brain. Her work in psychoneurobiology, it's a mouthful.

• 1:29Speaker 00

  It is.

• 1:31André Duqum?

  Her work in psychoneurobiology has spanned over forty plus years, exploring the deep ties into behavior change, into healing brain injuries and trauma. And at a time when neuroplasticity was just emerging as a field of study. Dr. Carolyn Lee, such a pleasure to have you here.

• 1:50Speaker 00

  Oh, thank you, Andre. I've been so looking forward to this, and it's such a pleasure to actually finally meet you. I've watched you a lot and I love your show. Thank you for having me on. It's great.

• 1:59André Duqum?

  It's great, it's joy. I love getting to meet people outside of the fruitful conversations that we get to have. And your work is so fascinating, and you've been devoted to it for so long.

• 2:11André Duqum?

  What would you, how would you articulate what the essence of your work is aiming to share with the world at the stage of your life?

• 2:17Speaker 00

  I love that question. Yeah, it's been forty-four years now that I've been doing this. And I think the essence is to help people to understand what the mind is and the difference to the brain. Because we live in such a physicalist, materialistic world that's just so consumed with the whole neurocentric approach to brain, brain, brain. And we've lost so much of our humanity in that process and got so out of touch with the deeper things, the spiritual things, philosophy, what consciousness is, and it's affected people's mental health. So I really try, and that's been, you know, that's my whole field of study, but try and open people's minds to understanding that in a very practical way. So, you know, people, I love the philosophy side, which is so important, but, you know, helping people know how to do, not just talk about it,

• 3:02Speaker 00

  but actually understand how to manage their mind and how to apply that.

• 3:06André Duqum?

  Yeah, applied philosophy. For most people, we think the mind and the brain are sort of interchangeable terms, and you make a clear distinction. So I think it's really important to set our definitions. That way, we know what we're talking about throughout this whole conversation, and then we can dive deeper. So what is the difference between the mind and the brain from your conception?

• 3:25Speaker 00

  My favorite question, the first question I'm always asked.

• 3:28André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 3:28Speaker 00

  Especially in this timeframe. Okay, so your mind is pretty much ninety-nine percent of who you are. It's who, it's you, it's your, all your you-ness, your aliveness, your ability to think, feel, choose. Your brain and body are the physical organs that the mind codes life into and uses for you to physically show up. So they're very much, they, the, not even, it's so much more than storage, but they are the things that are coded to function, to help you function physically. So your mind drives everything. It drives your physiology, your neurology, and your psyche, your whole mind. And so you're, and it's got different divisions. So that's what people don't really get, is the different divisions of mind, because people often hear the word consciousness or, and as you say, they use the word mind-brain interchangeably,

• 4:12Speaker 00

  and then consciousness is this kind of elusive concept somewhere out there. So I try and make that very clear. So the brain doesn't think, the brain Can't generate. The brain just simply responds to the stimulation received by the mind. The mind is doing all the processing, all the thinking, all the, everything we're doing now. And we're using our brain and literally coding it into our brain. And that happens fast. I mean, it's around about four hundred billion actions per second, just in the neurons that are happening. But our, and our mind is even far, way faster than that. So it's almost hard for people to picture. So always just say, you know, a, a, a simple analogy would be something like, if you think people understand, if you,

• 4:54Speaker 00

  if you're hungry, you eat, and when you eat, that changes your body. It changes your cells and you get energy. And if you eat healthy, you feel the difference. If you don't, you, so if you think of that, like that concept, the way that food, you think you're hun, you, you're hungry, you think about food, you choose the food, you put it in your body, it changes your body. It's a little bit of an analogy. It's not quite as deep, but it gives people an idea. The mind is like that, it's like the food that we choose and then put it into the brain and the body. But it's thought and it changes the brain and the body. So the mind is doing the changing, the brain is doing the responding and, if that makes sense.

• 5:32André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 5:32Speaker 00

  And it's quite a hard thing for people to picture because it, it comes into, I think, where it comes into more clarity is if you think about, um, thoughts, what thoughts are and that thoughts are real things and that they have structural change. And that's where the whole neuroplasticity concept comes in. So the easiest way, we said, another sort of easy analogy is to think if you're feeling very anxious or stressed out or in not managing something, you feel that in your body, you feel your body tense up. You feel over time, if you don't manage thoughts or whatever it may be that you're dealing with, you can feel that physical change. So it's also one way of thinking of it. What we do with our mind, how we look at life, how we're reacting to things, that's all mind stuff. And that goes into our brain and our body.

• 6:13Speaker 00

  So if it's not managed properly, because our body is literally wired for, but brain and body are literally wired for love. And if we don't manage that properly, it becomes, we feel that in our body physically, because the brain and body aren't thinking, they're just responding.

• 6:29André Duqum?

  It feels like most people.

• 6:34André Duqum?

  Experience life as almost like a victim of their own brain, especially because we have more opportunities now than ever, or pitfalls, if you want to call it that, to have our biology, our neurology hacked in so many different ways. And this overstimulated culture that we live in. So why is that distinction important? Because it feels like you're getting at the essence of who somebody is more when you speak about the mind being very distinct from the brain. What, if somebody were to really understand that and then through up this whole conversation, get a clear understanding, not just philosophically, but like ontologically, internally, actually experience and understand the difference between the two, what kind of impact and ripple would that carry out in their life?

• 7:18Speaker 00

  It's really important for people to understand the difference because, as you quite rightly said, we are at the mind and brain, I've seen this with one thing, and we, all the hacking that happens, let's hack our biology to live longer, let's be billionaires paying billions of dollars to make their physiology last longer and all the longevity stuff and all the supplementation and all these things that we do. It's so focused on the physical. But according to the research and according to thousands of years of philosophy as well and spiritual, spirituality and hundreds of years of neuroscience, our biology only is around about 1% of who we are, and that's our brain and our body. So something's driving that. And so to understand that distinction is important because you can hack and hack and hack it.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  You could do all the biohacks in the world. But if your mind isn't right, what's happening is that there's a complete disproportionate focus. So for example, if the brain and body are, according to this research and mine and many others, around about 1% of who we are as humans, people are spending 99% of their time on the 1% and they're giving maybe 1% to the 99. And the way that people pay attention to the mind is stress management. You know, they'll talk about stress management. Then it'll be meditation and breathing exercises and some affirmations and some positive psychology. Very often, it's also seen as like these four pillars or three pillars and it'll be When you eat, move, sleep, and then it will be thrown in a little bit of mind.

• 8:47Speaker 00

  So there's a disproportionate focus because we are so neurocentric, so physicalist, so materialistic. And science, the dominant science focus in the media is one of a physicalist nature. So that being, it's all about the brain. The brain, your amygdala made you do it. Your reward circuits will make you do this. And you're once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic, and you've distorted. So there's so much around that the brain is boss and the brain is generating thoughts almost as an epiphenomenon, as a mistake. But there's no science to back that up. If you look at the scientific studies that they base that kind of thinking on, you'll see it's a huge misinterpretation.

• 9:29Speaker 00

  Because they will put people, for example, in a scanner, an FM or IR scanner or something. And they'll ask them to do something or talk about something or look at photos. So they're first using their mind and then they're looking at the impact in the brain. But the way that those studies are presented to the general public is that, okay, so this part of the brain did this. And your nucleus accumbens did this when you were craving, when you were within withdrawal. And therefore, the nucleus accumbens is responsible for doing that in you. And you, so it takes away all the autonomy from the human. And we see them as these automatons that are mechanistic, that a part's taken out, a part's put in. And that's not how we are as humans. It's not, it's not good science, but it's easy science to explain. And so this is why it's so important.

• 10:12Speaker 00

  So if you look at the statistics of that kind of approach, there's many, many ways of looking at it. But there was an interesting study that was, that began around nineties, mid nineties. Around the time when we had MRI technology developed that could eventually tell us, show us a little bit more about what's going on in the brain. When I started back in the eighties, we had EEG, we didn't have QEEG yet. I used QEEG in my research. And we had CT scans. So we didn't have, we had EEGs and CT scans. So neuroplasticity, and my work is one of the earliest in that field. We, it wasn't, they didn't really speak, they knew the mind-brain difference that was all in place in the eighties. But looking at how the differences. They didn't have, we didn't have the technology to really see that. So we had to go on behavioral change and so on.

• 10:57Speaker 00

  So there was thinking in the eighties that there is a separation, but that the brain can't change. Then fast forward to the mid nineties with MRI technology, we see, oh, actually with different thinking, different experiences, the brain's responding differently. And so that, at the same times, all that was going on, which is really exciting and amazing research. We had studies being started all over the world, a huge one throughout this country as well, which looked at the impact of looking at humans in this very neurocentric way. And fast forward to our current day, and we see that people are dying eight to twenty-five years younger from preventable lifestyle diseases, which they're attributing to kind of beginning this,

• 11:39Speaker 00

  there was almost like a slide from the nineties back to, up to where we are now, where there was a move away from the human, the whole experience, the consciousness, the spirituality, all that stuff was seen as, well, can't measure, touch it, you know? So we just focus on that, you know? And so that's what's happened a lot and become very dominant. And I know there's been a counter movement and it's very dominant now, which is really good, which is this more awareness of spirituality and, you know, meditation and all these things. But at the same time, there's, there's an imbalance there too, which we can maybe explore.

• 12:12André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 12:12Speaker 00

  But yeah, so that's, I mean, that's a long answer, but that's why it's important not to think we're just logical beings. The brain isn't boss, the mind is boss. The brain just does what the mind tells it to do. And that distinction's very empowering.

• 12:25André Duqum?

  So I want to unpack that distinction a little bit more because again, like you mentioned, from the materialist reductionist notion, the pervasive understanding of how the consciousness works, and it's obviously the hard problem, so we don't know for certain. But the belief widespread right now is that at some point of our brain matter developing in the evolutionary process, it gives rise to an experience of itself, AKA your mind is emergent from your brain. And you're coming at it from the other way, which is not new per se, you know, ancient.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  Not at all, it's ancient.

• 12:59André Duqum?

  Yeah, the wisdom traditions have been speaking from Advaita Vedanta, thousands of years old, to hermeticism, talking about the universe being mental and the Gnostic traditions. And so it's not new, but it does feel counterintuitive because a lot of us were born and raised in a society that thinks that the brain creates experiences.

• 13:20André Duqum?

  When I say you can experience, a term for that we'd like to explore on this podcast is qualia, right? So like the taste of garlic, the experience of seeing the color red. You're not gonna cut a brain open and find that, right?

• 13:32Speaker 00

  Not at all.

• 13:33André Duqum?

  So just to have, so I can, so I can, and the audience can understand your orientation towards this all, like epistemically. You believe that the mind creates the brain? You believe, do you believe that like Aldous Huxley, Aldous Huxley's conception of the brain is a reduction valve? So it's kind of like an antenna that like limits consciousness and filters it for you to navigate reality? To me, they're both equally baffling. I don't have a strong conviction one way or the other. I tend to lean in this podcast more exploring the idealistic notions of consciousness and that feels more intuitive to me, but I've also been very humbled throughout time by what, where my intuitions has led me.

• 14:16André Duqum?

  So all that to say, do you believe that the brain, the physical brain is emergent from the mind? Or, or how do you?

• 14:24Speaker 00

  How do I see it? So first of all, I love everything you just said. It's beautifully expressed and I really love it and relate to it. So I believe that the brain is physical matter that has been structured and designed to be able to handle a certain amount of mind power because the mind is massive. And that leads to the whole concept of consciousness and we can break that down and define that in a moment. So I see the brain literally as a physical organ. We know that once the heart stops, within 15 to 20 seconds of the heart stopping, the brain, the, the brain flatlines and immediately, within those few seconds, cells start to disintegrate. So there's a definite change that occurs. We also know that the research that's actually also thousands of years old, but it's been

• 15:09Speaker 00

  100 years of neuroscientists showing this, but also there's a whole body of research that's really been developing over the last sort of 30 years, looking at the concept of the, the existence of mind beyond the physical body. Now, I use the word mind because it's more, it's an, I feel personally and from the research I've done, it's an older word, it's more ancient, it's more, I think it more accurately explains. The equivalent of what people would be reading in Apple News and all over the place, because it's very, people are very into this, you know, what is consciousness? Would be consciousness. So a lot of people, when I talk about mind, they may relate that to consciousness, which is not wrong at all, but it's only a part of the mind. So mind has got, has got a lot of aspects to it.

• 15:54Speaker 00

  And there's three main levels of mind. Where, and, and the brain is used by the mind. So it's this physical, while, while we're in this physical world, we need something to be able to literally code the power that is, I believe, is eternal, whatever word you want to use, in a physical body for a temporary time. So that comes from the philosophy that this is just a drop in the ocean of life, that there's so much more, that eternal life is, exists beyond this. So there's also a lot of research showing now, really great research, we have more tools now, showing that with ninety nine point nine percent certainty, which is absolutely massive, that, that consciousness exists beyond the physical brain and body.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  And that's very interesting, because just to get a paper published, for example, I have to have at least a one in one thousand probability, or one in one hundred minimum. They, this kind of research is showing a one in a million, one in a billion, one in a trillion, one in a billion type of certainty and probability, which means it's very accurate, more accurate than, for example, a statin drugs effectiveness. So that, what's very interesting there is that this, there's, there's a very interesting large body of research that's challenging the physicalist approach again. And it's, it was pushed aside as pseudoscience and everything, but it's actually, if you compare the different types, the two approaches, the science is much more accurate. It's also gold standard, double blind, I mean, it's really good science.

• 17:24André Duqum?

  What is this? What is the research?

• 17:26Speaker 00

  It's, it's a big body of research. There's a lot going on, like at Arizona University, there's Italy, all the, throughout, throughout universities, throughout the United States.

• 17:36André Duqum?

  Studying consciousness beyond the body.

• 17:38Speaker 00

  Yes, studying consciousness beyond the body, studying the concept of, they look at reincarnation, they look at. After death communication, they look at near death experiences, they look at, so they take those kinds of approaches and then they look at this also lots of work at Arizona University, Stuart Hammerhoff, you've probably heard of him, brilliant, absolutely brilliant, his work and Sir Roger Penrose, that he works with the Orchard theory. They've also been for years talking about how does, you know, this whole debate, where does it start? And their research is very effectively mathematically, they've done all the mathem-, huge mathematic, mathematical problems and using

• 18:16Speaker 00

  quantum physics and using very complex stuff that's, that I briefly understand because you have to understand a very simple, you have to understand the basic principles. But essentially what they've shown is that there is a whole mathematical equation that falls within the realm of quantum physics, that literally collapses into, they call it collapsing, but it's, it uses parts of the brain, the micro, in the neurons, we have microtubules, which are like little railway tracks and they're made of proteins called tubulin. And those seem to be able to vibrate and hold the information that's coming in from the universe.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  And that each person has their own unique way that we receive this information and that there's this whole connectedness happening. Now, you know from your work in spirituality that that is what is spoken about, that we are all one, that there's this connectedness, that there's, so there's the, from the eastern philosophy and this kind of research, they are coalescing. They, it's all coming together, it's the two different sides. And that's been quite dominant, it's been dominant, it's not dominant, it's becoming very, people are becoming much more aware of it. I've seen Hammerhoff, for example, on, in, in Apple News, and I say that because that means that they're being noticed. Only recently, but they've been doing this work for fifty years, you know, this incredible work.

• 19:39Speaker 00

  So, yeah, that's, so I believe then that therefore that the mind is the dominant force, it's creative. Equals mc squared, Einstein's theory, energy creates matter. Einstein played with this idea constantly. And he, and he, he, his whole philosophy was that, well, energy, um, energy generates something, it makes something. And so that goes against the physicalist thing because they say that's impossible. Physical is what is fundamental and it generates energy. But if you look at the calculations, it doesn't work that way. It's energy actually creates matter. So we are, the conscious, the mind, consciousness, unconscious, there's different levels, generates and creates matter and activates matter.

• 20:23Speaker 00

  So he, uh, Henry Step is another scientist that, um, he's, I think he might have passed by now, just recently, um, in, um, California, um, that's, uh, not, not UCLA, um, Berkeley. Um, brilliant, absolutely brilliant work where he talks about also this whole concept of consciousness and the mathematical, he's done incredible work with von Neumann's theories and things. So there's such a massive body from quantum physics through physics, through after death communication, reincarnation, and it's all coming together. You know, I've been watching this for the last forty years and that's all coming together. So, short answer to, I mean, long answer, short summary, I believe that consciousness creates matter and therefore the brain is pretty much created by consciousness and, and activated and innovated.

• 21:08Speaker 00

  And that's why when we physically disintegrate, that energy moves out, but it doesn't, it doesn't stop existing. Yeah. You've probably heard of Feynman as well, Feynman's geometric concepts. You know, once you've got your gem, but once you, it, it never disappears, you know. So that's, I don't know, that's a long answer with lots of things thrown in.

• 21:27Speaker 02

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• 21:57Speaker 03

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• 22:24André Duqum?

  Yeah, I think it's important just to, you know, put a little charcuterie board of all these different scientists and researchers and physicists, you know, and give a little sample platter of the work that is being done, that is being more and more studied and emergent. And we've had, you know, conversations on the podcast at length and ad nauseam with Donald Hoffman, Annika Harris.

• 22:48Speaker 00

  Credible work.

• 22:49André Duqum?

  And it's really exciting to see alternative theories that can appeal to the very scientifically oriented mind in a way that the spiritual traditions have been saying for a while. But we want proof and, you know, it's tough to be able to prove theories around non-physical stuff with microscopes, you know, and physical instrumentation that was developed to kind of split the world in this Cartesian way of observation. So I think I just love to be able to breathe humility into it all and say, we don't fully know what's going on, but through some of the science that's been doing, that's been

• 23:33André Duqum?

  coming out more recently, it is starting to open a lot of doors. And like you said, it is entering the mainstream in a really exciting way. I think where this now comes down into the practical side of things, because we can get, I'm sure we could go for two hours diving deeper into the philosophical.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  Only you and I get to know what's, enjoy it because we start talking about all kinds of things, yeah.

• 23:53André Duqum?

  But this, this is, this is important because it... It raises the question of who are you fundamentally, right? Are you a bunch of firing synapses? Or are these neuro correlates simply that? And that you exist in a vast, more vast field. You call it your mind, this consciousness in which it re-invites a sense of agency and ability to be able to shape your reality, instead of it just happening to you. And so now, when you started studying neuroplasticity and when you started studying our ability to be able to, with through our mind, be able to make real tangible impacts and changes

• 24:36André Duqum?

  on our health, our relationships, all of this. Was there a predominant study in your clinical research that really awoke in your mind up to how possible the change is?

• 24:50Speaker 00

  What really, so that's a very big leading question, because there's so many areas. You can't have, understand the stuff without looking at everything. You have to look at spirituality, you have to look at philosophy, you have to look at different types of approaches in science. You have to kind of look at it all. So I was trained in a very interesting environment where it was part medicine that we had to do and it was a whole lot of neurology and it was a kind of a combination degree, which was very interesting because it gave me exposure to a lot of different areas, from psychology to philosophy, to hardcore science, to medicine, to neurology. Neuroplasticity wasn't actually even really a word at that stage. It was more in neurology.

• 25:34Speaker 00

  What we would see would be changes in a person's functioning. There was assumptions that the brain was fixed and that once damage occurred, that was it. So I was trained that the mind was separate, but once it's damaged, no matter what you did with your mind, your brain was fixed and damaged. And so at that, what really stimulated that interest was that particular lecture we were learning about, what they now call TBR, traumatic brain injury. At that stage, it was called closed head injury. And we were having a lecture on that and whole examination. And one of the professors just had said exactly that. When you work with someone who's had traumatic brain injury. Basically, what you need to do is teach him to compensate because that damage is there forever. Now, Luria, you may have heard of him from years ago.

• 26:18Speaker 00

  He was one of the pioneers in the whole understanding of how the brain works. And then also you might have heard of Roger Penfield, Wilder Penfield. Brilliant, brilliant. One of the, I probably think, one of the most famous and done the most incredible, biggest body of work when it comes to open brain surgery. He was a dominant physicalist, but through his work shifted and became very much a dualist after that, recognizing that, well, dualist in the sense that it's, the mind influences the brain. So Wilder Penfield was a big influence in my life. Luria, those kinds of people. And we were having a lecture and in that lecture, this professor said, so this is it. Once the brain's damaged, that's it.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  You've got to teach your patients to compensate. And that was what triggered. And I remember putting up my hand and saying, and look, there weren't women, many women in science in those days. It was ridiculous. Patriarchy was very dominant in those days. And I think I was like one, five women in a class of mainly males. And I said, but how can that be possible? Because if you, if you think about it, you're always different. Every moment of every day, every new experience engrosses you as a human. Just think of that logically. So therefore, if, if your mind is using your brain, then how can it not change? And he said, and at that, he said, well, go and do research on it. And he was being sarcastic. So I said, okay, well, what area?

• 27:43Speaker 00

  And he said, well, traumatic brain injury because, or CHI, cause injury, because there's not much research on it. Because why do you research on it? The damage, the damage is done. So I said, okay, there was a little dearth of research in that area. And that's what stimulated me. So I started researching that concept and I started working with clients, that patients and being, I mean, very experimental, using developing mind-driven systems and formulas to see if, if I could train someone who's really battling, could there be change in their behavior, cognitive, emotional, social, that stuff? And we thought, I mean, I had clients that were literally written off. By neurologists, vegetables, that's what they used to say in those days.

• 28:24Speaker 00

  And we're functioning, they were eighteen and functioning at like a sort of twelve, sorry, eight, nine, seven, eight, nine year old level. And within eight months, going back to university, I went to school, finishing school, going on to university, when they had been written off. And I didn't just see that once, I saw it over and over again, so I knew that there was something. So that was some of the earliest work in neuroplasticity in my field. And that's when the, you know, that's sort of over that period was when I really saw that wow, mind really does change the physical, but it's logical. Because if you think about it, take all the science, all this complex stuff we've just been saying. And they talk about it being the hard question of science consciousness. I don't agree with that at all. I think it's the easiest question of science, but we've just asked, we've looked at it the wrong way. We've asked it in the wrong, the wrong way.

• 29:10Speaker 00

  You and I are having a conversation, after this, we're both going to be different. Because you have a point of view, I have a point of view, we're sharing ideas. We should be different, we're different from the day we've just had. We can just look at ourselves and observe ourselves and see how we've grown through experiences. The change is evident, we are constantly changing. And we're constantly changing and those changes impact us. Just think of when you're very sad, how your body feels, if you've gone through a trauma, feel how, how your body feels. When you're feeling extremely stressed, how we, how that can build up in your body. And if it's unmanaged, we see that. I mean, I've done research where we've shown telomeres shortening and getting, changing significantly in periods of nine weeks, which is pretty much unheard of.

• 29:49Speaker 00

  I've, I've worked with, it was Lisa Apple, who worked with Elizabeth, who, Elizabeth, gosh, with a B, I've forgotten her last name, who won the Nobel Prize in the work on telomeres. And based on their research, I did research and I sent him my stuff. And they said, this is unreal, that stuff can, because normally it takes five years for telomeres to change. So, and our telomeres are important because telomeres influence cell division. Cell division is important because we have eight hundred thousand, two million new cells forming every second. So therefore. Just think of this whole picture. If I am making, you and I, and the listeners and viewers are making eight hundred thousand to a million new cells every second. And that is, that is making up every organ in our body, which makes up our systems, which makes up your brain and body.

• 30:33Speaker 00

  And you are making new cells every second. And on top of that, what the research shows is that the quality of those cells is influenced by how you are managing your mind in the moment. And we see that direct impact on telomeres, which have paid, for many years, we've seen has been a proxy around diet and exercise. But there's been a lot of work done, especially by Lisa Apple, on how we manage our mind, stress management, et cetera, and how that influences telomere length. And generally, the, the, the work around telomeres has been that it'll take up to five years of changing diet, exercise, et cetera, before we see changes in telomere length. And telomeres, the end of chromosomes. So for those of you that are a bit lost at the moment, chromosomes like an X, and where my fingernails are would be the telomeres.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  And telomeres, as cells divide, those telomeres get shorter and then they replenish. But if we don't, as we age, they don't do it as well. But also, if we don't, if we're very stressed out, traumatized, sick, they don't work as well either. What we didn't know was that can you influence telomeres? Because they're really important in physical health. And what the research showed was diet, exercise, et cetera, but it would take five years. What we showed with our research, and what Lisa Apple's also shown with hers with different techniques, is that you can change it in short periods of time. So neuroplasticity can happen in as short as nine weeks. We've had people gain thirty five, up to thirty five years of biological age, which is healthy in their body within a nine week period. And so that's neuroplasticity in action.

• 31:59Speaker 00

  And that relates to how we're managing our mind. And then that, you know, that drives the changes in our body. So that's the E equals M C squared. We've come full circle, you know, back to that, that point. So that's what stimulated me, that research in traumatic brain injury and just seeing it in different spheres and seeing how people have come through. I also did a ton of work in South Africa for twenty five years, working in the poorly performing schools and things. So I grew up in the apartheid area, era, era, the transition.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  Mandela came into power in the post apartheid era. And I was working in what we call the, all the schools that they just shoved out in the townships. Terrible stuff. I mean, it was, they weren't getting an education. And I went into those schools. We had contracts to work in those schools. And I would literally teach the teachers and the students how to think, how to learn. So they could at least get, you know, educate, get knowledge. And the results were phenomenal. We had, we had schools that were not even getting an education, becoming top schools in the country and that kind of thing. Worked in, I worked in Rwanda after the genocide, a few years after the genocide. I've seen so much in so many constrained, I can tell you stories for hours and hours about seeing scenarios and situations of people in situations that they shouldn't be functional.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  But once you give them the understanding of this is, this physical is not it. There's so much more coming to mental health, how it's by the biomedical models, labeled and tie people into disease type names and disease diagnoses that limits people. You know, and so seeing the changes when you show people, hey, this is not who you are. You aren't bipolar depression. You're experiencing that as a sim, as, as basically a signal. There's a because of behind that. And there's amazing research backing this up that when you look at, at how we're showing up as humans in our conscious mind. And then, and, and you look at that and you see that, that's not who you are. That is data.

• 33:57Speaker 00

  And if you look at that data, you can track back to the source and you can't change what's happened, but you can reconstruct and you can change how it plays out into the future. And that process is neuroplasticity. It's directed neuroplasticity. It shows the power of the mind. It shows the power of humans getting through things in life. Long answer.

• 34:17André Duqum?

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• 35:03André Duqum?

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• 35:33André Duqum?

  It was a great answer, though. I, everybody can relate to some degree, whether they're recovering from a traumatic brain injury. Whether they're struggling something, mind-body relationships. And, or their life is just generally good and they want to be able to live a great life.

• 35:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:51André Duqum?

  Cause the work that you're doing like in South Africa and I think is so important. Like we go through our education systems, especially in the Western world. And it's great for so many reasons, but we learn so much about the external world and we don't really get taught how this mind-body breath works. And if we did, I mean, what kind of world would we live in if somebody knew how to regulate their nervous system? You know, it's like basics.

• 36:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's fundamental.

• 36:20André Duqum?

  Yeah. And so doing this work for so long, you've seen patterns, you've discovered what really, really works for people. And this is where I would just like to love to zoom in on the neurocycle and make it really practical for everybody who's listening right now. So what is the goal of what the neurocycle system and the way that you kind of break the five steps down? What is it aiming to do? And then what is it?

• 36:43Speaker 00

  Okay, so it was birthed out of my work with traumatic brain injury from that first, Yep. that first, with the professor making that comments and doing the research. And what I needed was to understand how, how do, what are you like, we're talking, this is an experience, how does this become part of me? How does it get installed in my network? What is the mind, brain, body connection? What is a thought? What are our memories? So I did a lot of work around that and then started understanding that this is a process that we go through in terms of the experiences of life becoming part of our neurophysiology. So that's the psychoneurobiology, which is a fairly new word as well. It's a fairly new field, psychoneuroimmunology, psychoneurobiology. But it's basically this relationship between the mind, brain and body.

• 37:28Speaker 00

  So in trying to understand that relationship, now I'm doing all this science and doing all this stuff, but I'm working with patients. And you can't go and have this kind of conversation with someone who's battling with traumatic brain injury or some kind of, on the neurological side, a tumor or something like that, or a stroke victim, or on the other side, someone going through extreme trauma from something abusive or whatever, and then in between sort of learning disabilities and that sort of thing. So I worked with quite a wide range of patients. Now, you can't sit and have this philosophical discussion with everyone. I had to have something practical. What could I sit and do with them to help that client or that patient who had a traumatic brain injury, who wanted to get back and finish a school with her peer group who was

• 38:11Speaker 00

  eighteen and she had lost a year, almost a year of school because of her car accident? What did I do with her? That's where it started. So I wanted, I took, well, that's science, you know, just okay, what is the system? What are we doing? What is it step by step? And a lot of science later, I developed this formula. It's not even, it's not a technique. It's not a process. It's a formula, because you can put anything into it. There's so many great techniques and ideas and philosophy, not even so much, well philosophies can also fit in, but it's not that it's, this is the technique. It's a formula that helps to facilitate directed neuroplasticity. So that whole thing of telomeres, directing them, if you're making these, that really got me. If, if we are making that many cells that we estimate and sort of understand, if our,

• 38:55Speaker 00

  if, or if one neuron has the power ten to eighteen, which, ten to sixteen, which is four hundred billion operations per second, and that's one, we have a hundred billion, what's the relationship between them? That's, that's just the neuron. What about inside the neuron? What about outside the neuron? What about all the, you know, all the other energy? How can we take all of that and put that into a way that translates into me managing myself when I'm extremely stressed, or backing that student to get back to school, or dealing with stroke, effect of stroke, or whatever, trauma, and then just day to day living, dealing with politics, socioeconomic situations, just the challenges of being, I mean, I don't know if you're a parent, but we've got four kids, running a business, all of that. And so I wanted to understand that process, and that's where the neurocycle

• 39:38Speaker 00

  was birthed. It was birthed out of initially then helping climatic brain injured patients rebuild their ability to function on a cognitive, emotional, social, intellectual level. Incredible improvements we saw, significant changes, thirty five to seventy five percent changes in those areas of function, nothing that we expected. In fact, the results were none of us, you know, if nothing happens, it's still research. But we thought if there's a five percent difference, we're going in the right direction. So when we got those results, we got external statisticians in to look at the work and that kind of thing. And that's when I knew we were on to something. And so the neurocycle was birthed out of that. And then it got translated back down into these five steps. So when I say five

• 40:21Speaker 00

  steps, it sounds, oh, well, this is so simple. Everything I'm going to say you already know. And that's good, because what we know, how you put what you know together, and how you filter that, and how you use it in a rhythm, that's what I've discovered with this formula. We are always in a neuroplastic state. Our body's bioplastic, our brain is neuroplastic.

• 40:41André Duqum?

  What does plastic mean?

• 40:42Speaker 00

  Can change.

• 40:43André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 40:44Speaker 00

  So nothing's fixed.

• 40:45André Duqum?

  Got it.

• 40:45Speaker 00

  So nothing is fixed. So that's Einstein's equation equals M C squared. So what you do with your energy of your consciousness is going to change that formula. And that's what Henry Stack took that even further with his work and really showed that translation mathematically and everything. His work's quite brilliant. If someone's interested, that's a great place to dive a little deeper, if interested in that translation. So essentially, if you are, it's five steps, and they're simple, but they're very complex. Being in a plastic state means that we're always changing. So from the moment you open your eyes to the moment you go to sleep, you're having experiences. Thousands, and those experiences have been processed, but they've been processed by what I call the non-conscious mind.

• 41:29Speaker 00

  Now, there's only probably two or three of us in the world that talk about the non-conscious. Myself and Erin Nadad Ashgar, who's, I think he's at UCLA, he was there anyway, he's moved around a bit. And it's a concept that we should be talking about more. So I've spent forty years studying the non-conscious mind. Now, the non-conscious mind is that deepest part of you that often we can refer to as a sort of spiritual level. It's where your intuition, your insight, your wisdom, your how to handle life, your guidance, all that stuff, it's perfect. It's your you, it's your you-ness, it's the uniqueness of you. It's, there's only one Andre, there's no one can ever do what you're doing. You make a lousy someone else, you make an amazing Andre. All of that's within the depths of our non-conscious.

• 42:13Speaker 00

  It's massive, it's huge, it's beyond space and time. It's everything about, everything about you and about your connection to the world. Now, that's all very spiritual, wiffly waffly words I've just said, but we can tie that down scientifically with quantum physics, with mathematics and that sort of thing. And so the non-conscious mind is a processor. From the moment you wake up in the morning to the moment you, well, twenty-four seven, it never stops. But as you wake up in the morning, you're experiencing life and through consciously experiencing life. The non-conscious takes that and builds that into packets of energy. So there's all the data, so this conversation, every word I'm saying, every word you're saying are little bits of memory, data. And they cluster together into this, into a thought.

• 42:56Speaker 00

  The thought is this podcast, this interview that you're doing with me, which whatever you call it. So you call it the mind-body connection. So that would be the name of the thought. Everything we're saying is data. Now, our non-conscious minds, yours and mine, at speeds faster than four hundred billion actions per second, are processing this information and into these clouds of energy, E equals mc squared. Then it's coded, like literally photocopied and coded into the brain and the body. And as this energy enters into the brain, now I use Q E G for on your scientific research. So all the people have heard of delta theta, alpha, beta. Gamma, those are the brainwaves, the frequencies of the brainwaves. And they basically represent energy flowing through the brain.

• 43:40Speaker 00

  So if someone's dead, we don't see energy in the brain. When someone's alive, we see energy in the brain. And so if someone's alive, you're living. And so your living is being processed by the non-conscious mind and put into the brain and the body, not just the brain, the body too. All the somatic work people talk about and all how trauma is stored in your body. Yes, it is. This conversation we're having now is not just going into your brain. It's going into your entire body. It's going into your fingertips, it's everywhere, it's across your entire body. We have different versions of this network building. So it's an entire network that the non-conscious mind builds at the speed of light. Every new word I say, every new concept is added, built in. But you do it differently to the listeners, to, we've got some people in the studio with us here.

• 44:22Speaker 00

  All of us are taking these words and building them differently because we're unique. But our unconscious is doing that, and it's happening very, very fast. As soon as it's into the brain and the body, then it filters through. The unconscious filters it through the subconscious. So the subconscious is a filter, doesn't store, it holds things temporarily, but it slows down the non-conscious. Because the non-conscious, and this is work done by Hammerhoff and Sir Roger Penrose and a lot of people. There's a whole team of thousands, probably a couple hundred scientists in this field that talk about the speed of the non-conscious and the conscious mind and that kind of thing. But what we know is that the non-conscious mind is massive, it's big, it's huge. It's that thing that the spiritual world would talk about being connected to the oneness

• 45:06Speaker 00

  and all that sort of thing, to a universe, to whatever you use, to source, et cetera. That is so big and so fast and so vast because it extends into whatever eternity is. So for a time, it has to kind of channel down, slow down, and work through a conscious mind and a physical brain and body that are limited fast. I mean, one neuron has the speed of ten to the sixteen, as I said, which is a billion operations per second, which is quite phenomenal. And that's one neuron, we have a hundred billion, we don't even understand the relationship between two. And AI, just side note, AI is based on the operations of one neuron, ten to the sixteen. So, and that will not produce consciousness. That's the kind of philosophy, and that's another whole discussion.

• 45:49Speaker 00

  So essentially, what we have is this incredible speed of our massiveness of who we are. And that has to, for a time, be channeled through. Something slowed down, so the subconscious slows down, slows down whatever the non-conscious knows you need in the moment, because we know what we need deep down to deal with a disruptive thought. Something beautiful that's going to increase our resilience. Whatever's needed is filtered through subconscious and then bubbles up into the conscious mind to get the conscious mind's attention. And the conscious, so the conscious mind is awake when you're awake. It's asleep when you're asleep. Your brain and body go to sleep physically when you're asleep. So when you're asleep, your brain becomes unconscious and your conscious mind goes to sleep.

• 46:33Speaker 00

  But the non-conscious never switches off, never switches off. So the subconscious doesn't do anything when we are sleeping because it's reliant on the input from the non-conscious. Now, I know this is a lot, those three levels. Non-conscious is doing everything. It's got all the solutions, all the problems, all our chaos of our life, all the good, bad and ugly are built and processed. And for every toxic issue, it generates all the solutions. So we, in our perfect spiritual level, we have intuition, insight, wisdom, all these things. Dr. Tara Swart, Tara Swart talks about intuition. She's huge on intuition. This is what I'm talking about. This is the science of, literally of intuition. We have all these solutions that we can handle life. And, and that's what the, the, the masters, the eastern philosophy,

• 47:18Speaker 00

  and the guides, all these sorts of things. We're trying to tap into that level.

• 47:23Speaker 02

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• 47:53Speaker 03

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• 48:22Speaker 00

  A practical example, let's say someone comes to us, and asks you, "Andre, I've got this and this and this problem, it's free of yours," let's say. And you listen, and you listen, and you listen, and you then just pour out this wisdom. And they say, "Oh, my gosh." And then you listen to yourself, and you think, "Why don't I listen to myself?" You know, we have this wisdom in us. And even now and then, we listen to our own wisdom, but we should listen more often. So that's the non-conscious, that's huge, massive, and it has to be channeled down. Because if we pour our non-conscious into our conscious mind, it would explode. It couldn't, it could shatter, and the brain and body would shatter. The power's too much, so it has to be, literally has to be toned down to what the brain can handle. And the brain can handle a lot, but not as much as the spiritual level. So then, this is a lot.

• 49:05Speaker 00

  The neurocycle takes all the science, and I haven't even mentioned half of it, is, and it is saying, "Okay, well, if this is the case, if I'm constantly building, do I have any kind of control? If I'm constantly in this neuroplastic state, that I'm consciously wiring all this stuff in, does it go in both directions?" Yes, that's the plastic paradox. So whether you like it or not, you are building life into you. What we need to recognize is that I can have some level of influence over how I build that stuff into me. So I can be the, I am the architect of my plasticity. Sometimes I'm just going to be so reactive that I'm going to build something into my mind-brain-body network that's not going to be good for me. And that, and when I say "build it in," as soon as that energy from the non-conscious mind,

• 49:50Speaker 00

  that packet of energy hits the brain, it activates all the neurochemistry, the electromagnetics, the quantum energy, the genetics, proteins are made, and networks grow. And those proteins fold in certain ways. And when it's something that is intrusive and deep and healthy, the proteins fold correctly, the network builds like it should, and then it enhances our capacity to function and grow, et cetera, et cetera, and learn and all that stuff. But if we don't manage it, and it's toxic, the proteins must fold. And that creates a pattern, a network that's disruptive chemistry, et cetera, et cetera. Now, that immediately sends a message. To the immune system of the brain and the body. Immune system of the brain was only discovered a few years ago. We thought only the body had an immune system.

• 50:34Speaker 00

  The brain has its own immune system as well. So what's interesting is that the brain and body do not read any difference between whether you have, let's say, for example, a COVID virus or a rhinovirus or whatever virus, or a bacteria, doesn't see any difference between that entering your body and something toxic that you haven't managed, like some trauma or some fight with someone or whatever. They both become protein, chemical structures in the brain and the body with energy inside of them, because there's that energetic component. That's Hammerhoff and Roger Penrose's work. That's the microtubules and tubulin I spoke about earlier on. So all this science is telling us that we actually have a level of control. We can redirect that neuroplasticity.

• 51:18Speaker 00

  So the neurocycle takes all this and says, okay, that's a lot. How do I do this if I'm battling, if I'm in a stress moment, if I'm in a challenge, if I want to get my mind right because I've had some kind of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, sports damage from boxing or something like that, a car accident, just life, trauma. You need to be able to read the signals. So it starts, you need to be able to direct the neuroplasticity. That starts with, first of all, being able to train yourself to stand back and observe yourself, which we're very good at doing. When we do that, our whole frontal lobe lights up in a way that it should because it's structured to respond to that action.

• 52:02Speaker 00

  And when that happens, it then sends signals through the rest of the brain and so on and so on, there's this whole downward effect through the body, because it's just responding. It's not thinking, it's responding like it should. Now, the example of that would be when one falls in love or you have a great connection, like having a great discussion, that activates a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, which is, and VTA, which are very associated with what we call craving and the reward circuit. Everyone's heard about the reward circuit. And when drug addicts are in withdrawal, that withdrawal circuit, that crave and all that kind of thing. So that circuit is designed for something beautiful. It's designed to help us when we connect. It responds, it lights up. So all the parts of the brain and the different structures and the way they work together

• 52:46Speaker 00

  are all designed, and the body, to light up. Immune system, hormones, hypothalamic tissue, every part is designed in this harmony to respond when we manage our mind. When we don't manage our mind, we create this disruption. And the first point of call of the disruption is the network that we build, which then causes all this other downward effect. So when the proteins must fold, what happens is then that creates an immune response. The immune system says, okay, this is like a virus. Let me send out the immune, the little soldiers and starts creating an autoimmune response. And all this goes wrong. So the neurocycle looks at, okay, let's see, how are you showing up? Stand back, observe yourself.

• 53:27Speaker 00

  The minute you do that, you immediately open the door between the conscious, subconscious and non-conscious. A lot of the time we live in this, you mentioned right at the beginning of this interview, about how we live in this very hyper-activated world, technology, et cetera, et cetera. So when we live so activated, we live in the very much the conscious mind-brain loop and only dip into the wisdom of the non-conscious intimately. And that's not a healthy state to be in. We need to keep that flow going all the time. And yeah, so the neurocycle, basically, sorry, I'm telling you what, the neurocycle teaches you how to get yourself back into that flow. We can break down the steps.

• 54:02André Duqum?

  Let's do it. So is that step one?

• 54:04Speaker 00

  Yes. So the first step is to observe yourself. And then what do you, what do you do? Your primary body is very organized. It's very structured. It's no chaos. It's very organized. So you've got to follow like, it's good logic. Okay. So the first thing is to be very observant in a very compassionate, but clinical way. Okay, what am I feeling? Where am I feeling that in my body? What behaviors am I generating from this? What am I saying and doing? How am I saying and doing it? What is my perspective, attitude in this moment? So it's an observation step, but you stand back and you gather awareness, gathers very specifically, I chose that word very specifically. You're in control gathering. You're not just being bombarded, you're choosing, you're looking, you're observing.

• 54:47Speaker 00

  Those four signals that I mentioned, they always work together as a cluster. Emotions will never work on their own. Emotions always show up somewhere in your body. Influence of behavior and influence of perspective. So we've always got to look at those four. So that's like those are a category, four categories of signals. So depression, anxiety would be emotions. Life sucks would be a perspective. Gut ache, when you're worried about something would be the bodily sensation. A behavior would be maybe getting snapping, irritable and going into the fight response, whatever. So it's multiple, infinite number of combinations that happen with us.

• 55:22André Duqum?

  So just to make this super simple, like if I was to explain this to a toddler. Things happen, you experience anxiety, fear, jealousy, something happens. And you don't want to just be a reactionary victim to what is happening. So you watch it. You, you watch how the fluctuations in your mind and your body and your emotions.

• 55:45Speaker 00

  More specifically, yes. So even, and I've got a book for kids, for parents with kids as young as two to 12 years of age. So you can teach, I've taught this to two year olds. So very, the most basic level, yes, is when a child, when a toddler, for example, is throwing a tantrum or getting very upset or something like that, is to be able to tell them to say, okay, let's, let's just see what you did. Let's stand back and observe. But you don't use those words. You would literally use something like a toy, like I've created a little brainy toy. Where it's like, I see brainy's upset or pick up any toy, doesn't matter. So transfer, because it's easier for them to, they don't know how to observe themselves. So you totally, so you give them something to observe. So if you go to that level, so if it's an old, if it's someone who's older, anything from five, six, eight and onwards, you can say, let's, let's look at how you're showing up.

• 56:29Speaker 00

  So it's very much, what are you, what are you saying? What are you feeling? Where do you feel this, you know, there's all the language you use for. So I've got all that, I've got books on how a parent can speak that simple language right down to the level of a two year old. But the point is, is to create that pause to observe in those four categories.

• 56:47Speaker 02

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• 57:17Speaker 04

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• 57:47André Duqum?

  In the tradition with Vipassana, they talk about any time, like a samskara and sort of subconscious material is triggered, there's always going to be a biochemical sensation somewhere in the body, and then also coupled with an abnormality in the breath. So your breath will get a little bit more shallow, you'll hold it completely, something will happen. And the more you can observe, the more subtle sensations and altering of your breath and your biology, the more you can actually be with it and not just be reactionary.

• 58:22Speaker 00

  Yes, that's the same principle.

• 58:23André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 58:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:24André Duqum?

  Okay, so that's step one. What's step two?

• 58:26Speaker 00

  Well, that particular description would fall into the preparation. So I call it "mind-brain prep." So any kind of breath work, visualization, meditation, gets you into that space where you can get your physiology under control. So for example, any kind of breath work, when you breathe in, you signal to your brain and your body, "It's going to be okay." When you breathe out, you're telling your body, "It is okay." And as you say, to observe that, because sometimes we, as you say, we lift our shoulders, we breathe short. So all of the way we're breathing is a way of observing. So for example, if someone's very worked up and you just say, "Just breathe," sometimes they'll breathe, and they'll do that, they'll get worse. So it's almost, so it's all that observation is a kind of a preparation phase.

• 59:08André Duqum?

  And you speak heavily around the importance of lengthening your exhales, right?

• 59:13Speaker 00

  Yes, three in for three, out for seven is one of my favorite because that's.

• 59:17André Duqum?

  In for three, hold for three?

• 59:19Speaker 00

  In, no, just in for three, out for seven.

• 59:21André Duqum?

  Got it. Yeah.

• 59:22Speaker 00

  And then, and you do that six times, so sixty seconds. And it does, it does, you can feel it, you'll immediately feel that sensation of oxygen and blood flow to your brain. You almost feel a little bit high, but it creates enough of a pause to be able to stand back and observe. So when someone's in a very high reactive state, where they're really being triggered, it's very hard to get cognitive at that stage. So that's where the breathing is vital. And that's where that really works very, very well to create that pause. And then you can reengage. And then the re-engaging is when you then would move into the five steps of the neurocycle. So you have to have almost like a CPR.

• 59:58André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 59:58Speaker 00

  Kind of situation, you know, to calm pause, regroup, I actually teach it to, it's a stress CPR. That gets you into that state of observation.

• 1:00:04André Duqum?

  Could you just, could you name all of the five steps? Just rattle them off and then we'll go through them?

• 1:00:08Speaker 00

  Absolutely. So the first step is gather awareness. The second step is reflect. The third step is mindstorm. And then kind of genetically writing, but just mindstorm's an easier word. And then recheck, which is a reconceptualization. And then active reach, very specifically chosen for what they do. Each step is giving you, you, each step as you consciously do it, you consciously forcing your conscious mind to deliberately intentionally engage with the unconscious. And then as you do that, then the unconscious can send information through the subconscious and bubbles up. Okay, so the, so when you, when you create that little, like a little bit of breathing, I always recommend start with either a little bit of breathing, bit of meditation, whatever works for you,

• 1:00:52Speaker 00

  however long, there's millions of ways you can do it. But even just, if you just breathe for the sixty seconds, that's gonna do a lot, just to get you in that space. And that opens up a lot. And then you start with step one, which is gather awareness. And that's where you would actually clinically, with compassion and kindness, I say clinically, with compassion and kindness. If you don't bring that mindset in and you bring in judgment and harsh critical towards yourself, that then throws your physiology back into a state and you're gonna throw yourself back into a, you're gonna get stuck in a mind brain loop. And then you actually make it worse, you don't make it better. So the compassion and kindness, and there's a million other reasons why it changes the physiology. Then you're going to just literally say, how am I feeling in this moment? What are my emotions in this moment?

• 1:01:37Speaker 00

  Where do I feel them in my body? What is it? What behaviors am I about to do? Or would I normally do? Would I just snap at that person? Am I going to withdraw? What am I already doing? I'm ready with whatever. Because you could be in the midst of this. And then what is my perspective in this moment? So it could be that depression, just a heavy lethargy through your body for the bodily sensation, could be withdrawing and life sucks. I mean, that's just a simple. So it's an observation of those. No judgment, just compassion. And with the compassion is the view that this is not who you are. You aren't depression. You can't have depression. You can't have bipolar depression or schizophrenia because they're not things like cancer. They are signals that are giving you data. They're data.

• 1:02:22Speaker 00

  And if we look at them as hard as it is, we will get the data. So that first step is to tell yourself, this is not you. You're showing up like this. Let's see, you know, how you're showing up. And then how we show up is always attached to a thought. The thought is the thing made of memories that an unconscious mind built in response to an experience. So we want to backtrack. We want to backtrack. So if I'm showing up like this, I never show up just randomly. It shows up because that's coming from something. That something is a thought. So in the reflect step, which is step two, you're starting to find the thought that those four signals are attached to. And a thought is made of lots of memories. I mean, you can have a hundred, few hundred to a few thousand memories in that thought,

• 1:03:05Speaker 00

  depending on what it is and how big, et cetera, et cetera. So the reflect step then is taking that, it's another, it's also data capturing.

• 1:03:12André Duqum?

  Reflects is step two?

• 1:03:13Speaker 00

  Step two is reflect.

• 1:03:14André Duqum?

  So the first one is essentially, as you slow down your breath, you kind of gather yourself. You ground, you chill out. You bring some compassion

• 1:03:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:22André Duqum?

  to whatever the trigger, the stimulus is.

• 1:03:24Speaker 00

  That's the preparation.

• 1:03:25André Duqum?

  That's the preparation.

• 1:03:27Speaker 00

  And then gather awareness.

• 1:03:28André Duqum?

  Awareness is kind of taking that a little bit of a step further.

• 1:03:31Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:03:31André Duqum?

  To like present it and to like be able to make deeper contact with it, essentially.

• 1:03:37Speaker 00

  Yes, it's you engaging now. You're engaging and you're connecting. And you're having a conscious, literally a conscious analysis, literally with giving yourself therapy, whatever you want to call it. You're literally observing. Yes, it's a conscious engagement. Speak out loud. Have, if you can have paper and write down as well as you observe.

• 1:03:53André Duqum?

  Is there a difference from?

• 1:03:56André Duqum?

  Separating yourself from it and observing it as a phenomenon in itself? Or do you actually embody it and like feel into the how personal it is?

• 1:04:09Speaker 00

  You merge, you are merging, but you're also disengaging and merging at the same time. So I call it the multiple perspective advantage. So you're going into an MPA. So you've done that breathing, all that stuff. Now you're going to go into a multiple perspective advantage.

• 1:04:21André Duqum?

  Metacognitive state, sort of, you're aware.

• 1:04:24Speaker 00

  Yes, this whole thing is metacognitive. Where you're thinking about your thinking, yeah. So it's an awareness. So it's the MPA, multiple perspective advantage, is where you stand back and you observe yourself with from multiple perspectives. So that's where the compassion and all that stuff comes in. So you're in essence observing, but you're still merging. So you're still feeling that, you're still feeling, you're not observing yourself as an object. There's still that engagement, which is really important because that's that essence of that humanity and that connection that we always want to keep with ourselves. And not disengage completely, but you want to be able to observe it. So then you're observing the four signals. It's gathering data. That's activated neuroscientifically. What that does is it actually activates the network. And as soon as the network's activated, the little proteins and chemicals, the bond starts loosening.

• 1:05:09Speaker 00

  So that means you can start rewiring. That's the plasticity aspect.

• 1:05:12André Duqum?

  Which is where reflect comes in?

• 1:05:14Speaker 00

  Reflect takes it even deeper. So the gather awareness gets that process going. Then reflect is your classic who, what, when, where, why, how. So it's the classic now, you've got this data that you just have gathered awareness. Now, who, who were you in that moment? Who else was involved? Maybe there was someone, maybe there wasn't. But who were you in that moment? That in that moment that it's happening? You're always trying to keep it in the moment that it's happening. Don't try and solve the world's problems and your whole life's problems in one shot. You take this as a rhythm in the now moment. So you're observing the who, the what, what am I worked up about? What is this? So you're getting more detail as opposed to just the signals. So the signals are being fleshed out, the when, the where, the why.

• 1:05:58Speaker 00

  And the how, let's reflect. And you answer those questions and you write them down. And there's a way of writing that I'll talk about just now. I don't want to give people too many things at once, but there's a way to write down that really captures this and takes you deep. Then the third step is now you've done this first two. So you've got this organised thing of signals. You've got these who, what, when, where, why answers. I've got data. So now this is going to have activated. It's brought the network up. And there's a lot of memories in those networks. And these connected networks, like trees in a forest, you'll see the roots. So what we do is the third step is a stream of consciousness. It's a mind storm. What do the first two steps generate? What else comes up? So you just let it flow, whatever comes up. It could be your shopping list pops up. It could be something from 20 years ago. It doesn't matter if it doesn't make sense.

• 1:06:42Speaker 00

  The point is just capture what's come up because there's something. At some point you'll understand that. Then you've got all this data. Now you've got this network up and active and now you can start redesigning. So it's a deconstruction and a little bit, and then you start reconstructing. And so the fourth and the fifth step is going into more of a reconstructive stage. So the fourth step is the recheck. I've got all this data. I'm looking at all this data in front of me. And now I'm going to start reorganising this. The big question is, this has happened. What can I do about it? Multiple perspectives. What are the different ways of looking at this? How can I see this differently? How can I see if there's this trauma associated with this place? Instead of always thinking that I can never go to that place because it's got this hold on me. We don't want the past to, we can't change the past,

• 1:07:26Speaker 00

  but we can't, we can change the impact of the past on our present and on our future. So a reconceptualisation would say, okay, that was painful, what happened there. But there's also the good, look at, look at the good that came out of it. Or look at how I handled it. Look at how I succeeded through that, whatever it is. So it's reconceptualising. And you're not solving the whole thing in one day. What my research has shown, mine and others, is that this rhythm of the neuro cycle that you do daily, you need to do for at least 63 days. You're not going to rewire a network in one hour, one, one session. It does take time. So it's, it's cumulative little bit each day. So then you wrap that up, you do, it's exhausting. So you don't want to drain yourself. Your physical brain and conscious mind get Very tired in your body. Your unconscious mind never gets tired.

• 1:08:11Speaker 00

  But it also will tell you when you're tired. So we need to listen. So I always say, keep it within a five, fifteen maximum hour window. That you work through the rhythm of the neurocycle. So fifteen minutes is kind of a good amount of time to do this. So you end off, so you do that work of the recheck. And then you go into, okay, so how can I take an action out of this data? I've gathered this recheck that I've done into an action that I can apply today. And that's generally some sort of a statement, like, I can handle this. I don't know how yet. Something as simple as that, but I will. Or I'm learning how to handle this. Or it's okay to feel not okay. So it's generally some sort of a statement that's made up of the work you've just done with the previous four steps. And then I always recommend to attach it to something visual.

• 1:08:55Speaker 00

  Good visualization, you all know that works so well. Maybe you visualize a white flower or something like that. Or you could, a quote, maybe there's a great quote or there's something great that, whatever. You can, you create something. Now that is your anchor for the day to keep you in a space that you work on this tomorrow. So you don't allow yourself to do this all day long. That particular activity, you can use the neurocycle for other things all day long. But when you're working on something that you're trying to change, you do that work. And the active reach then is, is what you anchor for yourself in during the day. So I've got an app called the Neurocycle, which is available at, we everywhere buy apps and there's a web version. So in that, there's a little place where you can write your active reach and you can set the timer to go off at least seven times. You can do it more, you can make it go off every hour.

• 1:09:39Speaker 00

  And then it just pops up on your screen and all you do is read it, think about it and move on. So that just keeps you in that space. This is so important to do because the active reach, if you allow yourself to go back to that space, you can undo the work you've just done. Whatever you think about the most grows, that's plasticity in action. So very often we can do the work, activate something. But if we don't manage and capture that, we can put ourselves into toxic stress. Stress is an intelligence, we want to use it intelligently. So the active reach keeps you in that place that I did my work. Now moving forward, I'll pick that up tomorrow. And that's pretty much the rhythm you get into. So that's doing the work of like, if you've got an issue that you can't to deal with, a disruptive thought, a pattern, something like that.

• 1:10:22Speaker 00

  And a pattern is a disruptive thought, it's a thought that's doing something. Maybe you want to build something on the positive side, there might be something that you're trying to grow. There's a new pattern that you're trying to grow. So it's not necessarily always breaking down to the problem. It could also be building a new network. And during the course of the day, once you get into that rhythm of the neuro cycle, because it's directing the whole mind, brain, body connection, you can use it in 10 seconds. I mean, I'll, I'll be in a, in an interview and someone will ask me a question and I will think what, you know, what, I mean, that's stimulated something and I'll quickly run through a neuro cycle to get to the answer. So I, I use it to get me into that, that insight level, that intuitive level so I can answer questions. So it's got multiple uses, there's many other uses too, but for the sake of this session,

• 1:11:05Speaker 00

  for the sake of not confusing everyone, that's the basic principle.

• 1:11:10André Duqum?

  So the fifth one, the last one was putting it to action. Have some sort of behavioral change that actually moves it from the level of conceptual to embodiment.

• 1:11:21Speaker 00

  Yes, so you're starting to rewire the network and stabilize it. Cause it's like, if you, as you start the work, it's basically you, the five steps, embrace, process and reconceptualize. So essentially that last step is how you anchor yourself in the work you've done today. So you don't go backwards and you don't try and do too much. Cause if you do too much, you'll stop, you'll, you'll get overwhelmed. So it's, yeah, it's a, it's a statement, it's a quote, it's a, it's a visualization, it's a combination. It's could be an affirmation, it could be a little technique, like a little CBT technique. Those out of context, out of the five steps, don't create sustainable change. When you put them into the right place, like actually reaches all the little action type of things that you can do to help you. If it's in that, it's followed the correct format, then it's going, the protein changes and the chemical changes

• 1:12:06Speaker 00

  and all that biology will happen in the correct way. Otherwise, it's a situation of you do it and then it's fun for a while and then you've got to do it all over again. And people get so disturbed and upset and think, what's wrong with me? Why can't I change? And because they're not following the correct rhythm for the correct amount of time. So you have a bit of growth forward and you've got 10 steps back. And that's kind of how you, why you have to go through a rhythm for at least 63 days.

• 1:12:32André Duqum?

  Our online community sent in some questions that I wanna add in here. Shannon from California said, "What advice do you have for those who are apprehensive about losing a part of their personality during the process of rewiring their mind?"

• 1:12:47Speaker 00

  Oh, you won't lose, that's such a great question, by the way. You won't lose, you'll find. It's in the unconscious mind, your perfect you, that you're, all of the brilliance and the hugeness of your humanity and all the insights and intelligence, all of that's there. So what it does is you peel off the layers that the conscious mind has got us stuck in from social media, thinking you should be like this and all the, we make a lousy someone else, we make a great us. And so this work really helps you find you. So I do a lot of identity work with people, and this is key, because that's one of the biggest things that gets shot. If I think of most of my patients and most of the clients that I do one-on-one work with, and the therapists and things that I train, that is one of the biggest issues, that most common issue, people feel like they're losing identity or losing part of

• 1:13:33Speaker 00

  themselves.

• 1:13:34André Duqum?

  If you had to, like, more specifically, do you recommend we plan for a space to grieve the part of ourselves we have lost? Or do you have any strategies one can use to make this aspect of rewiring the mind easier to accept or tolerate?

• 1:13:48Speaker 00

  So the grieving aspect is obviously, that's without, I don't have enough context here, but what I'm, I think I'm hearing her say is that there's gonna be a change in her. But see, what we get used to, we can have patterns that we've developed that are counter to our natural way that we function, that are cool, perfect you, that are cool, you know, that's inside the unconscious mind. And so life can really tarnish and taint that, and we can create counterparts to our personality that get us through, but they're not totally authentic. So I think what she's saying is that from life's experiences, she's developed certain ways of functioning. Now, with rewiring, some of those may go away. So yes, there is a grieving, but the grieving comes in, and the big grieving period comes in around thirty-six to forty-two days, from the research that we've done.

• 1:14:33Speaker 00

  We've tracked this daily, what the changes that go on in people's lives. Around that time period, when you've done this consistent work daily, your insight exceeds. Spans like three hundred and sixty degree view. You know, when you start, you're like this, like a horse with blinkers. And they come off and come off. And that can, that brings almost more anxiety and more depression, but it's different. It's, it's a grieving and a knowing and a seeing the change and the growth and the things that we need to go through as humans. It's good, it's healthy, it's hard. But it's, so it's a grieving we need to allow ourselves to do. And generally, that's about a sort of ten day period. If you're in that rhythm and then it picks up again. So, yeah, that's to, to the technique, the knowledge.

• 1:15:14Speaker 00

  So the technique is if you know that rhythm, which is why I have like the whole healing journey literally plotted. And we've got a paper coming out very soon on that as well. But I've got little graphs and things in, in my books and materials. If you know what's coming up, when it does come, you know what you're grieving. So knowledge is always, knowledge of what's coming up doesn't show you. Cause we get very strong when you do something that seems to be, what is this? I don't know what this is. But when we're prepared, that's really important. And in those moments, if it, if it becomes too much, or we say, if you're doing a neuro cycle and it hits you and you're feeling very great, because it brings up a lot of stuff, just stop. And then just do something in that breathing range, visualization, meditation. And I have different techniques, CPR techniques that one can do and so on.

• 1:15:58Speaker 00

  There's so many great stuff, things out there. So you can just pull out for a moment, just get yourself back together, maybe talk to someone as well. That's also another option. Be careful of who you talk to though. Because if you, sometimes your pearls of wisdom will go the wrong way. Or you won't, whatever, you, or you open up to someone who doesn't energetically receive that in the right way. Also, you can talk yourself into a hole. So if someone's just agreeing with you, you could increase your victim mentality. Can make you worse, whatever you think about the most grows. So if it's not progressive forward, if someone's not challenging you to be more curious, that's not going to really help you. It's, you, you could get stuck and go backwards.

• 1:16:37Speaker 02

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• 1:17:07Speaker 03

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• 1:17:36André Duqum?

  Yeah, it feels like the more that you go through this whole process, like the more you've gone through different depths of old versions of yourself, you see how the story ends.

• 1:17:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:17:45André Duqum?

  You know, you see that there's this transfiguration into a different, more evolved, more compassionate version of yourself. And so it's easier, I think, as you go through it to have more trust and faith in the process and know that it's not the end of a story. It's just a transition moment.

• 1:18:00Speaker 00

  And a growth into a new story. You know, you're writing your new story. You're always writing a new story.

• 1:18:05André Duqum?

  Yeah. But it, yeah, it definitely can feel like the end of your world in those moments.

• 1:18:11Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:18:11André Duqum?

  Because in some ways it is, but it's also the birth of a new one, right? And so...

• 1:18:17Speaker 00

  Transition is always hard.

• 1:18:19André Duqum?

  Yeah, and we have this tendency to compound the shame, guilt, and fear on top of it for feeling that way, you know? But it's like bringing some softness into the experience to realize that like this is kind of... This transformation process and the shedding and the birthing of new is like, what we're here to do as humans, like we're this journey of discovery.

• 1:18:37Speaker 00

  It is, and I love that you brought up the shame and the grief, just and the guilt or whatever that goes through. If one can look at those as data, so immediately when you feel it consuming, step back into the multiple perspective advantage and see that this is not me, I don't have to feel bad about this. This is something, wow, this is interesting, be curious. Why do I feel the shame? What is the data that it's telling me? And when you explore down that road, suddenly what was maybe going to block you grows you. And you get insight, there's going to be tears, there's going to be, but you will grow immediately. So it's data and then you don't merge with it in that way, you actually learn from it.

• 1:19:11André Duqum?

  Uh huh.

• 1:19:12Speaker 00

  So it's a shift and it works, it's hard, because when that shame hits and that guilt hits, we want to go into a sort of toxic stress response. We want to get into the intelligent version and see this data.

• 1:19:25André Duqum?

  No, we can so easily trap ourselves into the reason and logical way of needing to know how things are going to play out, right? Instead of knowing that once we get further, we'll see further.

• 1:19:36Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:19:37André Duqum?

  But the fearful part of us wants to have the logical A to B, you know, what's going to happen? And that need and control for certainty can undermine the process unraveling in a way that could be greater than we could expect.

• 1:19:50Speaker 00

  Exactly, and just what you said is that we can't, I mentioned already, we can't change the past, but we can change the impact of the past on our future, which brings the concept of, I don't know if you've ever heard of the concept of retroactive causation, which is fascinating, because if you think it's logical that our past influences are present, we will get that. But we can actually change, our present can change the past. And that's retroactive causation. And essentially what that's saying in simple language, and the neurocycle teaches you how to basically get into that mind state, is that the past can hold us in a certain way of thinking about who we are, how we function, how we have relationships, et cetera. And if we don't, we can't meditate that away, we can't breathe that away.

• 1:20:34Speaker 00

  Those help us get through the painful moments. We have, what the only thing we can do to heal that is to deconstruct and reconstruct and accept that you can't change the source, but you can change, you can reconstruct to change how it plays out into the future. So when you go through the neurocycle process, that's what you're doing, you're finding the source, you're accepting that what it is and you're rebuilding. And then when you do that, suddenly the past grip. Now loosens. So now the future work that you've done now goes back and changes the impact of the past. That's retroactive causation. Because there is no present, past and future in your spiritual level. In the non-conscious level, it's not bound by time. So the future has already happened in the past and it's a one. So we want that in our growth. We want to bring that up into our growth.

• 1:21:17Speaker 00

  It's a hard concept, but when you start working, you start seeing, wow, that had such a grip on me. And now it's still painful. I still maybe cry and have tears and sadness, but it's not the same. So now I've used my future work to change my past and I've changed the impact of the past.

• 1:21:34André Duqum?

  Those, I think you can certainly get into different heightened state experiences where you drop the illusion of this linearity and line of causality of time, where there's this past, present and future. And like you said, you can go and reconstruct your perception of these past moments, dropping the emotional charge, a tie to them, therefore birthing wisdom and perspective. And that, to me, feels like one of the beautiful fruits of processes like Neurocycle and the way that you described it, you know? Because then you can meet life more fruitfully present, not living life solely through the colored pain of your past.

• 1:22:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely, which keeps people stuck in a victim mentality. And that's, yes, there are victims and we're never going to decry when someone has been a victim. But you, in charge of your life going forward, we all know this, but we know it. Do we know it? Do you know what I'm saying? That's the hard part because we can't grow from that. So whatever, we all had things happen to us, but we have to be able to say, okay, that has happened. I need to move forward into the next steps. And it is very hard. We all know that. No one's denying that. But once you start doing it, it changes your life. You know, this, I wish I knew about this when I was at school. I wish I knew about this when I was at university. University has developing this, but over the years, as I've refined it, I wish I knew now. I mean, I wish I knew then what I know now.

• 1:23:01Speaker 00

  And you know, that's why I'm so hot about teaching as young as possible because you can lead, we can become decent humans, which is what we're supposed to be. And humans need that at the moment. Humanity is really, you know, I know we're in a spiritual rebirth and all that kind of thing. We really are, but we really do need to get our, look at ourselves and stand back and grow. And when we grow, it's not a selfish thing. When we work on our own growth, we become less selfish. We become, because we understand others better, because we're understanding ourselves. It sounds counterintuitive, but it actually is what happens. So, yeah.

• 1:23:33André Duqum?

  Looking back, have you felt like there's actually an intelligent design to the way these things are orchestrated? The painful, tough events where at times we really do feel we're the victim of circumstance and we learn painful lessons, often then are the birthplace for different gifts that become very important later in life. In terms of the way that these things happen, yeah, do you think that there is an intelligent design to the way they unfold?

• 1:23:58Speaker 00

  I think so, definitely. I think there is source, some sort of source. I like to talk about godness, source, whatever anyone wants to call it. There's definitely, and from the, all the near-death experience research that's been done and after-death communication, that sort of field is really opening up a very, across cultures, there's been so many thousands and thousands of documented scientific analyses of those things. And it definitely shows that there is a very strong intelligence that's behind everything and that this is just a tiny drop in the ocean, which is very encouraging because I believe there's also, I mean, this is really going down another path potentially, but I do believe that we, we kind of have some kind of knowledge of what we choose to go

• 1:24:41Speaker 00

  through, because there's a certain learning that we need to do and go through. And you kind of think, well, why on earth would I choose that? I mean, often I think, if this was a game, why did I choose these things that happened to me? But there's something in that, that we can, if we process those, there's something really amazing that comes out of that, that will touch, you don't know how that's going to touch the rest of humanity and, you know, that sort of thing. So yes, I do believe there's intelligence, absolutely. I don't think it's a man in the sky. I don't think that. I think that's very, very. Physicalist thinking. Yeah, very anthropocentric as well. Exactly. I do think it's a force of some loving. As we always said, it always comes back to love. You know, what is love? What is the science of love? And what's interesting around that sort of thinking is, you know, what is fundamental?

• 1:25:24Speaker 00

  Physics always tries to talk about atoms and quarks and bhajan. But actually fundamental to that is consciousness. So consciousness is below everything. And when I talk about with consciousness, I'm talking more about mind and the different levels of mind. So that's kind of a parallel. So that's underlying everything. So consciousness is intelligence. And the biggest thing I think that shows intelligence is that we do have intelligent design is our ability to choose. Because it's a choice that actually creates the E equals M C squared effect. That's what makes, completes the equation. So that's, choice is a very intelligent thing. Even though we make bad choices, it's to be able to choose and influence ourselves uniquely and therefore impact the world. Wow, I mean, that's for me is very strong indication.

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• 1:27:13André Duqum?

  Thank you for doing the work that you're doing. I think it's very empowering and needed now more than ever.

• 1:27:17Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:27:18André Duqum?

  What, um, if you had 60 seconds to share one message for humanity, what would it be?

• 1:27:24Speaker 00

  I would say to them, you can't control the events and circumstances of your life, but you can control how you react to them. And I would take on to that, that you can't change the past, but you can change how it plays out into your future. You can change what it looks like inside of you and how it plays out into your future. Such power. Your brain is, your mind is the superpower. Your mind is boss, not the brain. I've got three things in.

• 1:27:47André Duqum?

  That's great.

• 1:27:50André Duqum?

  Is there anything else on your heart that we haven't shared? That's either core to your work, helpful with the context of this conversation that you'd like to share before we start to wrap up?

• 1:28:00Speaker 00

  What was interesting is that we did do a survey for a book that I wrote to find out what are the top sort of areas that people are really battling with currently. And they, they're kind of almost ancient too. And it's interesting that the classic things that always come up are, I'm under so much pressure and I'm under things like black and white thinking and people pleasing. And so this, this, that was quite interesting to find. And I did a whole book on that with this 18 areas that people really get stuck in. And those seem to be mindsets, not seem to be, they're mindsets. And mindsets are something that are generated by a thought. So as I was saying, a thought is made of memories. And that's the experience. Experiences become memories inside of a thought. But they generate a mindset.

• 1:28:44Speaker 00

  So if it's a negative experience, it generates a negative mindset. So there's a whole, if someone's under tremendous pressure work wise and whatever, that's building that network and it generates that mindset of I'm under pressure. And if we can, what's very helpful, I saw this with my patients and my clients, which is why I ended up writing that book, is that if we can name, see that, oh, okay, that's what I'm doing, I'm under pressure. Then I can use the neurocycle more specifically. Most likely prescriptions, I do neurocycle prescriptions, where you can try and hone in on the area. So it's not just this bland. Oh, I've got trauma in my childhood. It's not, not everything is about trauma in your childhood. Sometimes it's just patterns that we've developed. And yes, there's very, a lot of it does come from childhood. But we've also developed, there's life happens. And sometimes we just need to know how to manage that kind of moment.

• 1:29:28Speaker 00

  So that, I think, is quite an important concept and idea. And then working with kids from young, I mean, if you are, children read, um, children read us. So if they're better at body language and nonverbal communication than adults, we lose a lot of that. We know that between the ages of, up to the age of five, they, we, children are incredibly insightful. Then it's still, it carries on. And then we lose that as we reach sort of our mid teens and that sort of thing, it gets less. But what's interesting is that's why it's so important for us to teach children from very young that it's okay to have a bad emotion. You know, we live in a biomedical world that is, has taken mental health into the world of biomed, has taken an approach to mental health that's very biomedical.

• 1:30:12Speaker 00

  So it's treating it like an illness and it's not. Mental health is part of our humanity and our response to adverse circumstances. So our children, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, are growing up the most challenged generation when it comes to emotions. Because every time they have an emotion, they're told it's bad. And then the tictocification of mental health. And that's a big concern, looking for the label to try and find, well, this is the solution. But that locks you in. And so they, they've got to be able to express themselves. You've got to be able to cry and have guilt and compassion and happiness and joy and fear. It's all part of it. And that concerns me, that that's not happening like it should. It's been labeled and medicated or suppressed.

• 1:30:50André Duqum?

  Felt an identity around it, instead of what you mentioned earlier, which is like their signals.

• 1:30:55Speaker 00

  Exactly, signals, exactly, they're signals. We can teach kids from young. That's, I think that's something that's very big on, on my heart to do that.

• 1:31:01André Duqum?

  Yeah, well done. You've written so many books.

• 1:31:04Speaker 00

  Yes, it's, the twenties just went in. I've just written a book on, went in last week, on, on stress, the truth about stress. For ninety years, we've been talking about stress is bad, stress, stress, stress and stress kills. And it does, but that's only one side of the coin. Stress is actually intelligence, it's a filter. And it actually helps us to process life. So if we understand how to read the flight, flight, whatever, all the ones that we're used to, flight, flight, free form, you know, the ones that we're used to hearing, that's just, if you, that's a signal. So if you can catch that signal, you can flip it into its intelligence. So that's. And you can, you can, there's techniques to do that. And that is life changing. That's, my patients have been asking me for years to write that book. And it's taken me, I should have done it years ago because it's, I think it's so practical. Cause we, we, uh, we react in the moment.

• 1:31:49Speaker 00

  So if something happens and we're going to one of those responses. And if we know, oh, okay, that's a stress response. I can flip it, I can use it to flip it and find the good one. So for example, we go, maybe go into a fight response. The healthy, intelligent version of that is fly, is assert, which is great. Because now I can turn something that was becoming confrontational into something that's actually solved, problem solving. So that kind of thing. So for me, that work is, and we're still doing a lot of research. I still do a lot of, we've, we've got another big clinical trial coming up. And trying to always understand and refine the non-conscious mind. What is it? How can we take that? How can we access it? If we can get in there and live in that part of our mind more actively, we can change, change so much.

• 1:32:33Speaker 00

  So that's a big, big desire of mine, to understand that more.

• 1:32:37André Duqum?

  You're doing so, so good. I, I love it. And it comes in amazing, in an amazing package. You know, I think that like a lot of these ideas become way more impactful when they come through a

• 1:32:53André Duqum?

  person who's obviously so passionate about them, but also makes it fun and irresistible that like this, it can feel quite heavy, this journey of these, you know, the, a lot of these conversations of like the things that another, another to do list on our biohacking thing that we gotta like add, you know, and it becomes a burden in and of itself. And as much as I love eating clean and the tools to support my mind and body, I feel like this conversation is pointing to something that surpasses all of them, which is the ability to actually use our mind to direct our life and architect our life in a way. And that is an underexplored area of life, which I hope this conversation gained people some.

• 1:33:32Speaker 00

  You said that so beautifully. You said that so beautifully. Once you're in that state, then you can decide what you want. But otherwise your to do list becomes so stressful that you are under pressure and you're cracking under the pressure of trying to do all these things to make you healthy. And they're not going to actually make you healthy.

• 1:33:45André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:45Speaker 00

  So start with your mind, get to know yourself, build yourself, and then you'll know what to do with all the other stuff. They'll just naturally fall into place.

• 1:33:52André Duqum?

  Yeah. Amazing. Well, we're gonna leave links down in the description where people can stay connected with you and your work. And that's all.

• 1:34:00Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:34:01André Duqum?

  Yeah, this is fun. How are you feeling?

• 1:34:02Speaker 00

  No, I love it. I really enjoyed it. There's one thing I didn't share. I don't know if it's possible. We've started a certification program. Can I talk about that?

• 1:34:10André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah, for sure.

• 1:34:11Speaker 00

  So one thing I'm very excited about is because people, I can't teach this to the whole. I can, I write books and things, but what we've started is a certification. I did it in South Africa. I trained a lot of therapists. But what we've done now is we've introduced a coaching version of the neurocycle. So people can become a coaching strategist. So a neurocycle strategist. Or if people are already in the clinical sphere, so they're mental health practitioners, some physician or whatever, then they can do the neurocycle clinical version. So that's where we're trying to help more people get into this. If they want more, they can, I've got all the materials they can do on their own. But if they want to start a business, but also if they want to help one-on-one, we can refer to those people for more one-on-one.

• 1:34:50André Duqum?

  All right, thank you.

• 1:34:51Speaker 00

  Well, thank you.

• 1:34:52André Duqum?

  Yeah, I appreciate you for tuning into this episode of the Know Thyself Podcast. Until next time, be well. Thank you.

• 1:34:58Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:34:58André Duqum?

  You did it.