Bliss Brain: How to Rewire Your Brain for Happiness Ep 164 | Guest: Dawson Church

If you find a regular meditation practice a challenge, this episode is for you.

This interview covers Dawson Church's personal journey from a troubled childhood and disillusionment with religion to discovering the power of meditation and transcendent states of consciousness. [01:22]

He discusses how his meditation practice helped him and his wife cope with the devastating loss of their home in a wildfire, and how this led them to rebuild their lives in a more intentional way. [10:13]

The interview also explores the neuroscience behind meditation, including the default mode network and task positive network in the brain, and how meditation can shift the balance between these networks to promote happiness and well-being. [23:54]

Highlights:

• Dawson had a troubled childhood and became disillusioned with religion, but had a transformative experience at age 15 that led him on a spiritual journey. [05:58]
• After years of studying spirituality and psychology, Dawson discovered the neuroscientific basis for transcendent states of consciousness, including bliss and ecstasy.
• When Dawson and his wife lost their home in a wildfire, he used his meditation practice and stress reduction techniques to not just survive, but thrive in the aftermath.
• The default mode network in the brain is associated with negative thinking about the past and future, while the task-positive network is associated with being present and in flow.
• Meditation can shift the balance between these networks, quieting the default mode network and activating the task positive network, leading to greater happiness and well-being. [23:59]

Many Thanks to Pixabay's Piotr Witowski's meditation music 21784 and Nature's Eye Gentle Piano Meditation 9692 for the music beds for this episode.
RESOURCES:
https://eftuniverse.com/
Dawson's Website

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Transcript

This transcript was generated using ai, and therefore may contain errors.
Julia Marie (00:00):
Thank you for your continuing, supportive, evolving humans. If you find value in this episode, please share it with at least two other people so that together we can bring more light to this world. If you want to learn how to achieve a deep flow state, my guest today wrote the book on it. You'll hear how with just
eight weeks of practice, 12 minutes a day. Using the right techniques, we can produce measurable changes in our brains that make us calmer, happier, and more resilient. Welcome to Evolving Humans, the podcast for Awakening Souls. I'm your host, Julia Marie. Settle in and get ready for another spirited conversation.
(01:04):
Dawson Church PhD is a bestselling science writer and the author of three award-winning books, his first game changing book, the Genie in Your Genes Linked Emotions and Genetics, his follow-up title, mind to Matter Reviews. The Science of Peak Mental States and Bliss Brain and Bliss Brain demonstrates that
as we cultivate peak states, our brains rapidly rewire themselves for happiness. Dawson is the founder of the Veteran Stress Solution, which has offered free PTSD treatment to over 22,000 veterans, and he shares how to apply energy psychology to health and personal performance through eft universe.com, one
of the largest alternative medicine sites on the web. His website is dawson church.com. Well, it's pretty rare that I find something that inspires me, that makes me feel like I might've stumbled onto something
that can change my personal life, and I think Bliss Brain might be that thing. After I read your book, I agree that it may be the fastest path to collective awakening. And I say this because I had a visceral physical reaction when I read your summary of the book on page 40. Like, see, it's coming up again. It just made me well up with tears that maybe there is something that we can all do together collectively to
shift ourselves out of our, what you call the caveman brain. And we'll talk about that in a minute, but I just feel like you're right that we can, with a simple technique, maybe change the trajectory of our current course. Welcome to Evolving Humans, Dawson Church.
Dawson Church (03:02):
It's great to be here, Julia, and that physical sensation you had is so important because what we're looking for in transformation in change isn't just theoretical or mental change, not just thinking about change and thinking about how we like to see things and how we'd like them to be, but we really look for them to be
rooted in your physiology, to be fundamental to the way you feel in your body, and you get to live in a very different body as you practice these techniques. So I'm glad you felt that. There are several things going on here. One is we all have the same physiology. We all have the same structure. If you look at
human beings as a head up, top, feet at the bottom and various things in between, and it's common to all of us, and it works roughly the same way.
(03:46):
Doesn't it work obviously exactly the same way for every single human being, but it works. Digestion works certain ways and respiration works certain ways. And what we're finding now is that when we look back at ancient traditions, Christian mysticism, Eastern mysticism, Patanjali, Vigo Sutras, the Bhagavan
Gita, the Vedas Pante in this ancient wisdom that predates all the religions, what Eldes Huxley called the perennial philosophy that underlies all the religions, we find that there is a feeling there that is universal, and those feelings are things like transcendence, the ability of human beings to move into transcendent
states. And everybody has them. Everybody has that brain hardware that's required for that. And we've focused a lot in neurophysiology for the last 20, 30, 50 years on the survival stuff we've got as part of our biology. We know about the fight and flight and we figured out the pituitary renal axis a hundred years ago.
(04:51):
We know a lot about how we react to threats and stress. What we're now mapping in neuroscience is how we have this common physiology, neurotransmitters and neuroplasticity and genetics and all of these ways in which our bodies respond not just distress, but also to transcendent states. And it's common to all
of us, and we feel in our bodies and we have this machinery, inner machinery, which when we activate it, when we activate it using some of those techniques and some of these texts go back thousands of years,we find when we use this, we feel it in our body and we then propel ourselves to transcendent states. So
we're this very new phase of human evolution where we're both drawing on ancient wisdom but scrutinizing it in the light of modern science and finding out that there are ways that we can dramatically accelerate the process where it doesn't take 10,000 hours or a hundred years to get to a certain place. You
can get there in just a few weeks,
Julia Marie (05:54):
And I can't wait to dive a little bit more deeply into that. But I like to start with pretty much the same question. What was it like growing up in Dawson Church's home, especially those years as a teenager?
Dawson Church (06:11):
Well, it was a pretty miserable place for me initially and my body and my experience because my parents, they were doing their best, but so was everyone else in my community. But back in the fifties and sixties, our best was pretty convention bound and we didn't have anything like the insights from science and we have today. So I had a lot of turmoil in my life. There was a lot of abuse in the church that I was in, and I became highly disillusioned with religion and with the society that I found myself in. And so I became an atheist at a very early age. I didn't believe in God or spirituality or any of that that's stuck. I saw these
priests and the pedophiles and the abusers and the domestic violence and all the power differentials with the priests having the power and the congregations not, and all the craziness in that world.
(07:09):
And I became disillusioned and not wanting to be here at all. I just wanted to basically just be on another planet or dead, just like no real spot here I wanted to be in. And then at 15, I had this experience where I suddenly one day lying in my bedroom and absolute despair, suddenly found myself floating in the
universe surrounded by stars and planets and the infinite expansive space, and I could feel the underlying structure of the universe and it was love, and I was just astonished that we live in this universe of love.
And after a while, I came back from that and it wasn't as though my life changed a lot on the outside, but at that point I knew that that possibility at least was there. And I began to then focus on getting back there through joining a spiritual community, eventually studying psychology eventually, much later, getting
into research and then breaking through to levels of transcendent joy that I just had no idea even existed.
(08:16):
I mean, I just had no notion that these levels of bliss were there. And then I discovered that in Sanskrit and in the Eastern traditions, they even have words for them like vka, which means sorrows, joy, joy without any element of sorrow or ananda, absolute transcendent bliss. So I then began to research these
states and especially their neuroscientific, their neurological correlates, and we find that we have these structures in our brain that can take us to bliss and that we're actually are meant to live in that blissful state. So I spent my early life really miserable and suicidal, had that breakthrough experience. Then
through a long journey, 50 years in spirituality and psychology eventually found the states of Ashoka and Nanda. And now I teach them, I just write about them in my books. I recommend people try them. The research shows it does not take a long time. In just a few weeks, we can embody those experiences. And
once you're broken through to those states, you then are likely to stay there the rest of your life and keep on moving in that growth trajectory. You're unlikely to ever want to go back to the place you were before.
Julia Marie (09:38):
I can understand that sentiment exactly. My raising was very similar, also a child of the fifties and the sixties. Now I read the book, the story that frames the rest of the book itself to me was a perfect example of how using these techniques can totally change how we respond to what happens to us. Now. Many people, especially when they're trying to reorder their life after a tragedy, tend to spiral downwards. And when you and your wife experienced a loss that took your life literally to the ground, somehow you demonstrated a certain type of resilience that came about through your meditation practice. So first, can you just share what happened?
Dawson Church (10:39):
I had been meditating at that point for many years. I was supposed to write a book for Hay House about post-traumatic growth. That was the idea. And the research shows that we all have stressors. We all have traumatic events. You're going to have people who you love die. You're going to have people inevitably
who you're close to and the friendship doesn't work out. They move away. You have losses in your life. You lose certain things throughout your life that you really love and miss and want, and how do we deal with those? And some of them are traumatic. We might lose people in really difficult ways or lose parts of
ourselves or things we love. And research shows that roughly two thirds of people when confronted with traumatic loss, not just a small thing, but a great big capital trauma, two thirds of people actually eventually do really well and may even use that as a way to move to a higher level of being.
(11:37):
But one third of people don't. One third of people are so affected that they remain devastated by that traumatic loss and they spiral into this pattern of symptoms we call PTSD, post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. And so for many, many years since roughly the late nineties, I was really focused, in fact probably even earlier on psychological methods that help us to move into coping that give us the tools to
get better. And then around 2000, I made the decision to meditate every single day. So it was incredibly powerful to make that choice that no matter what, no excuses, no compromises. My friend Jack Canfield, who wrote the book, the Success Principles and also was the co-author of the Chicken Soup series, love,
just had wonderful mentor in my life. If you read Jack's book, the Success Principles, one of his principles is that a 100% commitment is a breeze because you have no doubt after that, he said 99% commitment is a bitch, but a hundred percent is a breeze.
(12:49):
So I made that commitment and I was meditating every day. And then in 2017, suddenly I had this completely life altering experience where I woke up in the middle of the night, my wife was shaking me awake by the shoulder. I looked out the window and I saw this wild fire racing toward our house, and I just yelled, we're getting out of here right now. It was 12:45 AM We literally just sprinted to the closet, grabbed our closed, grabbed phones, ran to the car as the world around us was, it was like a hellscape with this Bernie embers just hitting. Our body was hitting the ground all around us. The winds were gusting at hurricane or tornado speed, and it was just a crazy loud, it was loud, loud, loud. We lived on a
piece of property with a lot of land around us, and so we had a long way to run to get to our car and then all these loud sounds because around us, our neighbors gas tanks were exploding and their propane tanks were exploding and trees were exploding and houses just crazy soundscape as well as visual landscape.
(14:11):
We drove out of there. We just barely escaped seconds before the fire, the big part of the fire hit, and that initiated a part of our lives when we had just had turmoil, all kinds of turmoil. We got out, we found ourselves the next day staying at a hotel many, many miles away. But we then saw photographs someone
had taken of where our house had been and all there was a concrete slab, ashes and a chimney sticking up.
Nothing else remained of our house, of our office, of our cars, of our pets, of our property. It was just completely wiped out. 5,000 houses were burned that night, and so 5,000 families lost their homes. Over 20 people died. They were just swept away by the fire, by the flames. And so suddenly we found ourselves one of 5,000 families and all the emergency services in the county were totally overwhelmed.
(15:12):
No one knew what was going on. So we had this many, many weeks of turmoil. And I tell that story, I tell the year after that in the first chapter of Bliss Brain. So I remember meditating that first day after the fire and then realizing I needed to anchor myself in meditation in EFT acupressure, tapping in all of the stress
reduction techniques I'd been training people in for the previous 20 years. And so I did. I used all of those techniques on myself, not just that first few days, but for the next couple of years. And we became people who didn't just survive, who thrived. We were able to put our lives back together again. We eventually were rebuilding our own life. We thought, why are we rebuilding our old life? Let's rebuild a new life, the life we really want, not just try and recreate all the stuff we already had. So all kinds of things happened in that year, but it was a powerful time for my wife and me to really review our lives and then rebuild the life we really wanted rather than the old life we had so enjoyed. And so that's the potential of post-
traumatic growth, is to turn even the tragedies and losses of your life and use them as fuel for your upward movement and transformation. And that's the potential we all have.
Julia Marie (16:44):
There was one part of that story that I really enjoyed, and that was when you made the intentional statement to say that if it doesn't fit in the Four Seasons resort, I don't want it in my life. You found yourself accepting a used couch that maybe wasn't too torn up, and your wife would gently remind you, would that fit in a Four Seasons resort? And I like to call those things pop quizzes from the universe when
we say, no, we're not doing that anymore. We want this. And the universe will send you, are you sure you want that? Here's a perfectly usable couch that you can say yes to, but that's not in alignment with your new intention. So I very much enjoyed that reminder.
Dawson Church (17:39):
Yeah, absolutely. So it gives you a chance to revision your life and then off you've had that loss say, what is my highest good? What is my highest intention? What does the universe want for me? It might be infinitely greater than what my limited local mind wants myself in Bliss Brain. And I talk about that, the idea of limited local mind. We have our local individual minds, and then we participate in the one mind and the great mind of the universe, the universal consciousness in which we live. And people say, oh, I'm looking for meaning in my life. I'm looking for a connection with something larger than myself. That's like a fish saying, I'm looking for water. We're in the middle of it. We're immersed in universal consciousness all the time. We just have to wake up and notice, oh, we're here.
Julia Marie (18:33):
I like that a fish saying, I'm looking for water. I say the same thing to people I talk to. I say that my physical body is the avatar for my soul, that there is a greater part of me that wants to express itself into this world, and it can only do so through this vehicle. So it's a similar concept. Now, I want to get into talking about the technique you talk about in Bliss Brain, but there's a couple of terms that if you wouldn't mind defining before we begin. And the two that I'm asking about now are the default mode network.
What that is and what the task positive network is.
Dawson Church (19:19):
And this is something that people don't really understand. Neuroscientists know all about this, but the average person doesn't realize this, is that the analogy I use in the book is that we've known, and most people have heard this before, that our brain uses about 20% of all our bodies energy. So the oxygen, the
nutrients that our body has available for our cells, 20% of it is used by our brain. Our brain is only 2% of our body's mass. It uses 20% of our body's energy. It's just a really energy intensive piece of hardware, and it's using that 20% day in day out all the time. And this was a huge big puzzle for neuroscience for decades, because surely when I'm focused on something, when I'm building a spreadsheet, when I'm composing an email, when I'm writing a poem, when I'm playing a song, when I'm I intensely involved in a conversation, surely that's demanding a lot of brainpower, then I'm using 20%.
(20:29):
But why would I go and take a walk around the block and take a break from work and go on vacation?
Why doesn't my brain's level of utilizing those resources drop? And what was discovered in the mid nineties is that there's a of the brain that when we aren't doing stuff, when we aren't calling on our brain to actively accomplish the tasks, there's a part of our brain that turns on an inverse proportion to the task part
of the brain. The task part of the brain is a set of regions roughly on the side of the head. Sometimes I call it the hat band. If you can think about wearing a hat. And there's a band that goes around here, and there's that hat band of regions around the side of the head. That's the task network. And that's active when we're
doing a task, when we kick back, when we relax, when we're not doing a task, a whole different set of regions kicks in and absorbs all that surplus energy.
(21:31):
And that's in the middle of our brains. I think of that as the mohawk. That's the Mohawk right in the center of the brain over here. And that's the default mode network because our brain defaults to using that part of the brain anytime. We aren't actively doing a task. So when we do a task, then our task positive
network turns on our default mode network quiets down when we aren't actively doing stuff and our task activity goes down, our default mode network turns on. And the default mode network does a number of very interesting things. One of them is it builds our sense of self when you're just lost in the task. I mean,
somebody in totally in flow at this very moment. Actually, my wife is in her art studio, and I walked in there and she's painting sunflowers. She's painting Van Gogh, sunflowers, and she is completely in flow.
(22:27):
So her toss positive network is turned on. Her default mode network is quiet, and she just forgets about the world. She's just completely absorbed in this incredibly pleasurable activity. So that's the activity of the Task positive network. And so when we stop doing that and we then take a break, our default mode
network goes up, our task positive network goes down, and the default mode network is very focused on the past and also on the future. So it starts to default to things that went wrong in the past and things that might go wrong in the future. And for our caveman brain ancestors, that was perfect. I mean, you aren't
doing a task now like digging for Ruths or looking for making a snare for an animal. Then your brain defaults to, well, let's reflect on things. What's most important for me as caman to reflect on?
(23:27):
Well, there was that tiger that almost ate me yesterday, and the tiger might eat me tomorrow, so I better think hard about what the tiger looks like and then how to avoid the tiger when it comes around again. So that's what the brain defaults to. And so we have these two networks. One is very involved in tasks and
flow and being in the present moment. The other is really about the future, really about the past. And the default mode network also builds our sense of self out of that, our sense of who we are. So what we find in people who are meditators is that the task positive network is mildly activated by certain kinds of
meditation. And the default mode network quietens down. So they are not in the past, not in the future. They then enter that magical present moment and that flow state.
(24:19):
So there are this inverse relationship between the two. And with certain ready specific kinds of meditation, we can enter into that flow state. And when do, we're in the present moment, of course, we're happy when the default mode network is on. We are miserable. We're thinking about all the bad stuff in the past, all the bats, stuff that might happen in the future. We're anxious. We're anxious about the future challenges. We're depressed about the miserable things that happened in the past. We are not happy. And so in the immortal words of two Harvard psychologists who did a huge study of this, they said that a
wandering mind is an unhappy mind, a default mode network brain is an unhappy brain. And that's how we make ourselves so unhappy is when we're not doing a task. We're in the default mode network. It's regurgitating, it's reflecting on, it's just obsessed with all the bad stuff in our past, our future. And then it
makes us really, really unhappy in people with major depressive disorder, for example, the default mode network is highly active. So we want to find ways of shifting that balance. And again, meditation in BS brain is the primary method for doing that.
Julia Marie (25:37):
So then if I understand what you said here, then that default mode network is why our brains might be hardwired for negativity because it doesn't let us be here. Now
Dawson Church (25:55):
They default to negativity. That's so useful for our survival ancestors to default to thinking about bad stuff. So they could not then have bad experience again and survive the next day. So yeah, I was really adaptive for our ancestors.
Julia Marie (26:11):
Doesn't work so well for us today.
Dawson Church (26:14):
Well, that many tigers running around the neighborhood. I mean, I checked, look at my window right now. I don't see, did not see a single tiger there, Julia. Me neither.
Julia Marie (26:27):
Well, that's our time for today and concludes part one of my two-part conversation with Dawson Church. Next time we explore just how you can physically change the anatomy of your brain and transform your life with eco meditation. Evolving Humans is now on YouTube. Go to Evolving Humans with Julia Marie
and subscribe so that you don't miss any new content posted on the Channeling project. And I'm adding Guided Meditations designed to support your evolving journey. Thank you for continuing to support evolving humans.