Tami Simon: Welcome to Insights at the Edge, produced by Sounds True. My name’s Tami Simon, I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I’d love to take a moment to introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation. The goal of the Sounds True Foundation is to provide access and eliminate financial barriers to transformational education and resources such as teachings and trainings on mindfulness, emotional awareness, and self-compassion. If you’d like to learn more and join with us in our efforts, please visit SoundsTrueFoundation.org
In this episode of Insights at the Edge my guest is Dawson Church. Dawson is an award-winning science writer with three bestselling books to his credit. He’s a prolific researcher on how to apply the breakthroughs of energy psychology to health and personal performance. Also, dozens of his studies have been published in peer-reviewed journals. With Sounds True, Dawson Church is the creator of a new audio learning series. It’s called Healing the Roots of Trauma: Emotional Freedom Technique for Recovery and Resilience. I have to say that I am floored by the research that Dawson has done, the studies that he’s done, and the results that he’s found from the effectiveness of EFT in the field. Take a listen.
We are connecting here for the first time after something like two decades. I remember meeting you 20-plus years ago at some kind of publishing event. You’re in the publishing world. I’m in the publishing world, and here you are, a Sounds True author, creator of this new audio series on the Emotional Freedom Technique. So bring me up to date. What was your personal journey moving from being in the publishing business to now being a writer, researcher, and teacher of the Emotional Freedom Technique?
Dawson Church: Yes, and that was a Book Expo America, Tami, many, many years ago. It was a wonderful experience meeting in publishing because in publishing, as you know, we get to meet the most fabulous people who are authors and then we play a role in getting their ideas out to the world. And I loved doing that. But then, in 1997, I retired and I wound up buying a small hotel and being a bed and breakfast owner for a while. And Tami, it was so boring. It was so boring, just wasn’t me. So I got back into it. I also recognized that this burgeoning field of energy psychology was really growing. So I started Energy Psychology Press and it’s the intersection of the energy work, energy medicine work that all these wonderful healers do, and also psychology and the ability to shift PTSD, anxiety, depression, phobias, other psychological types of disorders.
And I realized there was a big opportunity there. So I began the publishing company just in time after ten years to see that the world was going away from books and toward online sorts of media. So I then made the switch, began to offer online courses, and now we do a few books and hardly anyone that knows what those are anymore. They have their pages inside, they have covers, things like that. But we’re mostly doing online courses. So now we can reach people in all the time zones of the world. We have such a big reach doing that. I love that about this work.
And I also moved, Tami, from being an observer and a facilitator. As a publisher, I wanted to get these ideas out there. And after a while I realized that people are suffering. People are suffering psychologically, they’re suffering medically, and energy therapies can make an enormous difference. And we look at the research into how large the effects are of energy treatment. We realized the potential of these therapies. And so I switched from being a publisher to being an author and a real advocate for these therapies. Eventually I was able to help get them into the Veterans Administration. They’re in Kaiser Permanente, they’re in a lot of hospital systems. They’re in John’s Hopkins, they’re in Cleveland Clinic. And so I really want to see these therapies in primary care, and that’s my current focus.
TS: Now, you yourself have done quite a bit of research on the effectiveness, specifically, of the energy therapy, the Energy Freedom Technique. Can you explain, just introduce people who are not familiar to EFT and then what kinds of studies you’ve done and the results that you’re seeing?
DC: I remember the very first time I used EFT myself, and I was a gestalt therapy advocate at the time. And this therapist friend of mine said, “Dawson, I’m working with Vietnam veterans. I’m working with people having sports performance and anxiety, and I’m working with this variety of clients and we’re using this technique where they tap with their fingertips on acupuncture points.” Tami, I thought I’d never heard anything more ridiculous in my life. Tapping on acupuncture points can help with psychotherapy? And so I didn’t really have much faith in the idea. In fact, I took the instruction manual he gave me and threw it in a big pile of papers and forgot all about it until a few months later I had a really difficult moment in my own life when I was trying to sell a business and the sale was collapsing and I got really anxious.
At that moment, mysteriously, that instruction sheet surfaced at the top of my slush pile, and I sat down on the steps in my office and I tapped and my anxiety dropped by half, a lot, and then I began to pay attention to it. Then other psychotherapist friends began saying, “I’m not just treating Westerners. I’m not just treating Westerners for anxiety. I just got back from Rwanda and I’m treating people whose parents were killed in the genocide there, and tapping is releasing those PTSD symptoms like flashbacks and nightmares.” Then I really paid attention, when I heard about Vietnam veterans and Haitian orphans and variety of people with severe chronic stressful events in their life that were being affected by it.
So I dove into research. And research quantifies things. I want to know, not just that you got better, I want to know, on average, if it’s a group of people, by how much you got better. And then we compare that, for example, to psycho-pharmacology and traditional talk therapy. And the results of EFT that we began to measure in these studies were immense. And so I got further and further into it. In my very first study published in 2010 in a medical journal called Integrative Medicine, a very respected journal, we showed that one day of tapping, one day of tapping—and we were using tapping with health-care workers, like doctors and nurses and chiropractors—a single day of tapping dropped their levels of anxiety and depression by 45 percent. Their cravings for things like cake and chocolate and cookies and alcohol and all these other things dropped off—tapping in a single session—by 83 percent. So we were getting these massive, massive results. I then said, “We absolutely have to get these therapies into primary care. We had to do research on them.”
And now we have just literally, yesterday, there are over 30 million people tapping in the world. It’s very simple. You just think about something that’s bad, something that troubles you—could be a personal event, could be a childhood event, current event, could be a really old event that you’d think of about, something that bothers you—and you really focus on it intently. What that does is it lights up all of the stress circuits of the brain, especially the midbrain or limbic system.
And so now you have—and Sounds True, there are a lot of authors, wonderful authors who talk about the limbic system and the arousal of the sympathetic nervous system. People like Stephen Porges and Stephen Levine talk about this. And we know from a lot of research that when you’re stressed, those parts of the brain are highly active. You have a highly active limbic system, and we can read those signatures on an MRI.
We can see on the MRI that you are highly stressed. We then notice, as we have people tap and stimulate these 14 acupuncture meridians, we see rapid deactivation of that. If they were dealing with a craving, the craving goes way down. If they were thinking about a childhood memory, their limbic activation drops remarkably in only a couple of minutes. So it’s acting on the information flows in the brain. And when your limbic system, your whole limbic structure is then deactivated and it’s no longer sending signals of fight or flight through the amygdala into the peripheral nervous system, a central nervous system, you get much calmer.
And then for example, that veteran who was sharing about the death of his friend in a roadside explosion in Iraq and his ten out of ten for emotion, his limbic brain is all lit up as he recalls that stressful event. After only a few minutes of tapping, typically those levels of triggering will go way down. He remembers the event clearly still and the death of his friend in combat and he now remembers it without that strong activation of the fear response. And that’s a typical scenario with EFT.
TS: OK, Dawson, so you said when you were first introduced, you threw the piece of paper away and rolled your eyes. And it seems like there are still a lot of people in the mainstream culture who are like, come on, if it sounds too good to be true, it’s not, kind of thing. And you’re only talking about one day and you’re getting a 45 percent reduction in anxiety and depression? We would all know about this. It would be in the news. It wouldn’t be in these semi-narrow or esoteric platforms—like a podcast like Insights at the Edge. So what’s the gap between the effectiveness of EFT and its mainstream adoption? How do you understand that?
DC: Actually, it’s very widespread in primary care and in the mainstream. We estimate there are tens of millions of people using it. I’ve had a free manual, mini manual, on my website for over a decade and over 3 million people have downloaded that. So it’s had a lot of attention that way. If you go on to the US government’s website, pubmed.gov, which reports clinical trials and top-level journals, you’ll find dozens of studies of EFT there. You’ll also find practice guidelines developed by Kaiser Permanente, a large hospital chain. You’ll find other practice guidelines for the Veterans Administration. It’s been approved by the VA. It’s used by the VA, so it’s working its way into primary care.
But Tami, the main obstacle actually is not skepticism or disbelief. It’s really our fundamental Western approach of believing that material reality is the primary reality, and thinking that energy and consciousness and awareness is just something vague and ephemeral. And what I show in my books, like I have a book called Mind to Matter, where I literally look at all the research showing how our brains transceive signals and then turn that into what we think of as material reality.
When our consciousness changes… A very simple example of consciousness change and molecular change is when I think a stressful thought, when I get upset, when I enter fight-or-flight, my body produces cortisol, much more cortisol. Cortisol rises, I’m literally producing a molecule, cortisol, using a thought. With EFT, you find that cortisol drops. In one of my studies on pubmed.gov, in one week, people’s baseline levels of that stress hormone cortisol dropped 37 percent. So big drops in physical things as a result of changes in awareness, consciousness, fear, emotion—always intangibles—but they’re having a huge effect in our body. So it is working its way into mainstream medicine, it’s in wide use in private therapy.
One study found that about 42 percent of therapists are using some form of energy therapy, usually EFT. It’s also now starting to be applied for other things. But our culture is so oriented to give me the pill, give me the surgery, give me the external agent to go into my body. And what’s so not oriented, looking at energy. But if you change your energy, you change the molecules your body is producing and very, very quickly you can shift all kinds of [things]. We find for example, that high stress leads—the ACE study, the adverse childhood experience study, which I know you’ve covered on previous podcasts, that showed that people who have unresolved trauma have much higher levels of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, suicide attempts, smoking, hepatitis, and on and on and on.
So unresolved trauma, emotional trauma, emotions are literally driving disease. When you release emotion, when you drop cortisol, when you have much lower levels of all those stress hormones and brainwaves, then your body thrives. And so it is working its way into a surprising number of medical and psychological treatments.
TS: Do you have a vision of where EFT is going to be in a decade?
DC: It’s funny, I was walking through MD Anderson Cancer Center. MD Anderson has got probably the most advanced cancer treatment set of hospitals in the US. And I was walking through there with a nurse friend of mine who does EFT with cancer patients and with staff there—especially staff, staff, nurses, doctors, other hospital workers, already stressed. So people got to go to chemotherapy there and there’s a big recovery room at MD Anderson in Orlando, Florida, for them to be in to stabilize after chemotherapy. And it’s a glass-fronted room so that nurses can walk past, look at and make sure if anyone is having a serious AD reaction, they can intervene.
So I walked past there with my friend Pat and she said, “Dawson, my vision for the future is that one day we’ll look through this glass and we’ll see a patient tapping, doing EFT.” I said to her, “Pat, that’s not my vision at all. My vision is one day soon we walk past this room looking through the glass and see that there’s a patient not tapping and we’ll wonder why.” So I expect it to spread really widely. It is spreading widely right now. And these therapies are so good that they’re going to become part of primary care, part of pain management, part of physiological issues and psychological issues. So they are gaining ground, but they need to be part of this whole paradigm shift we’re in the middle of—realizing that energy and consciousness and awareness has dramatic effects at the level of the physical.
TS: What’s the history of tapping? Who first came up with this notion and the actual protocol? I mean, you start by saying to yourself as you’re tapping, I deeply and completely accept myself. I found that really interesting, really powerful. But I’d love to know more how this particular protocol that you teach came into being?
DC: Self-acceptance is pretty powerful. Carl Jung said essentially that self-acceptance is the primary marker of the material psyche. So Carl Roger said that, “Every journey in healing begins with accepting myself the way I am.” So that’s the fundamental precept of psychology for more than a century. Self-acceptance is really important. And then tapping itself comes from qigong. And that goes back thousands and thousands of years. I’ve been tapping with qigong masters now for 20 years, and it’s wonderful to realize that they’ve been incorporating tapping for centuries.
And then during President Nixon’s trip to China in 1972, one of his advisors witnessed an operation, surgery done only with ear acupuncture for pain. And that, then, began the whole cycle of the acceptance of acupuncture in the US. Also, shiatsu acupressure, pressure on pressure points that were just tapping or simply hard pressure on the various points.
It’s been around for a long, long time. A psychologist called Roger Callahan began to experiment with his clients in the late 1970s, early 1980s. And he worked with one client in particular and he tried everything with her, tried all kinds of things, because she had a phobia of water. Her name was Mary. She couldn’t immerse herself in water. She was afraid whenever she was around water. He had a swimming pool and treated people at his house and she couldn’t go within 20 feet of the pool. She was terrified. She’d have a panic attack if she got that close to a body of water. And after trying every single therapy he had, he read about acupressure and one day he just leaned over and tapped gently on her stomach meridian, which he knew was associated with fear, which is right under the pupil of her eye.
And so he tapped on her there, just wondering that might make a difference. That night, she phoned him and said, “My fear of water is gone.” He didn’t believe her, had her over the next day. She walked right up to the pool and stuck her feet in and for her the cure was permanent. She never had a fear of water. He then wrote a book called Five Minute Phobia Cure, which was published in 1985. His students took tapping further. So it’s an ancient technique, but it’s been systematized now. And EFT just uses a really simple form of tapping. But one, again, that’s now been proven in over 100 clinical trials.
TS: Can you talk me through the method and the import—how each step of the method is effective, how it works?
DC: I can walk you through it now. I have to warn you, Tami, do you know who Lisa Garr is? Lisa Garr?
TS: Yes.
DC: Anyway, OK, she asked me on my first interview with her, and this is live on the air, big audience. And she broke down crying and we had to interrupt.
TS: All right, I’m prepared for this. Let’s go.
DC: With that disclaimer in place. So you do that, and also every person listening now, I’d like you to think of an event in your life, within the last two weeks, that trouble you emotionally. So something that bothered you. You could have had a wait in line, you could have had a tense conversation with a coworker or a family member. So something in your life in the last couple weeks that affected you personally, directly, and where you had an emotional response to that. So think of something that happened in the recent past. Don’t go back to your childhood. It’s too triggering. Has to be within the last two weeks. Tami, just a couple of words of an annoying thing or triggering thing that happened to you.
TS: I’m going to pick a pretty low-lift one, which is my dogs are getting groomed upstairs and they whine and they bark and they howl and they’re upset. And when they’re upset like that, it upsets me. And my nervous system gets all jambled up when I hear them whining and howling and crying.
DC: Yes, entrainment. So think about your dogs getting groomed upstairs and then tune to yourself and your body right now, what number are you on a scale of zero to ten in terms of that triggering, zero being no triggering, ten being the maximum triggering.
TS: Well, I told you I’d pick something pretty mild. So I’m only really a four at this moment, especially because they’re quiet at the moment.
DC: OK, good. So they aren’t making a lot of noise right at this very moment. And you’re four. And now we’ll just go through the routine and if you’re listening, please do get your issue. Give it a really brief title, like “dogs being groomed.” And then I’ll describe to you which points to tap on to shift your energy. So you’ve got your number now, zero through ten. You’ve got your event, you’ve got your brief phrase. Now all we do is we incorporate that in a statement of self-acceptance while tapping on a meridian. And this meridian is on the side of your hand. So if you just look at the joint that anchors your little finger, then tap with three fingers on the other hand on that point. And either you can say out loud or silently. And I think, Tami, do it silently.
“Even though I’m remembering this issue,” —and, Tami, you can say the dog’s being groomed in your mind, really tune into the dogs being groomed, the sound of the whining—“I deeply and completely accept myself.” Keep tapping. Notice your breathing. Make sure you’re breathing deeply. “Even though I remember this emotionally triggering event,” —and then, Tami, you’ll say in your mind the name of your event, you’ll really tune into the sounds of those dogs being groomed. And if you’re listening to us, tune in and use the name of your event. “I deeply and completely accept myself.”
One more time, “Even though I remember this emotionally triggering event, name of your event. I am breathing now.” Notice your breathing, and “I accept myself just the way I am.” Now tap on the top of your head, right on the top of your head. That’s good. Yes. Keep your eyes open. Eyes open. There’s a lot of scientific theory behind this. I won’t explain it all now. I have whole books on that. So let that go. So tap the top of your head and again, really tune into that triggering event, your number, whatever your number is, the event. Remember it vividly. Now tap where your eyebrow meets the bridge of your nose with two fingers. So two fingers tapping where your eyebrow meets the bridge of your nose.
Notice your breath and say, either out loud or silently, the name of your emotionally triggering event. Notice your breath again. Now tap on the side of your eye, right on the edge of your eye socket in line with the very edge of your eye, and say the name of your event again. And again, vividly recall the specifics. Tami, keep your eyes open and vividly recall the sound of that whining, other noises they’re making, how long it went on, how intense it was, its volume, which dog was whining the most, that dog. Yes.
Now tap under the pupil of your eye with two fingers, really focusing on your event. This is your stomach meridian, the one that Roger Callahan tapped on with Mary with a fear of water, and really tune into your event. Let your mind be filled with your event and the recollection of your event, tapping onto your eye.
Now tap on to your nose. That’s your governing meridian end point. Good, keeping your eyes open, feeling your breath, all the details of the event. Now tap on your chin, on your lower lip. This is your central meridian you’re stimulating now. Feeling your breath, remembering that event, all the details of the event that bothered you within the last couple of weeks. And then tap where your collarbone meets your breast bone with three or four fingers on either side, feeling your breath, tuning into the event.
And then just reach onto your arm and tap about level with your elbow on the side of your body. That’s your spleen meridian. Tune in to the event as you stimulate your acupressure points. And then, one more time on the side of your hand. And then tap one more location, which is the back of your hand between the bones that anchor your little finger and your ring finger. So the back of your hand between those big long bones that anchor your little finger and your ring finger.
And now we’ll do a quick exercise that stimulates the production of calming brain waves. So first, keep your head steady and look all the way down. Keep your head steady, look all the way up. Imagine looking at a giant clock and you’re looking at 12 o’clock as you think about the event that annoyed you.
Now look at three o’clock, keeping your head steady. Look all the way to the side to the right at three o’clock. Now look all the way to the left at nine o’clock, keeping your head steady. Look all the way down at six o’clock again near the floor, look all the way up at 12 o’clock. Feel your breath as you think about the annoying event. And then stop tapping and relax. Relax completely. Feel your breath. And now think about the event again like you did exactly, let’s see, six minutes ago and see what your number is. How triggered are you on a scale of zero to ten? Tami, your dogs, that sound of them whining, what’s your number now? You’re smiling.
TS: I’d have to give it a one and a half. And, Dawson, I intentionally chose something that wasn’t a big-deal event. And of course I’d like to try this again with some things in my life that are more big-deal events. But thank you for taking us through that. It does bring up a bunch of questions for me. First is, I had a tendency I wanted to shut my eyes. Why keep the eyes open?
DC: Because we used to think that memories were static, like pulling a photograph out of an album, looking at the memory and dropping it back in the album. We now know that when we pull memories into our awareness, we actually modify them and we modify them by combining those memories, those images, those sensory experiences with information from the present moment. And the present moment contains safe information. So when we pull up a troubling piece of information from the past and pair it with a neutral piece of information or a pleasant stimulus now, just like for example, tapping or telling it to a friend or sharing it with a therapist, now we’re combining those two memories.
The way the brain works now is it’s putting that photograph back on the album with these positive or neutral emotional tags, which reduces the number. And it happens more if you have your eyes open than if you have your eyes closed.
TS: And this whole notion of actually bringing forward, bringing up the traumatic event, I mean, I’ve heard it say that that can be retraumatizing. Yet in this approach that you’re offering here with EFT, we’re intentionally bringing up the memory. So talk to me about that and what in the technique safeguards that it’s not retraumatizing?
DC: Retraumatization is coined by a therapist called Charles Figley in the 1980s. And the idea was first noticed strongly by another psychiatrist called Joseph Wolpe after World War II. And he was a famous psychiatrist and he was tasked with working, treating soldiers coming back from World War II with what they then called shell shock. And so being a good Freudian, he said, “Well lie down on the couch here and go ahead and talk about Omaha Beach.” He later wrote in one of his books, he wrote, “We found that this approach was not effective. It was harmful.” He noticed that they were worse after they remembered the bad stuff of their lives. And that’s retraumatization.
But if you pair that memory and that event and talk about that while you’re tapping, then something happens called memory reconsolidation and emotional extinction. And that means that you now reconsolidate that memory with a neutral cue and you remove all the emotional tags of fight or flight attached to the memory.
And so that’s why we keep our eyes open. That’s why we have this particular procedure. Because if you were just to tell the story, you retraumatize yourself. If you tell the story and you introduce the therapeutic cue of tapping, you then are able to cathartically discharge the emotion. Tami, I’ve done a lot of research that’s empirical research using MRIs, EEGs, cortisol, other genetic markers. I’ve done several studies using genetic tags. And I’ve done one study on epigenetic tags, little tiny molecules called micro RNAs.
We did this with veterans, veterans with severe PTSD, flashbacks, nightmares, intrusive thoughts, and a lot of disease. So in that study, we gave them ten one-hour sessions of EFT and we literally measured the expression of their genes before and after. And we found that a whole bunch of these micro RNAs, these micro RNAs attached to the genes of people who have traumatic stress, we see that parts of their genome that have to do with health, to do with emotional expression, to do with safety ought to shut down. And these little tags, micro RNA tags attached to the genes in stressed people, and those genes remain silenced. We literally saw those micro RNAs popping up the genome in this large-scale randomized control trial of veterans. So it is literally changing you epigenetically.
TS: OK, now I can imagine someone saying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We went from reduction of cortisol to impacting brainwaves to saying that EFT is an epigenetic intervention.” OK, so how do you measure whether or not something like tapping is affecting gene expression? You talked about these, but I didn’t follow it all, Dawson, to be honest. What are you measuring so that you can say this is a successful epigenetic intervention?
DC: Yes, you don’t have to measure these things in every patient and every client. I mean, these are highly technical studies that are measuring things like gene expression. And now, what’s really happened that’s been a game changer in the last ten years is—we used to need a blood draw to measure things like cortisol and gene expression. Now we can do on a saliva swab. So we have these companies like 23andMe now literally having people spit in a tube, mail it off to a lab, and we can extract enough genetic material from that saliva to be able to measure which genes are turned on, which genes are turned off. And about 85 percent of your genome is responsive to the environment, 15 percent is fixed, like I have gray eyes and brown hair. And that’s just a fixed genetic characteristic.
But only 15 percent is fixed. The other 85 percent is fluctuating depending on—and stress is having massive effects body-wide. Because think about it, your ancestors, 10,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago, when they were faced with a predator or a hostile environment, every single body system, organ system, had to come into play. Their muscles had to be filled up with blood and be ready for fight or flight. Their breathing would get shallow, forcing blood into their muscles for the stress response. So their hearts were pounding, their muscles were activated, their lungs were breathing shallowly. All these things were happening. A lot of it controlled by hormones like cortisol and by gene expression. And so we can measure these things now, it’s not easy, it’s highly technical. We can measure these now though. And there are now lots of studies showing that, all these things are being affected.
And the problem is that while those stress responses were highly useful for my ancestor 100,000 years ago, now being highly stressed just because I have a pimple on my chin. I mean, my daughter is a grown woman. I adore her. I see her a lot. But she was staying with us a while back and visiting from Colorado, where she lives. And Tami, she had a pimple on her chin and she was so stressed over the pimple on her chin. I was just laughing. It’s like, “I can’t even see the pimple on her chin,” but she’s like feeling like it’s a blemish to her whole life. So we get worried and stressed about our deadlines and not being the right body shape and being overweight, worried about all these things that, as Mark Twain said, never happened. So that stress is now not our friend the way it was to our ancestors. And so we want to really learn ways to bring it down by tapping.
TS: Impact our brainwaves, our brainwave state through tapping. And you had us using our eyes to look up at a clock and down at a clock and three o’clock, nine o’clock—tell me what’s going on in terms of brainwaves when I’m doing that kind of thing.
DC: It is so cool. And we’ve now known as we’ve been studying brain waves. So Hans Berger invented the EEG in 1929. And then around 1960, some advanced scientists like Robert Becker and Maxwell Cade used EEGs and looked at how the brain waves of people were changing when they were calm. And they were studying meditators and they were noticing that they shift their brain waves.
Also, that was a great period of discovering what happens during sleep. And so we began to realize that our brains slow way down. Normally they’re in beta, which is between 12 and roughly 30 cycles per second. That’s the normal state of consciousness. When we go to sleep, we have this drifting down feeling and we go to alpha, which is 8 to 12 cycles a second. It’s a much slower brainwave. Finally, we drop into theta, then delta. And most of the night we spend in delta, which is zero through four cycles per second, very, very slow brainwave. Every, roughly, hour we pop into a slightly higher, faster brainwave, theta. And then we drop down into delta again. So that’s the sleep rhythm. A very well understood phenomenon in psychology.
What we found is that as people do these eye movements, they drop into those slow brain waves. They have more delta, more theta. And that is the time of night when we’re, safe example, when we’re in deep sleep. We’re usually in a very peaceful, deep sleep. When we pop into theta, that’s rapid eye movement sleep or dreaming sleep. Our eyes move around a lot and we’re in dreams. So theta is when your brain is wiring and creating new memories and new connections.
Delta is when it’s pruning and cutting away unused neural pathways. And so the eye movements drive the brain into theta and delta. And that’s also, of course, how we process trauma and problems. We often do it through dreams, dreaming and sleep. You’re worried about something, you have a good night’s sleep. Benjamin Franklin said the best cure for your worries is a good night’s sleep. And even though that that was 300 years ago, it’s still really is true today. And so those eye movements we found—hook people up to EEGs, prompt those same cycles you go through in sleep. Only for a few minutes, but that’s the brain’s way of making solving problems, making neural connections and pruning.
TS: Use EFT for a good night’s sleep.
DC: Tap before you go to sleep to relax yourself. So you’ll just find it relaxing to tap. Sometimes I just tap without any particular thought in mind, just to feel relaxed. So you can tap before you go to sleep. Just to feel relaxed. You can tap to have good dreams. Like I visualize having good dreams while I’m tapping. So I’m calling myself and doing the visualization. You can tap to go to sleep quickly. I looked at all the research into this and for example, in our clinical trials of veterans, insomnia is a real problem for people with PTSD. And veterans in our studies had high levels of insomnia. After six one-hour sessions of EFT, their levels dropped back into the normal range. So you have increased sleep and increased sleep quality when you start tapping.
TS: One of the interesting sections of your audio teaching series on EFT for recovery and resilience is, what’s going on when EFT doesn’t work? So you ask that question and then you answer it. And I wonder if you can answer it here.
DC: I mean, EFT is not a panacea. Nothing’s a panacea. If anyone tells you that their therapy solves everything, cures everything, just run away. It’s not true. No therapy is a panacea. EFT works really well for things to do with episodic memory. So it works spectacularly well with PTSD. It works less well with things that are primarily genetic or purely medical. So there’s a range of how it works. And for example, in our studies, about nine out of ten veterans recovered from PTSD. Their levels dropped into the normal range. One out of ten didn’t budge.
TS: But, Dawson, first of all, let’s just take a moment. Nine out of ten? That’s huge. That’s huge. That’s huge.
DC: Yes. Yes. And so what we tell doctors and nurses, medical providers, is to use EFT as a frontline treatment, because nine out of ten veterans we’ve shown in this research respond to EFT, and that’s the cure. They do their six sessions or ten sessions and they’re done, but one out of ten doesn’t. So what we recommend for them is intensive individual psychotherapy, group work, social support is incredibly important. If you have caring people around you, loving people around you, then you want to bring them into the healing process.
Finally, in the stepped care model, the final step is, if all of that doesn’t work, then you do drugs and you do intensive psychotherapy. But for goodness sakes, and I’m passionate about this, Tami, do not do those extremely harsh drugs as your first line of treatment because they have side effects, they have really severe side effects.
And so what we’ve been doing for the last while is we’ve been medicating these veterans to an extreme degree. We have people coming to us. We have another social project. We’ve treated over 22,000 veterans free of charge in the last 12 years with EFT, and we find that many of them come into our program and they’re taking 12 medications or 6 medications. They’re taking medications to control the side effects of other medications. That’s not the first thing to do. The first thing to do is see how energy can change you. Meditation, consciousness, awareness that can make a big difference. And then go to your doctor with the real problem. Don’t expect your doctor to medicate away emotional stress. And your doctor will really appreciate that.
TS: So you mentioned a six-session series or a ten-session series, hour long each. Together, we did a six-minute practice. Do you repeat that six-minute practice up to an hour?
DC: Typically, we ask people to bring in lists of their problems. So for example, the veterans will bring in a list of problems, also with those scores, Tami. So they’ll have their list saying, “My dad beat me so hard when I was eight years old that I lost consciousness.” Or, “My brother tried to drown me when I was 12.” Or, “I didn’t get picked for the football squad when I was 18.” Whatever it might be. Their lists of those life issues. And then some of them have to do with the combats, have to do with regular life.
And so we work through those with veterans one by one. Now, some of these are severely traumatic, life-threatening events and it’s going to take more than six minutes to work on one. And we may have to work on what that person smelled and tasted and saw and heard as part of a treatment session. And those can take a while. So small things often drop pretty quickly. That’s why I do pick an easy thing from the recent past. If someone’s been traumatized and has dozens or even hundreds of traumatic memories, then it takes longer to work through.
TS: In the audio teaching series, one of the things you say, Dawson, is that EFT is unique among therapeutic approaches in that it actually makes deliberate and systematic use of dissociation in the healing process. So I wonder if you can explain that, how the technique actually uses our responsive dissociation to trauma in an efficacious way.
DC: Yes. So in trauma treatment in psychology, generally dissociation is a real barrier to success. You need exposure, you need to think about the bad stuff and light up those neurons near brain to treat them successfully. If the client is dissociating and not lighting up those neurons, then it’s hard to work with. And dissociation is normal for traumatized people early in life. If I am a child being violated, if I’m being ignored or hurt and I’m three or five or six years old, then what do I do? I just go somewhere else. I have a picture in one of my books of a woman who drew an image when she was in therapy of what it was like to be raped repeatedly by a family member when she was young. And you see this picture of this little girl she drew in a corner, this giant head reaching through her body up in the corner there’s a smiley face and a smiley face is me because it was not safe to be in her body. So that’s disassociation.
If you’re in a firefight in a foxhole, it is not safe to be there. You’d dissociate, and you probably dissociate when you think about it again. So disassociation’s a real issue, but when people are tiptoeing now into treatment and actually are willing to work on their issues a little bit, maybe, then giving them a couple of layers of safety and inducing a little bit of association allows them to gain confidence in working with those issues. So we typically start small with veterans. Like, we had one veteran, a Vietnam veteran called Bob Culver. And there was a documentary about Bob and a group of other veterans we treated. And Bob said, “I’ll work on these issues from Vietnam, these memories from Vietnam, but not this other group of memories that are behind the wall. Those are too terrible to even think about.” Now that is adaptive dissociation.
Bob can’t even face them. Three days later, Bob Culver was tapping away his memories; he’d gone behind the wall and retrieved them. We didn’t suggest that the first day, the first day we let him do all that disassociation he wanted while he worked on small issues and gained confidence that he could recover. Then he went, eventually, behind the wall. By the end of that time, he was describing a mortar attack on the field hospital he was at in Vietnam. And the therapist worked with him, said things like, “Now think about the motor attack,” and Bob’s thinking about the motor attack while tapping. The therapist then asks, “And remember the bodies of the people who were killed?” And Bob says, “Yes.” The therapist then says, “How many bodies? Count them.”
And Bob’s tapping and counting and telling us that 18 people were killed in the mortar attack. So he’s doing that. That’s on day three. Initially we used association therapeutically. And Bob worked on the easy things first and then moved to the hard stuff like the mortar attack and the body count. After which he remained totally calm, he remembered the event, but he no longer went into the stress.
TS: Now in the audio series, Dawson, you get personal at a certain point and you share a huge trauma that happened in your life approximately five years ago and how everything you had done prepared you to be able to go through it. And I wonder if you can tell our listeners about that.
DC: Tami, I’ve been a meditator for many years. I joined an ashram when I was 15 years old and learned the perennial philosophy. And we studied all Aldous Huxley and Paul Brunton and Alan Watts, all these people. But that’s wonderful to do that and immerse yourself in that material. And yet, I still faced a bunch of life’s challenges in my life over the last many, many years. And I already committed now to letting people know what those techniques are, without going through 50 years of stumbling through figuring it all out, that I had to apply it myself during that time.
And on the night of October 9, 2017, my wife woke me up in the middle of the night, shook me awake and said, “Something’s really wrong.” And I looked at the alarm clock next to my bed and it was flashing 12:45 AM. I looked out the window, there was an orange glow on the horizon and I went outside quickly and there was a wildfire racing down the opposite hill toward our hill.
And I just yelled at her, “We’re getting out of here right now,” and I ran through the house, grabbed car keys, grabbed the phone, threw on some clothes and sprinted to the car and drove out just as the flames began to engulf all the trees around us. And you go to an altered space at that time. I always felt as I was watching myself from above. And it’s funny, it was fear and yet this absolute feeling of love and security and being protected at the same time. But it was devastating for our community. 5,400 homes were destroyed. 22 people were killed, died. When the power went out, people got stuck in their garages. They couldn’t open the garage door. Trees fell across some of the neighbors’ driveways. Eight of our neighbors died. And so it was just a horrendous event, and it took us a long time to rebuild and recover.
We had a whole bunch of health problems after that. We had a huge financial crash because our office and our business was destroyed as well. So we faced a very challenging few years, and yet we found tapping, meditation, energy therapies were powerful. And so in the year after that, I’d sit in meditation after the fire, living in a rented house and gradually piecing our lives back together, trying to rebuild our business. And I was entering these extraordinary states as I would meditate and I would feel the love of the universe, Tami, just pouring down through me. I’d feel so much love and so much compassion and so much joy that I was just filled with gratitude. And so I wrote the book Bliss Brain during that period because I wanted to know, what is this? How come I have so much serotonin and dopamine, these two pleasure chemicals, anandamide, oxytocin.
So that book is all about those seven pleasure chemicals you get during deep meditation, about the brain waves that go along with them, about the regions of the brain that are active in people in Bliss Brain. And where we went from that point. And the book ends with post-traumatic growth. And the fact is that PTSD is not inevitable, that you go through trauma, and research shows that two-thirds of people who go through trauma like that actually emerge either with equilibrium or stronger. That’s post-traumatic growth. And we tend to be really obsessed with PTSD. And of course PTSD, a quarter or a third of people do actually develop PTSD. But two-thirds of people develop post traumatic growth or stabilize afterwards—are resilient. And you want to learn those skills—meditation, EFT—because we used them a lot in the year after the fire and they made—I mean, I can’t imagine how you could even go through an experience like that or even the average disruptions of the average life without these kinds of tools to support you.
TS: Did you find yourself surprised, Dawson, that here you were, experiencing these positive neurochemicals and writing a book like Bliss Brain not that long after such an incredible devastation?
DC: When you look at the studies of the Zen monks that use meditation, or long-term meditators, and you look at markers. I like objective markers. How much gamma brain wave do they have in their brains and how high is their level of bliss molecule? Like an anandamide? Anandamide is a very recently discovered neurotransmitter and it’s name, ananda, is a Sanskrit word for bliss. And how do you have those, that anandamide, in your system and how do you have those high levels of gamma brain waves?
We find in research that those monks have up to 25 times the amount of gamma in their brains. Not 25 percent, 25x the amount of gamma. That’s why it’s bliss brain. And you find yourself going to these extraordinary states of just being one with all that is. And so I found myself there, just day in and day out, both before the fire, I’d been practicing those techniques for a few years, and then after as well.
And I just got passionate about sharing this with people, because people, again, my daughter’s pimple on her chin, they have some little issue to deal with and they just feel their lives being wrecked. We just had this hugely annoying and a triggering event where the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade. And I mean people I know and everyone I know is pretty much, I mean the degree of anger and frustration and disappointment about that in much of American society, whether you’re on the right or on the left, is enormous.
And so I heard one friend of mine saying, “I heard the news and I was devastated, I was wrecked.” Well, be disappointed and feel the emotion and then do something to rescue yourself. Don’t be in that state of being wrecked all the time because it’s going to write your cortisol high and hurt your body. We need these tools, Tami. And that’s why I’m so passionate about advocating meditation, grounding. So many wonderful things we can do. Anything body-based that brings that experience of the infinite into our bodies is going to produce a rapid shift in the world around us.
TS: Explain to me, Dawson, how in being a meditator and connecting to this infinite space that changes the actual neurochemicals that are being elicited in our brain and in our body, how does that create that change?
DC: When you meditate effectively… Now in Bliss Brain, I shone a really clear light in terms of research into what is effective meditation. And the unfortunate truth, Tami, is that much of what people think of as meditation… When I was in the ashram at 15, the meditation master said, “Oh, just close your eyes and still your mind.” And I can do number one, I closed my eyes. Still in my mind? I’ve been doing this for 50 years, I still can’t still my mind. I can’t still my mind if I was at gunpoint in order to still my mind. Minds just aren’t meant to be still.
Our brains evolved to look around them all the time at the environment, and a crystal still mind is almost impossible. So what you can do is do physiological cues. So in Bliss Brain, I give people cues like tapping will calm you down, like relaxing your tongue on the floor of your mouth will stimulate the vagus nerve to send a calming signal throughout your body.
And so I give people seven evidence-based techniques like that, that really work to bring you into those states. A lot of what people are doing, thinking it’s meditation… Like we had one of our team members while I was writing Bliss Brain, he lived with his girlfriend and she was a meditator, long-time meditator, meditated an hour every day. And so he would, in the morning, wake up, get ready for work—this is before the pandemic—go into the office. And he would be very careful not to disturb her. But one day he made a little too much noise and she opened her eyes in the middle of her meditation and glared at him and said, “Don’t mess with my fucking serenity.”
Was she meditating? Probably not. And that’s what’s going on with most people. They think they’re meditating when they close their eyes, but you’ve got to do things that are effective. And so with Bliss Brain, I try to look at the science of what’s really effective. And there are a few things that are hyper-effective, but the saffron robes confer no special gift to you. The 108 prayer beads are doing nothing whatsoever for your well-being. You’ve got to focus on science. That’s why I love science, science is showing us what really works and what really doesn’t. So when we meditate, if people are meditating effectively, we watch their whole central nervous system go into parasympathetic mode. Their sympathetic fight-or-flight response is dramatically down-leveling and the nerves that spread out from the spinal column into all organs, your bladder, your tear ducts, your lungs, your heart, everything, is being affected by that movement.
So meditation is getting into the state of physical calm, sending a signal through the vagus nerve to calm everything in your body. Then it triggers those brain waves again, both slow waves of beta and delta and also that fast wave of gamma, which is the brain wave of integration, creativity. And it also lights up the part of the brain has to do with compassion. Compassion meditation is one of the three things you can do in meditation that’ll dramatically shift brain activity. And we watch in MRI studies how, when these meditators move into compassion, the whole lobe of the brain that handles positive emotion, gratitude, happiness or joy, all of those things, those are the emotional phenomena that happen. But what happens is that, that lobe of the brain, it’s called the insular, becomes highly active in meditators.
So it’s triggering those feel good neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine. And those are the same neurotransmitters that are part of the reward system that is stimulated by heroin and cocaine. So we’re getting these wonderful feelings of pleasure from the reward. Reward neurochemicals. We’re getting oxytocin, lots of oxytocin. So when you hear Saint Teresa of Avila talking about the beloved or hear Rumi or Hafiz talking about meditation and oneness for all, it is in erotic or relationship terms, it’s because they are having orgasmic experiences driven by oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine, and anandamide.
So I have a profile in my book Bliss Brain of the neurochemicals of meditation and neurochemicals of orgasm. And they’re pretty much an exact match. So all these people are having these orgiastically wonderful experiences, they’re also highly addicting, which is why, when people hit the mark and are able to meditate once or twice effectively, they tend to do it again. So we can measure the effects of meditation in all these many dimensions of the human brain.
TS: In the audio series you’ve created with Sounds True, Healing the Roots of Trauma: EFT for Recovery and Resilience, you offer several different meditative practices. You introduce something you called eco-meditation. You teach not just the EFT technique and various applications, but also some integrative meditative experiences. And I wonder here, at the end of this conversation, Dawson, can you leave us not just with that terrific laugh of yours that always comes shining through, but can we have a type of integrative meditation together here as we end? Something, some way to help us settle?
DC: The full meditation that it’s composed of—several, seven actually, evidence-based techniques—dramatically calm the body. And let’s just do one little technique right now, which affects the vagus nerve. So think of something that annoys you, something different from the previous thing. So something recent that annoys you. Maybe a person, maybe a name of a person, maybe an image, maybe a thought or a belief, but that makes you feel a little bit annoyed, maybe a little bit angry, resentful, blaming, shaming, any negative emotion. And now relax your tongue on the floor of your mouth, so let your tongue just fall on the floor of your mouth. Normally our tongues are tense and off it against the roof of our mouths. This is the opposite place. Let them fall to the floor of our mouths.
And now, keeping your tongue totally relaxed, try and get upset about that thing. Just try, but keep your tongue relaxed. Try getting upset, and you can’t. And you can’t because what’s happening is that when you relax your tongue on the floor of your mouth, it sends a signal through your vagus nerve, all of your body that you are safe and you can’t then easily get upset. So try it in traffic, try it when you’re stuck in a long line or have a long wait or have a disturbing meeting, just relax your tongue. And eco-meditation builds together seven of those techniques and you put them together in one package. You go into this deep, deeply relaxed state and you’re able to still your mind. You’re able to function in that usual human way. You might be as active or as still as you want it to be, but you’re doing these seven things that really send that signal of safety to your body.
TS: Wonderful. Dawson, what a great tip to leave people with. Wonderful. I’ve been speaking with Dawson Church. He’s the author of Bliss Brain. He’s the founder and CEO of the EFT Universe. And with Sounds True, he’s recorded a new audio learning series. It’s called Healing the Roots of Trauma: EFT for Recovery and Resilience.
Sounds True: waking up the world. Thanks for listening to Insights at the Edge. You can read a full transcript of today’s interview at resources.SoundsTrue.com/podcast. That’s resources.SoundsTrue.com/podcast. If you’re interested, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app. And if you feel inspired, head to iTunes and leave Insights at the Edge a review. I absolutely love getting your feedback and being connected. Sounds True: waking up the world.
