Healing Through Prayer: How to Build a Daily Prayer Life in a Distracted World

Is your faith stuck on “someday” while your calendar stays full? Today, Alex Jones reveals how drifting from prayer—and slowly returning to it—became the foundation for deeper peace, clarity, and spiritual strength. We explore how Sabbath, silence, confession, and simple daily prayer habits can reshape your life in a distracted world. Thank you to our sponsors! Sunlighten Sauna: https://get.sunlighten.com/axepodcast Manukora Manuka Honey: https://manukora.com/axe Watch The Dr. Josh Axe Show every Monday & Thursday on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@drjoshaxe?sub_confirmation=1 🎧 Early Access! Our podcast listeners get every episode early, and you can tune in and be a part of our exclusive listeners below → Spotify Apple Podcast Order my NEW BOOK, The Biblio Diet → https://bit.ly/4oPEP3t Watch my free training on how to naturally balance your blood sugar and reverse your symptoms → DrAxeDiabetesClass.com Discover practical steps you can take today to start healing your thyroid naturally → DrAxeThyroidClass.com If you’re ready to start feeling like yourself again and balance your hormones, take my free class → DrAxeHormoneClass.com Uncover what’s really going on in your body with advanced biomarker testing for hormones, thyroid, and metabolism— plus a 1-hour consultation with a Senior Health Advisor! → MyBloodWork.com CONNECT WITH DR. JOSH AXE Instagram Facebook TikTok X LinkedIn Website Sign up for my newsletter Ask me a question CONNECT WITH ALEX JONES X: @alexathallow Instagram: @alex.at.hallow LinkedIn: "Alex at Hallow" Book: The Brothers Karamazov Hallow Edition (Alex wrote the foreword / book that Hallow is going through for the Lent Pray40 Challenge) Hallow’s social pages X: @hallowapp Instagram: @hallowapp TikTok: @hallowapp DISCLAIMER This content is strictly the opinion of Dr. Josh Axe and is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to provide medical advice or to take the place of medical advice or treatment from a personal physician. All viewers of this content are advised to consult their doctors or qualified health professionals regarding specific health questions. Neither Dr. Axe nor the publisher of this content takes responsibility for possible health consequences of any person or persons reading or following the information in this educational content. All viewers of this content, especially those taking prescription or over-the-counter medications, should consult their physicians before beginning any nutrition, supplement or lifestyle program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:02Speaker 00

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• 1:15Josh Axe?

  If you could listen to the wisest person on the planet that loves you more than anything, the greatest person ever, would you want to listen?

• 1:21Speaker 04

  There was this one woman who was pronounced dead, and the doctor said, "Okay, we're gonna take away, we're gonna stop resuscitation, we're gonna take away life support." You know, I call that the time of death. And her friend had been praying the rosary on the app. And she said, "No, stop. I've got 30 seconds left in the rosary. I still want to keep praying. Let me keep praying." And when the prayer said "Amen," the heart just started beating again. I've never seen anything like this. And so if you just give him 30 seconds, it's like this little door. If you just crack it open for him, he takes the rest.

• 2:06Speaker 05

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• 2:33Josh Axe?

  Well, hey, Alex, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you here because, man, prayer has been such a big part of my life. And in treating patients, one of the things that I would always do, and I still do today when I'm working with somebody, is pray for them. There's probably not a lot of clinicians that necessarily do that, but I believe that the Bible is the greatest health book ever written. And it talks about if somebody's sick, what do you do? You pray for them.

• 2:54Speaker 04

  Yes, certainly.

• 2:55Josh Axe?

  And this is one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on. I know you're the founder of the Hallow app. And so you've got so many people you're working with on your team. You've got a lot of celebrities, everyone from Chris Pratt to Mark Wahlberg, who you've partnered with, and bring more awareness around what prayer is and how to do it. And I guess first question I'd have for you is, what is your sort of definition of prayer? What is prayer exactly?

• 3:20Speaker 04

  That's a great question. I mean, for me, prayer, and there's a lot of really great, really beautiful quotes on this, but one of my favorites is, prayer is nothing other than just being a friend of God, just being in friendship with the Lord, taking time to be alone with the one who loves us. That's another one that I love. Just a simple surge of your heart upwards towards heaven. There's a bunch of beautiful saints and scripture definitions of prayer, but for me, it's just taking time to be with Jesus. I mean, he's like, he's closer to you than you are to yourself and loves you so intimately and so deeply. So it's just taking time to be with him, especially to listen to him. We spend so much time in prayer, talking to God or talking at God, but we so rarely spend time to really listen. So that, for me, is what prayer is, and it just changes everything.

• 4:05Speaker 04

  Once you let God into your heart, he's just waiting there, knocking on your door, and all you have to do is open it and just let him in, and he brings you this incredible peace. He brings you health, he brings you joy, he brings you wisdom. All of the things that you're really seeking, he brings to you. And the way that you have that relationship with him is prayer.

• 4:22Josh Axe?

  That's powerful. You know, I, I remember, so growing up, I went to a Christian school when I was younger, up until high school. And so we were kind of, you know, we were taught to pray. We would pray before every time we eat. We did a lot communally, right? And I remember probably the, the time when I was a kid where I was the deepest in prayer. My mom was diagnosed with cancer. And I remember, you know, going to God and weeping in prayer and asking for his intervention, for him to save my mom. And praise God, she did. And, um, and, and thinking back on that, I just know that like for me, prayer has been, as I talk a lot about health here. But prayer has been such a big part of me seeing people in my life, everything from family members to patients to myself, seeing them healed.

• 5:07Josh Axe?

  In some cases, it would seem miraculously from devastating conditions. And so I know prayer, we, we were, we're called to pray for, um, for numerous reasons, right? And for ourselves, for our family, for other people. But I think a lot of times when people think about prayer, a lot of times it seems kind of like a one-way direction. A lot of times it's like, I'm presenting my requests to God. And, but I don't think a lot of people think about prayer as sort of like God speaking back to us.

• 5:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:34Josh Axe?

  So I'd love for you to talk maybe a little bit about, a little bit more about your thoughts about it being more of a conversation.

• 5:39Speaker 04

  Oh, it's a beautiful, I mean, the first thing that you brought up and what a lot of, how a lot of people think about prayer is, you know, intercessions are asking for things or, you know, asking God for healing, which is a beautiful way to pray. And it's real, it works. God is real, he's here and he does heal people. And we, we have this tremendous privilege on the app of, we, we get all these, uh, insanely beautiful stories of miracles happening today, yesterday, the day before. And we have millions of people who are praying through the app, praying for people, praying with people on the app. And they share with us when God. performs these incredible miracles and he doesn't always answer our prayers in the way that we want him to or in the way that we expect them to, but often he does. We've had these stories. There was this one woman who was pronounced dead for 30 seconds, but her

• 6:23Speaker 04

  friend had been praying the rosary on the app and the doctor said, okay, we're gonna take away, we're gonna stop resuscitation, we're gonna take away life support, you know, I call the time of death. And she said, no, stop, I've got 30 seconds left in the rosary, I still want to keep praying, let me keep praying. And so she finished the 45 seconds and at the end, when the prayer said amen, the heart just started beating again.

• 6:44Josh Axe?

  Wow.

• 6:45Speaker 04

  And the doctor said, I've never seen anything like this. It's, this is, and we had another, I mean, I could go all over these, but we had another story of a guy who was driving to work and he was driving to school, he was a school teacher and he just heard God say to him in the prayer, um, don't park in your usual spot, which is a very odd thing to hear in prayer. Usually it's like love better, you know, uh, serve the poor, something, you know, more traditional, but he just heard, don't park in your usual spot. And so he goes and he parks in a different spot at school and five minutes later, a shooter goes into the school, it was Uvalde, he was at the Uvalde school shooting and this shooter walked right by where his normal spot was, he would have been the first person killed. And so there's like prayer works, it's real, praise God, he does miracles still today. He's doing thousands and thousands of miracles and people are sharing them. Once

• 7:30Speaker 04

  you start listening, people are sharing them. But I remember when I, so I used to be an atheist, I was, I was an atheist, would have considered myself an atheist seven or eight years ago, maybe eight or nine years ago now. Um, and I, I start, I got really into meditation and kind of secular meditation, I was just fascinated with it. Uh, but I kept feeling this weird pull towards something spiritual, like the name Jesus or the image of the cross or something, whenever I would sit in silence, which is really all secular meditation is, is just learning to sit in silence. And we fill ourselves with so much noise and so much business that when you actually sit in silence, it's really hard, it's really overwhelming, but beautiful things happen. And so I started feeling this really weird pull. And so I started reaching out to pastors and I was asking what I thought was a really interesting question, which was, hey, is there's, anyway, there's some

• 8:13Speaker 04

  sort of intersection here between this meditation thing I've been doing and this Jesus thing? And they all laughed at me and said, yeah, we've been doing it for 2,000 years, it's called prayer, you probably should have heard about it. And I was like, no, no, no, I know prayer. Prayer is the like, hey, thanks for stuff, sorry for stuff, help me with stuff or whatever, asking God for things and. I had this one pastor who said, okay, well, imagine you came home every day to your wife. And you said, hey, honey, I'm thankful for these things. I'm sorry for these things. Could you help me with these things? Good night. How healthy would your relationship be with your wife? And I was like, it wouldn't be that healthy. And he was like, why? And I was like, well, because I spend most of my time saying, hey, honey, how was your day? And what can I do for you? And trying to listen to her. I spend most of my time listening to her. I don't like talking all that much anyway. She loves sharing about her day, so I spend most of my time listening.

• 8:59Speaker 04

  And he said, okay, great. So you spend most of your time in your relationship with your wife, listening? And I was like, yeah. He was like, what if instead of talking to your wife, you were talking to the creator of the universe, who knew the perfect good that he wanted out of you for you in every moment? Wouldn't you want to spend more time listening then? And I was like, yeah, but like, how do you listen for God? You can't, you know, you don't call him in the morning usually. He doesn't like speak audibly usually. You can, you don't like text him, so how do you listen for God? And I started learning all about this beautiful thousands and thousands of years tradition within Christianity of just how to listen for the Lord. Contemplative and meditative, how do you listen for the Lord in your heart? And he speaks in silence, he speaks through scripture, he speaks through other people. He speaks in all these different ways, but how do you learn really to listen for him?

• 9:43Speaker 04

  And it just completely changed my life. I sat down and opened up a Bible. And one of the ways is he speaks to you is through scripture. And so you read, there's this technique of meditation called lectio divina, where you pick a word that sticks out to you from scripture and you meditate on it. And the word that stuck out to me, I randomly opened up to Luke 11, which is where the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray. And he gives them the Our Father. And the word that stuck out to me in the Our Father, Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, was hallowed. And it was just like 10 minutes, just in the comfort of my own home. But it just completely changed my life. Like it, hallowed means to make holy. So it was two things. One was like this deeper sense of peace than I'd ever experienced with anything, secular meditation or working out or anything. But then combined with this depth of meaning and purpose,

• 10:27Speaker 04

  like there was something on the other side that I was wrestling with. Hallowed means to make holy. Was I letting God make me holy? Was I supposed to be letting him make me holy? Was I supposed to be helping other people grow in holiness? And the answer was no. So I had to quit my job and do this crazy startup thing, which was this app of Which was a terrible idea from everybody's perspective and was had a 99% chance of total and complete failure and I loved my job. And so it was this big stressful like life questions, but wrestling with them in this place of deep peace. And so that for me is began this real journey of what does it mean to listen for the Lord? What does it mean to spend time in silence and let him speak into your heart? Because we don't, when we pray, we don't change God. Like God is, God knows it all. He's already got it all figured out.

• 11:10Speaker 04

  It's already done. What he's doing is he's inviting you into it and what he wants from you mostly in prayer, although he does perform miracles, but what he wants from you mostly in prayer is to change your heart. So what you're doing when you talk to God and when you share with him what you need is you're revealing mostly honestly to yourself what has your heart. Like when you're like, ah, man, I really want, you know, Hallow to get, grow by X number of downloads. God's like, okay, really? Like, is that, do you care about the downloads? And I was like, no, I care about people growing closer to God. But it reveals in my heart, like, okay, well, maybe there's vanity there. Maybe there's an eat. So it's allowing God into my heart to then transform it into himself, which is the goal of the Christian life.

• 11:52Josh Axe?

  You know, we, we become like those we spend the most time with.

• 11:55Speaker 04

  Oh, beautiful.

• 11:56Josh Axe?

  You know, and so that's what it's making me think of. And so, you know, I was, you know, when I think about whenever I have gained a certain, you know, level of wisdom or I've had success at anything in life, whether it be in marriage or health or career or anything, most of the time I think back to, well, okay, I, this happened for me because I had a conversation with somebody who had more wisdom than I did and they rubbed off on me in some way and I took their advice and I applied it. I mean, a lot of times or I modeled what they were doing. And, you know, I just had this happen recently where I have this really amazing guy Clint Phillips and he's, Started this concierge medical testing with people, being able to, you know,

• 12:38Josh Axe?

  do early detection and longevity medicine, all this sort of stuff. But for me, I had the conversation with him this week and I learned so much from it because I had a conversation. I just listened to him a lot and it's going to allow me to do better, you know, testing and things like that on patients and things like that in the future. But, but you know, I think about this with God, a very similar thing. It's like to your point, the way you started this, the last thing you were sharing is, is that, you know, if you could listen or that pastor or priest that gave you that advice, if you could listen to the wisest person on the planet that loves you more than anything, the greatest person ever, would you want to listen? Of course. And, but I think for a lot of people, you know what helped me? One of the things that helped me the most is just to your point is silence is so important.

• 13:20Josh Axe?

  You know, last night, my wife Chelsea and I were sitting down, trying to have a conversation. I have a two-year-old and five-year-old and it was like, you know what? This is really hard to have a conversation right now. One is trying to, she's in jujitsu, our five-year-old, so she's trying to like, you know, all of her jujitsu requires her grabbing me by the neck and trying to pull as hard as she. So anyways, my wife and I were there trying to have this conversation. And it was like, there was so much distraction, you know what? We eventually were like, okay, we're going to have the conversation later when it's just us and it's quiet and the kids are in bed. But, you know, a lot of times we're trying to pray and it's like, we just got done with a, you know, scrolling on our cell phone and just running from this to this and whatever. And it just, I think our minds are so overwhelmed with so many things

• 14:02Josh Axe?

  that I think this has made it a little bit harder sometimes maybe for people to, to hear because there's so much noise constantly all the time.

• 14:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, I have a, I have a five-year-old, a three-year-old, a two-year-old, uh, maybe, yeah, I guess he's three and a half, a two-year-old, almost two-year-old and then relatively newborn. And so our home is-

• 14:22Josh Axe?

  You're doing your Catholic duty.

• 14:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, we have to, you know, I had the-

• 14:25Josh Axe?

  I had a cousin, just so you know, I had a cousin, a cousin's cousin and they had 18 kids. So half my family-

• 14:32Speaker 04

  Oh my gosh, 18.

• 14:33Josh Axe?

  Yeah, half my family's Catholic, half's Protestant.

• 14:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:37Josh Axe?

  So anyways-

• 14:38Speaker 04

  I wonder when people, my wife's, people joke, how many kids do you want? And I said, my, my goal is when people, we'll take whatever the good Lord gives us. Kids are such an incredible blessing. It's such a, such a beauty to, especially with our newborn. It's just like every, oh, and every age is just so fun and so joyful. But I want people to- I want people to look at us, see how many kids we have and know my religion from that. And that's, you know, that's the goal. But the, um, they must be Catholic or something else. But, um, but no, silence is, silence is so important. It's such a foundation to the spiritual life and especially in today's world. And if you think of, you know, as a Christian, I believe there's two things out there. There's good and then there's something very evil.

• 15:22Speaker 04

  And if I was the evil thing, what would I try to do? Well, I know in prayer, I've, I've experienced that over the last seven, eight years. There's such a profound peace that is waiting for you in prayer, like real silence. If you can learn to spend real time in silence, all God does in that silence, he'll, he'll grant you wisdom, he'll grant you all the things that you're seeking. But mostly what he does is he just tells you how much he loves you. Yeah. That's most, and, and you know that as a father, like when you spend time with your kids, it's like, okay, well, what, when my kids are going to bed at night, what do I most want to give them? What do I most want them to know? It's just, I just want them really to know how much I love them. Yeah. And you can't, you almost don't even control that. You just, you just like it, it has to come out of you. You have to share it with them.

• 16:05Speaker 04

  And that's all the father wants for us, is all God wants for us. And this is beautiful. The other great definition of prayer, I think, is the parable of the prodigal son, where Jesus, very famous parable, Jesus tells this parable, there's two young, um, there's two sons of a father. The younger son asks for his share of the inheritance from the father. The father somehow, the father is the image of God in this parable. The father gives him his inheritance early, knowing what would happen, which is the first kind of really miraculous part of this parable. But then the younger son goes out into the distant country and squanders all his money with prostitutes and with gambling. And he ends up with nothing and he ends up living with the pigs trying to, you know, work to try to get food, to get by however he can.

• 16:49Speaker 04

  And that's just such a beautiful story for each of us. Like we all, we might not be that lost. We might not have squandered everything that we have, but we're all pulled away from God in a thousand different ways, every, every day to our attachments to the world, like all the things that hold us down to the world. But then what the younger son does is he says, well, look, even the slaves, even the servants at my father's house, uh, live a better life than this. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna say, I'm gonna run back to my father's house. I'm gonna go back to my father's house and I'm gonna say, Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, I no longer am worthy to be called your son. Treat me as you would one of your hired hands. And so he starts walking back to the father's house. And then there's this beautiful passage in the parable where Jesus says,

• 17:30Speaker 04

  "But while he was still a long way off, the Father was filled with compassion and ran to him, put his arms around him, kissed him, and said to his servants, 'Let us celebrate, let us eat and celebrate, for the Son of mine was dead and he has been found. He was lost and has been found. He is dead and now is alive again.'" And it's just this beautiful passage of what God is doing in prayer. Like the Father is just sitting here and we busy ourselves with a thousand different things, Instagram or Tik Tok or whatever. And if I was Satan, if I was the devil, and I knew what would happen when you, one of the terms in Christian prayer and meditation is recollection, which is kind of this beautiful, I had this pastor explain it to me. It's like, you have this snow globe, and if you shake the snow globe, that's your mind. But then if you sit and let the snow globe settle, that's what happens in prayer and silence, which is everything

• 18:14Speaker 04

  is recollected and you're pulled together. And it's this beautiful peace that's offered to you. But if I was trying to fight against that, if I was trying to get you as far away from that as I could, what I would do is, I don't know, I'd probably try to fill your mind with the most engaging things anyone is saying at any current moment, the most angering things, the most funny things, the most whatever things, put it in a feed and try to get you to watch it as much as I possibly could, or click on it as much as I possibly could. And that's what social media is so much of the time. It can be beautiful, but so much of the time, it's just this noise. And so you just fill your mind with all this noise. But what God is offering you is, if you can just take the time, and it's really hard, especially at the beginning, it's why we work on Hallow. It's all that we do is try to make this less overwhelming and less scary. But if you just

• 18:57Speaker 04

  take the time and you spend it in silence, what happens is that snow globe settles, and then God is, is sitting there and while you are still a long way off runs to you and says, like, I am so, I have been waiting for you to come to me so that I could show you how much I love you. And it's this beautiful thing that's offered to all of us if we just take, and it's really hard, especially with young kids, to like wake up 20 minutes early and spend time in silence. But it's, it's by far the most beautiful, most important part of your day. And it sets up everything else to make you a better father, to make you a better whatever work you're trying to do, to make you a better husband, to make you- More loving in everything you can do, which is all that we try to do as Christians.

• 19:34Josh Axe?

  Yeah.

• 19:37Josh Axe?

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  ready to heal, go to mybloodwork.com. You'll get an at-home cellular blood work panel shipped straight to your home and reviewed on a private call with one of my senior health advisors at the Health Institute. And this will help you finally connect the dots between your symptoms at the cellular level. We'll also determine if you're a good candidate for one of our cellular healing protocols, so you can finally experience lasting healing. Once again, go to mybloodwork.com to check it out.

• 20:50Josh Axe?

  Yeah, I mean, fantastic points. You know, I think, you know, social media is just the best example of this in terms of if you're spending, of just, it's so easy to waste our time and throw part of our life away, you know. I, I, I'm trying to think who was sharing this. I think it was a pastor I had on the show, or a priest, somebody I had on the show, and they were sharing that, you know, they, they thought to themselves for years, a lot, there's a number of monks, and I don't remember the order of monks, but they, they meditate on the Psalms for so many hours a day. And I think he said something like two hours at least. And he said, you know, I couldn't imagine just sitting there and meditating, like, doing, like, I don't, his thing is, I don't have time to do that

• 21:33Josh Axe?

  two hours a day. But then he's like, he looked at his social media up on how many times, how many hours a day he spends scrolling, and it's well over two hours. So all that, all that being said, or he had in the past, and it was very convicting. And also thinking about, like, if I think about who you could become in the future, you're, think about who you are now, and the greatest version of yourself in the future. You're more wise, you're more loving, you're more compassionate, you're just character. It's a whole lot, lot of another level. Is that more likely to happen if you're taking two hours a day on a social media app or two hours a day in your Bible? And to the point where they were talking about you become who you surround yourself with or spend time with, you're going to become like those people that you're constantly

• 22:16Josh Axe?

  looking at on social media and what they're doing versus becoming like Christ, you know? So it's a very different model. This is why I love the Hallow app. I love what you're doing there. And I want to encourage everybody to go and check out the Hallow app where you can practice prayer and meditation. It's so powerful. You know, you were talking about prayer earlier and I think sometimes meditation can be, obviously it's a partner of prayer. And I, you know, when I, in the, in the hell space, there are a fair amount of Christians, but there are definitely a lot of people that are spiritual when you get into natural medicine and into more of the new age. And so when I, when I come across some of these people, a lot of them are into meditation. And to your point, what they do is it's, you think of nothing. There's, there's nothing that you're, it's just sort of empty your mind.

• 23:01Josh Axe?

  But to me, the Christian meditation, as the Bible talks about it, and feel free to correct this or, or confirm, but, but I typically tend to think of it as two things. One is you're chewing on something, you know? You read one scripture or verse and you're chewing on that or thinking about the person of Jesus or, or a word, you know, a single word like hallow. And what does that mean? And you're kind of chewing on that and letting that penetrate you and thinking from a Christian perspective, how can I apply this or what's God saying to me through this word? And there's also kind of a form of meditation of letting your mind be clear, but in order to hear from God. And maybe that's also kind of that meditation, prayer crossover. But would love to hear your thought, more of your thoughts on what meditation is comparatively

• 23:45Josh Axe?

  to prayer and how we can meditate better.

• 23:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's sad because in today's world, when you, when I was first coming back to my faith, if you told me the word meditation, my mind would go towards, I mean, maybe it's some forms of Eastern religion, so maybe Buddhism or Hinduism, but mostly secular meditation. And that's what like the, when we say the word meditation today, we think of. But I mean, the word meditate on God's word day and night is in the Psalms.

• 24:09Josh Axe?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 24:09Speaker 04

  So like this is, this is, goes back to the beginning of Christianity is this idea, at least using the word meditate to.

• 24:15Josh Axe?

  And I want to mention this because I think it's so important. So my mom, growing up, she used to tell me this and I'm so, I had amazing Christian parents. My mom would like place her chest on me and said, I named you Joshua for a reason, so you'd be Joshua. And she would read the book of Joshua to me sometimes. But in Joshua one, early on in Joshua, it says, you know, uh, God is talking to Joshua and he says, you know, meditate on my word day and night, then you will be prosperous and successful.

• 24:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:41Josh Axe?

  So if we're going to be prosperous and successful, God's like, hey, you want to be prosperous and successful? Meditate.

• 24:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. And he says it later too, that my sheep know my voice, the sheep know the sound of my voice. So like what you had said, you become like the person you spend time with. Yeah. And you also want to know his voice when he's speaking to you because in Christian theology, and that what I believe as a Christian is there's, there's good and evil. So in Buddhism, that's a big, that's one of the biggest differences. And most of these kind of secular meditation things or most of the new age things do come mostly from Buddhism or a philosophy built out of Buddhism. And the bit, one of the big differences is in the Christian world, there's two things, there's good and evil. So if you sit in silence and meditation is great, I was in Silicon Valley for a time when we were starting Hallow. And yeah, you would go talk to anybody and you'd say, are you religious? And everybody would say, no. And you'd go talk to somebody and you'd say, are you spiritual?

• 25:30Speaker 04

  And they'd all say, of course I'm spiritual. My question for that person is, okay, you're spiritual, so you're meditating, which is a beautiful thing. Like you have that snow globe and our minds are so, so, they're so split into a thousand pieces. So to just give them silence and to let them kind of fall and to let it collect is a beautiful thing. It's, it's like working out. It's like any of those things. It's a good thing for you to learn how to sit in stillness. But okay, you're sitting in stillness, you're sitting in silence. So my question for them would always be, there's no other people in the room, are you alone? And their answer would always be no. No, I'm not alone. There's something else there. And I was like, okay, well, that's crazy.

• 26:11Speaker 04

  So you're saying when you sit in silence in the room and you stop distracting yourself with social media and Instagram and Netflix and work and worries and all this stuff, you sense the presence of something else. Is it a good thing or a bad thing? They're like, it's a good thing. Does it love you? Maybe. And you just feel that. There's something very weird about silence that it just brings that. And it's from Elijah, like Elijah climbs up to the mountain. He's looking for the voice of God. A great fire comes by, but God is not in the fire. A great earthquake comes by, but God is not in the earthquake. A great fire comes by, but God is not in the fire. And then in the silence, a still small voice. And God is in the still small voice in the silence. So there's something crazy about silence in that you can just notice God's presence,

• 26:55Speaker 04

  both within His word, and there's a bunch of other ways to notice it, but something unique about silence. But then my answer to the spiritual, but not religious group, or kind of new age spiritual group would be, okay, so you sit in silence and there's something invisible there that feels like probably something good. Shouldn't you spend your entire life figuring out what that is? Like, isn't that the most important thing? There's some invisible thing here. That's the craziest thing I've ever heard. Yeah, yeah. And it's just here with you and it's good? Like, shouldn't you really try to figure that out? Not just try to learn the breathing technique or whatever, but really try to figure out what that other thing is and what it wants for you? And the thing that I believe, and I know for truth, and I want to share with you, is that that thing does love you, and it loves you infinitely so. And it's got a name and it's got a son, and its son is Jesus.

• 27:39Speaker 04

  And you listen to His word and you read His word and you meditate on His word and you tell me a person wrote that. Tell me a human being wrote that. You can't, because it's so beautiful, it's so deep, it's so powerful. But prayer and meditation, at least secular meditation, the way that our world describes it, there's like two or three big differences. One is, in prayer, you can sit in silence, you can still your mind, you can take deep breaths, you can do all the things that you do in meditation. But in prayer, there is both a good thing and a bad thing that could influence your mind. And secular meditation really struggles with this, because people have thoughts that are really negative, really evil thoughts, when they sit in prayer. And the answer as a Christian is, that's not the good one, that's the bad one. And so a big part of prayer is, how do you learn to discern? How do you learn to figure out what are the good thoughts and what are the bad thoughts?

• 28:23Speaker 04

  And how do you try to emphasize the good ones and lean into the good ones and follow the good ones and try to fight against the bad ones? And secular meditation doesn't have that. The other big piece of prayer... Which is unique is it is all about dying to yourself. And meditation, along with most things in life, like when you get good at something, your ego grows. When you get good at, when you get healthier, when you get, when you start working out more, when you do anything good, your ego grows. And it's the same in the spiritual life. Your ego grows because you, you, or it's a temptation for your ego to grow because you're becoming closer to God, which is a very good thing. The thing that prayer does that balances that radically is that the first step of prayer is humility, like the foundation of prayer is humility. The first thing you have to do

• 29:06Speaker 04

  is die to yourself. So you're constantly in prayer, trying to humble yourself. You're constantly trying to let God humble you. And so you're trying constantly to die, which is a very weird thing. You're definitely not doing that in secular meditation. And then the last thing, that's the biggest difference, and really the only thing that matters is meditation is, okay, I'm gonna take some breaths, mostly mindfulness. I'm gonna use some breathing exercises, and then I'm gonna let my mind go at the end. But prayer is just about, I want to spend time with Jesus. There is a real, it's not just the technique. It's not just how many breaths am I gonna take? What am I gonna count to? Whatever it is. It's no, I'm just, I don't honestly really care about the technique at all. I just want to spend time with Jesus. And He can cut through the technique. He can do whatever He wants and enter into your heart in whatever way He wants, but He's real. He's a person. He's there. And prayer is just about spending time with Him. So

• 29:49Speaker 04

  it's all about Him, all about growing closer to the Lord and letting Him change you. And meditation is, is mostly just a, a health activity that can be a precursor to prayer, like you take some time, you take some deep breaths, but certainly is not, prayer could never be a replacement for it.

• 30:03Josh Axe?

  Yeah. Yeah. And this is also why, I mean, I think there's so much value in spending time reading your Bible in order to better discern the voice of God, you know? For me, I think being able to, and I was really blessed, as I mentioned, growing up, going to a Christian school up through eighth grade and be very involved. And, you know, for me, it was, we went to church, then we went to Sunday school, and then we went to Wednesday nights. And so, you know, being able to do that, yeah, I had, again, I had amazing parents, amazing parents. And being able to do that, I think, really allowed me to better discern the voice of God. Because when you're sitting there listening to that still small voice, you, you want to determine, okay, is that God? Or is it something else? I mean, I believe that

• 30:48Josh Axe?

  there's demonic forces in this world. There are evil spirits, just like there is the good spirit, you know? Good spirit and specifically God. And so I think being able to decipher that, I think that's where also the Bible has such great value in sort of pairing this voice of the Spirit with the written word, the physical with the spiritual. Hundred percent. And, um, you know, I remember back, so I, I, that whole time being blessed, uh, having this Christian upbringing. And then I had two years in college where I really felt like I turned from the Lord, didn't focus on my faith. And then I was in my junior year and I remember just sitting there one day and just feeling like just so empty. And I'm like, I have kind of all these so-called friends and everything feels like it should be going

• 31:31Josh Axe?

  great, but I just felt this deep, deep sense of emptiness because it'd been a couple of years since I really had gone to churches regularly. And I remember praying to God and I said, God, I like, I need you. I feel so empty right now and I feel lost and I need your direction. And, um, and I remember praying and just kind of just starting to feel kind of a sense of his presence. And then I said, I realized I'm, I'm going to start going back and getting involved in church. And I went on a Wednesday night and I, I remember when I was praying earlier though, what I'd prayed to God was, I said, God, I feel so lost. I feel so empty and I feel like I need other godly men to be

• 32:14Josh Axe?

  around me that can help guide me. And then my, here's what was my exact prayer. I said, God, would you send a flood of positive Christian influences and men into my life? And that was my prayer. And then on Wednesday night I go and somebody was speaking, there was a guest speaker there and there's like 150 people there and the guy was on stage and he said, hey, is anybody in this fraternity? He's like, cause I was when I was whatever. And I'm like, 150, I was the only one that raised my hand. And he's like, hey, I want to talk to you after. I was like, okay. And so anyways, uh, this pastor ended up like, um, you know, we ended up having a conversation. He said, hey, I feel like I'm like called to, you know, connect with you and help disciple you. And so I joined a discipleship

• 32:58Josh Axe?

  group he was in. The next week I went and a, a younger guy was starting, uh, who was in seminary, starting a. A Bible study that I joined and literally since that day, and he's still doing it today. He like sending amazing Christian mentors and just people into my life constantly. And that was just an example of like God just answering a prayer so directly. And I can think through time and time again, where God has been so unbelievably faithful in me praying. And sometimes he does it immediately. And sometimes it's two years later, all of a sudden, whoa, I'd been praying for that. Yeah. And so it's just amazing, you know? And so I, uh, so again, I, I, I love this topic of prayer because it's so, um,

• 33:44Josh Axe?

  it's so important. Again, it's, it's, it's, if you're going to have a good relationship with anybody, you got to communicate and God is the most important relationship and prayer is how we, how we do it.

• 33:54Speaker 04

  A hundred percent. And I think for me, the, the, I think if you, if you were to really distill down prayer to something, for me, it's been learning this process of surrender, which is just such a freeing process. It just takes so much stress off your life and so much worry out of your heart. But it's everything, everything has been this like gripping something so tightly. And then just letting it go and just being like, God, okay, I can't do this. I don't, I don't know what I'm supposed to do here. And as soon as, as soon as you do that, and I've experienced this so many times with Hallo, but also so many times with family, where as soon as you just let that go to God, he's just like, ah, okay, that's what I was, that's what I was waiting for. And then he, once you crack that door open, he just takes all the rest.

• 34:38Speaker 04

  I remember I was talking with Mark and Wahlberg, who we've been working with for a long time and has been awesome. And he like, he initially did this Father Stu movie a long time ago, and we started working together on that. And then he's been doing a bunch of stuff.

• 34:52Josh Axe?

  You know, it's super.

• 34:53Speaker 04

  It's a great film. Yeah. He did a great job. But we started working together from that and then, uh, continued to work together through Hallo. And he was like, you know, I felt like God was calling me to do that movie because, uh, He was like, okay, I've given, I've given you this platform. I've given you this career. Now I need you to go share with people about, you know, me and just share me with people. And he was like, okay, fine. I'll like check the box. I'll do my God thing. And then, you know, I'll be done and that'll be great. Like that'll be my movie and I'll be done with that movie. And then I'll be, go back to my normal life. And he was like, and that's just not what happens. He just cracks the door open and then he just takes the rest of it. And just like you said, like you, you meet one person and then the flood comes. But for me, it's this beautiful process of like, you're just relinquishing a little bit of the control of your life.

• 35:37Speaker 04

  I remember like, I mean, we had the newborn recently and our two big kids were sick. And so our five year old and our three year old were sick and we were really worried about the newborn because she was just like five days old. And so we were trying to keep quarantined, whatever. And, and the big kids were coming and sleeping with me and snoring and like, there was just all this. And I was trying to get them and, and we're trying to do all this stuff. We have our two year old, whatever. And so in the middle of the night, it happened like every night in a row where I would just like two kids would wake up and I'd be like, God, like, if the third kid wakes up, I don't, I don't know what to do. I, I can't get my wife. I have no idea what to do. I want to keep him healthy and these two are sick. And, and so I was just like, I'm, I can't, I give up. I don't know what to do. Like there's no answer here. And then they all just sleep through the night.

• 36:22Speaker 04

  And it's, you know, it's the same thing. Actually, we, um.

• 36:26Josh Axe?

  I mean, part of this is, you know, it's, it's releasing control. It's like, we're trying to play God's role. And so when we're trying to play the role, God's like, well, listen, you're trying to do it. Like, okay, I'm gonna.

• 36:37Speaker 04

  Too many cooks in the kitchen.

• 36:38Josh Axe?

  Like my daughter does this now. We were like, she wants to carry 30 things at once. And she wants this independence and what, and I'm like, honey, you know, can I carry that water bottle for you? You a water bottle? Can I do this? And finally sometimes she's like, you know, okay, you know, okay dad. But it's that, uh, and by the way, this is a cure for anxiety as well. So many people, you know, one thing I noted, I've, I've, I've seen. And one of my biggest, I think the most surprising thing for me as a physician has been, I, I spent a lot of my career studying really in-depth nutrition and I believe that diet makes a huge, huge impact in people's lives. However, in taking care of so many people with many chronic illnesses. I think the single greatest thing causing people to be ill today, diet's number two.

• 37:23Josh Axe?

  Number one is stress, emotional trauma, spiritual, spiritual issue. I mean, you know, the mind, the mind body, the spiritual things of this life, where people are holding on to the point, even something like that. They're trying to hold on to things and control things that we should be giving to God. That is the single greatest cause of health issues today. Not just anxiety and depression, but even cancer, heart, heart disease, you name it.

• 37:52Speaker 04

  We see it, we see it all the time. Is this, I mean, we had this story of this. There's a bunch of people really struggling right now with anxiety, depression, suicide. We had this, I mean, there's a lot, there's a lot of really hard things. And it's so clear, it's so, it's crystal clear when you're at your absolute lowest. There's just nothing else but God. There's nothing else that can speak to that. There's no meditation, there's no working out, there's no, and all those things are good for you. They're good for you, but nothing can talk to you when you're at your lowest. We had this young woman who was 15, who was really depressed, really stressed, really anxious at school. And she, it got so bad that she decided she was gonna take her life. And she wrote her dad a suicide note, got into the bathtub. Her mom was worried about her, so had downloaded the app onto her phone.

• 38:36Speaker 04

  She stepped into the bathtub, prepared to end her life, got a little random push notification from the app telling her to pray. She looked up at the sky, which was the ceiling of her bathroom and said, "God, look, you know, I don't believe in you, but fine, before I go through with this, I'll give you one last shot. Here's your chance." And she presses play and it's meditation on Christ, Christ's passion and bleeding on the cross and the blood that he poured out for us. And she realized in that moment that he bled for her so that she didn't have to bleed that night.

• 39:03Josh Axe?

  Wow.

• 39:04Speaker 04

  She said, "I realized he was real. He was in that room, he picked me up out of the bathtub and he healed me. He brought me back to him and I..." Started serving the poor in the inner city and have been for the last three years. She reached out to us when she was 18 and we just, we get this all the time, which is people at, you see it in addiction all the time, people who have struggled, we see it with people who have struggled with addiction, there's just nothing else but God that can break through that. And maybe you can break through it for a moment, but sustained sobriety. I mean, AA has seen this for, you know, decades, but the, the hard part is, it's a little bit, to use a bad analogy, like food, if, if I were to give you like a giant cake of chocolate and be like, hey, can you eat this? You'd be like, no, that, that's awful. That's disgusting. No,

• 39:48Speaker 04

  of course not. But if I just give you a little bit each day, it's like, okay, yeah, sure. And then it just turns into this giant problem. So you can see it so clearly when you lose a loved one or something, or you're nearing the end of your own life, or you're wrestling with something really awful, like addiction or whatever it is, like when you're at these really low moments, there's only God. And you know that as a friend, like you know that as someone whose family members, who you've lost people, you've seen death, there's nothing else you can say to that person. You can't say like, well wishes, you can't say like, I'm gonna get you some flowers, nothing. It's all just nonsense. The only thing you can do is pray and say, the Lord is with you, like just, and, and he is, when you're in those moments, you feel God is with you. He's closer to you than he ever is in those moments. But in the little moments, in the little chocolates

• 40:33Speaker 04

  each day, or the little treats each day, it's you forget it, the little anxiety, the little stress just builds up and you're like, well, I'm not at my lowest. So like, I don't need to do the 10 minutes of prayer. And it's like, no, but you do. Those are the things that are gonna hold you through.

• 40:45Josh Axe?

  Yeah. Well, let me piggyback on this and how I see prayer with this is like, you know, there's a lot of people, sometimes when I take care of patients, sometimes there's just, there's one major deficiency they have and it's wreaking havoc on their health. Like vitamin D is a big one with some people. I mean, if you're deficient in vitamin D, your immune system's weaker, your bone density, your hormone, it's a pro hormone, so your hormone thing, all that's off. But you know, same thing, taking one capsule a day of vitamin D for some people, it can be transformative. It's this very similar thing with prayer, right? For some, I think a lot of times people think, okay, in order for me to, you know, see any results, again, I'm just saying like a comment, I gotta pray like, yo, so much, so many times a day. But sometimes it takes two minutes.

• 41:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:26Josh Axe?

  Two-minute prayer. You know, is that something that you've, you've seen through the Hallow app? And by the way, when somebody's in the Hallow app, I mean, there are different lengths of time, like two minutes, five minutes, 30 in terms of what people can do in terms of prayer and meditation.

• 41:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's the biggest thing that we have seen over the last seven years, seven, eight years working on it. And the biggest thing we try to do really well is people are at very different places in their spiritual journey, and they're at very different places in your life. Maybe you have a bunch of young kids at home, maybe your job's crazy, maybe you're working two jobs, who knows? But God works with, like, if you just give them just what you can, he works with the rest. It's the beautiful, again, to go back to scripture, which at the vast, I would argue, everything on the Hallow app, but the vast majority of everything, when you're praying and you're trying to listen to the Lord's voice, is just meditating on scripture. But one of the parables we meditate a lot on is the fishes and the loaves. And it's you just, the five fish and the two loaves. The disciples give, Jesus says, hey, let's go feed this crowd of thousands of people.

• 42:22Speaker 04

  And the disciples say, all we have is five fish and two loaves. What are you gonna do with that? Jesus says, well, just give it to me. And they give it to him, and then he feeds the whole crowd with it. And that's a miracle. It's great because he can multiply food. Awesome. That's like what most people think about that. But the other piece that we miss is the disciples have to take, we have five fish and two loaves. That's all we have. The problem is infinitely bigger than this. And yet, all I have to do is give it to the Lord still, and then he's gonna do the rest. And it's the same with your heart, and it's the same with prayer, which is, if one minute a day is all that there is, if two minutes a day is all there is, if three minutes a day is all there is, fine, start there. Just don't give up. Just don't give up. And even if you get up to, hey, I'm doing 30 minutes of prayer a day, and then things go crazy, it's like, well, but just hold on to something.

• 43:07Speaker 04

  Just try your best to hold on to something, two minutes a day, three minutes a day. And so we have all these different, I mean, we have a 30-second thing on the app, we have a 60-second thing on the app. But mostly, when you've, mostly people do like a 10 minute session or so, that's probably the usual. But we have people doing like an hour, two hours, three hours. We have monks and nuns on there all the time. I mean, it's, so there's, there's this incredible depth to it. But just to your point, it's the, the key is just, hey, just give it a shot. And what he does is, he, I mean, he's God. That's, he doesn't, all he needs is you to take one step back. It's like the parable of the prodigal son, the God, while he was still a long way off. He didn't make him come all the way home. He just wanted him to return. He just wanted him to make the turn and say,

• 43:49Speaker 04

  well, I want to go back to my dad. I just want to go back to spending life with my father. And even though in that parable, the son was, he wasn't being all that genuine. He just wanted food. Like it, it wasn't even real that he wanted to go back to his dad because he loved him. But still, the father runs out to you. And so if you just give him 30 seconds, it's like this little door. If you just crack it open for him, he takes the rest. And it's this beautiful, what he does in prayers. Man, he is, he is very good. He changes your life.

• 44:15Josh Axe?

  That's so good. You know, one of the things is I, I was writing, we were talking about right before the show. I wrote a, co-wrote a book called The Bibliodiet. And, um, and, you know, I spent years with my friend Jordan Rubin, writing the book. And really going through the entire Bible, looking to see, to see, see what God says about health. You know, what he says about, I mean, and it, by the way, it's amazing. I mean, the Bible is, you know,

• 44:38Speaker 04

  It's a big book.

• 44:39Josh Axe?

  The amount of things it says about health, farming. I mean, you know, you want to know how to have a great farming, like letting the land rest every seven years, regenerative agriculture. It's in the Bible. If you are sick with mold issues, the Bible talks about it in Leviticus. You know, you want to know what to eat for, you know, uh, healing GI issues and numerous, it's in, like, it's in the Bible. And so the Bible is the greatest health book. It's the greatest book ever written. But obviously even the greatest health book ever written. People don't think about it like that. But, um, One of the things that as we were writing the book and talking about fasting, that was one of the topics that we get into in the book of how to fast to heal. And we bring in both what the Bible says, also the latest medical science and research.

• 45:21Josh Axe?

  But one of the things that I got turned on to was, you know, the early church, they would fast every Wednesday or Friday or both days.

• 45:30Speaker 04

  Entirely.

• 45:31Josh Axe?

  Entirely. Yeah, well, a lot of, a lot of them, they would, they would fast until, and sometimes do one meal a day around, some of them did three o'clock, some of them, once it started to get dark, so to your point, yes, it still would be fasting all day. And that way, my point there is, is that it was, um, you know, the Bible talks a lot about fasting. And Jesus, at one point, you know, his disciples are trying to cast out demons. And Jesus is like, yeah, oh, hold up, you know, if you want to get rid of that demon, it takes prayer and fasting. So talk to me a little bit about fasting. I know that, uh, you know, I've, I've done Lent before and think it is such an incredible practice, uh, doing Lent. Um, I've done Daniel fast before. I've done fasting like was done by the early church, taking one day a week on typically,

• 46:14Josh Axe?

  for me, it was Wednesday and fasting for that day. And I've seen great fruits in my life from, from fasting and medically, you activate something called autophagy where your body is actually like eating itself, but in a good way to clear out anything that's damaged, anything unhealthy, including cancer cells. So I'm a huge bit fan of fasting. I know you are too. So talk to me a little about sort of pairing fasting with prayer and Lent as well.

• 46:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, they have to go together, which is, it's one of the things that we miss so much in our world today. And it's sad because you read scripture and they talk about fasting and they just talk about it as though they assume everyone knows what you're talking about. Like that Jesus just references, well, they will fast when I'm gone. That he doesn't specify like what is happening because everybody's fasting regularly. That was just, that was just what they did. And especially in the early church, you didn't like prescribe, okay, on Wednesday, we're going to have one, you can eat a thousand calories and you're going to have one meal and half a meal or whatever. It was, they were intense fasts. It was these, and all of Lent was a really intense fast for many monks. And I know a bunch of monks who have fasted for 40 days during Lent. Kevin James actually did a 40 day Lenten fast like two years ago.

• 47:22Speaker 04

  The, um, his joke is he had, he had enough fuel to burn for the, for the 40 days, but the. But fasting is such an important part. I think it's a beautiful part of health. So I've noticed it in my own life, like a, yeah, it's just, it cleans you. It helps you to like grow in discipline. It helps you to detach from your need for food. It helps you to see food in a lot healthier light. But mostly for me, I'm, you're the health guy. So you can give the wisdom on, on the health stuff, doctor. But for me, it's a spiritual thing, which is a beautiful, it's a beautiful spiritual practice. And you're right, in Mark, the disciples do try to cast out a demon and they can't. And they had been casting out a bunch of demons before. Jesus had sent them out and all the demons obeyed them. And this demon did not. And they said, Jesus, why can't we cast this demon out?

• 48:07Speaker 04

  And he said, this kind can only come out through prayer and fasting. Which is also funny, because in some Bible translations, they remove the words and fasting, which is like, which is crazy. But so sometimes it just says, this kind can only come out through prayer. So you have to check your Bible translation. Most of the time, they put it in the footnote, which is crazy. But they put it in the footnote that says, sometimes this is interpreted as and fasting, which it is, it just originally was written as fasting. But the fasting is this beautiful, okay, so spiritually, what you try to do with prayer, there's this really beautiful prayer. And what we try to do in Lent, Lent, there's three pillars of Lent. There's prayer, fasting, and then almsgiving, which is charity and good works and giving of your time and treasure. And what you try to do in prayer, really what you try to do in the spiritual life,

• 48:50Speaker 04

  we have this beautiful prayer that we're going through in this Lenten challenge, is just, Lord, empty me, fill me, use me. Empty me, fill me, use me, empty me, fill me, use me. And that's like the whole thing, that's the whole game, which is, empty me. God wants to come into you, but you've got a lot of crap in there. You've got a lot of stuff piled up in the way. And so you've got to clear it out. He can't come in if he doesn't share, he's a jealous God. He doesn't share. He wants your whole heart. And so you've got to clear out all this other stuff. You've got to make space for him. He can't come into this crowded, noisy, and he has to come in to a place where there's space. And so you have to make, even if it's just a little bit of space, you have to make space. And you have all these attachments to the world, like the younger son, that are pulling you away from God. And so you have to disconnect from those.

• 49:33Speaker 04

  You have to detach from those, is the word that you would use in the spiritual life, which takes discipline. That can be social media, it can be overeating, it can be gossip, it can be judgment, it can be whatever it is that is pulling you away from God, that you know you shouldn't be doing. And if you sit down for like five minutes and you're just like, God, What should I not have in my life right now? It's, you know it, within like thirty seconds. It's like, okay, those two things. Like, yeah, I know those two things, alright. So, you have to empty yourself of that, and then fill me. He then, it's not just empty. He doesn't just want you to be some, like, I'm gonna sit and meditate and be empty of everything. He wants to fill you with his love, and then he wants to use you for his goodness. There's this, one of the great saints from a contemplative, meditative tradition. It's Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross.

• 50:18Speaker 04

  Those are two, they're called like the mystic saints. And they have written these incredible books on prayer, and like way deeper into prayer than I, well, hopefully, maybe by the end of my life, the Lord will bring me there. But like infinitely deeper than I am in prayer right now. Just like beautiful meditation, they're where the two hours comes from. They're Carmelites, that's probably what your friend was talking about. But they spend two hours in prayer at a minimum every day. It's this beautiful journey of spiritual life. And Saint Teresa of Avila, who was the first, and then John of the Cross came after her, but wrote this, a lot about fasting, which was, she has these beautiful quotes. "Those who are not detached from visible things cannot be attached to invisible ones." And then she has this other one, which was, "I tried so long to harmonize these two things,

• 51:02Speaker 04

  which are so contrary to one another, which is the spiritual life and sensory joys. And what I would do is I would try to shut myself within myself," which was her practice of trying to meditate and pray. But what she would do is she would shut herself within a thousand vanities, is what she said. It's a beautiful line. "You would shut yourself within a thousand vanities," which all things are vanity, all is vanity, which is this. And so then what she learned from that is, I have to detach from these sensory things. I have to detach from the world, which can sound really intense. And Christian life is really intense. And John of the Cross goes even further. He says, "His prayer every day was to desire not what is easiest, but that which is most difficult. Not that which is most pleasurable, but that which is least, that which is harshest."

• 51:44Speaker 04

  Which is like to ask God for the hardest things, that would be, I can't do that. But it's to try to completely and totally disconnect from the world. And Saint Paul says this a lot, too. The flesh and the spirit are at war. You know, it's the, the spirit has to be the ruler, but often, so often in our lives, the flesh is. And so what we learn in this fasting is how to detach from these things. But if you actually do it, and you fast, you know, for like a day, uh... What you'll see at what I feel, one, it's so much easier to enter into prayer. There's just this, like, if you sit, it takes me like 10, 15 minutes to actually really enter into prayer. If I'm just sitting and I'm fed and I'm normal. But if I'm fasting, I can do it like 30 seconds. I just sit there and there's just, I'm just closer to the other side than I was before.

• 52:29Josh Axe?

  Yeah.

• 52:30Speaker 04

  And the other thing is, I, you know what meekness is? And that's what, Jesus says, "I'm meek and humble of heart, hear me. I'm meek and humble of heart, follow me." This meekness, which is something that we just don't ever talk about in our regular life. Cause we're all supposed to be, you know, big and strong and independent and prideful and whatever. But this meekness is, what does it mean to be meek? And when you're fasting, you just feel this like, this surrender. It's just like, ah, well, I, I don't, I, maybe I'm a little lower energy, but I still can do all the things I need to do.

• 52:59Josh Axe?

  Yeah.

• 52:59Speaker 04

  But I just feel this like joy and this freedom that I didn't have before.

• 53:03Josh Axe?

  Yeah. You know, what I've done fast, especially longer ones, I did a 21 day Daniel fast. But the way I did it was, the only thing I ate was, uh, vegetables and fruit. And that was it.

• 53:14Speaker 04

  Tense.

• 53:15Josh Axe?

  And so.

• 53:16Speaker 04

  No beans?

• 53:16Josh Axe?

  Huh?

• 53:17Speaker 04

  No beans?

• 53:17Josh Axe?

  No. Um, and so that, that was all I did. And I felt such a sense of need. Like, I, I need food, but also I need God. Like, I, I, you know, I just felt this sense of, wow, like, I'm a person who, it was, it was humbling. I mean, that's what I'd say, it felt very, it's felt very, very humbling when I've done longer fasts. Like, I, I have a, you know, the other thing that I did when I was on this fast, I didn't eat any salt.

• 53:45Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 53:46Josh Axe?

  So it's just fruits and vegetables.

• 53:47Speaker 04

  That's hard.

• 53:47Josh Axe?

  And one thing's I realized too, like, if you're eating just a plain steamed vegetable, and it doesn't have salt.

• 53:52Speaker 04

  It's gross.

• 53:53Josh Axe?

  Yeah, exactly, it's gross. It does, does no, like, salt brings, so even the, you know, the Bible verses about salt. Like, it spoke to me in a whole new way in terms of where to be a salt of the earth and, and sort of bring, you know, a richness and a flavor. And like, flavors are, they're impactful, you know? So it, it caused me to really even read scripture in a different way. You know, when I was fasting, and so there's, there's so much powerful there. The other thing I love about Lent is, um, The fasting, you know, in Daniel fasts, there's fasting of food, but also there's fasting of those, to your point, those worldly connections, right? So fasting from your cellphone, you know, thinking about what are those things that are most pulling you away from God?

• 54:37Josh Axe?

  I mean, part of the thing there is preparing, you know, obviously with Lent, there's that connection to, at the end, Pentecost.

• 54:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:42Josh Axe?

  Right? And God sending His Holy Spirit to fill you and lead you and preparing yourself, making yourself a holy vessel, preparing for, you know, to be filled with the Holy Spirit. So I, anyways, I love fasting. I love that's something that you guys, you know, encourage.

• 55:00Speaker 04

  The Lenten challenge we do on the app, so Mark and Chris lead these fasting Fridays challenges every week where you fast from a different thing. And then we journey through this kind of spiritual journey that's meditating on Scripture and some beautiful books and just how the Lord is calling us to deepen our relationship with Him. But the theme, the whole thing kicks off with, amen, amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat, but if it dies, it bears much fruit. And that's, like, Jesus says that actually all the time, if you really listen. You pick up your cross and follow Me unless you die to this world. And it's, it's so consistent and it is His story also, which is Lent is the 40 days leading up to Easter, and then you're right, at the end of the Easter season, you have Pentecost, the Holy Spirit comes.

• 55:43Speaker 04

  And so it's this 40 days leading up to Easter, and what happens at Easter? Well, Holy Week, Good Friday, He's killed. He dies. He dies voluntarily for us, and then He rises again. And that's like, if you were to say, okay, tell me the gospel, Jesus died and He rose again. That's it. Like, Jesus died for us and He rose again. And that is what we're called to do in our hearts, which is to die to ourselves so that Christ can live within us. And that's what we do, are called to do and to prepare to do. It takes us a lot longer than, you know, just the Holy Week to do it, but through this Lent is to try to die so that God can live within us. And one of the really beautiful ways that you do that is through fasting, and then He He sees that and it's again, one of those things where it's like, ah, Lord, I.

• 56:27Speaker 04

  And what we also fail to do so often is we try to do it as like, oh, I'm gonna fast because I'm a big deal.

• 56:32Josh Axe?

  Yeah.

• 56:32Speaker 04

  You know, I can, I can do the Daniel fast. I can fast for seven days. I can do the Kevin James forty day fast. I can, because I'm awesome. I'm super and, and that's just pride. And what you do once you see when you're really fast is like, oh no, I can't do this. Like, that's actually really hard. And then you just say, God, I can't, you know, if you want to do this, you're gonna have to do it. And then he does. And it's this beautiful opportunity for humility, which is like, okay, yeah, you're dying to yourself, both your attachments, but also your pride. And letting me come into your heart. And that's what I want for you this month. That's what I want for your life is to let me in. So that it's not you. It's not you trying to carry all these things. It's me.

• 57:08Josh Axe?

  That's so good. It's so good. If, if people are, you know, I was, Michael Nels was on the show and we were having this conversation around spiritual practices and rituals. When you think about the spiritual practices that have most impacted your life, I love a ranking order here. Okay? So if you're like, these are the top five that have changed who you are, impacted you positively, you see impacting others. What are those top five spiritual practices in ranking order?

• 57:37Speaker 04

  Okay, I'm gonna answer this a few ways because that's a very difficult question. The one that matters most is bad, the practices implies like daily, but I'm gonna say a couple of things before that. Baptism is the most important and I was baptized as a kid. You don't like recognize it, but once you understand what happened in that moment, you're made a child of God. Everything changes when you're baptized. It's a beautiful thing. Marriage, second most important, changes everything. You become one with someone else. And that's the main way that you learn how to die to yourself is with the wife, which is beautiful. But also how you learn how to love and like life comes from it. It's this beautiful, beautiful thing. But for me, okay, so I'm Catholic. So for me, the mass, which is receiving the Eucharist and praying with God's word is, I, I do it every day.

• 58:19Speaker 04

  And it's, oh, it's just like, it's the medicine I need it. It, it gives me like strength. It's my armor. It's everything. Everything comes from that. Confession is another beautiful way to like, realize your humility and to ask God for his forgiveness. But then in terms of like prayer, uh, which all those things are prayer in a way, but in terms of prayer, for me, the two big ones were. I had the spiritual director who said, "You gotta do three things every day and everything else flows from that. You have to do 20 minutes of silence, a daily rosary, and daily mass." And the 20 minutes of silence has been the most impactful, but all three have been really beautiful. The rosary is another way to, I like it at the end of the day, it's another

• 59:04Speaker 04

  way to like really collect yourself after everything is crazy. I don't think everybody probably knows that is not Catholic. Yeah. What the rosary is. Can you? Yes, please. Okay, so we have it on the app, so if you don't know how to do a rosary, you can just look it up on the app. Mark does it in like 12 minutes, which is actually quite stressful, because he's like, "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed are thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus." But it usually takes like 15 minutes or so, but often you'll have beads with you. And so what it is, is a series of repeated prayers. You do the Our Father and then the Hail Mary 10 times, which both are, Our Father is the perfect prayer taken from Scripture that the Lord gives us, obviously, and then the Hail Mary is taken from when the angel shows up and says, "Hail Mary,

• 59:45Speaker 04

  full of grace, the Lord is with thee." And Hail Mary, full of grace, when he first appears to Mary, to tell her that she is going to bear the child of God. So those two prayers, you repeat, you do the Our Father and then the Hail Mary 10 times, the Our Father and Hail Mary 10 times, you do that five times. So each one's called a decade, you do that five times, it's five decades. You have the little beads. Again, it's confusing, the like how, which is why it's a lot easier on the Hallow app, but the key of it is that in each decade, you meditate on a mystery of Scripture. So you meditate on something that has happened in Scripture. And so there's different sets of these mysteries. There's the joyful ones, which are mostly surrounding Jesus's birth, and so you meditate on the angel appearing to Mary and telling her that she's going to be the mother of God. You

• 1:00:28Speaker 04

  meditate on the nativity, Jesus being born to Mary and Joseph. You meditate on the early days of Jesus's life. There's the sorrowful ones, where Jesus is killed, and so you meditate on the passion, you meditate on the crucifixion. And then there's the glorious ones, where he rose again. And there's luminous ones and all these different things, but the glorious ones is when he rose again. So you meditate on... What you try to do is spend as much time in these stories of Scripture as you can. And so you'll hear, you'll say, okay, this, for this decade, I'm going to meditate on the resurrection of Jesus. And then you pray the Our Father and you pray the 10 Hail Marys. But what those Hail Marys do, and this is especially helpful for anybody, when you sit down and pray for 10, 20 minutes of silence and your mind is just going all over the place and you're just thinking about a thousand other things.

• 1:01:11Speaker 04

  The rosary can be a great way to just say, okay, I'm just going to do the Hail Mary full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Takes a little bit to memorize it, two seconds. If you do it on the Hallow app, you don't have to memorize it, you go along with us. But it just kind of, it's like when you're driving and you can think a lot better, you know? Or you're like in a shower and you can think a lot better, like your mind is just like 5% engaged. So then the rest of it can, you're not busy and stressed, you're actually able to focus. The rosary gives you that like structure so that you're able then to be, to enter into the mystery of the resurrection, to try to spend as much time with the passion or with the nativity, which are, you know, Jesus being born or Jesus being killed or Jesus rising again and just sit at the foot of the cross and just be with Jesus at the foot of the cross. Or just sit with Mary Magdalene as she recognizes the Lord risen from the dead for the first time.

• 1:01:54Speaker 04

  So it's this beautiful prayer, I love it at the end of the day. And then 20 minutes of silence, which usually, we have a bunch of different things on the app that structure this, but usually is in Scripture. Those two things for me have been like, ah, they're just like, everything then comes from them. And it's, it's also, health is actually a really great analogy for the spiritual life because it's, it's a good habit, you're trying to build it. And it's really hard at the beginning because you're like, you've got all these addictions to food, you know? So you're like, you really want your Doritos or your chocolate or whatever. It's really hard at the beginning. But once you get into it, you actually start to desire That's so true. Clean eating. That's right. And you, you start to actually feel repulsed by the other stuff. You're like, oh, like McDonald's, like the burger. Yeah, Big Mac, I couldn't even imagine. But Yeah. The, you actually do like, you, you start to want it.

• 1:02:39Speaker 04

  And so your day starts to become like, man, if I don't get that, I, I need, I need that run or I need that whatever. But for me, it's the silence, I need that silence.

• 1:02:48Josh Axe?

  So anyway, those are my, those are my big ones. You know, it's in a similar way. Like I have had my best, um, honest to say this, best ideas for like, something I should do in my family or business or anything during, you know, when I get, when I go to church, we do a praise and worship and say it's like 30 minutes. I mean, sometimes I feel back and sometimes I'm like, you know, I'm in their praise and worship and things come to me. And I'm like, okay, I need to be praising worship. I know, but you want to write it down. Exactly. And I'm taking notes furiously and I go back to praise and worship. And so I've definitely experienced that during that time. And then also same during prayer. It's the other time. It's like prayer and meditation. It's like, wow, I mean, you know, God's thoughts are better than my thoughts, you know? Certainly. Praise are above your ways. So, uh, so powerful. All right. So this is came to me. I would love to hear from you.

• 1:03:33Josh Axe?

  So I, um, I'm Protestant, but I really respect and love the Catholic faith. In fact, one constant conversation I have with all the Catholics that come on is, uh, is, um, there, I really wish that there were elements of Catholicism that Protestants would practice, like confessing and whether that's more confessing to the Lord or confessing to a priest or a pastor. I think there's, I think that is something that Protestants should be doing a lot more. And a lot of the ritual habits, I think that's something we should be doing a lot more.

• 1:04:08Josh Axe?

  And all that being said, so I have a lot of Catholics I follow and listen to and absolutely love. And I know, I think most of the people I'm going to say now, you are familiar with. And I'd love for you to describe something you love about them in one word. Oh, that'll be fun. Okay. Bishop Barron. Wisdom. There you go. That's good. Mike Schmidt.

• 1:04:31Josh Axe?

  Art. Lila Rose. Courage. Michael Knowles.

• 1:04:39Josh Axe?

  Intellect. Mark Wahlberg.

• 1:04:45Speaker 04

  Discipline, there's a lot there, but discipline.

• 1:04:47Josh Axe?

  That's good. That's great. Wow. I mean, Michael Knowles, that had to be intelligent. I'll tell you when he was on the-

• 1:04:53Speaker 04

  He's funny too. He's a funny guy too. I was gonna, but yeah.

• 1:04:55Josh Axe?

  I'll tell you this, when he was on the show, I was like, I have never heard anybody with this level of vocabulary.

• 1:05:01Speaker 04

  Oh, it's insane. It's like talking to Thomas Quinn. It's, yeah, and like, he's, no, he's very, he talks as though he's like reading from a literary book, like in class. Like, it's like, how is this, how are you doing that?

• 1:05:13Josh Axe?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:14Speaker 04

  But no, it's so beautiful. And one thing I will throw out, I'm Catholic. I love being Catholic.

• 1:05:17Josh Axe?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:18Speaker 04

  We have, uh, on Hallow, what we try to do for Hallow is build a place where anybody who's interested in a relationship with Jesus can come and grow closer to the Lord.

• 1:05:25Josh Axe?

  Well, you mentioned Chris Pratt. There's a lot of Protestants on Hallow as well.

• 1:05:29Speaker 04

  Folks on there. So about half of the folks now coming into the app are Protestant or non-denominational or, uh, non-Catholic Christians, and then half are Catholics. So it's, it's a very even split. And again, all we try to do is just meditate on God's word. And most of that we can agree on. And if you want to skip the rosary, you can skip the rosary. Again, I think it's great. You should try it, but, and there's a lot of Protestants actually who love the rosary. But the, uh, but yeah, all we try to do is meditate on God's word and to be a place where we can all grow closer to, to Jesus.

• 1:05:57Josh Axe?

  That's so good. Well, thanks so much for coming on today.

• 1:05:59Speaker 04

  Oh, praise the Lord. Thanks for having me.

• 1:06:00Josh Axe?

  This is amazing. I, I love what you're up to and I love that. Again, you've had so many, uh, impacted people so positively. We know that prayer, and we're called to pray, we're called to meditate, and these practices literally change who we are. They bring us closer to Christ. And, um, and so anyways, I just, I, I, and, and the other thing that I love too is it could take five minutes. You know, to your point, most people just do 10 minutes. And what that can do for who we become, becoming more like Christ, growing closer to Christ is so powerful. So thanks so much for what you do. Let, let people know, um, obviously Hallow app is, is the, is a thing. You can go get the app, download the app, start a practice. Could be one minute a day to open the door to change your, your life.

• 1:06:43Speaker 04

  Oh, that's a great pitch. I don't think I can do better than that. But thank you for, it takes a lot of, I love doing these conversations and with folks like you who have platforms of their own or- Expertise of their own in health, or whatever it is, to be willing to step out and share what the Lord has done for them and for them, and invite other people to that. It takes a lot of courage that people don't often appreciate, and it's a beautiful thing. It's the real important work of Christians is to reach out through different folks, but not just at church, but to reach out to people who, especially people, maybe if you haven't prayed in 10, 20 years, to give it a chance, just give the Lord two, three minutes. So I appreciate you doing that with your career. It's beautiful.

• 1:07:22Josh Axe?

  Well, thanks so much for the encouraging words, and thanks for coming on today. I want to encourage everybody to go check out the Hallow app and just get started with prayer and meditation on that app. Again, just a couple minutes a day can radically change your life, change your faith. I also want to say, hey, thanks so much for tuning in here to the Dr. Josh Ak Show. Remember, each and every week, we're diving deep into the science and principles of how you can heal physically, mentally, spiritually, and take your health and your life to the next level. Also, don't forget to subscribe and share the number one thing you can do to support the show is to become a subscriber. It allows it to show up on your feed more, allows me to bring in more high-profile guests here, like Alex, who came on today. And also, don't forget to share, there are millions

• 1:08:06Josh Axe?

  and millions of people who need God in their life and who could benefit from prayer, from fasting, from meditation. So thanks so much for sharing this as well today, and we'll see you on the next episode.