Part Two: Yale Psychiatrist on the Science of Manifestation, The Truth of Your Intuition, Reconnecting to our Souls and Why Mental Health Needs Spirituality! | Dr. Anna Yusim

What if everything you’ve been told about spirituality and mental health is wrong? In this powerful episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, Dr. Anna Yusim—Clinical Assistant Professor at Yale Medical School, co-founder of the Yale Mental Health & Spirituality Program, and author of Fulfilled: How the Science of Spirituality Can Help You Live a Happier, More Meaningful Life—reveals the biggest misconception about spirituality and why it’s not about religion, “good vibes,” or blind belief…it’s about science, psychology, and lived experience. Dr. Yusim explains how connection to a higher power can measurably improve mental and physical health, how to have authentic spiritual experiences without religion, and the two ways to manifest—including which one actually works (and which one most people get wrong). Dr. Yusim also breaks down: - How spirituality, meditation, and manifestation can change your physiology, mood, & nervous system - What it really means to raise your frequency & how to do it in real life - Unconscious reprogramming: what it is and how to use it to break old patterns - Why surrender opens the door to creative solutions - How to overcome victim mentality while balancing personal responsibility & external circumstances - Breaking intergenerational cycles of self-sabotage using family constellation therapy - How to tell when family conflict can be healed, and when boundaries are necessary - How to protect yourself from energy vampires Dr. Yusim also explores the mystical edges of psychology, and where science draws the line: - 3 types of intuition and 4 intuitive pathways for receiving extrasensory information - Similarities and differences between psychics and schizophrenia, and how information is received in each case - Whether telepathy is heightened intuition, if anyone can access it (& whether they should) - Where spiritual practices fit inside a Western psychiatric model - How she clinically distinguishes between healthy intuitive experiences & serious mental health conditions that require treatment We also discuss: - How after-death communication through psychic mediums can help people process grief (and when it becomes unhealthy) - Crown Reading vs Third Eye Reading - Whether everyone has spirit guides or guardian angels, and how to navigate conflicting messages - Dr. Yusim’s personal journey with claircognizance and the psychic reading that shifted her life path - Karmic patterns and the soul’s repeating lessons - How to tap into your Higher Self - 3 universal truths found across all spiritual and religious traditions - How psychedelics help process trauma from a psychiatric perspective - Why the Law of Attraction may not be working for you - Why some people can train themselves to hold their breath for extraordinary lengths of time This episode is the bread & butter of MBB, bridging psychiatry, spirituality, intuition, trauma, and healing, without bypassing science or mental health! Dr. Anna Yusim’s book, Fulfilled: How the Science of Spirituality Can Help You Live a Happier, More Meaningful Life: ⁠https://annayusim.com/book/⁠ https://annayusim.com/book/ Learn more about Dr. Yusim’s psychiatry & coaching sessions: ⁠https://annayusim.com/⁠ https://annayusim.com/ Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik%E2%81%A0 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  With the American Express Platinum Card, I can unlock experiences like no other. Since I'm always booking my next trip, I love that I can earn points on travel. Plus, I get a resi benefit, so you know I'm hitting the restaurants everyone's talking about. And you can find out your welcome offer after you apply, which could be as high as 175,000 points. For experiences like no other, there's nothing like Platinum. Learn more at americanexpress.com/explore-platinum. Terms apply.

• 0:34Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Mayim Viallick.

• 0:35Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 0:37Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to part two of our conversation with Dr. Anna Yusim. She's an internationally recognized, award-winning, board-certified, Stanford and Yale-educated psychiatrist and executive coach. Her book, "Fulfill: How the Science of Spirituality Can Help You Live a Happier, More Meaningful Life", is what we started discussing in part one of our conversation with Dr. Yusim. Part one of our conversation had Dr. Yusim explaining to us the foundations of why spirituality actually helps our mental and physical health, and what are some of the patterns we can get out to so that we can be open to seeing miracles and spiritual progress in our lives? What are we discussing in part two, Jonathan?

• 1:19Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, Mayim, you have to be careful what you pray for. We're going to discuss why the law of attraction may not be working for you and what to do instead.

• 1:29Mayim Bialik?

  We'll also tackle some of the pitfalls of spiritual solutions, karmic patterns, and are psychedelics the only way to get in touch with your spiritual side in order to process your trauma?

• 1:40Jonathan Cohen?

  We tackle three different types of intuitions and how to connect with your spirit guides.

• 1:46Mayim Bialik?

  Head over to Substack for more on our conversation with Dr. Yusim as we walk you through a practical exercise meditation from her book. In addition, make sure to check out Dr. Yusim's website, annayusim.com. That's A-N-N-A-Y-U-S-I-M dot com to learn more about her psychiatry sessions and her coaching sessions. Without further ado, enjoy part two of our conversation with Dr. Anna Yusim.

• 2:12Mayim Bialik?

  Since we're talking about the Akashic Records, an extension of this, I'm just gonna ask. So, the telepathy tapes, you know, came on the scene of podcasting last year, and introduced this concept, and I always have to say this, we can set aside the conversation about facilitated communication, and for people who don't believe in facilitated communication, we don't have to talk about it. So I'm gonna set that aside, but, you know, the telepathy tapes, over the course of this season, proposed that there is a radio station that can be tuned into, that there is a field of consciousness that people who are not in the same physical space can access and commune in, outside of their physical body.

• 2:57Mayim Bialik?

  Is this notion of telepathy an extension of an understanding that there's a field of knowledge all around us, and we just need to learn to tune into it?

• 3:08Speaker 03

  I think that that could very well be. However, I don't know if we have the roadmap as to exactly how to tune in, and I have, very interestingly, we have numerous patients who tune into precisely that. You know, the hill that everybody, you know, who are non-verbal autistics meet on in order to commune, right? I have had patients like that, who will describe going to spaces like this and being able to communicate with people like that. Unfortunately, oftentimes, those very patients, it's hard to exist fully in this world, because they're very much in this other world. And so I have found that, that sometimes if people are too tuned in

• 3:51Speaker 03

  to certain frequencies, it's hard to be fully grounded. This has been my clinical experience with people I have treated like this.

• 3:58Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, so what I'm thinking, and, you know, I've been seeing a psychiatrist since I was, you know, 15 years old. So, if you go into a psychiatrist's office, in most places, in, you know, a materialist world, and if you were to say things, they would put you on medication that would tamp down many of your systems.

• 4:23Mayim Bialik?

  Meaning, you know, this would be, by many psychiatrists, classified as problematic. And I'm not saying that it is problematic, but to have a new perspective of mental health, of mental capabilities, and of the practice of psychiatry, I mean, it's a tremendous opening to be able to say, what information is there that this person is either communicating or receiving? How do you, you know, as a psychiatrist, how do you decide? Is it your own intuition? Is it your own sense of, this is what I was trained as a medical professional to do,

• 5:06Mayim Bialik?

  and this is what I've been trained as a human being to do? How do you manage something that also has tremendous cultural variation? You've spent time in, I think, over 70 countries, where there are people who are given special cultural designations, which we cannot appropriate, but you know a lot about these practices. Where does it fit into a Western model?

• 5:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's such a great question. And with respect specifically to the nonverbal autistics or individuals who can have access to an inner world, or an inner world connected to many other people that others don't have. Some of these cases have been indeed my hardest cases to treat. And the reason is because within, as a psychiatrist with a psychiatric toolbox, if people are not able to really function in this world, and are having those kind of symptoms, we have as one of the tools, one of many tools in the toolbox, antipsychotic medications. And I have had people like this, who I have treated with antipsychotics. It's changed their life for the better,

• 6:10Speaker 03

  and they have really, really good, healthy lives now.

• 6:13Mayim Bialik?

  But you turned, you turned off the voices. Maybe there is something in there.

• 6:18Speaker 03

  Correct, correct, yes. So that, so in the cases where people were open to that, My experience has been very positive with helping people. There are also, I have had cases where people will have the voices and they're not open to the medication. And actually, these people have been hospitalized before and they were not open to the medication in the hospital and they were discharged from the hospital because the hospital got frustrated with them after months and months of trying to convince them to take medication. And these are individuals who are not sick enough to be hospitalized and not healthy enough to be functioning in society. And you can't force anybody to take meds. And so they love the fact that they have this inner world and this inner world is what they have, but it also keeps them from being able to be fully functional.

• 7:01Speaker 03

  So it's a very, very complicated, difficult case and/or cases where you have to be in that in-between space and you have to hold the space for the patient and the family to figure out what's right. And you can't force medications on anybody, nor do you want to. And you're there in case of an emergency, in which case they can be hospitalized, of course, but it's hard. It's very hard because the family would like this person functioning in the way that they were before and this person just is unwilling and unable.

• 7:30Jonathan Cohen?

  Let's bring this to the general population. Do you believe that it's everyone's unique capability as a human being to have a sense of intuition and to connect with it in whatever format it comes in?

• 7:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. And I think that there's people who will value and rely on intuition much more and find much greater utility and use in their intuition and therefore seek to develop it much more because of how they're wired, because of value placed in it in their society and family. And then there's other people who are super rational and even if they are intuitive, their intuitive intuition comes through their rationality and they wouldn't even use the word intuition. It wouldn't, you know, and let's also define intuition a little bit broadly, a little bit more broadly. When I think about intuition, I would think about three types of intuition, right? The first type is type one intuition, which you can think of as what Nobel Prize winner

• 8:26Speaker 03

  Daniel Kahneman, who wrote Thinking Fast and Slow, described as the fast thinking system. What he described more as instinct. It's like a pattern recognition system where you know something and you don't even know why you know. You just recognize a pattern and boom. That's type one intuition.

• 8:42Mayim Bialik?

  Like I was at the doctor the other day and she was mentioning different things. And like when you make that face of like, I don't want to do that. Is that the same as intuition? Or that's just, I don't want to do that?

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you, you know, for you, like that face, like that was, she made a face and you immediately knew what that was. You didn't think, you didn't have to think hard to figure out what that face meant. You intuitively know, that was like almost an instinct. Type two intuition is the intuition that you're sitting in a room with someone. And it's, it's kind of like what you said, Maim. It's like you're with somebody, but you know something without knowing why you know. And it's not because they made a certain facial gesture. It's like you're reading the signs, but you don't even exactly know why you know. It's like you see somebody and you just have an intuition about that person. So it's through, and, and example of that is, um, there are studies that have shown that people know when people are staring at them. So someone from behind you could be staring at you and you will know.

• 9:34Mayim Bialik?

  Oh.

• 9:35Speaker 03

  And you don't know why you know, but you just know, you're just able to pick it up, right? So that's type two intuition. And type three intuition is like twin telepathy on the other side of the world. Or when a mother knows that something's wrong with her child eighty, a hundred miles away. You just feel something's wrong. Are you okay sweetheart? You know, something like that. So three different types of intuition, all technically with similar words, but very different meanings and phenomena.

• 9:58Mayim Bialik?

  Jonathan gets intuitions all the time.

• 10:00Jonathan Cohen?

  I believe that we all have the capability to develop it. If someone wants to develop more intuition and feels like maybe they have the first experience, but they really want to get this third or fourth, where it's someone across the room or someone who they want to feel connected to, who they may not be in the same physical space. Or they want answers, they want intuitive guidance on what should I do with my life? And they're not sure that ChatGPT has the best answer, even though that's what it's used for. How do we begin to help someone develop their intuition?

• 10:35Speaker 03

  That is such an important question because oftentimes intuition can indeed give you those answers that reason cannot. You can make your pro con list, but actually the answer is something much deeper than your pros and cons list. The pros and cons list helps you to weigh the options and weigh the possibilities. But it's not necessarily the answer to should I marry this person? Or what kind of work should I pursue? The most important questions in life. And often those are questions of the heart and soul and not necessarily pro con questions. And so I think that to help people develop their intuition, first you help them obviously develop their reason and create their pro con list for whatever question it is.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  But then you also ask the person to do whatever work they can to figure stuff out. And then to please take a day or two just to put it aside, but to ask if they are open to guidance and whatever that they would want guidance from, from your ancestors, from God, from, you know, to ask for that guidance and to be open to how that guidance will present. And that guidance can present as a meaningful coincidence. It could present as an intuitive insight. It can present as starting to see something new. It could present as advice from someone that was unanticipated. You can see a movie that will put something into a new perspective for you. So I think that those are some ways that you do your maximum work yourself through your pro and con list and your reason.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  And then you put, you, you know, ask for help. You put forth the intention to have an intuitive insight and then you become open to receive that insight.

• 12:11Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, I think it's important that we're not telling people to dismiss the logical mind. When we think about intuition, it's in conjunction. I've heard it described that, you know, the logical mind and the rational mind can see, it's like driving at night. You can see is about that 200 meters that the headlights provide, but the intuition may be able to see multiple lengths beyond that because there's things that haven't happened yet that in the infinite field of awareness may be available to understand or to know.

• 12:44Speaker 03

  Precisely, precisely. And these are, you know, spiritual and Kabbalistic concepts. And the idea that that which we can see with our eyes and hear with our ears is only 1% of reality. And the idea is that 99% of reality is unseen and unheard. And this is in contrast to the scientific universe, where 100% of reality is seen and heard and subject to experimentation and, you know, all sorts of replication, et cetera. And so this is a very, very different way to see life. Is this all there is? Or is this a little piece of all there is? Part of a much bigger puzzle?

• 13:17Mayim Bialik?

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• 14:02Mayim Bialik?

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• 14:47Mayim Bialik?

  Well, and I think also, you know, this is the time to mention dark matter and dark energy, which actually, when you take a, you know, the perspective of the universe, close to 100% of what's out there is actually unknown, right? On this kind of other scale.

• 15:04Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 15:05Jonathan Cohen?

  So it brings back the idea of how much of information is knowable outside of our five senses if only 1% is knowable through our eyes and ears.

• 15:18Speaker 03

  Precisely, which is why it's so important to develop our other ways of knowing. And you know, do you need to develop that? Are you going to be worse off if you don't? Maybe or maybe not, because in the world of science, which is the currency of exchange in the Western world, this is all there is. So you don't necessarily need anything outside of it. But there are some brilliant scientists who are deeply spiritual, like Francis Collins, et cetera, who really bring in a spiritual perspective. And if you can enhance your intuition, that often can help all aspects of your work, because you can receive information in other ways, other than just through your rational mind.

• 15:53Jonathan Cohen?

  Tell us what you've researched, or your colleagues have researched, that you're aware of. You mentioned clairvoyance, or people who are using mediumship. What can you tell us about those modalities as it relates to, you know, accessing the infinite field of consciousness for practical and tangible benefit? Whether it be material benefit or emotional benefit?

• 16:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I can tell you in my own clinical practice that I have had patients who have lost loved ones use mediums to connect with those loved ones. And oftentimes, for my patients, and I've had maybe seven or eight patients like this over the course of like 15, 20 years. And those experiences have never been neutral. They've been never negative either, generally positive or very, very positive. That everybody, especially the doubters, because sometimes I have a doubter who is stuck after the loss of a loved one and can't move forward. And the medium is actually the person that opens things up for them a little bit. And they've had incredible experiences that really

• 17:02Speaker 03

  and let's also be clear, not all mediums are created equal, not all mediums are real, but there are some out there who are incredibly talented and are able to connect and are able to provide people with deeply healing information. And so if you are going to do that, please make sure to use a medium that's been vetted by somebody that you know and trust. And you know, somebody who's very, very good.

• 17:28Jonathan Cohen?

  Without getting into specifics, what are some of the types of information that people are getting from these exchanges through a mediumship that are offering that kind of healing?

• 17:38Mayim Bialik?

  I'm going to go ahead, I'm going to be a big like devil's advocate here. I've been to many channelers, I have, I've been to mediums, I've talked to psychics. Yes, I've gone to ones that might be more legitimate and others that might be less legitimate. I'm just here to say that usually they they confirm that they are legitimate, which can be done any number of ways, right? They usually tell you things that in theory they shouldn't know. But just to be Debbie Downer here, the message is usually, I'm sorry I hurt you, you're gonna do amazing things. I release you of any connection that's painful. And I never meant to do that, it wasn't my soul's intent, you're gonna be fine.

• 18:22Speaker 03

  And was that when you have had those experiences, was that helpful to you in any way?

• 18:26Mayim Bialik?

  No. I guess my question is like, what is the specificity that we can ask for? If we're trying to access information from beyond? Because I get it, like, love, peace, coexistence, like, I get it. But I think people want to know personally, why am I sick? How do I get better? How does life not feel so difficult? And why is the world such a mess, right?

• 18:55Speaker 03

  Those are big, big questions, right? And I feel as though Yeah, those are, they're really philosophical questions and I'm sure that a good channeler could give you guidance on that, but oftentimes, those questions are also questions for us to answer, you know, and off, like, we're the ones to make sense of our lives and the mess of why things happen, why things didn't happen, and could we get a elevated perspective from a psychic medium, Lee Harris, etc. Absolutely. Could we get an opinion from a really good elevated psychic? Absolutely. Could we also get someone to say something totally cliche that is meaningless to us? Of course. We've all had those experiences, as you have, you

• 19:40Speaker 03

  know, aptly pointed out, Mayim, but I feel like, yeah, oftentimes, I don't know if those are necessarily, you know, it's very interesting, because I have a talk I often give on spirituality, and I talk about the pitfalls or toxic parts of spirituality, and one of them is addiction to psychics and mediums. And there are people who become addicted to psychics and mediums, that for a little bit of money, you give someone control of your life in order for them to, you know, tell you back what is true and to give you certainty about something. And does it end up being true or not? Maybe sometimes, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, depending, you know, and there's also some exceptionally good psychics out there. I've

• 20:23Speaker 03

  certainly met those. I've also met the opposite, as I'm sure we all have, you know, but it's, I think that our difficulty in fully owning our lives and our desire to give over control, and how addictive that could be when it appears that somebody can peek into the future and give you certainty, and it's essentially, an addiction to psychics is an addiction to control. So, it's very important also, kind of to realize. Now, with mediums, sometimes what happens is, an individual has passed on, and a person could be so stuck in grief that they cannot move forward. And sometimes, a medium, by enabling that person to connect

• 21:05Speaker 03

  with the person who has passed, and for the medium to prove the legitimacy of the mediumship, enables this person to know, wow, this person has passed, but they're still with me in some form, and I still have a form of communication with them. And that is, for some people, really what they need to move forward. I've certainly had that. That's not something I advocate, or, but-

• 21:29Speaker 03

  In times when there's been a suicide, that also is very, very powerful.

• 21:35Jonathan Cohen?

  The idea of being addicted to certainty, trying to get that. Some people pursue intuition because they're like, they just want certainty and answers. And the joke is that like, you're never gonna have certainty, no matter how strong your intuition is. You may be led to the next best solution, but it still is likely not gonna turn out exactly how you imagined or thought or wanted. There's always this element of surprise in the world and the world changing and evolving that we can't escape.

• 22:07Speaker 03

  It's true. It's true. You know, and if you want to go even deeper into that, you know, like different psychics, like different psychics read different things. There are people who can read the Akashic records. There are people who can read you. There are people who can read you, your third eye, or they can read your connection to the heavens. Reading these two different things will give you two totally different readings. You know, so it's like, you don't exactly know what person, what people are reading when they are reading, when they are reading you, you know, and where they're getting their information.

• 22:35Mayim Bialik?

  We talked to a lot of different people who do a lot of interesting things in the universe. I've never learned as much as talking to you about the things that people hear and read and see. People can read your third eye?

• 22:50Speaker 03

  Hmm, yeah.

• 22:51Jonathan Cohen?

  Tell us the difference between reading the crown and reading the third eye.

• 22:54Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So, so when people are reading your third eye, they're essentially reading your own intuition. What do you feel? So you ask someone, what does this guy think about me? And what they're gonna read, they're not gonna go to the guy and to that. They're actually gonna go to you and read what you think that the guy thinks about you and then reflect that back to you. So that's that. As opposed to reading from the crown. And if they, they can also read from their own crown and get like a download from technically the divine or from their spirit guides. So there's a lot of different ways. There's a lot of different ways. And you can also have different spirit guides that might have a different opinion on a certain matter. So you might be getting, you know, different things coming in for that. So it's, it's very interesting.

• 23:36Jonathan Cohen?

  Reading your third eye is like being in a medial echo chamber. You're just being reinforced what you believe. And then you're like, oh my gosh, that psychic is so powerful. But all they're doing is telling you what you feel instead of what an objective reality is.

• 23:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, but and to be clear, sometimes for somebody to reflect back to you exactly what you feel, when you didn't tell them any of that, could be so incredibly powerful, you might not even know that you feel it. And then they might reflect it back to you. And then you're like, wow, that's amazing. But that's a very different reading.

• 24:10Jonathan Cohen?

  But that doesn't make it true.

• 24:11Mayim Bialik?

  I've been accused by more than one ex of feeling like I knew them better than they knew themselves, but I still think I was right.

• 24:20Jonathan Cohen?

  Maybe you were reading their third eye.

• 24:22Mayim Bialik?

  That's what I'm saying. We call it bossy, know-it-all, controlling girlfriend. Maybe it's deeply intuitively aligned with the universe girlfriend.

• 24:32Speaker 03

  I like that. That's much, yeah, much more catchy, for sure.

• 24:36Jonathan Cohen?

  This touches on something that we actually talked to Thomas Campbell about. The notion of where to get information from. You can get information from the larger consciousness system. You can get information from an individual's consciousness or from your own consciousness, and that information will be different. We think that, oh, if I go off and try to get intuition, that intuition will be objective. But the same tuning, placing your consciousness is, is important because that information will be different. I'm fascinated what you said about guides and guardian angels. The first question would be, do, does everyone have guides and guardian angels?

• 25:21Jonathan Cohen?

  And the second question would be, why are their perspectives different? Are they not working towards some goal that is, that is synchronized in some way?

• 25:32Speaker 03

  I do believe that most people have some sort of angelic or guardian angels, archangels, you know, protecting them on some level. And different people to different degrees, given what their purpose is in the world and what they're doing and how they live their life, and I guess what they need. And, um.

• 25:53Speaker 03

  I think that just different guides could provide different information.

• 25:57Jonathan Cohen?

  Maybe there's a work guide and a love guide and like a physical health guide and you can't ask all the guides the same questions.

• 26:07Speaker 03

  Absolutely, that you have different, you know, and you can think about like everyone has different talents, abilities, interests, charms, and that we essentially are kind of guided through that. And a lot of these things, we don't develop, we just kind of are come into the world with them. And so we have guides that help us as one way of being, guides that help us to develop these ways of being in the world.

• 26:26Jonathan Cohen?

  Do you have a relationship with your guides? Did you develop that?

• 26:29Speaker 03

  You know, I do and I have, I often will ask them questions, but when I get my intuition, I don't know who it's coming from. I don't know if it's from my guides, if it's from God, if it's from myself, but I definitely know when I have an intuitive hit or insight.

• 26:44Jonathan Cohen?

  What's your primary mode of knowing?

• 26:48Speaker 03

  Clear cognizance, when I just know without knowing how I know, something will just come into my mind as a thought. And I think it's because my thinking capacity is so overdeveloped relative to my other capacities, that that's like the easiest way for information to come into my mind or into my being.

• 27:03Jonathan Cohen?

  You know, I've tried to develop relationship with guides. But you know better than all of them. No, it's never, I've never sort of gotten clarity when, after our episode with some, some people who have access to guides, I was like, oh, I do believe there are guides all around. And I believe that, and I have asked for guidance from guides, but I don't believe that that information comes from a specific guide. I don't have a sense of a counsel around me or different roles that they may play. But I do feel like I get information often through auditory, often through just a knowing or an empathetic sense that the

• 27:47Jonathan Cohen?

  voice that I hear is a version of myself, not, not some, someone else. I don't hear like a British voice communicating with me and telling me what's up. You hear voices, Jonathan? Not multiple voices. I hear a version of my own voice. Some people can call that a version of themselves. Maybe others call it a higher self. I'm curious, Dr. Yusim, how do you understand a higher self? Is it the same as a guide or an angel? Is it just another part of our knowing? What is it to you?

• 28:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I love how you wrote or said another part of our knowing. I think that that's what it is. You know, we have all of our aspects of ourselves in one. You know, you can think of it in the Freudian sense, the id ego and superego, right? The id is our most primitive, basic instincts. The superego is our morality. And the ego is sort of the intersection or the integration of those. And the higher self also is the part of us that already knows what is best for us in any given situation. And the idea is that you can tap into that part, even in your current form. Because, you know, there's many different notions, but some of them are that

• 29:08Speaker 03

  time is a little bit of an illusion. So you can go forward in time to yourself that knows the future a little bit. You can go back in time and talk to that self. There's a lot of like inner child work. There's working with younger parts of yourself. There's parts work. So all of those are ways of being able to tap into all the different parts of yourself. And so the higher self is the part that already knows. The more evolved conscious part that has already lived through and metabolized and grown through what you are going through now.

• 29:39Jonathan Cohen?

  And potentially that part is outside of the influence of whatever unconscious programming we were speaking about before. It is free of some of the this lifetime karmic residue. It may have been the part of us that has stayed with us if we believe in past lives throughout many versions of our existence.

• 30:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, it could be part of the transcendent soul, the part that's transcendent, that, you know, has gone on and on and is our soul or spirit. That is the indefatigable part, the part that we will never lose and that keeps growing and expanding always.

• 30:18Jonathan Cohen?

  Conversation about mediumship and helping people see something differently. We spoke with Teresa Caputo. The Long Island Medium. And in that episode, she, you know, just had a sense of something that she shared with me that really impacted me in a way that I had never considered before. My family had a significant tragedy when I was 14 that marked the next 30-plus years of our lives. And what she discussed was something that happened in the non-physical realm. For people who haven't heard the story or the episode, my older brother was severely injured in a car accident and he almost died.

• 31:01Jonathan Cohen?

  And what she talked about was when he was in that decision space between life and death, that my dad's father intervened and helped send him back to be, to continue to be alive in this world. And that the role that he, that my grandfather played was really to support my father. And as much as I had considered the family impact of that situation, I had mostly seen it from my brother's perspective, what it would mean to be injured. I saw it from my perspective. I had seen it partly from my dad's perspective, but I had never really understood the message that she provided in that moment.

• 31:44Jonathan Cohen?

  And imagine thinking about something, experiencing it for 35 years, and now all of a sudden, there's a new angle to it that I'd never experienced before, simply by this woman, who knows where the information came from, sharing that little insight. It was very powerful.

• 32:03Speaker 03

  Wow. That sounds, yes, incredibly powerful. And it's also, like, when you receive this information, did it feel, did you have a knowing that it was indeed true? And did it fit within your scheme of how you understood the world? Or was it an immediate expansion of your own system?

• 32:19Jonathan Cohen?

  I had never considered it, and it was immediately integrated. Like, my system did not fight against that information to say, oh, I don't know, this feels off, it doesn't, like, it was a... It's like I never considered it. And when I received it, it immediately plugged in and expanded my understanding of the entire experience in a way that felt much more complete and whole.

• 32:46Speaker 03

  It sounds so powerful. And this is, you know, we talked about the definition of a miracle being a shift in perception. And sometimes that kind of information that leads you to see something a little bit differently and changes your whole perception on something so vital and traumatic that happened in your life, changes your whole life. So that is, it sounds like a miraculous thing that happened.

• 33:05Jonathan Cohen?

  Can you tell us a little bit about your personal awakening? Was there a time where you were purely a materialist without an experience of extrasensory abilities, intuition, without a relationship with your guides? How did you go from pre Dr. Usim now to the version of yourself you are today?

• 33:27Speaker 03

  Had anyone told me that I would be a spiritual person 25 years ago, I would have laughed. Spirituality was the furthest thing from my mind. And I went through my undergraduate training, studied biology and philosophy, medical schooling, residency, no spirituality, because it just wasn't who I was. I had too many things. I was studying for medical school. I was in a relationship. I was doing normal things, you know? And then interesting things started to happen towards the end of my psychiatry residency that led me to start to think, wow, maybe the world works a little bit differently than I've always been taught. I was getting interested in the concept of a soul because I met somebody at the time who I thought was my soulmate. He did not end up being my soulmate, but it was definitely got me interested in this whole process.

• 34:12Speaker 03

  And I remember having gone to a synagogue and was listening to a lecture on the soul. And I was walking back home and I felt drawn into this ice cream shop to go have an ice cream. I was like, okay, eating my ice cream. This psychic and a young child come up to me and the psychic says, I'm a psychic. I have a message for you. Can I give you a message? No. And I said, okay, sure. It sounds relatively innocuous in New York City. So she sits down and this woman starts telling me all of these deep truths about my life that she has no possible way of knowing, including the name of the guy that I had a crush on. And just, it just comes out of her. And after that, I was like, what in the world happened here? Because here, up until this point, I had been taught that all of our minds are separate and distinct. And I'm living in my world, you're living in your world.

• 34:57Speaker 03

  And this woman, literally, I don't know if she read my mind, if she read something up there, but she knew things that she had no, and it wasn't in my journal even. It wasn't on Facebook, it wasn't, there's no way this woman could have known. And she knew.

• 35:09Mayim Bialik?

  Did you buy her an ice cream?

• 35:11Speaker 03

  Buy her a little, yeah. No, I ended up working with her for a while to, you know, that was kind of the beginning. And it was then that I also, these messages would start coming in. I had this dream of a sign that said, "Kabbalah Revealed." And my mom had studied Kabbalah a while ago, and she'd sent me books. So I thought, maybe this is a book from my bookshelf. No. And then, a few weeks later, I'm walking to dinner with a friend, and I saw the exact sign from my dream, Kabbalah Revealed. It was the New York Kabbalah Center. So I walked in and I was like, okay, well, this is from my dream. I signed up and took a class. And the Kabbalah Center started to give me a new framework for how to see and understand all of this stuff that I was learning. So the differentiation between the scientific framework that I had learned in the many years prior,

• 35:53Speaker 03

  and this framework that I was just starting to learn. So very interesting.

• 35:58Jonathan Cohen?

  Was there a moment where your intuition sort of opened? How did you go from sort of receiving and starting to receive that first reading, and the signs, and starting to be guided a little bit, it sounds like through synchronicity, into what sounds like a much more integrated spiritual life, where you are literally integrating spirituality and intuition on a daily basis?

• 36:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was very gradual. It was having these things happen in my life, and then processing it and starting to understand what exactly is happening. How do I understand this? And then eventually, within seven years, gathering enough patient cases to write a book about it with 50 cases from my private practice, and then eventually, publishing this and sort of, you know, rebranding myself as a spiritual psychiatrist, somebody who integrates psychiatry and spirituality, and then doing this at Yale to start this mental health and spirituality center there. So it was, it was, it was slow and gradual. And it's also continuous because there are people who are incredibly talented at receiving intuitive information. I'm intuitive, and it does come to me. But I wish that I could further and expand my capacities,

• 37:08Speaker 03

  and I'm always looking to do that.

• 37:10Jonathan Cohen?

  Do you believe that we have soulmates?

• 37:13Speaker 03

  I believe, you know, certainly that, you know, perhaps there have been past lives and perhaps there are other souls that we've come in contact with that have been important to us. And there could be certain lessons and certain karmic patterns and sure, and a soulmate. And, uh, you know, just because somebody is a soulmate does not mean that everything's going to be perfect and roses with this person. It means that there is a karmic pattern. And it's an important karmic pattern to figure out and understand. And so absolutely, I like, you know, the very romanticized concept of soulmates. But I also don't think it's something that needs to hold people back from having love, joy and fulfillment in their lives.

• 37:52Jonathan Cohen?

  How should people understand karmic patterns?

• 37:54Speaker 03

  So karmic patterns are based on the idea of lessons and lifetimes. It's the idea that this isn't our only lifetime, that our soul has come in here with, you know, many past lifetimes before us and certain things that we have done and certain karma that we have accumulated that we clear out in this lifetime through our actions, through sometimes pain and suffering and sometimes through positive choices. And that, you know, there's also people who believe that there's no more karma, that you can just release all your karma, which is a beautiful notion if that's indeed the case. But the idea that, you know, we talked about repetition compulsions and soul corrections and things that seem to come up in this lifetime over and over again as challenges or hardships, much to our chagrin and dismay

• 38:39Speaker 03

  and despite our best efforts to change it, oftentimes those are our so-called karmic patterns. There are different words to describe similar things that we have to work through in this lifetime to move beyond.

• 38:50Mayim Bialik?

  You've studied so many different kinds of spiritual and religious traditions as sort of part of the foundation for the work that you do. What do you find is universal? You know, you've studied in South America, in India, in Israel, you know, all over the world. What are the common themes that you think in many ways, science might be trying to catch up with and explain, but that seem to be thousands of years old, universal truths? If you had to say, what are the top three things that you feel? The great mystical spiritual traditions have in common.

• 39:31Speaker 03

  So I think that the three universal truths that are across religious and spiritual traditions are number one, the universality of love as being one of the most important things, if not the most important things in this world. And the definitions of love are varied, and that includes self-love, love of others, love of God. That's number one. Number two is the importance of service and being able to give of oneself and service through all the different means and service as far as your uniqueness in this world, the way that you can be of service in a way that nobody else can.

• 40:12Speaker 03

  And also just a devotion to receiving for the sake of giving to others and ensuring that you have a way to create that flow in your life that you are always giving. And the third thing is purpose, which has to do with giving as well, but it's much deeper. It's also just having a sense of why you are here, one's purpose in life and the work that one needs to do in this world to actualize their their full potential. So I think that those are three of the top universal truths that pervade different religious and spiritual traditions.

• 40:50Mayim Bialik?

  That's really interesting and very comforting. I had a feeling you'd say love, also because, you know, from a lot of the incredible psilocybin and therapy assisted, you know, even ketamine, you know, there's a lot of evidence that once we stimulate, you know, the ability of the brain to let go and to kind of remove that veil of ego, remove that veil of the defenses and the organizing principles, the default mode network, once that veil is lifted, what is there is an openness that that most of us probably don't even remember because the last time we purely felt it, we were probably babies, right, or infants for many of us, right? So I knew that love would be there, but this notion of kind of service and purpose,

• 41:35Mayim Bialik?

  I really Love those two and I know there are many others. I just asked you kind of, you know, for your top three. Kind of another adjacent question. Where do you see the use of psychedelics, you know, in terms of trauma processing? You know, I'm talking to more and more people who have done the medication route and this one works, but then you don't want to have sex or you can't have an orgasm because of side effects. And, you know, you kind of like keep going back to talk therapy and it's kind of like, well, this is what happened this week. I don't know. And, you know, it's, it's not getting to some of that deeper stuff. Many people don't have the money to keep going to the kind of therapy or even to maintain the kind of medication regimen that many of us need. If something's not working and you have to try

• 42:20Mayim Bialik?

  something else. Many people are turning to psychedelics, both to take, to kind of take the weight off of their existence, right? People are experimenting with microdosing, which you can do with psilocybin or LSD or other things as well. But also people are taking larger journeys that, you know, if you read the celebrity accounts, it's like, I did ayahuasca in Ojai and my life is better, you know? But what is your perspective on, is this a shortcut to spiritual growth? Is it a shortcut to mental healing? Is it the transformation that some people are needing? And where does it fit into the practice of medicine as you were trained?

• 42:59Speaker 03

  So I think that psychedelics offer not just a novel neurobiological mechanism for some of the most treatment resistant psychiatric and mental health conditions like alcoholism, depression, anxiety, et cetera. But for many people, they also offer a connection to spirit and that is what makes them so unique. And in that connection to spirit, there is something very innately healing and creating of wholeness, which people so desperately desire. And oftentimes they come for precisely that. And there's been many studies showing at Johns Hopkins that

• 43:37Speaker 03

  The greater the spiritual effect or connection, the greater the mystical experience, the greater the healing potential of that psychedelic journey for a person.

• 43:47Mayim Bialik?

  Can you say that again?

• 43:48Speaker 03

  There is work that's been shown at Johns Hopkins and also at NYU showing that the greater the spiritual effect or mystical experience within a psychedelic journey, and this is specifically with psilocybin, but it's possible that it also could be generalized, the greater the anti-anxiety effect of the treatment or the anti, yeah, the greater the mental health benefit to the patient.

• 44:16Jonathan Cohen?

  Why do you think that is?

• 44:18Speaker 03

  Because I think that we are ultimately bio-psychosocial spiritual creatures, biological, psychological, social and spiritual. And oftentimes, people forget the spiritual part. And when they're able to have that connection that reconnects them to spirit, they start to feel whole again.

• 44:35Mayim Bialik?

  I have also, I mean, there's also mechanistic ways that we can explain some of that. You're flooding a system, right? You're flooding a system with serotonin. You're flooding a system with oxytocin, right? So you're kind of laying this neurochemical foundation for ease, right? So that when you'd normally go down that anxiety groove, it could be, and I haven't looked up receptors in a minute, you know, in this arena, it could be that there are more receptors available for that positivity and there are less receptors available or taken or doct to prevent that. So you're looking to potentiate.

• 45:18Mayim Bialik?

  That's what these kind of things are supposed to do. They're supposed to potentiate a longer-term health outcome. And that's why, by contrast, Paul Stamets has one of the most fantastic examples, you know, a lifelong stutterer, lifelong troubled soul, and he accidentally took like five times a hero dose of psilocybin by himself. He never stuttered again and like his entire life opened up and he has stayed that way. He had a profound spiritual awakening relating to that, you know, connection. For most people, it's not that significant, but that notion that it can potentiate other positive decisions, other positive experiences.

• 46:02Mayim Bialik?

  You know, it's kind of like when you meet someone and they've just fallen in love and everything is amazing to them and like everything tastes better and they look better, you know? That's what it is. It's all of those goodies that that hormone is providing you with as well.

• 46:15Jonathan Cohen?

  And potentially sensing that there is a spiritual connection to our lives and accessing that is the key to help helping that create all the neurochemical soup that we want.

• 46:29Speaker 03

  I was actually just on a cruise with Paul Stamets and Rick Doblin in Antarctica. We went on this cruise for insider expeditions and there was 200 people all studying in some way psychedelics. It was the most interesting experience, an amazing, amazing experience. And there was also, as one of the people, kind of as the entertainers, but also like a trainer on this trip, was this incredible guy named Brandon who has the world record for holding one's breath underwater. It's almost like 30 minutes.

• 46:56Mayim Bialik?

  What?

• 46:56Speaker 03

  Unbelievable. Yeah. And he taught, he was teaching us how to do this on this trip. And, but Brandon way back told me his story, which I think he'd be okay of my sharing. He's not a patient or anything. He had really, really bad OCD. And one time he took a very high level or dose of LSD and it completely did away with it. And then eventually he microdosed it for six months and completely did away with his OCD. So this is, the examples that you gave is individuals with chronic lifelong conditions having healing effects from conditions that are very rarely healed. So it's very powerful. I mean, these are obviously case studies. This is not every other person, but there is very powerful healing potential here.

• 47:41Mayim Bialik?

  How long can you hold your breath underwater?

• 47:43Speaker 03

  Well, thank you for asking that question, Mimi. I was hoping you'd ask. So I came in with about like two minutes, but then after working with Brandon for a few days, I'm almost up to four and a half minutes. So which for me is like huge.

• 47:56Mayim Bialik?

  Wait, wait, so hold on. I actually want to ask about this because I was thinking about this. Someone referenced it in another podcast. So most of us think like, I can't hold my breath for that long. Right? Like, that's what you would think. But the fact is, it's kind of, and I equate this to like, you know, natural labor, like giving birth without drugs. Most people are like, I can't do that. Right? It's like, well, yeah, everybody can. It's just there's some preparation involved. So you can learn to do things that seem difficult, impossible, whatever. So it has to do with basically calming your system, correct?

• 48:33Speaker 03

  Calming your system and recognizing that, as Brandon said, that the urge to breathe is a biological drive to protect you, but you can overcome that with your will and with calming yourself. And he also is the kind of person, he's like, I'm okay with all options. You know, if you're doing something like that, it's invariably risky. And he takes the risk. So he was the perfect person to hold this, you know, record. And it was fascinating. And he works with Olympic athletes to help them expand their lung capacity. He's just this brilliant, amazing man.

• 49:07Jonathan Cohen?

  Why doesn't it cause brain damage?

• 49:09Mayim Bialik?

  Well, lack of oxygen to the brain will cause brain damage. Sorry, I'll let Dr. use him.

• 49:13Jonathan Cohen?

  But if you're, yeah, and if you're not breathing for 30 minutes, explain the mechanism because laypeople are like, oh, we've been taught that the brain needs oxygen. And if you deprive it of oxygen for a certain amount of time, there's going to be a consequence. How is this man holding his breath for that amount of time? Is it similar to the yogis who just slow all the systems of their body down?

• 49:39Speaker 03

  Yes, and that's exactly what it is. And so you're gonna have to obviously talk to him and have him on, which I would highly recommend. But as I understand it, that's exactly what it is. First, he does a few exercises to maximize to the degree that we are able our oxygenation capacity through certain breath work. He puts as much oxygen into our lungs as possible. And then he does, he mentally as well as physically teaches a relaxation technique to enable us to go very, very deep into the breath holding.

• 50:07Mayim Bialik?

  You're like hibernating. You're basically, you're metabolically hibernating. So you're not depriving the brain of oxygen in the same way. You're also not requiring that the brain do tasks. The less you are making this sort of process taxing, you know, it's like when you, if you've ever been in a critical accident, the more you freak out, the faster you're gonna lose blood, right? Like calming the system down. And it's not unlike labor. It's like any of these very, very potentially excruciating situations, there's a reframe that reframes not only your mind, but your physiology as well.

• 50:43Jonathan Cohen?

  How was it for you going those four plus minutes? Did it have a spiritual component whereby you were transcending the perceived limits of your physical body and accessing something else? Like what was, what did it feel like for you?

• 50:59Speaker 03

  You know, it was because Antarctica was that as well, because I felt like for, you know, nine days, I was in a space that I was breathing the cleanest possible air with no industrialization, no urbanization. And it felt so connected to nature, to the divine, to these amazing people on my boat. And it did actually feel that way in concert with everything else. But it's not something I've necessarily kept up. So I don't know if today I were to do it, if it continued. But it made me think that I really need to work with Brandon. And this is something that one day I really want to commit to and see what is the potential for, what is the human potential for that?

• 51:34Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, this leads to a question that I wanted to get into regarding Kabbalah and some of that specific spiritual tradition. But what made me kind of think of it is like, you know, when we fast in the Jewish calendar, we do dry fasts. And there are two 25-hour dry fasts that we do. One is Yom Kippur and the other falls in the summer on Tishavav. But people always ask me, like, how do you do? You can't live, you know, without food and water for a day. You must be starving all the time. And I remind people that when you fast like that, you're not out like going to work, making, you know, three meals a day and two snacks. I mean, when my kids were little, I would do that and fast.

• 52:15Mayim Bialik?

  But the idea is, what if you place yourself in an environment where less is required of you metabolically so that you can focus on not the external, but the things that are inside of you? And our rabbi would always teach, like, you get to be like an angel. Like, angels don't have to eat or drink. Like, that's what the experience, the spiritual experience of fasting and being in prayer and meditation in that time, like, that's what it's for. I wonder if you can talk a little bit specifically about, we've had people mention Kabbalah here and there, and I mentioned Kabbalah here and there, but can you tell us specifically about what the specialness is for you of that particular spiritual tradition, especially

• 52:56Mayim Bialik?

  in terms of the way you kind of see the world and the information that exists for you spiritually?

• 53:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I, you know, my perception of the fasts that you described are very similar to yourself, Mayim, in that that was what really I learned in Kabbalah, that we don't focus on the physical meals in order to have the internal spiritual meals. And we have, you know, five spiritual meals based on like the five different prayers that you do throughout the course of the 25-hour period on Yom Kippur, and then again for, you know, the other fast. And I also think it's just such a good, healthy, beautiful thing to cleanse your body of all food and water and give your body the opportunity to rest of that. And there's many different cultures and traditions that use fasting in such powerful ways that are underutilized in our country.

• 53:47Speaker 03

  In Russia, for instance, fasting was ways of getting rid of cancer and getting rid, like, it was, it was really a reversal. And dry fast were more powerful that, but in, with dry fast, you have to be in nature. You can't even shower with a dry fast. But there's like extensive books written about this and there's a science to this. That's not something that's safely practiced here. Here, we usually, people will do a juice fast or those are also wonderful and healthy. But in a world where there's all of these toxins coming at us all the time through the food we eat, through our environment, et cetera, backseat and detox in general is such an important part, I think, of mental and physical well-being that's often not talked about.

• 54:24Mayim Bialik?

  What is it specifically about what you've studied through the Kabbalistic traditions that have provided you with information about our spiritual existence or how we are set to function in this world as spiritual beings?

• 54:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I learned so many important lessons and so many things that I've passed on to so many patients and written about in my books. And one of the most important things is that all of us have essentially lessons to learn and I guess certain things to get through in this lifetime. And there's two ways in which, in which we can grow as a person. We can grow proactively or we can grow reactively. Proactively is making choices to be the best versions of ourselves, to be able to go against our nature, do which is, that which is more difficult, have moral courage, act with integrity, look at the parts of us that maybe aren't perfect and start to, you know, make shifts in the other direction. So that is proactive growth.

• 55:27Speaker 03

  And whatever growth we can't do proactively, we will do reactively, and that is growth through pain and suffering. Pain and suffering are an inevitable part of life. And kabbalistically, they believe that the more proactive growth you do, the less you have to do reactively through pain and suffering. So I thought that was a very interesting concept. It's something that I often will pass along to my clients and patients. So we can think together, what does proactive growth in this situation look like? What does going against your nature look like in this particular situation? What would be your default pathway and what would be the growth pathway?

• 55:59Mayim Bialik?

  I really like that notion also because it it puts the power, you know, in your hands to the extent that you are able to to have control, right, over your agency. You're not just allowed to say, well, whatever God wants, let's see what happens. There's legwork that we there's footwork that we have to do to sort of meet God or meet whatever you believe in. We're partners with our higher power in this journey. I think also the notion that

• 56:30Mayim Bialik?

  suffering is sometimes an opportunity or challenges are an opportunity for growth. It also removes this polarity of good and evil, which, you know, I think other traditions sometimes way more heavily on. But this concept, I think, introduces the fact that we don't always know what's good or bad for us. But there's a path that we're on and challenges don't have to just be seen as punishment. They don't have to just be seen as we did something wrong or we messed up. What's the lesson to learn and what's the growth? So it's kind of like, you know, I whenever people ask me about prayer, and I actually just wrote a series on Substack about prayer. You know, be careful what you pray for.

• 57:15Mayim Bialik?

  Praying for the things that I want would be if I'm God and I know what my am needs, right? What I usually try and pray for is being open to whatever's God, whatever God's will is for me. And I don't know what that is, you know. I if I think I want a job, I really want that job. That may not be what is in my path. So being open to this notion of if I'm unhappy, it can be an opening.

• 57:40Speaker 03

  I love that, and especially recognizing that we may think that we want what we want and need what we need, and we may think that we know what is best for us, but we only see a small part of reality, and maybe there is a higher order, and maybe there is a being, God, etc., who sees a little bit more and can give us what we really need, because, you know, it's the idea of a directional purpose in this lifetime, that all of our souls have come in to grow in certain ways, and we don't necessarily know what our growth path is, or the way in which we're supposed to open and expand and see things through a different perspective. So I love what you're saying. I think that's exactly right.

• 58:17Mayim Bialik?

  You talk about the law of attraction, which we sort of talked about towards the beginning of our conversation with you, but you have really interesting reasons why the law of attraction may not work from your perspective, right? Meaning, why isn't this working? And what you say is that there are four possibilities. One is that you weren't clear about what you asked for, which I've been told is important. Another is that you didn't really believe that you could have what you asked for, which I think is really interesting. What you asked for may not be in the highest and greatest good of all involved. And finally, you weren't able to receive it when the universe was trying to

• 59:02Mayim Bialik?

  give it to you. And I think of how many times I either said no when I should have said yes, or I said yes when I should have said no. This notion of what are we ready for? How do you help us frame that? You know, how do you help your patients, your clients, frame this? You know, why do bad things keep happening to me? Can you give us a little kind of positive send-off in terms of what we attract and what we can deserve?

• 59:30Speaker 03

  Absolutely, and it's it's true that we don't know if if we want something desperately and it's not happening, there's so many different reasons why that's the case and you have to look deep within to understand, is it my unconscious, is it my conscious, is it that, you know, God's will, is it something else? And so, as with everything, we, you know, there's, in in Kabbalah, actually, they say that there's three ways to manifest what you most deeply want. One is you do your maximum work in the physical world. So, you want something, you figure out how to do it, you make it happen, you do your part. And number two, you also do your maximum work in the spiritual world. You pray, you ask for help, you try to, you know, change about yourself, what you need to change to become the person who can receive what you need to receive. And third, you have ultimate

• 1:00:13Speaker 03

  certainty. So, one, two, three, if you can have those things, many people get what they want. And that's sort of the Kabbalistic formula for it.

• 1:00:21Mayim Bialik?

  I I love that because, you know, also to go back to why we sometimes attract unhealthy people, you know, we we also need to do the footwork. Where am I spending my time? What am I reading? What am I consuming? What am I doing with my downtime? Right? Am I drinking? Am I taking drugs? Like, am I not getting regular sleep? Am I not taking care of like the most basic things about my nutrition and my exercise? Right? Because sometimes we kind of want to be looking everywhere for what went wrong, when there's so many things we could do to try and help us make it more right.

• 1:00:58Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Absolutely. That's exactly right. And so, it's such a powerful lesson in accountability to be able to look at oneself and say, what control do I have here? And recognizing, doing everything you can, control what you can, and then realizing that the control for the majority of the most important things is somewhat limited. And that, to some degree, you also have to surrender and be open to receiving what that much be might be in your even greater good than what it is that you think that you want.

• 1:01:26Mayim Bialik?

  Dr. Yusim, really, thank you so much for being here with us. And I highly recommend "Fulfilld: How the Science of Spirituality Can Help You Live a Happier, More Meaningful Life." And we didn't get to do any of the... There's incredible meditations and exercises in here. So Jonathan and I will head over to Substack and give some examples of some of the practical stuff that's in the book. The book is a really, really... It really is. It's a lovely exploration of your particular and personal journey. And I especially love hearing about patients and the progress you've helped them have. But in addition, it's a very practical book, and I appreciate that as well. Thank you so much for having this conversation with us.

• 1:02:07Speaker 03

  Thank you, guys. This is great. Thank you.

• 1:02:13Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm reading your third eye right now.

• 1:02:15Mayim Bialik?

  I want to walk around with a Band-Aid over my third eye, so nobody can read it.

• 1:02:20Jonathan Cohen?

  People are gonna just be telling you what you think and feel.

• 1:02:23Mayim Bialik?

  They don't even need to see it. This is the thing. I'm walking around the world with people like you and her. They're just looking into my brain all the time?

• 1:02:32Jonathan Cohen?

  We have to teach you how to read your crown. We have to extend your consciousness. When was this? Sometimes... Here's the problem with doing so many podcasts. Is that I remember us having a conversation about changing our consciousness. I actually think it was on a Substack Live, where I tried to lead you through a meditation. And the meditation was fundamentally about what Anna was talking about, which is that we can set our consciousness to a frequency or to a location away from our own understanding into a larger, universal understanding. And you got very upset about that.

• 1:03:14Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, I told you, you're bananas.

• 1:03:16Jonathan Cohen?

  Dr. Yusim would be like, "You know what, Mayim? Clear yourself."

• 1:03:22Jonathan Cohen?

  Take your awareness.

• 1:03:23Mayim Bialik?

  You don't know what she would say to me. Get out of her head, too. I can't stop you. You're just like mind surfing everywhere. You're everywhere.

• 1:03:32Jonathan Cohen?

  If anyone's listening and they want me in their head, let me know. I'm happy to take a look around and see what I see.

• 1:03:39Mayim Bialik?

  No, but now, honestly, true story. I am looking at a lot of this differently because I'm thinking of all those like people that I see in my yoga class sometimes, or they walk around, they walk among us, and you can tell these people are aligned to something different, but it doesn't always seem that life is getting done the way I would think it should. But they're walking around probably feeling very overwhelmed by the information they might be receiving. It's like making me nuts. I don't know how to wrap my head around this.

• 1:04:07Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, you bring up an important point because people want information for themselves, but it is something that you have to learn to navigate. When you start to receive extrasensory information from one of the four Claire's, it can be very disorienting. You don't know what to tune into. There's people who don't have good boundaries. Their filters are open too wide, and you just get overwhelmed and like, how do you go and just go to the grocery store when everyone around you is like overflowing you with information?

• 1:04:42Mayim Bialik?

  Your filter's open too wide. That's what I want to say to people. Get out of my third eye. Your filter's open too wide.

• 1:04:48Jonathan Cohen?

  You just focus on your own consciousness.

• 1:04:50Mayim Bialik?

  You know what I was thinking about? First of all, how much we enjoy doing Substack Lives, because I know that when we do the Substack Live for this episode, this week, that this airs, that y'all are listening to this, people are gonna lose their minds in the best way. Also, I wanted to mention, check out annayusim.com to learn about her psychiatry sessions and also coaching sessions. I kind of felt like, I need to see her. I want her to be like my person. I want her to tell me all the things. Read my third eye.

• 1:05:20Jonathan Cohen?

  She pauses a lot after we speak.

• 1:05:22Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, she's a very patient woman.

• 1:05:23Jonathan Cohen?

  And I wasn't sure if it was the internet, but it wasn't.

• 1:05:26Mayim Bialik?

  She's a psychiatrist. They teach them to do that.

• 1:05:28Jonathan Cohen?

  You know why you pause? You can't receive one of the four Claire's if you're Russian.

• 1:05:33Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, my God. That's your new nickname, Claire. From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time. Me and Claire.

• 1:05:42Speaker 04

  It's my impiolics breakdown. She's gonna break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. One fiction. And now she's gonna break down. So break down. She's gonna break it down.