Meredith Oke: Welcome to the QVC podcast.

John Douillard.

I am so excited to talk about the intersection of quantum physics and Ayurveda.

This is going to be so fun.

John Douillard: Well, thanks for having me.

I'm excited.

Meredith Oke: Great.

So let's start a little bit with your background.

You have been in space sports medicine and Ayurvedic medicine for over 40 years.

Tell us how you landed in Ayurveda.

That wasn't necessarily the top of the line choice and what your journey's been like.

John Douillard: Yeah, you know, I remember I went to a lecture when I was in college and it was a yoga, Ayurveda meditation lecture.

And I was training for an ironman at the time.

And I went up to the guy afterwards who was teaching it and I asked him, what do you think about doing an ironman from the ayurvedic yoga meditation perspective?

And he looked at me and was like, what is that?

And I told him what it was.

It's two and a half mile, you know, swim in the ocean, 112 mile bike, 26 mile run.

He looked at me and was like, why do you do that?

And it was weird because no one ever asked me that before and I didn't really have a good answer.

So I was sort of hemming and hawing and he then said, do you meditate?

And I said, yes, in fact, I do meditate.

And he goes, do you sleep when you meditate?

And I was like, deeply, I get this really deep sleep.

And then he looked at me again, sort of like I was an idiot and said, meditation is different than sleep.

Sleep is, you're kind of knocked out, unconscious in a way.

But meditation, you're alert, resting and you're alert at the same time.

And I was like, wow, that's not what I do.

I just conk out.

And he says, you're exhausted.

And I was like, so does that mean if I could meditate and not fall asleep and do all this exercise, it would be okay?

And he kind of looked at me and he said, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so that became sort of my marching orders.

Originally I started, you know, meditating more, training a little bit less.

So not just killing it, like going for three hour runs in the mountains and stuff.

Like I was surely really dialed it down and started to gear up my meditation, started going meditation retreats on the weekends and.

And then I went on a two week meditation retreat.

And this is the game changer for me.

And when I'm in my book Body Mind Sport, which I wrote about this, the last chapter is jet fuel, which was this.

On this thing that happened to me where I went into this zone for like three months.

I went into this kind of runner's high peak experience state where I started competing at an extremely high level.

Started competing in know, placing and winning medals and my triathlons, which I was before sort of a good amateur, but not really at that level.

I just all of a sudden started training and competing so much better.

I was in my clinical internship at the time and my bandwidth in terms of my capacity, what I could tolerate just academically and everything was like off the charts.

I was like on some drug that allowed me to do so much with so much less effort.

I really felt it was like the eye of the storm, the bigger the calm that I had on the inside supported all this incredible wind or activity in my life.

And I wasn't getting beat up or exhausted by the winds.

And that's like, that's sort of been my analogy.

Like the bigger the calm, the more powerful the winds, the more calm you can establish, the more productive you can be in your life.

So the idea of meditation was like, okay, meditate, yoga, breathe, don't do anything, live in a bubble.

No, no, no.

Human potential is unlimited, but we're limited by if you're in the winds of the storm and you're dodging, you know, refrigerators and tree trunks and stress, we're limited.

But if you can start to establish that internal experience, composure and calm and hail from that place, you begin to tap into that runner's high.

My best race is my easiest race.

You know, I was so fascinated by the runner's high, started reading all these books on it, the Psychic side of Sports and all the old books on runners high where Roger Bannister, who if you Remember broke the 4 minute mile and he said, I felt like I was standing still, I felt like I was going slow.

Yet he was running faster than he met alive.

And these experiences just blew me up because I was like, I had it, you know, but then three months later it was gone, you know, so I was just sort of super fascinated by that.

And that's what sort of got me to, you know, that, that, that, you know, that class and learning and doing the meditation and, and, and really plugging that in.

And it got me eventually to go to India and that's where I kind of took a deeper dive into Ayurveda because it was this.

I was studying Chinese medicine at the time and I heard about Ayurveda and I heard about this longevity experience.

People could live to 150.

And not that all of it turned out to be actually true, but it definitely was enough to hook me and get me to go to India for a 4.

I had like a 4 week vacation scheduled and, and I ended up going there, ended up getting invited to stay there permanently and learn Ayurveda, which was like a miracle.

And I ended up staying there for a year and a half and that's where I met Deepak Chopra.

He was there and he was starting a center and he had invited me after my training to come back and, and helped co direct his center.

And I was thrown into the arena of training medical doctors, which I did.

But it became really clear that I needed the ancient wisdom of Ayurveda, which is their like ancient traditional medical system.

But I also needed the modern science.

And that's what got me into that and that's what I've been doing ever since, is writing about Ayurvedic, like ancient principles.

Time tested that around for thousands of years or hundreds of years.

But if they don't have modern science, I don't really want to write about that.

But they have science and the ancient wisdom.

I feel like that makes sense because science alone.

Right.

Can prove really whatever it wants.

Coffee can be good or bad.

Wheat's good, wheat's bad.

Soy's good.

Meredith Oke: Drink wine.

No, don't drink wine.

Coffee's fine.

Coffee's terrible.

John Douillard: Yeah.

So you don't know really who to believe.

But if you have something that's been around for thousands of years and the science, I feel like it's a great place to start.

Meredith Oke: Yes.

And that is very much sort of where, where we land too a lot of the time on this podcast because we look at all of the newest science and what is it telling us?

It's telling us to go outside, to respect our circadian rhythms, to spend time in nature, to breathe, to drink clean water, which is, these are all ancient practices, of course, because we evolved outside.

So it's, it's fun when the, the new science comes up to support the old traditions, especially when our modern life is getting in the way so much of them, which it has more and more and more over the past few decades.

And I love that you mentioned Roger Bannister.

The only reason I know who that is is because that's the example that Rupert Sheldrake often uses when he talks about the morph, about creating morphogenic fields or my understanding is like a field of consciousness which once it has been established, then affects other people.

Whether or not they were present for the event that triggered it or not.

So I'm wondering how that.

How that plays into Ayurveda.

Because it sounded.

It sounds to me like that first teacher you had was sort of like, dial back the physical exertion.

And pay attention to your consciousness.

John Douillard: 100%.

And that's sort of the.

That was my first real introduction to, like, the full human potential.

And that calm that I felt like I was doing all this stuff.

But I felt like a real presence and a real experience of composure and calm.

You know, two of my favorite quotes are do less and accomplish more.

Which is sort of what I was engaged in.

But then there's this kind of Roger Bannister thing which is like, do nothing and accomplish everything.

Which I really love.

Because that's where consciousness steps into play.

Where you're.

When you're in that.

When you're hailing from that place of composure and calm.

That source of consciousness, which is sort of, we now know from quantum physics.

Everything comes from that silent field.

Then when you're established in being or in that silence and then you perform action.

You are not the doer of the activity.

You are just the observer of the activity.

So the idea that you could actually do less, accomplish more, that's cool.

I get that that's the runner's high.

But this old Vedic saying of do nothing and accomplish everything was like, whoa, that's like that way too far out there.

But in reality, that's exactly the ultimate potential of the human consciousness.

And this human body is nothing more than an instrument to perceive subtle energy exactly that way.

And that's the cool thing about Ayurveda was it wasn't just like a medical system.

Here's the herb for your heartburn and your back pain and this.

And it does that.

And it does circadian rhythms and clean water and everything that you said.

But it also takes you all the way to the understanding of that there's an underlying field of consciousness, which is an intelligent field.

That even Max Planck and Albert Einstein called that field intelligent.

And that field is, you know, pervades everything and that we.

Then you could call that field, you know, the place where our soul comes from or lives.

And what I also really loved about Ayurveda was that they understood that we are spirit and we're body.

And they also understood that you didn't have to die to.

To then finally figure out, oh, yes, we actually are a spirit.

Like, in our culture, we think there's a spirit.

We talk about spirit.

We Believe there's a spirit, but we don't really know for sure until we die.

Then we become a spirit.

You know, we have to die to really know for sure.

Right.

And in Ayurveda they were like, no, no, no, no.

The whole point of this Vedic knowledge and purifying and healing your body is to refine this human instrument so it can perceive subtle energy and in ways that allow you to actually realize that you actually can be aware of the fact that there is a field of consciousness, sort of a spiritual field, and this physical body.

And you don't have to have one or the other.

You can actually have some experience of both, which is a pretty cool concept.

Meredith Oke: It really is.

Okay, so in your words, how, how do you explain what Ayurveda is?

John Douillard: So I.

There's two definitions for that.

One, the sort of, the basic definition I use, life data, is science.

So it's the science of life science, of circadian rhythms, science of eating seasonal food.

Right.

Sounds super simple, but we don't do that anymore.

But every culture in the world historically did, because you had no other choice.

And you were getting, as a result, the right microbes that change from season to season to season.

That's Stanford research.

The bugs on the Hadza tribes gut change from season to season to season.

That's also Stanford research.

Our bugs in our gut are supposed to change from season to season.

Those bugs, like our microbiome, we know runs the show.

It controls our mood, our energy, our vitality, our immunity.

When the bugs are changing from season to season, you're getting the right bugs for the right season.

So in the winter, you get bugs that support immunity when we need it the most.

In the spring, you get bugs that support decongesting you.

Because in the spring, it's rainy and muddy and congestive in the allergy season.

In the summer, you get bugs that help to dissipate heat.

They're called bacterial endophytes.

And the bugs on plants that are synergistically related to plants, when we eat them is called xenohormesis, where we get the benefit of that plant, not just the chemical, which we think all that matters in America is just like sterilize it, you know, spray species on it, kill everything.

Just give me the chemical.

It's not that you're not just chemical, you're mostly bug, right?

So when you take foods or herbs, you really want to have that natural occurring microbiome.

We do it in season.

You start establishing a, a resonance between your biological clocks and nature's Circadian rhythms.

Right?

Makes sense.

Meredith Oke: Yeah.

John Douillard: And that's.

That's Ayurveda, understanding those, like, really subtle things that we are just beginning to really start to understand and kind of reverse engineer.

So that's that there's herbs, diet, lifestyle, all these things to keep your body in balance.

And that's the science of life, how to live your best life.

My more favorite definition, I think, which applies to your podcast, is that is that science is light or ire is life.

And Veda is truth, which means the truth of your life.

And the truth of your life is the part of you that never changes.

So you could make a case that the part of us that never changes is that consciousness, spiritual basis that never changes.

And so Ayurveda was the understanding that.

That it's about letting the truth of who you are out, letting a more initially a more vulnerable, delicate, passionate, and even powerful part of you out.

So as opposed to engaging in behaviors that are constantly attempting to get satisfied from the outside world to make people like me, approve of me, love me, get food or shopping, or all this outside stimulus to make me happy temporarily was, from the Ayurvedic perspective, unconscious.

And studies show that in the first five or six years of life, we create all these impressions that muster 95% of the things we think and say and do as adults.

So all the things we're doing as adults come from these early, early impressions.

And everybody was like, that is so unconscious.

We have to do something to become conscious.

We can't just have our whole 95 of our whole world becoming based on those impressions, which are about, you know, needing approval from mom and dad.

We were hardwired to make sure mom and dad liked us because if they didn't care, we'd walk into the jungle, eaten by a lion, there'd be no people here.

Right?

So it was really important for us to have an attachment to mom and dad and to figure out a way to manipulate them to like us and give us toys and stuff.

Right.

You know, and most kids figure that out early on, but then we continue to create a culture which is all about getting stimuli stimulated, stimulated and happy and satisfied again from the outside world.

Right?

So that's what we have in our culture is this extra, you know, sensory stimulus that, you know, we're happy when good things happen and, you know, really sad when bad things happen.

And from that level of the field, from that part of you that is truthful and never changing, you know, things go up, things go down, but we sort of are Weatherproofed from the highs and lows.

Not that you can't be happy, you can't be sad, but you're not attached to that emotion, right?

You're observing that emotion.

And there's a difference.

You're not like, oh, you go down with this ship when something bad happens and you're stressed and anxious and worried because you're so attached to the outcome.

So that's a big part of the Ayurveda definition.

That Ayurveda is life and Veda is truth.

And then when you take that even further, when you start doing you and letting who you really are, letting the very more delicate and protected petals of your flower to sort of open naturally by taking action from that place of being and calm that runner's high place, same thing, really.

And start taking action on that, you start becoming aware of the fact that it's easier and more satisfying.

And I feel more happy and more content in my life when I'm actually taking a risk to do me.

And I stop needing and requiring approval and appreciation from the outside world.

And that is sort of the big gap between being conscious and being unconscious.

And we can really work on that because we are all aware of that.

We can all be aware, very much so of when we are engaging in behavior for approval and appreciation and you start doing.

There was a really cool study to kind of back this up where they had two groups of people and one group was giving a gift in a hedonistic way.

So let's say I gave you a gift, a sweater, and I really wanted you to like it.

And I called you up.

Did you get it?

Did you like it?

Did it fit?

Does the color look good?

Can I see it on you?

You know, all this, like, I need.

It's like for me, it's for the approval for me.

The other group gave in at Eudaimonic way where they gave the gift with no expectation.

They just loved giving you this gift.

I just had a feeling it'd be perfect for you.

And I had no attachment to you telling me how wonderful I am.

When they gave the gift in a hedonistic way where it had some attachment return on that investment, it had a negative effect on the person they were giving it to so they could tell you were full of it and manipulating.

And the negative effect on the person giving when they gave you demonically just giving because it's your nature to give and love and care.

That's that truth of you.

It's nature to be loving.

It had a positive effect on the on the epigenetics of the people they were giving it to so they could feel that it was truth.

And that opened them up and allowed a real, true heart to heart level of communication.

And of course, when they did it that way, it had an effect on both, both parties involved.

They were both opened up and establishing, communicating in a more heart to heart, soul to soul type of way.

So it was kind of a cool thing.

And we could all be aware of like, okay, what's my motivation here?

And we can start, I call playing the game of life and start being a little bit more aware of how you engage and how you can, you know, be more eudemonic and more, more loving and giving and kind in your interactions and start to realize that, that you being like the sun was just gives, as far as we can tell, doesn't really get anything from us.

It just gives a lot, everything, right?

And if you could just be that, that would actually be.

That's been proven in so many studies.

When you do that, your microbiome dramatically changes with more positive bugs, less bad bugs.

Your oxytocin hormone, which is the longevity hormone, surges.

You have significantly more beneficial epigenetic qualities like good genes turn on, bad genes turn off.

The list goes on and on.

In terms of our health benefits, when we actually give and be loving and kind of and take that risk to do the thing that we hate and fear to do, which is to put our crazy mind, which is in control and protecting, and let something give and love and be kind for no reason because it's your nature.

Meredith Oke: Wow, that's really beautiful.

And I love the comparison to the sun.

The sun is life in so many ways, including as a role model.

And it gets a break, gets to go to sleep, and we get some darkness, which is also important.

And so I'm really, I'm really interested in your approach to Ayurveda and the way that you have opened it up beyond just, you know, a to do list of, of how to be healthy.

And I think this element of consciousness that you bring into it and awareness of how we're doing things is so important.

I know so many of us are on, you know, our health journey and we become a little wrapped up in like, am I doing it right?

Am I doing it enough?

And then we start judging other people.

Well, that person doesn't do it and oh, that person said she ate pizza and all that.

But you know, and we, we, you know, these things that we're meant to be doing to help us feel better can Sometimes become overtake our consciousness as that.

That mind you were referring to turns them against us almost in a way.

And it seems to me that this Ayurvedic approach that you've developed really takes that into account from the start.

John Douillard: Well, let's talk about that.

Let's take a deeper dive into the kind of the quantum Ayurvedic kind of concept.

What I really love about Ayurveda is they describe the cause of disease.

Thousands of years ago they said that the cause of disease is this.

It's called Pragya Prada, which means the mistake of the intellect.

Which means that the intellect, the mind, makes a mistake and starts to think of itself as separate from the underlying field of intelligence, consciousness.

Let's say we disconnect from the whole.

We.

We lose access to the whole.

We lose access to the conscious, and that is the cause of disease.

Right.

So what they're saying is that when the field of intelligence becomes physiology, our body and that physiology forgets that it's the field which everything comes from.

Our body loses access to the intelligence, it loses access to, you know, how to connect with rhythms of nature.

It starts to go rogue and start.

Things start to happen.

You start to function independent of the field and you're not part of the whole anymore.

And bad things happen.

That's what they said was the cause of disease.

Meredith Oke: I was like, wow, that's like, so I love this.

Yes.

So that.

So disease arises from the separation of our physiology from the field.

John Douillard: Right, Right.

Meredith Oke: Amazing.

Okay, keep going.

John Douillard: So now let's just make a little visual image here.

We have the field and then we have the physiology, or we have consciousness and matter.

So fields of intelligence become matter.

Right?

Molecules, atoms and atoms, molecules and atoms comes things, and we're part of those things.

Right.

So turns out that if you wanted to restore the memory of consciousness into the field or into the physiology, you would want to probably put your attention right where the field becomes the physiology.

Like if you were to put a light or a lamp in a doorway, the lamp would shine into both rooms, into, let's say, one room's the field, one room is the physiology.

And you would then bring awareness or light or, you know, awareness into both fields.

And the physiology would wake up and go, oh, yeah, I'm part of the field.

That's right.

We're supposed to part function as part of the whole, not independently, not rogue on our own, you know, and we start to restore the memory of pure consciousness into the physiology.

So the idea is you need to find Something that can function as both field and physiology.

Right.

I mean, that makes sense.

Right.

So what is it in nature, in quantum physics that we know can function both as a field, which is a frequency, and as a particle, which is an atomic particle?

Physiology.

Right.

And that is a photon.

Photons of light are both fields and they're particles at the same time.

So if we could find a photon that exists at the junction between field and physiology and we put attention on it, we could potentially restore the memory of pure consciousness.

Because it's at the gap between consciousness and matter that we actually.

It's the Vedas said it's at the gap that that cause is the cause of disease.

So they would create therapies to put your attention at the gap between physiology, field and physiology, or consciousness and matter.

So there was kind of really cool because all these therapies they had were designed to put the attention there.

We call them, they're called sandhi or gap or junction point therapies.

Junction points between daytime and nighttime, the sunrise and sunset.

I mean, we all know that all traditional cultures were there for every sunrise.

And they prayed and they did sun salutation, they did some type of.

Some type of meditation or some type of reverence to the sun setting and rising.

When the seasons change, the solstices and the equinoxes, we know that there are celebrations around the world for that still to this day.

So they're all.

There's.

There's.

In Ayurveda, when you actually do breathe, and they talk about pranayama, prana means breath, and yam means to hold, pause or extend your breath.

So when you hold, pause and extend the breath, you're actually accessing the gap between the breath.

And it's the gap between the breath that is.

Ayurveda is called kumbak or pranayama.

And there's incredible science behind the value of holding your breath.

And when free divers sort of stumbled upon this, when they would go down really deep and they would spend 11 minutes down there with no oxygen, and they would come back, and then if they didn't die, they would have all these really amazing health benefits.

And then they took them into the lab and they found that when they did hold their breath, like Ayurvedic breath retention techniques, which are like the source of pranayama breathing techniques, they called that intermittent hypoxia, which means if you hold your breath for just a short period of time, not like to the point of danger.

It's sort of like autophagy, where we do calorie restriction without starvation.

And all of a sudden the body starts producing all the cellular repair and cel recycling.

And it's really good for us to a certain extent.

Kind of cleans up all the, all the old stuff in the cupboards and cleans it all out.

The same thing happens when you hold your breath within your capacity of comfort.

You have to build up to this over time, obviously, but when you actually do hold your breath, this intermittent hypoxia has been shown for just a short period of time.

The body's saying, hey, if I'm holding my breath, all of a sudden my oxygen levels are starting to go down.

And when I go below 90, what will happen is the body will go into that intermittent hypoxia anywhere in the 80s.

And when you go into that place, the body starts producing more stem cells, it starts producing more nitric oxide, which is a molecule that won the Nobel Prize.

It starts producing more endothelial growth factors which protect your arterial lining.

It's been shown to produce transcription factors called the guardian of your genome, which protects your genetic code from expressing negative traits, which we all have them.

And as we get older, that's sort of what happens.

It's been shown to increase neuroplasticity so you can change and be more aware of those old childlike patterns, you know, that locked us in doing the same dumb stuff again and again in our life, being that hedonistic giver and be willing to actually take action to free yourself from those old patterns.

It's called neuroplasticity.

It's pretty been shown to lower blood pressure.

Blood sugar is what Lance Armstrong got busted for injecting epo, which boosts your blood oxygen levels when you hold your breath.

That's been boosted as well.

So it's sort of like, wow, that's a gap, you know, so there are all these gap therapies which Ayurveda was all about.

And there's even more.

I can go dive, dive into the, into the weeds because there's so many even more subtle ones, but those are sort of the big ones.

But then there's something that quantum physics in the research on that has recently described for us, is that we actually produce photons out of our DNA every day, thousands of them per minute.

And they're called ultra weak photon emissions or sometimes called biophotons.

These ultra weak photon emissions are interesting because most of them are caused by DNA damage, which is a problem as we get older.

We produce more DNA damage.

We don't produce the free radical the antioxidants to swab up the free radical damage.

Because whenever you make energy anywhere, you're going to have waste products.

And in the body it's the same thing.

And as we get older, we don't, we don't make as much energy because we don't help get rid of the trash and the waste products of energy production as well.

And, and would accelerate aging causes DNA damage.

And that's what makes the genetic expressions, negative ones, express themselves in a way we don't like.

So, so most of the photon emissions are damaging.

In fact, they did something, it's called, it's called the, the bystander phenomena, where if they took, they did this study where they took a monkey who had cancer and all this kind of really in a disease state, and they put a healthy monkey next to it, and within a certain period of time, the healthy monkey started getting sick.

And they measured the mechanism for that and they found it was the photon emissions.

Which, remember, photons don't stop here, right.

They go right through everything, you and me.

They don't seem to care about our body because it's so subtle, just blasting through.

Right.

So turns out that these photon emissions, when they're damaging, can be damaging.

It's almost like when you walk into a room and you get a bad feeling.

It's that you're feeling those, those photon emissions which are not necessarily healthy for you.

Well, it turned out that studies show that when you actually meditate and do yoga and breathing, those incoherent photon emissions become coherent, which is.

So then all the crazy damaging photons come down, which is like, fundamental reason why I'll digress for a second.

That epidemic, I mean, metabolic syndrome is the epidemic of our time, right?

Meredith Oke: Yeah.

John Douillard: And high blood pressure, high blood sugar, X ray around your belly, high blood pressure, all these things, when you look at them, they're all caused by stress.

And I wrote an article about the science behind that.

Every one of them caused by stress.

Which means that when you're under this chronic incoming, go, go, go, go.

Life that we have in this culture, compared to our ancient ancestors, which pretty much life was pretty chill.

You know, this connected in resonance with nature and migrating with the seasons.

And it wasn't easy, but it wasn't like we have today.

So much incoming.

That underlying chronic stress that we have tells the body life's an emergency and there's a bear chasing you.

It's not like going to eat me in this moment, but I can see it down the road.

It's coming out it's following me, and I'm having to constantly go, when that happens, your body's going to produce more stress hormone.

So it's going to have to put more cholesterol in the blood to make that hormone.

It's going to have to put more sugar in the blood to get you up a tree faster.

It's going to have to raise your blood pressure to help you get up.

That tree is going to help take any fat it can find as reserve fuel, stick it under the mattress, and hopefully use it as reserve fuel.

So the science is really clear.

All this stuff that we.

Everybody's being put on metformin and statins.

The science is clear.

It's caused by stress.

And then I said, well, let's look at meditation as a.

As a possible resource to heal that stress.

And study after study after study, meditation lowers your obesity rates, lowers blood pressure, lowers cholesterol levels, lowers blood sugar, everything.

So I was like, wow, okay, this stress is there.

So when you take.

Do yoga, breathing and meditate, and you're getting rid of all the incoherent photon emissions, thousands per minute coming out of your DNA, you've done a huge job to help your body not break down, because if it can break down someone next to you, it's sure going to have an effect on breaking down you, right?

And that means that if you can meditate, yoga and breathe, and the science shows you can create coherent emissions of these photons, that could be really cool.

And studies now show that our photon emissions are used in your body as information carrying particles of light or frequencies of light, and that even our thoughts are thought to be carried by these photon emissions.

Because when you actually do the math and go, okay, like, all the thoughts that I just had, which is like way too many, probably not enough nerves, firing nerves to firing nerves to make all that happen.

And I admit I said that really fast because if I said it slower, I figured I thought I might forget half the things I was saying because it starts to get really complicated.

But the idea is that the nerves firing on nerves just isn't fast enough.

So the research is showing that we actually are thinking on these frequencies of light.

All right, so now this is really cool.

Turns out that if I meditate, what am I doing?

And I'm taking my.

My thinking and I'm transcending my thinking, and I'm going into the field of consciousness.

So meditation is a tool to get you to that gap between the field of consciousness and matter or the field of physiology.

So meditation takes me down into that gap.

Well, it also turns out this is called Bokan's phenomena with the photon emissions, that when they're coherent, they are more able to carry information and they're more able to carry intention.

So if you have an intention in that underlying field of coherent emissions, in a meditative state or a prayer state, and you have an intention, that intention can be carried at great distances because photons are carried at great distances.

Okay, so that sort of helps to understand prayer and why.

There's like incredible amount of research on how prayer can be like the biggest, best drug ever.

But there are also studies show the prayer didn't work.

But there's so many studies saying it does work.

So why does it work sometimes?

Why does it work, not work some other times?

Well, it's possible that it doesn't work all the time because if you're not in a deep enough prayer state or meditative state to down, you know, to downregulate some of the incoherent photon emissions, then you won't have enough of the coherent to have it create a real coherent effect and really have a good impact of your intention and the carrying of that information into your body as a self healing tool or as a distance healing tool, which is what prayer is.

And in Ayurveda, distance healing was like completely automatic understood.

When I live there, you know, we would on the weekends usually go see some healer or something, some person that was a healer of some sort.

And regularly we'd go see a distance healer and we'd take a picture of our mom and say, can you heal my mom, my grandmom?

And.

And they would like take your pulse and do these things.

And it was just like common knowledge, you know, that distance only was a thing here.

It's like there is interesting and emerging science about this.

Definitely in the quantum world that this is absolutely real but still emerging.

Right, okay, so, well, how does this really work then?

Well, it's kind of like, you know, I've been having this, you know, having you on my radar to have this podcast with you.

And you had me on your schedule for a while.

So that mean my.

I had this intention to be here and talk to you now.

And you had that intention.

Intention, which means that our photon emissions, which are blasting out of our body at the speed of light, we're carrying a certain intention.

And that intention, you know, then lands.

And then when we meet each other, I don't know if you felt it, but sometimes you walk into restaurant, you go and you just meet someone for the first time you feel like.

You feel like I know you.

And.

And that's because you.

You are photons of a minority communicating in this quantum field.

Field which is, of course, beyond space and time, you know, weeks and weeks before.

And all of a sudden, we feel this connection, you know, so that's sort of what's happening.

So Einstein called that kind of an effect.

Well, there was an effect that he called spooky action at a distance, which is called quantum entanglement, which I'm sure some of you are.

The other guests have talked about.

Well, quantum entanglement is when I have a photon, and I have.

And I am aware of a photon, right.

And that photon is entangled with another photon, which could be in another galaxy, literally, or it could be inside of you.

It could be anywhere.

And I have an awareness and I have an intention on those photons.

It'll instantly change the photons at great distances.

And the word, the key word there is instantly, which means faster than the speed of light, which could instantly change the spin of that photon in another galaxy instantaneously faster than the speed of light.

Einstein knew this was a thing, and he said, this is weird.

And it's called spooky action addition.

We don't understand it.

He didn't really want to talk about it because he couldn't understand.

It sort of blew up this whole thing.

Meredith Oke: You know, if they're communicating faster than the speed of light, then what does that say for his work?

John Douillard: Right, right.

So that's sort of where.

And now, since then, though, quantum entanglement has been proven again and again and again and again.

It's a real, absolute phenomenon.

In fact, quantum computing is exactly that.

Like, you know, we're both on our computer, and quantum computing is going to be where if I'm on my computer and someone hacks into my computer and my photons are by definition entangled with the.

With a person who gets on that computer because I'm on it, and that entangled photon is on his criminal computer.

It'll instantly change a photon on my computer.

My computer will pick that up and lock them out.

That's the future of quantum security.

That is what's happening.

It's not like me just made that up.

That's what's happening.

That is what quantum computing is.

And that's what quantum success, what cybersecurity will be all about in the very near future.

Meredith Oke: That's crazy.

John Douillard: Or based on spooky action at a distance.

Well, Ayurveda said that spooky action at A distance is what heals, is what stores the memory of pure consciousness in the part of the physiology that lost its way, that became more dense and disconnected from the field.

Right, right.

So if I am now in a meditative state and I dial down my incoherent photon emissions and I have an intention to heal myself or others, that intention, if it's entangled with my mom, you know, who I love, and she's not well, she is well, but we'll just pretend she's not well for a minute and we'll heal her anyway.

And I have an intention, and all of a sudden that instantaneously will actually change and bring more awareness to the photons that may have become more particulate as opposed to field.

They became more particle, more dense, more physiology, as opposed to consciousness based.

So by actually having an awareness and have an intention from that level of field, you can create an effect where the particles which have become more dense and more incoherent can actually become more light based, more frequency based and more coherent based, and restore normal function and in fact restore consciousness, the field, into the physiology and restore the memory of pure consciousness into that part of the body that lost its way.

And that's quantum healing in a nutshell.

Meredith Oke: That's amazing and so beautifully explained.

I really, really appreciate your ability to do that because I know it takes a lot of deep understanding of the details in order to explain it so simply in a way that everyone can understand.

That is, that is no small thing that you just did.

So thank you so much, John.

I know a lot of us spend time thinking about this and.

And we either get lost in the weeds on the mechanisms or, you know, or so that was, that was beautiful.

And I'm really.

This idea of healing, being to close the gap between the field and the physiology is just so, so profound.

I have not heard it framed that way before.

And then when I think about, you know, if we're going to stay, you know, grounded in science, you know, all of the science and all of the ancient traditions and all, everyone, you know, there are certain constants that come up as being healing.

Time in nature, time in quiet reflection or meditative state, positive social connections and loving relationships.

And this physiology, field gap really ties all of those things together.

Like if I'm outside in my bare feet at sunrise, my body is.

I'm bringing those particles into the field.

And then if you add a meditative state to that, and then you add the fact that I feel so happy, I get to make a healthy breakfast for my children, before they go to school.

And I feel the gratitude of that.

It's like I'm collapsing that gap in so many different ways.

John Douillard: Let's take what we just talked about and what you just said back to what we started with, when we started with the eye of the storm, right, that runner's high.

That's what got me into all this, was I had that experience.

I was like, I need to know what this is, you know?

And so that is the bigger the calm, the more powerful the winds.

And this is called the coexistence of opposites, where you're engaged in dynamic activity but calm at the same time.

What that Indian doctor wanted me to experience.

Well, when I came back from India, I wrote a book called Body minus four, which is all about breathing through your nose versus your mouth.

And we published studies that show that when you run or walk or breathe through your nose while you're running or walking or exercising, that the brain shifted from a fight or flight beta state in the brain to an alpha state in the brain and a more coherent state in the brain.

So it was.

So we actually proved in published study in the International Journal of Neuroscience that when you actually breathe through your nose, the brain goes into a meditative state, a coherent alpha state, which is what you see in meditation.

But we were doing that while running as fast as we could.

So we were the first group to ever produce alpha and brainwave coherence during vigorous exercise.

So I was like, wait a minute.

Okay, this is really cool.

This is like, you know, we proved that the runner's high is the coexistence of opposites, that you have to create an experience where you're coexisting dynamic activity and silence at the same time.

Right when you're at the junction between sunrise and sunset, you're experiencing night, which is a resting time, and day, which is an active time.

You're at that point of the coexistence of opposites in a way, similarly with seasonal changes.

So the idea is that when you do the yoga and the breathing and the meditation, when you do the yoga, breathing and meditation, you can start to look for that experience of composition, exposure, and calm in the midst of dynamic activity.

You're calm and alert at the same time.

You're in a posture, you're really still, but your body's dynamically active.

You're breathing, but your.

Your mind is really still, but you're still breathing.

Meditation, your restful alert.

You go into nature, play the game, see if you can actually, when you're walking in the forest.

You know, look at that river or that creek and watch it.

You see if you can identify the silence and dynamic dynamism coexisting.

The river's going silently still, but it's also dramatic.

You can hardly even hear it, but it's also silent and active at the same time.

Look at the leaves, look at the trees, and you can start to kind of see that in nature that coexistence of opposites is everywhere.

And when you meditate, you just start to dip the cloth in.

The dye of your own consciousness come out, you pull a little bit more of that dye with you, so you start to bring that memory of pure consciousness back into your cells on a regular basis.

And they start to function in a more coherent versus incoherent, you know, ultra weak photon emission way out of your DNA.

And, and that's why studies upon studies upon studies show, though, that meditation or prayer or that kind of spiritual work, whatever it is, whatever religion, doesn't matter, is going to provide a level of health and longevity for us because it's dragging like a mouse, like in your computer with a mouse.

It's dragging that consciousness, that coherence into the density of your physiology that lost its way.

Meredith Oke: Oh, I love it.

And as I know from my personal experience and from talking to a lot, a lot of people sort of on their individual health journeys, there is often a.

I'll use myself as an example.

So I had quite intense chronic fatigue for a while.

And as I learned some of the ways that I was causing that and some of the habits that I had that was making it worse and I started to heal them and I started to get, get my energy back.

My tendency was to overuse it, like getting like, you know, going over the limit on your credit card.

I was so excited to have my, my energy credits back that I was just like, how much can I do?

I'm just going to keep adding things to my life more and more to do because I'm so excited to have energy.

And so I, by necessity, I'm now in a, in a place where I'm learning what you're saying, how to be active and have, and have a life where we do things, ideally, most of mostly things we enjoy to some extent, without getting lost in the doing, if that makes sense.

And I heard, I heard a woman once and it stayed with me.

And I feel like I've been like, I need someone explain this to me.

And I feel like maybe you just did.

And she, she was an intuitive and a healer, I think she did distance healing as well and, you know, very psychic.

And she could see all kinds of things.

And someone asked her, like, does it take a lot of energy?

And she said, the master never uses his own energy.

And I was like, what?

And I feel like you have helped me understand that mystery a little bit.

John Douillard: Yeah, I think that's the, you know, the do less, accomplish more.

The do nothing, accomplish everything.

And when you can now see that if you actually are, you know, functioning from that field and you're, you know, functioning from.

We all function from that field.

We just don't know it.

But if you start to become aware of the fact that you're functioning from that field, field, you're not the doer of the activity.

Just like you said, you're not doing it with your energy.

It's, you know, we don't have ownership of that.

You know, it's the field that's providing and provoking everything.

You know, I thought maybe it'd be a good idea to teach folks something that I learned.

I call it the one minute meditation.

Because what I noticed was that when I was in that field and I'm like, in the flow, it's like, great.

And then there started to become sort of this like, distinct difference between being okay and being like, stressed, you know.

And I think a lot of people probably feel that, like you're just cruising along and all of a sudden, ah, you're, you're spin out and you're.

Now you're not yourself.

So there's really interesting research about this one minute meditation.

And it's using a breathing technique called the bellows breath.

I'll teach it to you in a book.

People do it.

We can do it together.

It's just a minute.

And the studies show that it actually activates what's called gamma brainwave activity, which is the kind of the higher frequency brainwave.

It's a brainwave that's been shown for universal love and higher states of consciousness.

So it's kind of cool.

And it provokes a, a, a, it's a stimulating breathing technique.

But then it gives you about 10 minutes of parasympathetic dominance after that, which means they rest, rebuild and rejuvenative state.

So what we did in our study, when we did the nose breathing versus mouth breathing, we noticed that when you breathe through your mouth, fight or flight nervous system goes up and your parasympathetic rest and rejuvenation goes down to zero, which means you're in a full fight or flight state.

You know, break your body down to build yourself up.

It's an emergency response.

You're going to have to recover from that.

It's an emergency degenerative experience.

And most of us live here and we exercise, we definitely live here.

That's the way we work.

We stress and the body recovers.

And then you can stress more, you recover stress more.

And that's what I do with athletes.

When you're 20, you know, 18 to maybe 30 if you're lucky, you can stress and recover and keep getting better and break world records.

But then at some point you're limited by how much stress you can endure.

And then they take that kid and they send him off somewhere and they bring in a new young kid and they break records there.

That had nothing to do with the, with the development of full human potential for the long haul.

It was squeeze out as much performance that we want in this culture, but nothing to do with what we actually can do as a human being.

So the idea is that when we did with our nose breathing exercises was that the sympathetic, sympathetic system did not go to 100%, it only went up 50%.

And the parasympathetic didn't go to zero like it does with regular exercise, it only went down by 50%.

So we had and proved that the two opposite nervous systems were literally coexisting when we are engaged in a proper state.

So how do we get that state?

So it's okay, in this one minute meditation to stimulate you, create a little sympathetic activation, which flips the brain into a gamma brainwave activity, which is that universal love, high state consciousness brainwave.

But then it actually gives you about 15, 10 to 15 minutes of parasympathetic activation, which means rest, rebuild, rejuvenate.

And so that's the thing that I would use and teach my patients over the many years to use to kind of reset that internal experience of calm.

And you can do it in your car.

It's a minute.

Like it doesn't take any longer.

And my wife, when I first developed this, she said, john, you're crazy.

You can't.

The one minute meditation, it's not like it's too American, you know, you can't do that.

I was like, but it works.

And people need a quick reset, you know, so it's really simple.

It's a nose breathing, bellows breath.

It's called bus streak.

I have an article on my website, a life spread called one minute meditation.

If you want more information and, and so you just breathe through your nose like this.

Like if you were taking a Bellows and bellows in and bellowing out like that.

So you do 30 of those breaths.

If you feel dizzy, breathe a little less intense.

If you feel okay, breathe more intense.

If you feel a little dizzy, stop.

There's no reason for any discomfort, but you'll work up to very quickly to do 30 pretty powerful bellows breaths.

And then you do 30 seconds of being still.

Close your eyes and be still.

Let's all do it together.

Everybody listening can sit up and we can do it.

We'll do 30 of these breaths against your whole rib cage in, belly in, belly out, ribcage in, rib cage out.

It's a big, deep breath.

Best you can.

So here we go.

Meredith Oke: Okay.

John Douillard: Sa.

And stop.

Be perfectly still.

Eyes closed.

You might notice that there's not a lot of thinking going on here.

Just be with that silence and slowly open your eyes.

Meredith Oke: Oh, wow.

That's crazy.

I felt.

Yeah.

Like you were calling it runner's high.

Like that just sense of almost elation or just after the 30 seconds of doing that breath.

John Douillard: Like it's a really quick and easy reset, which is, you know, can do anytime in your car before you go, in your office, house, before you.

While you're waiting for your kids to pick them up from school or soccer.

It's really easy.

Meredith Oke: Yeah.

You know, I love that I've been.

I was reading in some of my coaching material like that, the importance of those transition moments in our day where it's like I'm on the phone and, you know, I'm at work and it's.

And then you, like, go straight into the house and it.

Or you working with a client, then you go straight into a social alert.

And it was sort of.

And the.

The coaching was to acknowledge those transition moments consciously.

And so this is a beautiful practice to mark those.

Those transition moments.

And then they're naturally built into our.

Into the day to.

I love that remind.

Like, where.

Where am I.

What am I doing here?

What am I doing next?

What's my intention with the next.

With this next moment of my day?

John Douillard: Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a.

There's an aspect of the Vedic literature called donner ved, and if you do yoga, it's called donner asana.

Is the.

The bow asana, like a.

Like a bow.

And there's a.

There's a whole kind of Vedic science around archery and.

Because a real metaphor for.

For this.

Because when you pull back the bow, if you're moving the bow string, you know, and then you let it go, you're never going to find the arrow, probably.

But if you're pulling back the bowstring and your mind isn't going like this and you're holding it really still, and then you take action from that silence.

It's a transformational shot.

It's a karmic moving shot.

Its ability to.

It's actually called established being and perform action.

And this is a really important concept.

And in fact, one of the most important concepts of all.

This whole idea of Vedic understanding of Ayurveda was that you must take action from the field, from the place of consciousness, from the place of silence.

And a lot of us, you know, do a stress reduction technique, meditate, and then we go lie, cheat and steal and do whatever we do in our life.

You know what I mean?

Meredith Oke: Like, we're like, why am I so stressed?

John Douillard: Yeah.

The idea is to take that science with you.

And that's what these tools are all about.

Waking up at the sunrise and being there.

Going for a walk in the woods and, you know, and just being mindful as you walk and breathing long, slow and deep and being aware of the silence and the activity of a forest and all of that that's happening.

It's mind boggling.

But.

But yes, that's the key is to create that silence and then start to.

With this one minute meditation, you create that calm.

I feel a little more calm now.

Now I can go into my house and carry that with me and deal with, you know, my kids and I gotta do.

After a long day at work, I now have to help my kids with algebra, you know, which is never easy, right?

Or whatever.

We had six kids, so that was like my job.

I would go to school, work all day, come back, and I would have to do homework.

You were the homework tutor.

But that one minute meditation in the garage before I went in there helped make me just reset and give me that little bit of energy to go out there and do it from that loving, giving place.

And then once you get into that loving, giving stream, you know, it's that runner's high.

You're back in the zone.

Meredith Oke: Yes.

And we're so blessed.

I mean, we're just so, so blessed.

So many of us.

And we are pulled out of it so quickly by, you know, forces that want to disconnect us from that.

So this was just extraordinary.

I would love to have you back again sometime.

I feel like we just started.

There's so many more questions that I have.

So thank you for being here and please, please let everyone know how to find you.

Where, where's the best Place to go.

John Douillard: Yeah, well, my website is lifespa.com l I f e s p a dot com and that's where like I said, I started taking all the ancient wisdom and putting it together with modern Science.

We have 1500 articles, all them for free, where you can type in your health concern and read up on how you can take some ancient wisdom medical practices along with the science and employ them into your life to actually do some self healing and that all that knowledge for free.

Our business model has always been put the knowledge out for free somehow we'll pay the bills, the business will come.

So that's what we do at LifeSpa.

It's all for free.

There's also a newsletter that you can subscribe to.

You get information.

We put that out three times a week.

All about ancient wisdom, modern science.

Also I have an ayurvedic store where I've been formulating ayurvedic herbs for myself or my company and other companies for many, many decades now.

And that's@thelifespa.com as well.

You can go to the store, check out all of our whole organic or ayurvedic herbs which really importantly have the natural microbiome with them.

Most of the herbs and supplements people take are sterile.

People don't realize how, how dead they are.

But we have a microbial diversity crisis in our culture, in humanity, and it's an extinction event.

So how we can actually employ more of the natural bugs that exist on plants into our body is having a more diverse amount of herbal supplements that are whole with all the natural bugs, organic, well tested that you can take to have to act as support inoculants for the right bugs for the right season.

So we talk about eating seasonally and or and we give you grocery lists for winter, summer and spring.

So you don't need to think should I be a vegan for I be this or be that.

All you need to do is eat what nature provides in the wheat right season.

So take the winter grocery list which is or the summer one now, or circle the foods on there that you like and eat more of them.

That's it.

And the ones with the asterisks are the superfoods for that season.

The idea is you just want to get medicinal doses of the right food for the right season to get the right bugs in your gut to give you the benefits of the, of the protection that the seasonal microbes provide for us.

We need to connect our body with circadian rhythms and it's just simple stuff like that and all those grocery lists are all for free and of course I'm on all the social channels as well.

Usually I do like one minute shorts to kind of just talk about a topic that I've written much more deeply in than a long form video in with all the references and science that's there as well.

So you can always bet and bank on the fact that we're going to give you ancient knowledge with the science so you can feel safe.

That is something that I feel a great place to start your journey when you're looking for some health support.

Meredith Oke: Thank you.

And that sound those are those are beautiful resources and I know this this crowd is really into seasonal eating so that thank you for doing that.

You can check out John's meal plans and subscribe to his newsletter.

And John I look I look forward to continuing this conversation another time.

John Douillard: Thank you so much that'd be wonderful.

Love to be.