ecoMeditation: Change Your Life, Change the World Ep 165 | Guest: Dawson Church

We explore the process of ecoMeditation in this episode, and Dawson Church brings suggestions that can make a difference for all of us.

The interview covers the topic of eco meditation, a technique developed by Dawson Church that combines various meditation and relaxation practices in a specific sequence to help people quickly achieve a deep meditative state.  

The discussion explores the science behind eco meditation, how it can rapidly change brain structure and function, and the potential for widespread societal impact if more people adopt the practice. 

Episode Highlights:

• Eco meditation combines techniques like heart coherence breathing, acupressure tapping, mindfulness, and self-hypnosis in a specific sequence to quickly induce a deep meditative state. [02:29]
• Practicing eco meditation for 30 days can lead to significant anatomical changes in the brain, including reduced activity in the default mode network and increased activity in the compassion and altruism network.
• Eco meditation can help rewire the brain to develop positive traits like happiness, gratitude, and resilience, rather than just temporary states. [18:15]
• Surrounding yourself with positive people, consuming positive media, and managing your own negative thoughts are also important for brain health and transformation. [14:23]
• If more people adopt practices like eco meditation, it could lead to a "blizzard of radical social change" towards greater compassion, kindness, and global wellbeing. [21:19]

RESOURCES:
Dawson's website

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Transcript

This transcript was generated using ai, and therefore may contain errors.
Julia Marie (00:00):
Here's part two of my conversation with Dawson Church. We dive into the details of eco meditation, the research behind it, and most importantly, how you can transform your life with this one simple practice.
Welcome to Evolving Humans, the podcast for awakening souls. I'm your host, Julia Marie. Settle in and get ready for another spirited conversation. Now, you kind of alluded to this a little bit earlier that I just want to reiterate. A lot of people think that meditation is difficult. Again, take years, that whole 10,000
hour rule can take years to master, but I feel like you've hinted at, and now I'd like for you to please explain a little bit about what you call the eco meditation process.
Dawson Church (01:12):
Sure, absolutely. Well, I came up with eco meditation because meditation is hard for most people. And when I joined the spiritual community at the age of 15, the meditation master said, meditation simple. All you do is sit there, close your eyes, steal your mind. And like most people, I couldn't steal my mind. My
mind has started racing. In fact, you closed your eyes. The default mode network really gets going. Now you're really thinking about all the bad stuff going on and you're worried and you're anxious. And so it doesn't work for most people. And the way most of us are taught to meditate, I took meditation classes, I took Buddhist meditation classes, I read books, and I, the reason I'm so well known for my meditation methods now is I pretty much was the world's worst meditator. I would just have my mind full of distraction.
(02:02):
So I found though that science to the rescue science came to the rescue because I read study showing, for example, that HeartMath is really effective at producing heart coherence. Self-hypnosis has some wonderful techniques to it. Mindfulness can help you with that breathing and biofeedback, neurofeedback, EFT, tapping, tapping on acupuncture points, calms you. So in 2009, I was playing with
all of these different methods of meditation after about 10 years of meditating daily, and I'd learned all of these and I would use them intermittently. Then I thought, how about if I use all of these methods in sequence? How about if I tap on ACU pressure points and then do heart coherent breathing and then do
near feedback biofeedback, then do mindfulness, then do self-hypnosis? And I found that the sequence of all of these things put me into a really deep state very, very quickly.
(03:02):
So I began to offer it to other people. Suddenly they found they could get into a meditative state even if they'd failed. Everything else they tried, and I put it up on the web, called it eco meditation, ECO meditation. It's been free for the last 15 years or so on the web. Millions of people have begun to use it,
and it just gets you there in a flash. You just do this takes about five minutes to stack those practices on top of each other, and you're just in this really relaxed state. It calms the default mode network. We now have MRI scans showing that it just calms the default mode network down and the network brain network
that is responsible for compassion and altruism and gratitude and happiness and various kinds of positive emotion. That part is highly active in e-com meditation. So that's what I've been doing and practicing myself ever since.
Julia Marie (04:02):
I think it was probably the stacking component that intrigued me. It wasn't just like one thing. I'm very happy you are bringing this to the world. Now, how can this process, this meditation process, change how my brain functions when I'm not meditating, for example?
Dawson Church (04:23):
That's a very good question, Julia. And what we're doing, we meditate, is we are training our physiology to be a certain way, and what happens after a while of that training? And for eCom meditation, the period is about 30 days. Now, eCom meditation is very, very effective because it's physiologically based. It's
using the stack of our procedures one off to the other, and they take about five minutes to do the whole stack. And then we're in that space. We regulate our physiology. So what eCom meditation is doing, it's giving us that physiological regulation really, really fast. And then it shifts the way our brain functions
when we shift the way our brain functions once or twice, and people usually, well, the very, very first time they try it, they're usually like, wow, okay, I tried that. That really put me into a pleasant, relaxed, deep state.
(05:32):
Then they do it again and they do it again, and they do it day after day after day. And in a clinical trial, we
found that after 30 days of doing it, substantial anatomical change happen in the brain. Now, if you think about substantial anatomical change happening in any part of the body, that's like me saying, okay, go to the gym workout, go onto the bars and let's do some arm lifts for 30 days. And you're going to have
gigantic physiological change and you aren't. You're going to work out and after a month, you're going to see maybe a tiny bit of change, but it'll take you three to six months to see your body reshaping itself in a year or two to see big shifts in your body. Our brains work much faster, transform much faster than our
muscle fibers. So you do EQ meditation every day for that 30 days, and you're going to find remarkable shifts happening in just that very, very brief four week period.
(06:44):
And you literally are changing the anatomy of your brain. We find that that default mode network gets very quiet in only a month, and that compassion network lights up dramatically in that 30 days. So with eCom meditation, you're producing rapid brain change, enormous amounts of pleasure, all of these
pleasure chemicals that are unlocked like serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, andandamide, make you feel really good. So now you're feeling good as you shut down the default bone network as you activate these other pleasure neurochemicals and you tend to repeat the process. So people will start eCom meditation and I'll say, do it for a month, just one month. And people hardly ever stop because they feel so good after that. So I challenge all of you listening, just go to eCom meditation.com, download the track, it's free there, and then do it for a month, and you're likely to get totally hooked.
Julia Marie (07:50):
Now, that's the kind of an addiction the world needs more of, I would say. So we've talked a lot about the process itself, and you've told me basically, I could change my world in 30 days. Now, I enjoyed chapter six where you talked about how it's possible to change the hardware in my brain using the software of the
mind, and you talked about altered states versus altered traits. So what's the difference first between the two and how can eco meditation help me make the shift?
Dawson Church (08:29):
A state is something you experience temporarily. So you go and look at a beautiful sunset, and that fills you with inner peace. So now you have the experience of inner peace. You go and read a great scripture, you listen to an inspiring speaker, you go and hear some really uplifting music, and now you're in this
wonderful state. But then you walk out of the concert hall or the sun sets, and you go home and the experience ends, and you're right back to the way you were before. So states can be pleasant, but they're temporary. Also, states of distress are temporary. If you get upset, you'll be upset for a while, but you're
making a lot of the stress hormone cortisol, and after a while it is going to diminish. And so you may be triggered, you may get angry, resentful, upset, shame, blame any of those negative emotions, and you'll be
there as a temporary state for a while, and then it'll pass.
(09:37):
A trait is when you are happy as your disposition, you are a happy person, a fundamentally happy person.
And what we found, the astonishing thing that's going on inside our brains is that when we experience states, they are producing patterns of firing in our neurons. And so I'm feeling this happy state. I'm firing the neural bundles of happiness in my brain, and neurons that fire together wire together. So now after
firing those happy neurons for a week, a month, two months, three months, four months, five months now again, I've been bulking up these inner neural muscles inside my brain. They've gotten much, much
bigger. Now, I'm happy almost all the time because I've built the neural wiring around that. Now I have happiness as a trait. And exactly the reverse thing can happen with negative emotion. Negative emotion is producing neural wiring. In one study of twins, male twins where one twin went and served in Vietnam,
the other twin did not go to Vietnam.
(10:55):
These men had identical genes, very same neural firing patterns before they went away. When they came back, the twin that had been to Vietnam developed a much faster stress response in the brain and developed traits to do with hypervigilance and avoidance, and many of the characteristics of PTSD hardwired into the brain. It works both ways. And so you are hardwiring your brain by the way you think.
You are using the software of your thinking to produce hardware in your brain. Every thought you think, every emotion you feel, and if you don't take control of the process, you're just being triggered. You have all these negative emotions running around. You build those neural pathways of the brain. And often if
you're running the neurochemistry of stress, anger, resentment, blame, shame, guilt, all of those negative emotions, those pathways get bigger. And PTSD, for example, the symptoms usually get worse and worse and worse throughout your lifetime until you die of fairly miserable death at a fairly early age.
(12:05):
I mean, the results are not pretty for medical outcomes, people with PTSD. And so this has real consequences for your health and longevity. But if you meditate and you're firing all of these patterns in your brain, all of these pathways of kindness and compassion and gratitude and joy, thankfulness, optimism, you're making all of those, your normal state, those states eventually rewire themselves into
traits and that becomes your brain. So when Christina and I, when my wife and I had the fire, we were dysregulated, we had traumatic stress, we were miserable, we lost everything we owned. It was not an easy time for us, as I talk about in that first chapter of my book Sprain. But we were resilient because we
had spent years meditating and tapping and all these other spiritual practices, and they gave us all that hard wiring of resilience. So you want to do all this stuff before you lose your job, before you get sick, before you get divorced, before there's a downturn in the economy.
(13:18):
Do all of this stuff and build, use your mind intelligently to build those traits of resilience. You've used the software of your mind to use the hardware of your brain, and you have this brain that's I just tell you, it is so wonderful to live in a brain that is full of love and kindness, and you let bad stuff happen that's
going on that will upset you, and you are just basically have this trait, all these positive traits of optimism, joy, happiness, and gratitude. So they're now hardwired into the actual physical structure of your brain,
Julia Marie (13:54):
And you tend to respond to a situation instead of react to it. And that's not a bad thing. Now, we've talked about the positive effects meditation can have on our brain and how it can change our brain, but what are some of the other things, the other activities that maybe some of us do that can change how our brain
works maybe in a not so positive way?
Dawson Church (14:23):
Who you associate with makes a big difference. If you are hanging around people who are negative, who are processors of negative emotion, that negative emotion's triggering mirror neurons in your brain and is going to drag you down. And so what you'll find is there's a negative spiral, and we've all been part of
conversations where somebody says something a little bit negative and then somebody else says something negative, and then before you know it, you've really just gone down the drain in terms of the vibrational energy in the room. And so you want to pick positive people for your life. Pick positive people
for your friends, for people who are close to you, find the most inspirational people you can possibly find, spend time with them. Media, what are you putting into your field of awareness? There's an old saying in the computer science, garbage in, garbage out if you're consuming all kinds of garbage media with negativity and violence and criticism.
(15:24):
And I watched some stations and listened to some. I was in a taxi cab recently and the driver was listening to a program, and clearly he just has this running his whole shift. He just has radio tuned this talk talk station. I don't even know what the talk station was, but there was this constant patter of negativity. It was
called news, but it wasn't really news. It was just basically negative commentary on other people and things and name calling, and I had no value at all. I think garbage in, garbage out. What is this doing to this guy's neurology? What is this doing to his mood? How do you stay positive when you're pulling all this garbage from media? So just turn that stuff off. Just quit watching it. You'll find after a while, once you've rewired your neural network, you don't really want to watch those gory movies anymore or those violent images or scenes.
(16:29):
You can't make them go away, but you can certainly not participate in them yourself. So media, what books are you reading? What are the visual images you're bringing in? When I watch a movie and there's a scene that's just violent or I can't avoid it, I just close my eyes and look away. I don't have stuff going in
here. So be really curator. If you were walking through a buffet line and looking at the food and choosing food to put in your body and there was rotten stinking refuse in that buffet line, would you load up your plate with it? Would you put any of that on your plate? You absolutely would not. Many of us treat our
minds with far less respect than we treat our elementary canal, where not discriminating about what we put into our minds. We're watching news, watching stories. That's like eating garbage.
(17:28):
And you don't want to do that to your precious brain and your consciousness. Direct your consciousness to positive things. So positive people, positive media. And then our thoughts. My biggest source personally, me, docent church, biggest source of challenge is my thoughts. My thoughts are pretty much
like that buffet. And there's a of garbage that surfaces in my own thinking every day. I wish I could tell you after there are decades of doing this, I didn't have to worry about that anymore. But I'm sure there are saints who don't have negative thoughts anymore, but I'm certainly not one of them. And every day after
wrestle with my own negative thoughts, I'll see myself obsessing about something and it's like focusing on the garbage. How do you break that cycle? That's what meditation comes in, where spiritual practices come in. There are various ways of breaking that cycle. So the third thing besides people media, the third
thing is inputs your own thoughts. What do you do? And there's a lot of guidance in my books. I give you methods to interrupt your thinking pattern, interrupt, interrupt that pattern to take that negative thought
and just release it quickly. Don't keep harboring it anymore than you would tolerate having crap on your dinner plate.
Julia Marie (18:49):
Well, that was a very vivid picture you painted. Yes.
Dawson Church (19:00):
Yeah, get the point.
Julia Marie (19:06):
So we've talked a little bit about the potential of this process and what it can do for me individually, and I just want to expand it out and maybe orient it to the wider view or vision of the potential of this. What could happen if whole groups of people start doing eco meditation?
Dawson Church (19:30):
Well, whole groups of people are doing meditation and millions of people do eco meditation, but hundreds of millions of people are doing meditation and countries, Western countries have been tracking this. The union has a European, a pan-European tracking system for tracking this. In the US we have the
centers for the disease control, C, D, C, that tracks people doing meditation, prayer, various spiritual practices over the course of a week or a month. And the number of people doing it in 1980 was roughly 1% of the population. So one of every a hundred people was doing it in 1980, but by around 2005, around
4% of the population was doing it. Now, that's a massive increase. That's a 400% increase in the number of people meditating today, 20%. So in 1980, we had 1% of the population changing their brains, working out those neural muscles, firing and wiring those circuits of gratitude, compassion, joy, love.
(20:49):
Today we have 20 times the number of people doing that, and it is producing massive change. We track the social changes that are happening, and we're on the threshold of a blizzard of radical social change all toward the good, all toward compassion, all toward joy, all toward kindness, all toward inclusion, all
toward peace, toward global wellbeing. So it may seem hard when you read the headlines and I explain why in bliss brain and spiritual intelligence, why it seems hard if you're reading the news to spot these trends. But zoom out, 30,000 foot view and the global data is overwhelming, that there is this new era of
human flourishing that we human beings are in driven by the spiritual intelligence practices like meditation and by various other forms of compassion we have as a society. So we're in the middle of this radical evolutionary shift. I mean, no species ever in history has been able to change its own brain in 30 days. We human beings have that gift and we are using it masse and are now producing massive social
change as a result.
Julia Marie (22:09):
Well, I'm just going to tell you that when you're talking about all of that, I'm having, again, a physiological response, like the goosebumps of truth or rolling down my legs. Yes, there is potential here for us to change how we are in the world, and it's kind of exciting. Now, could I then say that maybe eco meditation is a bit of a systems disruptor?
Dawson Church (22:38):
It is a shortcut to getting there quickly. So the reason it's so effective is that all of these methods individually have a lot of research behind them. So EFT has over 200 clinical trials. HeartMath has a lot of studies of that, acupressure, acupuncture, over 15,000 studies. So all of these methods are well studied.
If you put them together, it gets you there really, really quickly. There are several studies of eCom meditation. Now, it shifts people very, very rapidly. So you want to just do eCom meditation, and we find even experienced meditators benefit from the steps in eCom meditation. One of the cool things talking
about systems disruptor, several clinical trials have been published very, very recently. And I report on these in my new book, spiritual Intelligence. And what they're showing is that people who do the style of meditation where they're shifting their physiology, there are several clinical trials of Alzheimer's patients.
(23:42):
And in Alzheimer's patients, of course, your brain shrinks. The Alzheimer's brain shrinks up to 70%. I have an image and spiritual intelligence of a normal 65-year-old brain and an Alzheimer's brain. And the Alzheimer's brain is like a little walnut rattling around in that head. It is so tiny. So the brain shrinks a lot
with Alzheimer's. And of course you have radical cognitive decline followed by death. So that's the course of Alzheimer's cognitive decline and brain shrinkage. And they found that people doing this style of meditation, physiological meditation, where they're shifting their breathing, shifting their muscle
patterns, those Alzheimer's patients doing that, they were expecting that it would change the course. They didn't have as rapid a brain decline. They found that did not happen with those Alzheimer's patients. Their brains began to grow again. So radical change, literally Alzheimer's brains regrowing with this kind of
meditation. It's going to be able to affect all kinds of degenerative disease and give us much healthier and much happier lifespans. It's going to shift society as a whole. It's going to affect a lot of individuals and people, and we're on the threshold of an absolutely remarkable shift in society as we implement these
kinds of evidence-based changes on a global scale. So yeah, it is a game changer, and we're living through it right now.
Julia Marie (25:19):
I'm glad I get to be a part of this one. So we're coming to the end of our time, and I just want to ask, we've covered a lot of ground, but I always like to ask, is there anything that I didn't ask you about but you wish I had?
Dawson Church (25:36):
Well, the bottom line I love to share with people is that we are beings of unlimited potential. And we are like people who have available to us at Palace, and we're living like in the outhouse. I mean, we're just not living our potential. And so you have a potential that you won't even believe until you start to do these
practices and unveil it. And when you release your trauma, when you release your stress, your shift from that mohawk to that hat badge shift from the default mode network to the task positive network, you develop that part of your brain, which you can do in 30 days. Your life just gets dramatically better, and
you start to live and express your potential. So that's really my prayer for us as individuals and for humankind, is that we have the ability, we have extraordinary powers, which we barely begin to tap, and that's where we're destined to move next. So claim this for yourself. Don't live small, don't live in the outhouse. Go inhabit the palace.
Julia Marie (26:41):
That's probably the best takeaway for the entire show. Don't live in the outhouse. Go live in the palace. This has been a mind expanding conversation and personally inspiring for me. So before we close, can you please tell the people how they can connect with you?
Dawson Church (27:02):
Sure. There's a lot you can do to participate in this whole cycle. And the basic thing to do is to go to the website, Dawson, my name, just D-A-W-S-O-N, and then the word gift, GIF t.com, dawson gift.com, and you can download the EFT Tapping manual and also a free eCom meditation tracks. So go there and download those two. Just start using those right away. Use eCom meditation for 30 days. And again, you're rewiring your brain. Use the tapping manual to release your stress and then see what else is there.
That's your access point. We have certified clinical e ft practitioners who can work with you and help release trauma. It doesn't take more than a few sessions. We have live classes. We have a lot of virtual ones as well. So it's all evidence-based material we have on EFT Universe. I think it's all available through that Dawson gift.com link. And you'll find access there to all the other things. But at the least,
download the manual, get the free meditation, and just start to then release those things that are holding you back.
Julia Marie (28:13):
Well, I just want to thank you again for taking the time to speak with us today. And your insights probably going to inspire, hopefully some new eco meditation practitioners that I'm always on the hunt for things that make living a spirit guided life in a material world easier. And this really does sound like it will. So thank you for bringing Bliss Brain to the world.
Dawson Church (28:42):
It's a joy, Julia. It's a joy this moment. It's a joy every day. Thanks for having me.
Julia Marie (28:46):
Well, that's our time for today. Evolving Humans is now on YouTube, along with the channeling, project releases and other content not available on the podcast. Click on the link in the show notes and subscribe so you don't miss any new content. And now here's a quote for you to ponder as you go about your day.
While material things may come and go, the core of eternal energy, that is the truth of our being and not be burned, Dawson Church