Unlock The Secret To Healing Illness with Zach Bush | EP 71

Emotional trauma seems to be the most profound and disruptive toxicity that we can enter into, and it's the foundation of every organ disease that we know. If you store an emotion in the system, you disrupt the relationship between the energetic and biologic systems, the chemical trauma of a herbicide, pesticide, or an antibiotic.
We can overcome that instantaneously if we get over this psychological bust in our identity that we were abandoned by nature. Take a vial of your blood, send it across town, put it under a microscope.
You take an aspirin and all of the platelets in that test tube will instantly respond to the aspirin. And so it doesn't matter where that cell is, it's responding to your collective experience.
Your body is a non-local phenomenon of biology connected and entangled with a soul. Addiction is a symptom of an abandonment disorder.
We are most addicted to emotional input and that's where how we build our stories it's how we build our daily social interactions it's how we build our entire sense of self-worth is out of how many emotions did i experience today and when we start to get numbed out we get depressed numbness is the most terrifying thing to the biology because it means we're no longer alive. Nature has never allowed a wound that she didn't already have a solution for.
Welcome back to the Healing and Human Potential podcast, where today we're going to explore profound insights that come with near-death experiences from a doctor. We're also going to talk about the most common regrets people have in the final moments of their life and how those can teach us to live more fully.
Because what if the answers are hidden in the way we care for our bodies, our minds, and our connection to the world around us? Our guest today, Dr. Zach Bush, is a physician specializing in internal medicine, endocrinology, and hospice care.
And he's going to uncover how disrupting the microbiome impacts everything from depression to cancer and the universal intelligence that organizes all of life, as well as why reconnecting with nature can transform us physically, emotionally, and spiritually. So if you're ready to challenge conventional ideas about health and step into a more connected, whole, and vibrant way of living, this episode is for you.
I know that you've worked with a lot of people around end of life and have seen some really powerful transitions. One of my former best friends was a hospice nurse and she said, the way you live is the way you die.
And I'm curious if there is a, just having been so involved in that work, if there's an experience of your own or of a client that you saw that really shaped how you see life and death because of it. Wow, so many.
I have so many of those. Yeah, when I was an associate hospice director, I was admitting 80 patients a week to die, and I did that for four years.
So at some point, there's so many thousands of stories or whatever that kind of amalgamate into an experience. I would say the ones that stuck with me the hardest were the children.
You know, when you see kids on hospice and watch them transition, it's so starkly different than how adults tend to transition or are elderly. There was an 11-year-old girl that passed away under my care.
That has really stuck with me. She really showed me what it looks like to be fearless in life and have no fear of death either, you know, and just ready for the transition.
And in fact, relieved for the transition, I think a lot. Um, she seemed to be somebody who picked her exit moment and she had overheard a doctor talking to her parents earlier in the year that, um, the doctor was trying to help the parents come to terms with the fact that this was the end.
The parents had struggled to stop doing the heroic efforts, you know, and the transition to hospice for a child is very difficult for a parent to come to terms with the fact that there really is, you know, an end point coming is really hard. And, um, they had pushed for so much care over the years, um, so much treatment and surgeries and interventions and 40 rounds of chemo.
And this kiddo had been through so much and she overheard the doctor say, you know, trying to get through to the parents, the severity of the situation, she had overheard them that, uh, he didn't feel that she would, you know, still be alive by the end of the year kind of thing. And that was, you know, February or something like that, that she had overheard that.
And she ended up passing away around, you know, late in the evening on the last day of the year. And so you could tell in that experience that she had logged in her brain that she didn't, there was no longer any expectation for her to be around into the new year,

you know,

and she had held on for as long as she could or felt like she needed to for her

parents really,

you know,

and I've,

I've seen that a lot with death and dying is whether it be an elder or a

child,

they've often come to terms with their own departure and have often seen their next, you know, chapter and have seen past the veil in those months leading up to their transition. But they often stick around on behalf or in an effort to ease or help those that are going to survive the situation with their mental journey and psychology of it.

And so it's when you see a child that's that expanded, that is no victim mentality,

no fear of death, and has enough care and sense of her parents and everything else,

that she would be living to that last possible moment to help them in their journey and everything else. And myself and everybody involved in her care team, I think she had a sense of all of us and, and she was doing something so loving and caring towards everyone.
And so I think a soul, when it starts to really see itself rather than, you know, be convinced that a human body is, is the identity, the soul starts to do beautiful, you know, expansive work. And soul is always doing that, I think.
But for the being, the human being to reach that singularity of soul consciousness or soul awareness of the infinite nature of itself, and it starts to realize I'm here on earth to do something far beyond this lifetime or far beyond the finite nature. I'm here to constellate with these other souls of my parents and caregivers and siblings.
And I'm here to pass on information, pass through experience of this. And so that I think is something that's really informed the rest of my life is to try to constantly be aware that I need not be limited by my human experience in the day to my understanding of why I'm here or what I'm here to do.
And for that, I get excited about every single moment of my life because I'm now sitting in a room with a couple people that I've not spent any significant time with in the past, and our souls are here. There's 8 billion people on the planet.
We're in the midst of wildfires all over Los Angeles. Houses are burning down.
Lives are changing dramatically. You know, macroeconomic structures are failing all over the world.
The amount of drama on the planet is so profound and so severe in these moments that we're living in, and yet these three souls decided to be in this room right now. And we can call it a podcast, we can call it, you know, something.
And there's a lot of human productivity and human ingenuity going along, you know, behind the scenes of the cameras and in your mind and your capacity to hold space for a discussion. But there's this higher plane happening where there's, for some reason, these three souls decided to step into a room right now and constellate while 8 billion others are on their journeys.
What are we here to do? And that just changes all perspective, I think, is that to your friend's point, when you start to live the way in which you're going to die, you become multidimensional throughout your life rather than waiting to be a three-dimensional being realizing at the end of your journey, like, oh, I'm a multidimensional being and I've been here forever and I'm going to go do something else now. To start to live that every day of living, breathing a finite life, body, biology in a more permanent physics of reality is a beautiful way to live.
And it's relieves of some of the apparent drama or limitations of being human and starts to move us towards this glory of nature is ascending through everything, including me. As me.
Yeah. And I love that you're bringing up what's happening amongst where we are right now with the fires.
And I notice in challenging situations, there's just a presence that comes on board that's larger than just the moment. I can even feel some of the ego pull to get caught up into social media and look at any challenges that are happening.
There's a bit of a orientation for safety, but there's also the feeding of a drama. And so watching that within myself, holding presence, tapping into something bigger than just this finite body mind, I think is really helpful.
And I know that you, you look at death as a rebirth. Most people look at death as the completion, but looking at it from that perspective, how do you think that helps people face challenges in their life? I hope it helps.
You know, I'm not at all sure that it does in some ways, because there's this duality that we are living in as human beings. We basically signed up for a journey to forget everything, you know, and I think we probably come in as infants or newborns or we're in the womb with complete consciousness.
Like, I think we begin complete and then we buy into a journey of incompleteness, you know, this fractioning of our psyche, this fractioning of our self-identity, the fractioning of our ego, egoic mind. And in that, a deep amnesia that we come from wholeness and we go back to wholeness.
You know, I hope that it's just a reminder to everybody that, um, you are perfect. You were born perfect.
There's no way you weren't perfect or else you wouldn't have completed yourself in the womb. The complexity of turning a single cell into 70 trillion cells that are all differentiated into dozens of different organs that are carried out in a symphony of behaviors through hundreds of thousands of different protein signaling cascades driven by, you know, enough DNA information to wrap around the earth 2 million times.
Like the scale of a single infant is so grandiose. The DNA in a single newborn wraps around the earth 2 million times.
The amount of genetic information, the amount of protein intelligence, the amount of molecular coherence and collaboration, there's no way you weren't perfect at the beginning or else you could not have pulled off that miraculous feat of forming yourself in your mother's womb. It's impossible.
And so with that impossibility of impersonation or the inevitability of your perfection that allowed you to form, coming to terms with the fact that you signed up to forget everything and be on a journey back to remembering all of that, I think at least gives framework if it doesn't necessarily relieve the human nature of fear, guilt, shame that comes around the death process or the belief that it is the loss and end of something. All of those are in some ways very real.
It's worthwhile to acknowledge that in the three-dimensional space there's an end. That This physical body is no longer there of your grandmother or your father or whoever's passing or your child.
There is an end point in the physicality of the situation, and it's worth feeling all of that. And I guess that would be my conclusion to the matter is framing it in any context of rebirth versus versus endpoint is hopefully, you know, helps reduce some of the stress, fear, guilt, shame, and move us to more of a wonderment towards it.
I hope that as a society, we could move back to wonderment of death. If you find yourself really locked in fear of death, I would invite you to go to Bhutan or Tibet.
These are cultures that have spent tens of thousands of years honoring and in wonderment of death, and all of their efforts are to be in constant reverence to the dying. And there's, the culture is far more driven daily, every day.
There's marches in the streets and parades and, you know, honoring of those that have passed in the last couple of days or the last week, you know. And so there's more reverence being paid to the death or the rebirth there than in the entry point of a birth.
And so these cultures, I think, are useful to tap into to just realize there's a different way of bringing reverence and wonderment to this thing that we call death and a curiosity. Like, I mean, it drives me like, I am so curious to see what I see on the other side when I get to witness myself because I've had two events in my life that might be called near death or whatever, like two events in my life where I kind of saw past the veil for a moment.
And the beauty of everything is so startling, and most of all the beauty of yourself. And so I'm curious and in wonderment of when will my soul decide I'm done with this three-dimensional journey? What am I here to complete before I decide to do that next contract when I'm ready for the next thing? I feel the same way for everybody who's dealing with these fires right now.
It's like, isn't this kind of an extraordinary thing? Your house has been there for some decades. Your children maybe grew up in it.
There's some sense of desire for permanence of the house, but your house just

went up in smoke on purpose too. And everything that you thought was important just burned to the ground and is in ashes.
What's left after that is beauty. And I think you do get to see that in times of natural disaster of any scale.
You see the best of humanity coming through over and over again. And it's because we, for a moment, drop the performative nature of being human in an egoic world.
And we just become authentic for a moment. And we authentically grieve what we just lost.
We authentically rejoice in what was saved. And we authentically re-evaluate what's truly valuable to us.
That's beautiful. Yeah, I've been thinking about that as well.
All of the firefighters and the human spirit, people coming together to really just be of service. And I would also been considering our relationship to death and what happens in different cultures when somebody dies.
Do we just take the body away right away?

Do we sit Shiva to be with a dead body?

Like all of these different traditions really can teach us about having a healthy relationship

with grief, with death, completions.

And I do think it's important if we're in a culture that denies it to embrace it in

our own way so that we can have a healthy relationship with birth and death, with loss and beginnings. And so I've just been contemplating that.
I took a comparative mysticism course in my undergrad and death, dying in the afterlife to really proactively look at things that I know my culture doesn't and to take the narrative back because otherwise if I push that away, I'm going to have more fear about it rather than like, and we've had Anita Morjani on the podcast as well. This is an amazing story about her passing and coming back and having more of this in the zeitgeist and talking about it, I think has us have a better relationship with death and dying and completions and loss and grief and to feel it fully.
I know part of my work is around, I used to be a psychotherapist. And so really helping people go through their inner world and process it rather than stuff it or avoid it, not to deny or indulge feelings, but just have a healthy relationship with it.
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I know that there's a recent study that shares that 90% of adults have regrets about their life. And I'm curious if you've heard common themes around those regrets.
And if so, are there things that we can learn from people that have had those regrets that we can live more intentionally now? Yeah, those regrets tend to happen quite distance from the death moment in some ways. I think where I tend to hear the regrets is when somebody is now faced with stage four cancer and is starting to come to terms with the fact that there's an endpoint coming, but that endpoint might be years out or months out or whatever it is.
And so that's when they start to do that re-evaluation. And one of the themes that has come through pretty strong in those regrets over the years is as individuals caught up in the social constructs that we've created, there's a sadness that we spent so much time with the people that we spent so much time with, and we didn't spend enough time with the people that we really felt resident with.
And for a lot of that, I tended to hear that far more often from people in urban environments.

When I was in Virginia, with a lot of my hospice work, I dealt with a lot of deep rural community,

fifth generation poverty and been rural on the same pieces of land for generations, passed down.

The only reason they subsisted was because despite their poverty, there was family land that was passed down generation to generation. And so they were living in the same place their grandmother lived.
And I didn't hear those regrets from those people that were connected to lineage. But the wealthy people that were living in cities and living these wealthy lifestyles of separatism that is often framed or carried out in the frameworks of social caste systems where you're from West Richmond or you're, you know, you're in one of these environments where there's so much social pressure and we're sitting in, you know, one of the biggest enclaves of this in the world world is Los Angeles here.
And during the first evacuation, I was put into a hotel in northern Santa Monica and would be evacuated from that then a few hours later. But sitting in that hotel lobby that evening, having some food and watching the people pour in, you could tell immediately who had come to the hotel flown in from some European destination or out of town and who was being displaced from, you know, the Pacific Palisades because they just look different.
And the amount of effort that Los Angeles, Miami, New York, you know, the amount of effort going into creating a false identity is visible. And the fire has a way of suddenly shattering the false identity.
And so I saw a lot of acceptance of death and turnover in my rural population that were fifth generation poverty. And I saw a lot of shock and regrets in the people that had been more affluent and had lived into these quote unquote successful pathways of false identity.
And so the shattering of identity that happens when a fire comes through or a hospice moment comes upon you, the level of shock will depend on what level of performative success you've had in your life. And for me, that's been a long, slow deconstruction.
I started my life in relative poverty. I say relative because the poverty in the United States is in stark contrast to something that you would find in India or something like that.
But grew up in government housing, low-income housing. Dad was a tree trimmer at the university making $2.40 an hour.
And, you know, we were, you know, a hippie family in Boulder, Colorado, like doing our thing. And it was a wonderful way to grow up.
It was absolutely, I think there was so many beautiful things about growing up that way. And then worked myself into medical doctor at an Ivy League program and everything else.
And so I went through the journey into this environment of highly, you know, performative identities. And what I found is the more altruistic you think your identity is in this performative path the more difficult it is let go of and it took me decades of being a doctor before I realized that my identity as a doctor was disrupting my authentic capacity as a human and my authentic capacity showed up in my full force and so I slowly you know let go of a lot of pieces, like the university and all of the accolades and, you know, constant awards that we give each other.
That's one of the funny things about performative environments. You probably know you could quickly determine, am I in a performative kind of place or am I authentic place based on the number of awards that you're busy either receiving or giving to others.
If you're running around receiving and giving awards, you're probably in a false reality. Nature's not awarding the oak tree for being a good oak tree.
When you are in your authentic natural self, the value that you bring is so inherent that you overwhelm the environment around you with a state of grace and generosity that is met with a equal gifting economy back to you and a sense of gratitude in this reinforcing environment. And nobody has to give anybody an award to reassure each other that your fake reality is good, you know, or fake reality is successful.
And so when we look at something like, you know, award ceremonies, we need to take a deep look at like, what are we trying to convince ourselves of here?

What is the Oscars trying to convince the world of? We're trying to convince ourselves that the world of storytelling in Hollywood and actors and actresses are the most valuable thing on the planet. you know and when we look at things like the nobel prize or something like this

or you know just the awards that we give people socially, you think of somebody like an Elon Musk who gets so many direct or indirect social rewards and accolades for doing what he does. He's a genius mind, but he's a good example of somebody that's not running around trying to get awards.
You know, he's authentically expressing himself and you can like him or dislike him. I agree with some of his visions.
I disagree with others, but that's irrelevant. The fact is he's a generative engine and he's got this personality or this, you know, demeanor that keeps him pretty devoid of the desire for any recognition or any awards to reassure him that he's on his right path, you know.
And so you got that Elon Musk who's in his own world, creating his own world, creating from the visions that he has. And then you have people running around who don't have access, haven't tapped into their own visionary capacity, haven't tapped into the divinity with themselves.
And for that, they're putting all of their operational efforts towards producing somebody else's vision, producing something outside of themselves, trying to make social metrics, you know, meet social metrics, try to be performative in that environment. And that's where that award-seeking reassurance

behavior starts to really sneak in is, am I doing a good job? Yes, because here's the awards I've gotten. And I know a lot of phenomenal actors and some dear friends in that space.
And I've watched their journey similar to mine is when you are awarded many times as a great doctor and a great teacher or a great actor, and you've got all these awards sitting around, the journey to destructuring that and getting to who is my core authentic self and how is that different than these identities or roles that I've taken on in the community. And you find as you sink into that authentic state, this is what it feels like to live a life that's ready to die.
Ultimately, I'm ready to die today because I've been authentic again today. And that feels like such a relief at the end of the day.
You sleep so much better if you just simply had an authentic day and you were ready to die. Because every moment you were here, you were aware of these higher levels of impact where you just were a good oak tree just because you're

an oak tree, not because the oak tree performed today. I was a good Zach today because I showed up as Zach today and I let life flow through me and I didn't have any metrics of success or failure.
And frankly, this has been challenging in business. I've been running companies for 15 years and it's very challenging to run companies where you're not putting a lot of emphasis on, you know, the award feedback to your personnel because then they're, if you're going to run a company in that same way you want to be an authentic self that just shows up as self, every single person in the company they're going to have to find that same core self-worth, self-identity.
And your journey as a boss or a founder or CEO has to be its own journey and their journey needs to be separate from that identity. And that's challenging.
It's challenging to create these corporate and social structures in which there's an understanding that authentic showing up is the inherent reward of life. Because our social structures have really said, well, if you're a good employee, then you should get the following awards.
And there's growth and there's things and there's more money next year than this year. There's all these expectations on the situation to reflect a successful year or a successful contribution.
And so for me, I find that duality quite interesting of, are we performative and, and running around reassuring each other that the performative nature is good, or are we showing up authentically and willing to just experience self today? And I think the missing piece is identity because the, the deeper we tap into who we are beyond a story of who we are, the more that that is not only nourishing, but that actually changes every other aspect of our life.

So I think that performative nature comes when we have a pseudo self, when we haven't really tapped into who we are. And when we feel and know ourselves deeply, that is so nourishing and so fulfilling that it doesn't matter if one person shows up for your event, or 1 million, because you know that you're being true to yourself.
And you may or may not get the rewards. But that, to me, it's about identity.
And as it really is embodied within ourselves, then it can be mirrored in business and in structures. And you talk so poetically and beautifully.
And one of those things you talk about is the soul, And we've kind of danced around it a little bit. I'm curious if you can define the soul from a more scientific perspective so that we can get on the same page.
Cause that's part of where I want to go in this conversation. Cause I think it's most, that's the thing.
Cause it's like, if we judge ourselves because we haven't experienced ourselves, then it's so innocent that we may be trying to perform like, look what I can do. You know, it's so innocent from the perspective of soul.
It's like, okay, sweetheart, you know, and when we tap into who and what we are, there's nothing else that could offer us more or less because we can't be more or less, we just are. And when we know that it's a different game.
But when we're trying, it's innocent. And so I'm curious if you could share a little bit more about the soul from a scientific perspective.

Yeah, maybe just come up for a 30,000 foot view, just thinking about identity at these

different layers. And so the soul might be a description of an energetic identity that's

permanent. This is the thing that allows you to knit yourself together in your mother's womb.
There's no biologic template in your mother's womb to create a human embryo, nor have we found that template or some sort of book of directions in the ovum, in the egg, or any of the cells that birth out of it. And so somehow there's this energetic experience of this is a human becoming human because this energy center or this energetic identity knows how to manifest, you know, in a state of order that we would call human.
And so the energy field that you become as you let go of the biological body, which we see at the hospice moment as these near-death experiences.

One of the eerie things about near-death experiences, and you hear dramatic, beautiful stories of people when their heart stopped and their brain function went quiet, they were gone for 15 or 20 minutes, and then they came back in. And during that 15 minutes, many of them will travel around the world and see all the loved ones or connect to the ancestors or they'll leave the planet and go to distinct universes or galaxies and experience them.
And then they're snapped back into the body as I'm paddling their chest and shocking them back into the body and putting chemicals and drugs into their bodies to get their heart restarted and force them back into the body on some level. When they come back in, whatever story they tell, they never doubt their identity.
Their identity never disappeared. It's always, I am, I had this experience.
I had this experience. I knew this.
I was there. The I never disappears.
And so that's what I would call the soul is this energy center that predates and post dates the biologic experience. Then you have a biologic identity.
So you have energetic identity, soul. Then you have biologic identity, which is a body.
And this is where the science of my laboratory has spent in the last decade or more really working in detail is understanding what allows a biologic vessel or container to have an identity. And the answer under the microscope is healthy boundaries.
And so I developed with my colleagues a whole line of dietary supplements from fossil soil that function as the cell-cell communication network within a human body. And so you can picture this much like a cell phone tower system where each cell phone becomes actually completely useless as a communication device if the cell phone tower is down.
And so the cell phone tower that helps one cell talk to the other cell is something called redox chemistry in biology. And these redox molecules are made by bacteria and fungi that we're extracting from fossil soil.
The human cell makes a tiny little cohort of these molecules as well. Really, the only one the human cell makes is nitric oxide.
And then the mitochondria, the bacteria living inside of our cells, make a host of oxygen-based molecules for redox communication. But what we discovered in 2012 was that the soil and our gut were carrying in the microbiome a massive treasure trove of communication molecules and the bacteria and fungi in their diversity are producing an extremely fluent method of communication so we're extracting that from fossil soil we put that into a liquid state and then we add that back to human experience the diversity of the communication is is from soil 60 million years ago homo sapiens come along 300,000 years ago.
So we're actually giving people an experience of a level of cell cell communication that actually hasn't been present in the human experience because the soil systems of 60 million years ago were far more verdant and deep and more biodiverse than the ones that we have today. And so when you start to give this back to humans, and you can do it in a petri dish with human cells, or you can give it to a patient, and the radical nature of cells communicating and what happens has shown us that the most important thing ultimately is self-identity.
And so the first thing the cell does is to create a boundary in which it understands outside and inside. And that's the definition of a system.
I think it was Buckminster Fuller who defined that. I think a system is anything with an outside and an inside.
And so the human body as a system of identity is defined by these boundaries that are defined at the gut level, at the blood-brain barrier, kidney tubules. So what's outside and inside the human system is apparently one of the primary priorities of your biologic system because the second the communication network hits a gut lining, the gut lining starts making more tight junctions, which is a healthier boundary.
And so the most important thing to the body is your self-identity at the biologic level. And extraordinarily, there's an entanglement between your biologic identity and your soul identity or your energetic identity.
And this is where we spend a lot of our time in our clinical work now. My clinic really morphed from like at the university, I was developing chemotherapy and I was doing all the drugs for endocrine management of diabetes and bone disease and thyroid disease and everything you can think of.
And so I was in this pharmaceutical management of disease. After 17 years in academia, I realized this is a chasing after the wind.
Like there's no, I will never prevent a single disease if I keep just treating these end stages of things. So launched out of the university in 2010, started a nutrition center to reverse chronic disease and then was faced with the challenge of like, okay, wow, there's a whole world out here that I wasn't told about.
There's functional medicine, there's integrative medicine, there's Chinese medicine, there's Reiki, there's all of these 9,000-year technologies and brand new technologies. And so it was like on a daily basis, hundreds of things coming at me like, maybe this will work, maybe this will work, maybe this will work.
So for a decade, was trying to sift through the the mess that everybody has to deal with once they stop just trusting that there's a drug for their thing and they start to say well there's got to be a better way now you're faced with the internet and you know you're a deluge of information of everybody promising that they just found the new biohacking tool that's going to make you younger or better prevent your cancer whatever it is digging through that for a decade, I finally got back down to the only thing that matters is do you have self-identity ultimately? And the quantum entanglement between the biologic identity and the energetic identity that we might call a soul became pretty profound. We got to see it under the microscope often, but some good studies have been interestingly done where you can take a vial of your blood, send it across town, put it under a microscope, you take an aspirin, and all of the platelets in that test tube will instantly respond to the aspirin.
And so what that shows us is that there's a quantum entanglement of your self-identity at the soul level with your biologic identity. And so it doesn't matter where that cell is, it's responding to your collective experience.
And so your body is a non-local phenomenon of biology connected and entangled with a soul. How the hell does that happen? Like, how does a soul, some ancient, you know, fractal of God show up to animate a human cell? Like, and then how does that one ovum, that egg know how to produce 70 trillion cells? And then those cells go to turn over every two or three days for an 80 year lifespan.
How is that identity so baked in there? And I, you know, this is framework that is my experience. And so you can take this or leave this, but I've stopped trying to believe anything I haven't actually seen my, and felt and experienced myself.
And that was 17 years of higher education and academia, slowly letting go of all of that to realize I can't believe anything I've been ever taught in a textbook until I've experienced it for real myself. And that was a long, slow process of, I believed that, but I haven't felt and seen that.
Oh gosh, I felt and saw these other things that don't agree with that. I'm going to have to let go of that belief and go with what I've felt and seen.
And so for that, I've been deconstructing and reconstructing my worldview for a long time. And this moment of entanglement is one of my most fascinating pieces of biologic evidence

that I've seen.

There is a moment that we call the zinc flash that happens at the moment of conception.

This is achieved through an insane amount of energetic concentration.

My 70 trillion human cells on average have about 200 mitochondria when I'm at my optimal

youthful health.

I'm half a century old, so I've lost about one or two percent of those mitochondria per year since I was about age two. So maybe I've got somewhere around 120 mitochondria per human cell at this point in my life.
And that's the aging process is ultimately less mitochondrial metabolism per cubic centimeter. And so I'm producing less light energy.
That's what the mitochondria do. They release sunlight from glucose or fatty acids.
And so there's less sunlight being produced or released per cubic centimeter of my body than I had when I was two. The results are pretty obvious.
I'm repairing less well. And so I end up with scar tissue rather than stem cell replacement.
I end up with, you know, arthritis instead of, you know, a joint that's always fluid, you know. And so these changes in our bodies that are natural as we age are a result of diminishing light energy per cubic centimeter, which gets us at the story of life itself.
Life is ultimately a concentration of light energy, period. And so, to understand how much light it takes to organize chaotic matter into a syntropic or organized identity at a biologic cell level, you have to appreciate the intense brightness of biology.
The sun is the brightest thing physics does. We call it a star, we call it a sun.
That thing is a nuclear fission and fusion reactor that's generating massive amounts of energy per cubic centimeter, but it doesn't produce life. It does not enough energy to organize matter around it into living systems.
To get that, that sunlight has to be captured by these chlorophyll or other little tiny plastids inside of plants, inside of green things, where the sunlight can be stored in between carbon bonds. So CO2 is extracted from the atmosphere.
It stores sunlight between the carbons. That turns into a carbohydrate or a fat in the plant matter.
An animal goes to eat that. The animal in its cells will break apart the carbons through the mitochondria and release the sunlight.
It's that innovation of the mitochondria that was allowing life to occur on this planet because the mitochondria are able to release 10,000 times more light per cubic centimeter than the surface of the sun. And so life is ultimately an innovation that allows for the concentration of sunlight per cubic centimeter, a thousandfold to get to a single celled organism like a bacteria, 10,000 fold to get to an earthworm or a human.
And so you're 10,000 times more energy per cubic centimeter than a sun. The reason I can look at you and you're not blinding me is because you're using all of that energy.
Instead of you just emitting it like the sun does, you're utilizing that 10,000 X concentration of light to make order out of chaos. You're taking space, time, energy, particles from the universe, and you're turning them into a human body.
That takes an enormous amount of energy to achieve and then to maintain. And so for you to continue to manifest this body every millionth of a second, which is the speed at which your atomic structure has to keep disappearing and reappearing, you have to have so much light per cubic centimeter.
So the aging process is one of decaying that, but this quantum entanglement between the soul and the biology is this moment of conception. I had mentioned that the average human cell has 200 mitochondria per cell.
The egg, the ovum that lies within your ovaries and is released and floats into, takes this magical journey through the unorganized abdominal cavity to find the fallopian tube. And then from the fallopian tube into the uterus, that egg floating along has half a million mitochondria in it.
One cell with half a million mitochondria. And so we were already at 10,000 X with 200 mitochondria.
Now you're at millions of times, you know, brighter than the sun or something like it's an insane amount of energy with half a million mitochondria sitting in that egg. And the purpose of that much energy seems to be to ignite this moment of entanglement between an energetic identity what we might call a soul and the biology that will be manifested from it and so the at the moment of conception those half a million mitochondria discharge a massive amount of light and it blinds the microscope when it happens and so this zinc flash that happens must allow for this entanglement to occur between a physics field that we would call a soul and a biologic possibility that we would call a human body.
That flash happens and life occurs. It's beyond miracle.
It's beyond magic. It's beyond anything that the human brain can really wrap itself around.
And so I have such a deep state of wonderment for the miraculous nature of life. And I spend a lot of my time trying to help humans understand what we've done to ourselves over the last 50 years.
Because what we have done is we have maximized a lifestyle, a social system, an economic system that rewards antibiotic behavior. Antibiotic era started in really robust ways in the 1940s, but we had long been engaged in our effort to try to sterilize the human experience.
We did it with alcohol and everything else back in the day. Then antibiotics come along in the 1940s, and then we start using antibiotics in warfare.
We use antibiotics in herbicides and pesticides for food production.

We build macro antibiotic systems by building fences in the name of conservation or ownership, and all the fences break the flow of macro flora and fauna, which is antibiotic at the macro level, just as our chemical drugs are antibiotic at the microscopic level. So we've developed a whole human behavior system, human economic system around antibiosis.
Biosis or biotic refers to the relationships that collaborate to create the possibility of life, which I think is a cool definition. The relationships that collaborate to make life possible.
Antibiotic is something that's inherently against the relationship piece of that. And so it breaks the relationships that make life possible.
And so when you take an antibiotic, you are doing massive devastating effect on your relationship to the microbiome, your relationship to the human cells, your relationship to self ultimately. And this is why we see an increase in anxiety disorders and depression after a course of antibiotics.
And you take two courses of antibiotics in a short period of time, these numbers can get quite large. So we're breaking our biotic nature when we take or adopt antibiotic behaviors in our food system, in our medical system, in our conservation efforts.
And for that, we are depleting the amount of mitochondria per cubic centimeter because mitochondria are small bacteria that live inside our cells. So if you take an antibiotic, you're going to kill a lot of mitochondria, not just the bacteria in your gut, you're going to kill a lot of mitochondria.
And so the light per cubic centimeter goes down. When you start eating food with chemical residues, and all of us eat it every day.
Organic is a step in the right direction,

but organic is very rarely free of glyphosate, which is the most prevalent antibiotic and

herbicide weed killer that we consume. 85% of the air we breathe in the United States,

85% of the rainfall is contaminated. So it's in our rain, it's in our fossil aquifers,

it's everywhere, this chemical. And so we've saturated this planet with an antibiotic.
And for that, we are diminishing the amount of light per cubic centimeter on the planet. There's less life every year now to generate the light energy that allows life to occur.
And so for this, we see a 10,000 times increase in extinction rate of species over the last 50 years. And so we're accelerating the end of life as it's currently exhibited or expressed on this planet for this diminishment of light.
And this zinc flash is a critical piece of that as the soul can no longer connect to the biology if you don't have that half million mitochondria in there. And so when this diminishment of fertility in both men and women is largely a decrease in the amount of energy that it takes

to do this quantum entanglement between the soul identity and the biologic identity.

It's long-winded, but that's as good as I can get it.

No, I mean, I have so many questions from that.

I appreciate how you really take science, you merge so many worlds, spirituality, the

environment, and so it's helpful to see all of that together and to be more aware so that we can make healthier choices. I'll kind of circle back about soul, because I'm still interested in that.
But you know, in terms of all the research that you've done over the last few decades, what do you now think is the most important thing that we know for our health? I mean, it sounds like it's this. Is it the antibiotics? I mean, I know there's so many layers to it, but if you could succinct some of them so that we can practically become more educated, but also do something about it.
So I guess that gets us into a third layer of self-identity, which is psychological identity. And so you've got energetic soul identity, you got biologic identity, and then you have the human psychological identity.
Of the three of those that's most damaging to our health, the psychological identity is the most damaging and creates the most vulnerability for the human. It's almost like we needed to take care of the body.
You said there's a boundary, right? So it's like we identify with the body so that we take care of this for evolutionarily speaking. But then that physical survival got transferred to psychological survival, right? That the ego itself, that I am separate.
And then that's where I think we are as a species in terms of waking up right now. I think you're right about that.
I think there's a sudden realization that we must not be separate from nature. You know, we must be nature.

And this is exciting because it's getting at the root wound of humanity.

If you,

if there's a root wound that I have seen all over the world in every

indigenous to non-indigenous,

you know,

colonial cultures,

all the rest,

we have a fundamental root wound of we're separate from nature.

And we're trying to heal that at every level.

We're so vulnerable to the drugs that palliate abandonment disorder. And I've seen this in indigenous cultures just as much as I've seen them in colonial cultures, is that wound is very present and has to be because we're so addictive in our behavior.
addiction is is a symptom of an abandonment disorder. And so the addiction of alcohol or drugs, those are small examples of a deeper reality that we are all as humans addicted to something because we have this disorder of abandonment at our fundamental psychological identity level.
So to be human is to have being rejected from nature. And you can read this in our own definition of nature.
Go to Oxford English Dictionary, look up the word nature, and it will tell you that it's everything in the firmament of the earth. It's the minerals, the plants, the animals, everything as opposed to humans or anything humans have made.
So not only did we write ourselves out of nature, we made ourselves in opposition to nature. Everything as opposed to humans or anything humans have made.
And so it's this oppositional belief system that then puts us in an egoic structure of, well, we better protect ourselves because screw you. If we're abandoned, then we're going to be belligerent.
We're going to to beat you. We're going to beat you at your own game nature.
We're going to kill you before you kill us. And so we have hunted into extinction, all of the major species, you know, anything bigger than us, we basically hunted to extinction around the world.
And we did that for tens of thousands of years. If you've read, read some of the recent books of sapiens or things like this, like this is not a new problem in the last 50 years.
We have been hunting to extinction animals that we felt threatened by for a long time, tens of thousands of years. And so we have this fear of nature and this sense of abandonment that then leads to addiction behavior.
And I've seen this in the jungles. I've been with the most recently contacted, the last peoples on the planet right now to make contact with what we would call a modern civilization was 1996, deep in Ecuador jungle.
And I've been there and sat with the indigenous elders and shamans in that space and watched their kids and grandkids scrolling Facebook behind them as they shared their indigenous wisdom of a 75-year-old in the jungle, watching their 50- and 25-year-old descendants already addicted to the same technologies that our children and ourselves are addicted to in this culture, which is just unmasking this abandonment disorder and our propensity to addiction. You know, go to any, you know, reservation within, you know, the North American thing to sit with some of our First Nations in Canada or Native American communities in this culture.
And you can see them clinging to the memory of their language of their stories of the identities that you know have have nearly been extincted now and despite them clinging to those and doing such a heroic effort of just surviving the onslaught of a genocide that's been going for hundreds of years, for them to cling to that and at the same time knowing those stories, knowing the singularity, knowing we are nature, we are part of nature, the addiction levels are so high because of the trauma patterns. And so when you layer that abandonment disorder with subsequent trauma that's not being cleared from the system, then you get human behavior of today.
And so we are now become energetically, genetically, probably not energetically, I think the soul is, you know, that physics field can't be perturbed in the same way that perhaps the biology does, but there can be a disconnect between the energy field and the biology. And we witnessed this many times in my clinic with a camera made in Russia that does a pulse wave electrical induction of energy across the fingertip.
And then you can map the photon discharge off that explosion off the fingertip. And for that photon discharge, you get to see the patterns of chaos or order in every organ system of the body.
And so we were able to do this induction field of the energy field of the body to see that the biologic stress was perturbing the energetic imprint on those cells. And so the stress that the liver was leading to liver disease because of the disconnect between an ordered energy field and the disordered biology or the subsequent disordered energetic field that was resulting from that.
So you can have energetic disruption, you know, biologic disruption, you know, psychological disruption. And the thing that seems to be accelerating that faster than anything else is coming from the psyche part of the trifold identity, which is emotional trauma.
Emotional trauma seems to be the most profound and disruptive toxicity that we can enter into. And it's the foundation of every organ disease that we know, whether it's cancer or autoimmune disease or major depression or acne, it doesn't matter.
Fundamentally, there's got to be an emotional underpinning to that because if there is no emotional field disruption, then the biology is healing very quickly. If you store an emotion in the system, you disrupt the relationship between the energetic and biologic systems.
So now the chemical trauma of an herbicide, pesticide, or an antibiotic becomes really profound. If you're not disrupting it with that psychological, emotional toxicity, then we are quite resilient to these factors.
The American Gut Project did a really, it was an accidental discovery there. The American Gut Project is such a beautiful thing.
There's something profound that got witnessed in that they were studying these African tribes of the gut microbiome as, you know, these hunter-gatherers, the last hunter-gatherers on earth. And they were watching the microbiome of these guts of the hunter-gatherers.
And they, not surprisingly, saw exponential, you know, larger populations of biodiversity in the gut of, you know, a hunter-gatherer in West Africa than they do in, you know, the urban cities of America. The hunter-gatherer has 40,000 species of bacteria, tens of thousands of species of fungi.
The Americans got 8,000 instead of 40,000. And so we're walking around with 80% loss of our microbiome diversity just by being in this chemical environment of being human in a technologic space.
But what they showed is an accident. There was a missionary group that moved through this area and dropped off for these

indigenous tribes, these hunter-gatherers, boxes of antibiotics in case they got sick. And so this was translated to them, if you get sick, you can take these antibiotics and they can help your children or you.
So it was very altruistic. But as it turned out, the translation didn't go well because they didn't actually have a term for sick because it's not part of their cultural identity of being sick or healthy.
They're just them all the time and they biologically are present and they're quite resilient and they don't have any chronic diseases in their communities. And so these boxes get dropped off, not understanding when they're going to get sick, but they're all these shiny little red capsules and everything else.
Around the fire that night, the tribe passes all this around and consumes the entire boxes and boxes of antibiotics. And the researchers are just stunned the next day when they come back realizing that was probably the end of the microbiome, as we understand it.
This was the last semblance of a healthy microbiome. And in one night, they took these boxes of antibiotics.
So there was this deep sense of loss and just tragedy. But the researchers kept doing their work.
And so they were collecting stool samples from the whole tribe every day or every couple of days and sending those across the ocean to get genomic sequencing and all this. A month and a half later, all of the data comes back in a shocking way that the next day, the next day, the next day after taking Box of Antibox, there was absolutely no change in the microflora of these tribes.
These peoples are so connected to their greater ecosystem that there's no sever between their microbiome and that of the soil they're sitting on or the air that they're breathing. They are a continuum of nature and nature is constantly reinforcing their connected state and biology.
And deeper than that, they have no emotional trauma or belief of sickness. And so there's no place for them to put in their energy field, the belief that they aren't enough or they aren't complete or they need something else.
And so for the lack of emotional trauma, these people are extremely connected and resilient and regenerative in their microbiome, in their cell biology, in their immune identity, all these things. And so for me, I think it's hopeful that while the psychological trauma of emotional storage is a great disruptor, the release of that leads to this intensely regenerative state that really is almost bulletproof to the chemical nature and so for that I've come to realize while the chemicals are a big problem we can overcome that instantaneously if we get over the psychological bust in our identity that we were abandoned by nature.
I mean that makes me so happy to hear because that's the foundation of the work that I'm here to do and that I do and that the psychological tools when I was becoming a licensed psychotherapist, I was like, why don't people know this? And so to be able to have those tools, because those make such a big difference, and wake up to our inherent worth and value who we are, not as separate. Yes, we have a body, but we're more than a body.
And when we access that, I think that's the most natural, nourishing, healing, regenerative insight that we could actually have. And everything you're sharing is just confirming that.
And so I'm so grateful because it sounds like that's such a big part of healing the planet, healing ourselves, no separation. You were mentioning earlier, I was just curious about the abandonment piece of it.
I always think about not good enough, but essentially it's separation. Would you say that that's fair or accurate? Because to me, the illusion of separation then has people think that they're not good enough.
And when they think they're not good enough, that means that, you know, there's a lot of addiction and things that can happen. We were talking earlier about the accolades and kind of chasing a false sense of self.
I'm curious the abandonment piece and how you've come to that. And I'm wondering how I fit it in my own frame.
Yeah, the abandonment disorder, I think, is something that is interesting to look at in human history because Homo sapiens or some version of our sapien genetics seem to have large social societies that built technologies that are far beyond what we can do today. Quite recently, 10,000 years ago.
So if Homo sapiens have been around 300,000 years and we had a way of interacting with our environment, whether it be through information technologies that we were, you know, getting from, you know, some sort of lineage off planet, or, you know, we can come up with all kinds of myths and stories of what was happening, but we have an enormous amount of archaeological evidence that we were building stuff that we can't build today. And so there was a period of time of hyper-intelligence, hyper-connectedness, and we were definitely seemed to be more in tune to the fact that we were having a finite experience of an infinite soul, you know.
And so the ways in which the Aztecs played sports, you know, is a good example of it. They had this amazing game that's some sort of mashup of what we would think of football or soccer today and basketball, where they had to kick this tiny little ball or hit it with some body part other than their hands to get it through this tiny little stone hoop that was far up, high up.
It looks to me like it's 10 meters up or something, 30 feet above ground. So they had to get this tiny little ball up through this tiny little hole.
And when you look at this at one of the Aztec ascensions, like that looks physically impossible to do that. But these games would apparently go on for days until somebody scored or somebody won the game.
And the captain of the winning team had the honor of being executed at the end of the game. Well, that's just a fundamentally different relationship to life.
So there was not only technological capacities to build pyramids we can't build, there was this understanding that the highest honor is to go back into the spiritual realm having achieved something impossible in the physical realm. And so there was this honor of physicality and this great achievement of I brought an infinite soul into a finite experience to create the impossible.
And that's the highest thing I can do. And I'm so ready to recycle into my energy field to do this again.
I want to see what I can become next. And maybe I become white lion or something, but that's a different relationship to nature.
And we have a lot of evidence that it was here quite recently. And then I've traveled all over the world looking for some answers here because it's one of my biggest mysteries that I'm trying to solve for because I think it's so important to how are we going to survive extinction if we are to.
We're going to have to figure out what happened 5,000 or 7,000 years ago. Between 5,000 and 7,000 years ago, there was a global amnesia to all

oral histories. The Khoi and the San people of Africa have a 100,000-year oral history.

100,000 years of this is how it went out, this is what occurred, this is where peoples were,

this is what the Maori and the Aboriginal peoples of Australia and New Zealand have got 40,000-year

history. Most of our North American indigenous peoples have 40 000 year histories of oral tradition and then if you ask any of them what happened five to seven thousand years ago they've got no story as to like when when this occurred like what why did we suddenly go into this separation moment Why did we lose the technologies? Why did we develop fear, guilt, and shame as dominant social structures? And so I believe the abandonment event could have happened that recently.
The abandonment disorder may have happened then. When you're abandoned from nature, you immediately don't think you're enough.
And when you don't think you're enough, you are in a state of scarcity on every other social level. And so this moment of scarcity happened in our collective psyche a few thousand years ago.
And in that, we started to develop a deep sense of need for ownership. And in ownership comes empire or colonial behavior.
And so not only do you need enough for today, you need to make sure your kids and grandkids have got more than enough because you don't want them to starve. And so now you're storing stuff rather than letting it flow on a daily basis.
And we do have indigenous cultures that have not bought so deep into this, but I don't think anybody's free and clear of this abandonment. Again, this propensity for addiction is so ever prevalent across peoples that I think we all carry at least a kernel of this deep abandonment disorder.
But what comes out of it then is this sense of ownership and scarcity models that then drive our current, you know, exploitive, extractive, destructive nature as humans. We weren't always like that.
As recent as a couple hundred years ago, we had a different relationship to that. And so there's a hundred million people living in North America when Europeans arrived 400 years ago.
That a hundred million people were being fed by an agricultural system that was far more complex than what Europe had at the time. And so the Iroquois and many other nations were teaching Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, These guys were all agronomists.
All of the families that came over to start living in the United States all had to be agronomists because they needed to start again. So they were learning how to farm and do these complex food system things from the nations that had been here for 40,000 years.
And for that, there was a lot of respect and reverence for natural law that had come out of the Iroquois. And Benjamin Franklin had studied the heck out of it through Confucius and China in the mid-1700s.
And Benjamin Franklin had written many treaties on natural law in the mid-1700s before he would help pen the Declaration of Independence and everything else that would become the founding documents of the United States. But you can see the ways in which we poisoned both the food system at that time and the concepts of natural law with this deep wound of abandonment and this belief that we were not enough.
And we poisoned it in our original documents. We poisoned it in our farming systems like we came so close to being

able to perpetuate a different future and we failed for this deep deep wound that we carry yeah and i how i kind of construct and hold it is that this this illusion of separation not knowing who and what we are and the psychological trauma together is what's creating a lot of the safety strategies of bigger, better, faster, more of not enough. And you talk about abandonment.
I think of it also, I think of it as separation and a survival strategy, because we think if we are this body, then we need to survive. And then everything we're separate from nature and whatnot.
And as we do that, then I think that the deeper gift in that, at least for my own, I like what you were saying, what's your true experience, micro macro, my true lived experiences, I was trying to run away from not feeling good enough. And when I finally just met that feeling of not good enough, it alchemized, I woke up to who I am beyond any story of good enough.
I used to think like, oh, I don't have value. And it was like from that level of consciousness of wholeness, it's like the idea of value doesn't even make sense.
How could you separate the whole and measure it as anything other than all of it? And so this better than worse than is like, or not good enough or am good enough. Both of them illusions, both of them are stories.
And deconstructing some of that, which I would say is identity, removing all of what we think we are, helps us recognize our inherent worth, the interconnectedness of all of life, which, to me, is part of the medicine that we're moving towards. And sometimes, suffering has an intelligence that we have to hurt to wake up to

a bigger gift if we're willing to use it that way. Yeah, you're hitting on a very important word there, which is feeling.
And this is much different than emotion. And so this has been a slow learn for me.
But what we were watching in the energy field, the disruption between the energy and the biologic identity was emotional, you know, trauma, emotional storage. 9,000 years of Chinese medicine had mapped out very carefully which organ systems stored which emotion.
And so your unprocessed, you know, emotion of grief sits in the base of your lungs. Guilt in the prostate of a male.
That sense of I am not enough in the colon. These things are stored all over the body in very predictable ways, and they disrupt the energy field.
Those are emotions. How I would describe an emotion is a mental construct of a small bandwidth of a feeling.
The feeling of unconditional love begins in grief. You have to come to terms.
If you have unconditional love, you have to come to terms with you're about to lose whatever it is you're falling in love with. Because if you really come to terms with everything is divine and on its own sovereign path and not on your path, everything you fall in love with is going to disappear.
And that might be a child who dies. It might be your parent that dies.
It may be the spouse that divorces you. It's all temporal.
It has to be because everything's on its own sovereign path and nobody's required to be on somebody else's sovereign path. So everything is on its own sovereign path and therefore everything will diverge.
All of the souls are going on their own path for eons. There is none of them that are living parallel journeys.
And so we will simply lose everything that we love. And so unconditional love has to begin in the understanding of the grief of loss is worth it.
And for that unconditional love, it'll take you into a journey into what I would call joy and ecstasy and these states of acceptance and these states of wonderment. And then it will take you back into loss and grief again.
And so the feeling of unconditional love is a full bandwidth of every emotion you can think of. The emotion of love is this little tiny thin bandwidth that we've decided to define as, oh my gosh, I got this fluttery feeling.
I think I love this person. I think this person loves me.
And that little fluttering feeling and emotion lasts for seven seconds in the neurology. And so in this abandonment disorder, emotions are a perfect drug because they give us this neurochemical experience.
And because we are so prone to addiction because of our underlying abandonment disorder, all of us are more addicted to emotional input than any other thing on the planet. More than alcohol, more than drugs, more than whatever it is.
We are most addicted to emotional input. And that's how we build our stories.
It's how we build our daily social interactions. It's how we build our entire sense of self-worth is out of how many emotions did I experience today? And when we start to get numbed out, we get depressed.
And so if we can't feel the emotions, major depression is inevitable. And I think that's the biggest, you know, experiential learning that I did in depression is I had managed depression in thousands of patients and in my own immediate family for years before I ended up getting depressed.
And when I developed major depression, I couldn't believe the discomfort of it because it's not just being blue. It's not like, oh, I'm not happy today.
Well, that's not actually depression. Depression is a state of numbness where you can no longer feel.
And when you can no longer feel what you've been told is the only thing that really makes you valid as a social animal. When you can't feel love for your own child, when you can't have that emotion of like, oh my gosh, I love you so much.
When you can no longer generate that emotional frequency that you've been told is the most important thing. Love is the fabric of everything.
If you can't feel or give love, then you're worthless. This is where we suicide, you know? So we suicide at that moment of numbness rather than sadness.
Numbness is the most terrifying thing to the biology because it means we're no longer alive. And so we're looking for an out immediately when we become chronically numb and we can no longer self-stimulate with emotions.
And so a lot of this addiction to emotional input is our problem and our crisis and is driving our disease. And the problem at the biologic level with emotion is it can't metabolize through the system.
When you lodge the emotion of grief in the lungs, it doesn't have a way of getting out of the energy field there. It's just stuck there and it will chronically disrupt the relationship between the energy field and the biology.
Anger in the pancreas, guilt in the prostate, wherever these things are occurring, the emotion is not a full waveform. It's a distilled abstraction of the feeling and therefore can't metabolize through the system.
And so we just store it. So the difference between emotions and feelings is you can store the one, the emotions, and in the other, you clean the system.
If you fully feel the world around you and you fully feel the emotion of rejection from a lover or loss of a child or the burning down of your house, if you fully let yourself feel all of that, it moves through your body surprisingly, shockingly quickly, and it actually cleans the body just like a big set of waves does on the ocean

surface. When a big set comes in, it wipes out the previous stuff.
The big waves carry a lot

and feelings are big waves for biologic reset. And so you really nailed it with your description

is one day you woke up and you really felt what it felt like to have the I'm not enough belief. And so you had an emotional belief that was disrupting you and your biology.
And then you allow the feeling to come along and sweep it all clean. And so that opportunity that we have is to become more feeling organisms and allow ourselves to feel everything.
Don't numb it out. Don't distract yourself from it.
Feel all of it and just acknowledge where it's happening in your body is a good way. What's the difference between emotion and feeling? Emotions up in your head.
You're waiting for this little neurologic thing of like, oh my God, I'm so sad, or oh my God, I'm so in love, or oh my God, I'm doing. A feeling often starts in your core, down in your abdomen, and will sweep through and will move through an arm or move out to the fingertips or move to your face or up into the neck.
So feel not only what you're feeling, but where are you feeling it and where is it moving and how is it moving and let, and then let that become your big wave experience and start to learn how to ride those big waves. And if you learn how to serve feelings, you're going to be very clean very quickly.
And so in our, I closed my clinic ultimately to try to a stop being the problem because of the longer I was a doctor that people had to come to with a belief that I had something they didn't piece of knowledge, a piece of technology, biohacking, whatever I was part of the problem. And so by closing the clinic, it was my announcement to the world of like, you have everything you need and I'm no longer going to pretend that I have something you don't have.
I got nothing in my 17 years in academic training that you didn't already have at your biologic level. What you have at your biologic level is an inherent identity of who you are and you're quantum entangled with your soul, and that is enough to heal anything.
And so let's go there. And so we closed the clinic and we launched Journey of Intrinsic Health, an eight-week program.
And the first week is dedicated. And we put people in constellations of eight people to witness each other.
Because if you're witnessed and you're healing, it sticks. If you go on a healing journey and you're isolated, you have to learn the lessons over and over and over again before you start to believe it.
But if you're witnessed in your healing moment, when you make that one little breakthrough where that part of you heals instantly because you let go of the psychological belief system and you suddenly reconnected to an original design, original soul connect, that spark is so bright that people will see that and reflect that back at you at that moment. And when you get it reflected back at you, what just happened, then your experiential learning is compounded.
And so the eight-week program is one of experientially learning that you are whole, experientially learning the process of becoming a biologic generative engine as a reflection of an energetic soul or identity that's been here forever. And so the journey of intrinsic health has been so fascinating.
And the first week of it is dedicated to the state of being, the state of letting go of all of the roles that has currently, or up until this moment, been your amalgamation of a sense of self-identity, burning all of those roles. Burn it down and let your true identity, that soul identity, start to shine through.
And then having six or eight people witness you in that unmasking, you will see yourself for that. And you have to be seen in that because you can't actually see yourself.
You have to see it in the face of another. And so this is where we serve each other well as egoic split minds, as we function as great mirrors.
No matter how much I talk, no matter what I do, you'll actually not see me. It's impossible for you to see me because I've got an egoic shield up, but you can see yourself in that mirror.
And so as egoic split beings, we also have to acknowledge that there's a role for that too. There's a blessing we can give each other, even though we don't know how to make ourselves completely vulnerable and seen, we can see ourselves in one another more profoundly if we sit still and be a mirror and be witness to and give people feedback to what you're witnessing, the sparks of life back in them.
It's actually you're witnessing yourself sparking back to life in them. And so there's this beautiful mirroring journey that we get to do for each other.
And it's been interesting for me as I let go of kind of that doctor identity to watch people with no medical training healing each other more effectively than I did as a doctor. And so it's the witnessing of one another now where we become the human medicine.
And I believe this is the moment we are in as we are going to go past plant medicine era, and we're going to start to become human medicine. And the human medicine is a much higher order of healing than plant medicine can bring you.
And so if we need plant medicines to get us over this hump of abandonment and say, oh my gosh, we never got kicked out of the garden. We are the garden.
The garden's us. We're connected.
Thank goodness. Get over the abandonment disorder, but now you've got to heal the disease of being human.
And we have to do that at a fast enough rate that we allow something to go extinct here, which might be our inhumanity. The inhumanity is the judgment that comes, as you said.
Once scarcity hits, once you've been abandoned, you have scarcity mentality, you start to have ownership. The first thing that happens, your assumption, if I've been abandoned, I must not be enough.
And if you're not enough, then you start to store this behavior of judgment. And so that's good.
That's bad. And now you rebuild social structures and we believe in ethical codes.
Ethics is ultimately a symptom of a disconnect. We don't need a field of ethics.
The oak tree does not need an ethical manual to figure out how to be a good oak and take care of the rest of the forest. It simply does by being itself.
So ethics is the effort to understand a wounded psyche or to try to force social behaviors that are better or something like that to a wounded psyche of a humanity we can let go of ethics completely and simply behave ethically by you know reconnecting to the this source of of core value core identity core expression but to do that we have to let go of judgment and that's very difficult to do for others it's very hard for us not to run around judging everything especially ourselves so we are such brutal critics and judgment you know arbiters on our own behavior and our own selves and to see the critical mind to see i think the critic has a bad rap that it's just trying to make sure that we're safe and it's just it's there's no, it's just like the traffic in the background. There's no more weight that we, that it offers.
It's just noise. And if we can offer it compassion for trying to take care of us or trying to protect us, my experience is if we change our relationship with a critic, the critic changes and it doesn't need to just because there's a presence that gets to witness it and see that it's also part of the one, you know, like you're, I love you using the palm tree analogy that that palm tree doesn't compare to the oak tree, right? Cause it knows it's all part of the same ecosystem.
And so the willingness to feel not enough opened me in my wholeness. And I call it the paradox of transformation.
It's the very, it's like when you love someone so deeply or something so deeply, there's a bittersweet in it, right? Because of the duality that there's both in it, there's the sweetness and the bitter, because we've just fully said yes to all of it. And my experience is for anybody going through grief or loss or the fires or whatever the challenges that they're facing to create safety for themselves and then to feel it fully so that it does move through.
Like you're saying that wave washes through, but when we know we're the ocean, we don't get tumbled by that wave. We're feeling the bigness of who and what we are.
And there's so much I love in your poetic sharing and all of what you're bringing. And I also really appreciate the work that you're doing in the world on many different levels.
One of them through IONS, your product line. And I'm excited for people to hear about that and what you're offering.
So I just wanted to open the space for you to share about it. ION stands for Intelligence of Nature as a brand.
And it came out of the science I was talking about earlier around this fossil soil.

And so the extraction of the intelligence of a complex microecosystem that no longer exists on the planet was the breakthrough. And so in 2012, we started extracting soil elements from these fossil layers of soil out in New Mexico and Arizona.
and we've now found six other places around the world that have these well-preserved

fossil soil systems that carry these roots. soil out in New Mexico and Arizona.
And we've now found six other places around the world that have,

you know, these well-preserved, you know, fossil soil systems that carry these really high concentrations of diverse carbon molecules that function as this wireless communication network. And so it's been a real extraordinary journey into that humble reality that there is, there's no pill, there is no solution for disease, but there is a reconnected potential for life to happen.
And so when cells have unfettered access to information, they become bulletproof. And that journey has been interesting in that, you know, the terror of herbicides, our laboratory is one of the most experienced in the world with glyphosate.
And we We have published many papers around glyphosate, but we're about to publish what I believe is the definitive paper on all of the biologic pathways by which glyphosate disrupts human biology at these extremely tiny levels, down to like two parts per billion, which is currently like our threshold of detection of this molecule. So even at our lowest detectable level of this molecule, we're showing all of the pathways

of biology that are disrupted severely and are contributing to the extinction of species.

And so this publication will, you know, we hope finally start to move the needle. We've testified

in front of the EPA over and over again about, you know, the terror of glyphosate at the biologic level

and ecosystems and human health and all this, and it just continues to get approved. And so we're hoping that this definitive document really kind of overcomes some of the justifications and kind of workarounds that the regulatory and scientific industries have been in denial around.
but irregardless of that, our excitement is that ion has shown us that nature has never allowed a wound that she didn't already have a solution for. Nature has never allowed an injury to occur that she didn't already have a solution to.
And so before we even had teased out glyphosate's damage, we were showing that these molecules from fossil soils were reversing the damage of herbicides and pesticides immediately. And so that was such a crazy thing to witness.
There had never been a model like this for us to understand as scientists. How does nature not only overcome the injury but actually make you stronger, not weaker, for these intense chemical traumas? And that's what we see over again in our studies is that the gut lining, if you have enough communication network from these fossil soils, if you drink ion at the same time that you eat your meal that has the glyphosate in it, the gut membrane actually increases its strength, not decreases it after that glyphosate injury.
So you're getting stronger, not weaker, if you have the communication network in place. Biologically, how that presents, or clinically, how that phenomenon presents is pretty extraordinary.
And it was really our autistic community that started working with us in 2014. Mothers of autistic children had learned more about the gut-brain connection than any of the doctors in the world had by this point.

And so by 2014, there was this starting to accept that the microbiome had roles in all diseases was just beginning. And these mothers had really drilled down on the science that was still nascent at the time and had come to these conclusions.
And so, while others, doctors, et cetera, had been very slow to adopt this new category of dietary supplements that ION was representing, these mothers saw it, understood it immediately, implemented it immediately. And as a company, we can't talk about disease and supplements at all because of the way that the FDA regulates these spaces.
So these mothers went out on their own and created their own Facebook groups and everything else, and they were sharing all of the science and they were sharing the impact that it was having on their children. And so we had like this, you know, grassroots, you know, movement happening from this technology out of soil that nature had created.
And the autistic children have now for more than a decade shown us the beauty of reconnecting a human mind to its

nature. And these children are just genius, beautiful angels among us.
And so the autistic

community kind of led the charge for us, but we've done a lot of work with, you know, different

populations of different diseases to help us understand that it's not about treating diseases

anymore. It's about reconnecting ourselves to the natural systems that make disease obsolete.
And that's what nature intended. It was she was going to do so much redundancy and healing that disease was not a necessary outcome.
And that's been the experience of some of these West Africa tribes and everybody else historically is there was no reason for us to have a word of sickness or disease in the language because it didn't exist because we were so tied into nature that the redundant systems of repair were fundamentally more profound and and eloquent than any source of disruption or injury could have created for us. So Ion has been this really extraordinary journey into the human potential that lies within a reconnected humanity.
When nature re-embraces us and welcomes us back into her arms, we are going to experience a level of connected, resilient, regenerative biology that we've just been disconnected with for certainly thousands of years, maybe tens of thousands of years, maybe not even since our origin. Because again, these

molecules that ion has haven't existed in human history. They predate humans by millions of years.

And so it's really intriguing to me is, has nature been waiting to reveal her ancient potential for

our distant future? And can we stay in play when we start to really reground into the whole matrix

I'm going to go there? So ION was a powerful tool there. ION has gone on to understand that nature delivers its nutrients and its nurture through these molecules as well.
So not only are they communication network, these carbon molecules also function as the ferry system or the taxi system to get nutrients inside of cells. There's been an increasing awareness of the importance of bioavailability of nutrients or supplements over the years.
And so there's been a lot of technologies that have come along that we call nanotech and things like this to increase the bioavailability. And so you can get liposomal or nanotech curcumin on the market now.
But we've shown in our laboratory and clinical trials that even if it's the fanciest liposomal nanotech thing on the market, you're still not ever going to see that curcumin in the urine. It doesn't go from your gut to the bloodstream all the way through the kidneys.
Like it's not saturating the system. There's this biologic breakdown of delivery.
Contrast that to dissolving that same curcumin in ion before it's consumed. You suddenly have 3,000 nanograms per milliliter of urine or curcumin in your urine.
So you have this massive concentration going through the whole body suddenly if you just suspend it in these molecules. And this is kind of obvious when you start to think about soil systems is how does a mycelium network get nutrients from one side of the farm to the other? And it does it through these carbon molecules.
And so the fiber optic cable of a mycelium is structural there, but the functionality is actually in the carbon molecules inside the fiber optic cable, not the cable itself. And so these molecules of ion are the communication network and the delivery system of nature's nurture.
And as we start to really better understand the feminine and masculine within nature, we start to realize that the feminine is actually what protects systems. The masculine never does.
The masculine is a system of structural holding. So the mycelial cable is the masculine structures, these big proteins that hold space, but they don't functionally move or take care of anything.
It's the nurture of the feminine flow through that mycelial network that actually delivers the nurture that creates safety for all of the offspring that would be downstream. So it's the feminine that nurtures us into safety.
Protection comes from the maternal state of being rather than the paternal. And I think if we could reverse that in human behavior, we'll end up with a completely different society overnight.
Because if we understand that mothers are what protect their children and their social systems, and men no longer are burdened with that, well, we can stop war. The masculine being tasked with protection when it doesn't have the ability to actually nurture in nature the same way that the feminine does, the only option we have is battle each other, war.
And so I think it's the misappropriations of identity that men have been burdened with that forces us into this extractive, destructive, competitive, war-like behavior in business or in fiat countries or whatever it is, when we surrender to the fact that the feminine knows how to protect everything, then we're going to start to go back to a feminine method of sociopolitical change. And for this, we'll find natural law again.
And so I started the Institute of Natural Law with a couple of incredible groups of women and peoples around the world so that we can start to understand what does social political change look like in our future when we start to embrace the feminine flow and protection that's inherent in our natural systems and within ourselves and start to give back the masculine its rightful role. Interestingly, when the masculine gives up this warlike behavior of protection, its real role comes forward as the one that will open the heart.
And so the feminine is that that will protect and the masculine is that will open the heart. What I mean by that, it turns out that to open the heart or to actually experience love, you have to witness beauty.
And so the role of the masculine within myself or yourself, your masculine side of you, the role is to witness the beauty of the flow of life through you. And if you witness your own flow, you will fall in love with yourself immediately.
And so the opening of the heart happens when the masculine witnesses the feminine within itself. Each being, whether it be a leaf, a mycelial network, or a human has both the masculine and feminine within it.
And we need to start to develop experiential learning in our children, so that they learn that they do have the capacity to see their own flow of life through them, that they can actually see their own creative, intuitive function and the creativity that flows through a child to create that piece of art or to write that first poem or to write the first, you know, love letter. That flow of creativity is the feminine flowing through.
And so you teach a child to witness its own beauty. There will no longer be this sense of I'm not enough.
There will only be a sense of like, oh my gosh, I am this creative force of nature and I create beauty just as I appreciate beauty around me. And we will fall in love with ourselves at a very early age,

or maybe we just won't fall out of love with ourselves at these early ages. And we'll stay

in love with ourselves long enough to get out of our egoic, competitive, warlike behavior and start

to turn ourselves over into feminine care and nurture and protection, and then use that masculine witness of the beauty to open our own hearts back to a possibility of a different future. I just love the way you see life and the way that you poetically translate that.
It's such a gift, Zach. Thank you for all of the work that you're doing.
Thank you for who you are in the world. We're going to make sure to put all of the links below the show notes so that people can stay connected to you and participate in all the ways that they feel called.
Thank you again. My heart is open.
My mind is open and I feel so grateful for you in this time. Thank you so much for having me on.
Thank you for all you listening. Blessings on all of you.
Much love. Thank you so much for doing this work that changes the world starting with yourself.
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