Dr. Tara Swart: 4 Brain Hacks To Manifest Anything Into Your Life (Science-Backed Method!)

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That's terrifying.

That's fair.

Joe, Regional Vice President, PG&E.

We have to run the business in a way that keeps people safe, but it starts driving costs down.

I would love to see that.

We're on our way.

I hope so.

PG&E electricity rates are now lower than they were last year.

Hear what other customers have to say and what PG&E is doing about it at pge.com slash open dash lines. Are you still quoting 30-year-old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past.
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Visit ambar.org slash FLA to learn more. You know that feeling of I'm trying to manifest but nothing's happening? Manifestation is not creating a fantasy and then waiting for it to come true with no action from yourself.
Leading neuroscientist. Best-selling author.
Dr. Tara Swart.
We cannot undo a negative thought pattern. We have to overwrite it with a new one.
Your brain, it's two and a half times more strongly wired to avoid risk than it is to get a reward. Wow.
The number one health and wellness podcast. Jay Shetty.
Jay Shetty. The one, the only Jay Shetty.
Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the place you choose to become happier, healthier, and more healed. Today's guest is someone that I've wanted to talk to for such a long time.
And I'm so excited because we finally have her in the studio. Actually, we're all the way in London because we didn't know when she was coming to LA.

And I'm so glad we made it happen.

I'm speaking about the one and only Dr. Tara Swat.

She's a PhD neuroscientist, former MD,

executive advisor, best-selling author,

and senior advisor for neuroscience

and leadership at MIT Sloan.

Her book is called The Source,

The Secrets of the Universe, The Science of the Brain. If you don't already have a copy, I want you to go and grab it now.
I promise you, you won't regret it. Please welcome to On Purpose, Dr.
Tara Swart. Tara, it's such a joy to have you here, honestly.
Thank you so much. And thank you for, you know, squeezing me in when you're in London for such a short time.
No, no, not. This is something I was looking forward to all week.
I can promise you it's a Thursday for anyone who's listening. And I've been recording all week and I was really excited to sit down with you.
I think the work that you're doing is so similar in value to the work I'm trying to do in the world. I really believe that for so long, ancient wisdom and the wisdom of the east especially has been seen through two lenses I think there's been a lot of enthusiasm towards it and a lot of value and reverence and at the same time I think there's been as you say skepticism and cynicism around it and so to have someone with your of your caliber your research your insight and communicating in the way you do, I think is such a great blessing and benefit for the industry in and of itself.
So thank you so much for the work you do. It really means the world.
But let's dive straight in. And if you hear me and Tara lock into some, what would I call them, inside jokes, because we're both North Londoners, then just please roll with us.
But Tara, I wanted to start off with where did you and why did you get so passionate about this work and finding the parallels between ancient wisdom and modern science? And why did that work call you? As you know, I grew up in North London, and I was the oldest child of first generation immigrant parents. So I always felt like I was bridging two worlds.
You know, I went to school, I didn't have any Indian friends, and I just wanted to fit in with my friends. And then I would come home, and obviously we would have, like, the altars and the incense and the ceremonies and the rituals and everything.
And so, yeah, I would say for most of my childhood, I was living in two worlds. And then at the age of 18, I went to medical school and I think I moved very much away from our cultural heritage and just lived like a teenager and someone in their 20s at university.
And I was at university for most of my 20s because I did medical school and a PhD. So nine years at university.
Around the time that I became a doctor, yoga was becoming quite popular in society. So I sort of returned to that.
And I would say that reignited my interest in our cultural heritage. And but then still, I would keep it very separate from my work.
So I was working in the NHS, you know, that really wasn't very holistic. But at home, I was eating in an Ayurvedic way and doing yoga and some time passed.
And these things came more into our culture anyway. But still, at the time that I wrote the source, it was a risk for me as an MIT professor to start speaking about manifestation and visualization and meditation and things like that.
But writing it really, for me, actually brought those two things together and made me think, I don't have to keep my personal life separate from my professional life. And I have to say thank you to everyone that the response to it then, you know, took that even further.
As we were discussing, you know, we both had books out around that time, couldn't really do world promo because of the pandemic. But very early on in the pandemic, I thought, oh no, there's going to be a huge mental health crisis.
And it was so unprecedented. I thought, what can I offer that isn't already available to people? But I will caveat that by saying, I think all of the ancient wisdom and knowledge that I try to apply to modern mental health problems is it's just things that we've forgotten.
It's not anything new, but it's about bringing, you know, finding those things. It's like gold mining and bringing them to people and saying, this could really help you.
It's fascinating that all of these things have been practiced for thousands and thousands of years. And ironically, we've also had mental health and anxiety challenges for much longer than we believe we have.
And I often think of the Bhagavad Gita and Arjun, which, you know, was spoken 5000 years ago. But that experience that he's having on the battlefield is anxiety, stress.
He's having a sense of a loss of identity. He's worried about the surroundings and the impending war that's about to take place.
And so you see that in a text that's 5,000 years old. And then you have all of this wisdom that surrounds it.
But being able to translate that into what's happening now is so needed. And I guess that's why you had that positive response.
Yeah. And what I found really interesting is that it would be one thing if you and I sat here and talked about our own cultural heritage.
But what I found is that if you look at the ancient Greeks, ancient Egyptians, Babylon, and all sorts of other ancient cultures, the first Americans, that there are so many similar themes of the things that keep us healthy and such new science as if it's just been discovered in the last year or two, like things like connection to nature. I mean, how are we not understanding that for so long? You know, I think because there were no planes in the sky and less traffic and our time in nature in this country anyway, was limited.
People were allowed like a one-hour walk outside during the day at some points. The appreciation of nature grew.
And then suddenly, as if from nowhere, comes out the science that time in nature helps your mental health, your physical health, your longevity. It boosts your immunity.
There's just an impact of that awe-inspiring sort of feeling of being in beautiful nature on the way that your brain works. So like so much modern science that is actually not one of those things that's new.
Yeah, absolutely. It's not new at all.
This idea then that we have the power to change our destiny, this idea that we have the power to propel our lives, whether it's careers, whether it's relationships, we have the ability to shift and pivot. A lot of people will hear that and they think to themselves, well, that doesn't happen to me.
It happens for those people. They hear that and think, yeah, you can't really think your way into anything.
Or people hear it and say, no, I tried that once and it didn't work for me. How do you approach that conversation of helping people realize the power that they hold and the power of what's possible for any one of us? I love the way you've kind of segued that from nature into manifestation because a few things here.
One thing is if you just observe nature, you see manifestation all the time. You know, you see a flower growing from a bud into a fully formed flower and then its petals starting to fall.
You see trees growing, you know, all sorts of things. And the other connection there is that creating the environment within yourself and around yourself to allow things like manifestation to happen and that basically means at the simplest level that you set a goal you say this is what I want my life to be like or this is a specific thing I want in my life and then there's a process that leads that to potentially manifesting in the real world but I do agree with one of those skepticism points, which is that you can't sit at home and think about it.
So I've been really, really clear about saying that it's manifestation is not creating a fantasy and then waiting for it to come true with no action from yourself. So I actually renamed vision boards, action boards, as if to say that, yes, create imagery that represents what you want, but then you have to be doing something every day to move yourself closer to that.
Whether it's being healthier, just so that your brain's in a better environment, or it's networking or dating or, you know, saving money, whatever it is that's going to get you, let's say the house that you want. you know, a great example is people might say, of course, I'd love a house in the Hamptons.
But if that's not realistic for you in the short term, then you'll only reinforce the fact that you're failing at manifesting. So it's better to say, I'd like to be on the property ladder and start there and then obviously build bigger.
Did you find a difference? And I want to get into the science and research part to show the validity of what you're saying. Did you find a difference in the science of measuring extrinsic and intrinsic motivators? Because I feel like manifestation is still always about what do you want? Where do you want to be? And as you know, honestly, I can only really speak for myself.
But when I think about it, for me, if someone asked me what that was, I've always wanted to just wake up and do what I love every day. Like that's really all I care about.
And so it's all I care about is I want to wake up and do what I love every day and hopefully improves the lives of other people. And if those two things can go together.
And I find that a lot of manifestation stems around like what kind of house do you want? And what kind of car do you want? And what kind of life do you want? And it gets very extrinsic. And so I wonder whether, I'm intrigued, I'm really curious to know what the science suggests about when you're having an action board towards an intrinsic motivator or an extrinsic motivator.
There's a lot to unpack here. Please.
I'm all ears. I'm here as a student to just listen because i'm so fascinated so in terms of the motivation to make it really easy for people to understand i called it magnetic desire which is something that is so emotionally driven for you personally and aligned with you know what's logically doable in your life and what your intuition tells you and you you know, what your creative brain can help you to achieve, that if you have magnetic desire for something, then, you know, I always say, if you follow your passion, you will be successful.
But I'm mindful that that statement, and even your one of I just want to wake up and do what I love, are extremely privileged statements. So with manifestation, one of the criticisms is that, you know, that's a luxury for people who already have, you know, more than what they need.
And then they can say, oh, well, I would love, you know, to do this or have this. And so I think what I've learned in where I have ever felt slightly defensive around that statement is that whoever you are, wherever you are, there is one tiny thing that you could do to make your life better.
And it's the micro changes that build you up to getting to a point where maybe you can actually do something that you love rather than do what you have to do to put food on the table for your children. But having said that, if your ideas for what you want to manifest are things like, well, all my friends are getting married and having family, so I want to get married and have a family, rather than I've really thought about what I want to do and my passion and purpose might mean that I have to delay having a family and that's okay.

It's more likely to work out with the second one than the one that's kind of too guided by parental expectations, societal expectation, career, you know, aspirations. So I do think people have to dig deeper for manifestation to, you know, really work well.
Yeah. Walk me through some of the science that, and the research that validates some of these claims, because I think that's your, that's your unique perspective.
And that's been the unique angle that you brought to it. And I feel like it's great to understand that this stuff is actually being researched, tested, discovered.
It's not just being said because it not just sounds good, but that maybe there's a couple of case studies, but there's more than that. So there's two main sort of areas around that.
One is the sort of six themes that I narrowed down from the 12 laws of attraction that I could explain with cognitive science, which is neuroscience and psychology. So when I first started that research, I saw that there wasn't even agreement over what the laws of attraction were or how many there were.
So I thought, okay, let me distill this down to something that makes sense to me and then see what we can do with it. So the first one is abundance because one of the strongest gearings in the brain is loss avoidance.
So to survive when we lived in the cave, we had to stay safe rather than take risk. now for most of us who are lucky enough you know to live in the modern world and have basic safety

around us, it's healthier for us to be willing to take risk. So you actually have to override that ancient wiring of the brain, which says, no, don't go and like, you know, fly to London and try to have meetings with lots of different people who may not want to meet you.
Stay in LA because that's safer and you've got your community around you and you know you know you've got a big network so for you to say well I'm going to go to a new I know it's not it was your home but in terms of like recent work you know kind of take a bit of a risk take a week out there you know see who I can interview that is you overriding that part of your brain that might say it would just be easier for me to stay in LA. So it's as simple as that.
It can obviously be a lot harder than that as well, but it's understanding that your brain will do quite a lot to stop you from taking risk. It's two and a half times as strongly wired to avoid risk as it is to gain reward.
And it's two and a half times more strongly wired to avoid risk than is to get a reward. Wow.
It's about believing that there are enough resources out there for everyone. And that by, you know, perhaps entering a new career pool or a new community of people, that it doesn't mean that you're likely to fail if you've managed to be in an abundant state, because what that does in the brain is it moves the brain away from the fear and shame kind of states, which correlate with the stress hormone cortisol, to the love and trust and joy and excitement states, which correlate with the bonding hormone oxytocin.
Now, when your brain is in that state, it's much more likely to take a healthy risk. It's much more likely to ask someone for a favor.
We were talking about, you know, asking each other for favors before. You wouldn't do that if you thought, well, don't ask Jay because he'll just shut you down.
Then you would never ask anyone. But if you start a conversation and someone looks like they want to be generous and help you, then, you know, you go into that oxytocin mode, but you need to be pushing yourself into that mode as much of the time as you can.
So the second one is manifestation, which is believing that with your abundant resources, you can do things in the real world that mean that whether it's that feeling of I do what I love or it's an actual house, that you have it in your capability to make that happen. Because of course, if you believe it will never happen for me, one of these common statements, that's likely to become true.
That's manifestation too. It's just negative manifestation.
And it's important to say that both manifestation and the process of neuroplasticity, which I will describe in detail, which is how your brain changes to allow you to grow and grasp new opportunities, they both have a good side and a bad side.

And the classic example of a bad side of neuroplasticity is obsessing over an ex after a breakup. Because what you're saying to your brain is, this is what people do.
You know, you trust them and then they leave you. And you just remind yourself of all the times that you should have like seen the signs and then, you know, all the times that that it went wrong that's also inducing neuroplasticity and potentially manifestation in your brain because if you don't make a change after that your relationship pattern will stay the same and you'll reinforce it further with more breakups and more you know sort of choices of partners aren't ideal for you the third one is the magnetic desire I already discussed, which means that it has to be really authentic to you, but also aligned in simple terms in your head, your heart and your gut.
But in the source, I talk about six ways of thinking, which are logical, emotional, physical, intuitive, motivational and creative. So if you think of something that you want, and you ask yourself in six different questions, you know, why do I want this logically? Why do I want it intuitively? And you can get a really good answer to those.
Then it's likely that, you know, you will be able to manifest that. Then there's patience, which has to do with neuroplasticity.
So until we had sophisticated scanning technologies, a lot of this work, cognitive science work, was all thought to be psychological rather than neurological. So it would kind of be like, oh, you know, Jay, you're not mentally strong enough.
You gave up too quickly. And it would kind of infer an intangible psychological weakness that is kind of your fault.
And I think that's another criticism of manifestation as well, that if it doesn't work, then there's something wrong with you. If you understand that it's actually physical work, when you're changing something, when you're striving for something, you're actually connecting up neurons or nerve cells in your brain that weren't connected previously.
You may even be growing new nerve cells from little embryonic, you know, baby nerve cells that then connect up with ones that already exist. And you may also be adding an insulating coat around existing neural pathways to make them faster, to make them more efficient.
So the patient's piece is because a lot of hard work goes on. You know that feeling of I'm trying to manifest but nothing's happening? That's in the patient's piece because when you get to a critical mass of neurons that have created a new pathway that is stronger than the pathway you had before.
So let's say it's just the things like that never happened for me pathway changes to a, well actually I've seen Jay do it so maybe it could happen for me pathway. takes a lot of effort.
But once you get to the critical mass of enough neurons, suddenly it feels like everything's easy and everything's manifesting. And I do feel like people have to get a taste of that before, you know, at least once with a quick win to have the courage to take it to the next level.
And the last two, which I didn't expand on too much in the source, are harmony and universal connection. And harmony is kind of also to do with the fact that you're aligned in yourself, but it also means that it should be aligned with the world, like you're not doing some harm to get what you want.
And universal connection is about the fact that, you know, we are all interrelated. If you believe that you can achieve something because there are enough resources in the world for everyone then you should also be generous and pay it forward i couldn't be more excited to share something truly special with all you tea lovers out there and even if you don't love tea if you love refreshing rejuvenating refueling sodas that are good for you listen to this radhi and i poured our hearts into creating juni sparkling tea with adaptogens for you because we believe in nurturing your body and with every sip you'll experience calmness of mind a refreshing vitality and a burst of brightness to your day juni is infused with adaptogens that are amazing natural substances that act like superheroes for your body to help you adapt to stress and find balance in your busy life.

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We were getting where we couldn't pay the bill. PG&E asked customers about their biggest concerns so we could address them one by one.
That's terrifying. That's fair.
Joe, Regional Vice President, PG&E. We have to run the business in a way that keeps people safe, but it starts driving costs down.
I would love to see that. We're on our way.
I hope so. PG&E electricity rates are now lower than they were last year.
Hear what other customers have to say and what PG&E is doing about it at pge.com slash open dash lines. Count your way into a perfect night with Amex gold.
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Head to jshetty.me and get yours today. As I'm listening to you, I'm just thinking that so much of our psychology has been made so limited and scarce.
When I think about the way we talk about our relationship with money, you may have grown up in a family that that says we have just enough to survive or we don't need more we have we have all we need and those things become so hardwired and therefore as we get older it becomes really hard to change them right and so that also applies to love it's like oh if someone says oh my parents had marriage, like, I'm just scared I'm going to repeat it. And then that becomes their narrative.
When we're talking about changing those, does every thought count? Does every thought matter? Like, talk me through that. Yeah, absolutely.
Every single thought matters. And that's why there's an old Buddhist saying that is replace every negative thought with a positive thought.
And neuroplasticity completely backs that up because the way we rewire our brains is not that we, so basically we cannot undo a negative thought pattern or a negative relationship pattern. We have to overwrite it with a new one.
So rather than focusing on the negatives, which is, you know, to do with that abundance piece, it's better to work out what do I need to do differently to not keep repeating this obstacle or challenge that keeps coming up in my life. So the way that it physically works, the process that underpins neuroplasticity, is underpinned by neuroplasticity, is a four-step process.
And it starts with raised awareness, which is kind of what you've already said which is really monitoring your thoughts understanding what the beliefs are that are underneath driving those thoughts and making you make the decisions that you make in the real world and I would suggest that people spend at least a month monitoring that with journaling maybe talking therapy maybe talking to a friend as long as you know you're very clear that they, that their agenda for you kind of doesn't, you know, affect that. And then the second stage is focused attention.
So that is then, let's say you notice a particular pattern that you have, let's say it's around money, notice the next time again for a month, probably that you don't buy something because you don't feel you deserve it because you think it's too expensive, or you wait for something to go into the sale and then you miss out on getting it, you know, so things like that. So any money behaviors or love behaviors, whichever.
And at first, don't try to change anything, but just notice it like maybe straight after it happened. Then try to, in time, get yourself to notice when it's happening and see if you can reframe it it maybe you can maybe you can't and then to try to get yourself to the stage where you think normally I wouldn't buy this because I don't think I deserve it but today I'm going to treat myself because I believe in abundance and I believe that I will achieve the you know career aims that I have that will make me able to afford that the third stage deliberate practice, which is that you regularly practice the new desired behavior until it becomes so ingrained in your brain that it's actually easier for you to do that than default to the old behavior.
And the last part, it's not really one of the stages, it takes you through the whole process is accountability. So how do you hold yourself accountable? Some people have a coach or a therapist or a partner that might hold them accountable.
If you don't, and you need to do it by yourself, then a vision board is a really good way of doing it because you've clearly stated what you want. You can see if you've got it or not.
At the end of the year, you can say I manifested 60% of the things that I wanted. And I also use an app called Habit Share where where I record 12 micro habits each year.
And I can track them, I can share them if I want to. I found that was better for me than New Year's resolutions, because I could just take two or three of them and try to bring them into my toolkit each quarter of the year.
And then by the end of the year, I would find like eight or 10 or 10 of those were habits already. So I kind of do that alongside my bigger goals.
I find like when people think about this, one of the things that kind of keeps tripping them up is, Jay, I can say it and I can think it, but I don't believe it. Yeah.
Right. And I'm sure you've heard that a million times, that fear of like, okay, well, you know, I don't believe I can start living my passion and I don't believe that I can do what I love for work or I don't believe that it's possible for someone like me to achieve whatever else it may be.
And then I can say it to myself before I go to bed, but I don't believe it. Because I don't believe it, I stopped doing it after two to three days.
What's the difference between someone who's practicing this in a way that it works and we'll get on to action in a second but at least practicing the belief change because I'm I'm fully with you by the way like I remember I had a mentor that used to constantly say to me he'd say Jay you're an entrepreneur you're an entrepreneur you're an entrepreneur and at this time I was working a full-time job nine to five and getting paid whatever it was and he'd keep telling me but like Jay you're an entrepreneur and I'd keep telling him I'd be like no I'm not no I'm not no I'm not I'm I'm an artist I'm a creative I'm definitely not an entrepreneur the last thing I want to do is run a business like that's just not who I am and if you asked me I would have said I'm a very self-aware person at this point in my life it wasn't that I didn't reflect enough I felt like I really knew who I was and I was like this is and then it was only when I was required to have to be an entrepreneur did I have to shift into that gear and become one but if you still ask me today I'm like I'm an entrepreneur but I much prefer being a creative and an artist and and a thinker that's that's where I thrive if you ask me. But I did something when I was required to do it.
So I see you smiling. And so I want to hear your reaction to what I'm sharing.
Four things there. So I hope I can remember them all.
The first one is that there's a step before what you said, which is that some people aren't even aware that they don't think they deserve it. So I discovered something quite by accident, which was a theme of people selecting images for their vision board, placing them onto the board, even spending the time to like shuffle them around, make sure it all like looks and feels right.
And then telling me that they never stuck them down. Wow.
And I just had a light bulb moment and I said, you haven't stuck them down because you don't believe you deserve them. And the person just like, you know, had a bit of a meltdown.
And so every time I've heard someone do, you know, a variation on that theme, I've talked about deservingness. So like, even that has to be known in the first place, right? We think it's too ridiculous or too out there or, right? Next, I do think it's about who you surround yourself with.
So I started smiling when you said I had a mentor, because that already means that you've sought out someone that's going to challenge your thinking, that's going to push you to be your best. And my version of that is that, like I said, I spent nine years at university to become a medical doctor in the NHS.
I did not believe that I could do anything else. I didn't, I had a vocational degree.
I didn't have a more general degree where I could say, I could go and, you know, apply to do something else. My best friend, whose kids I was just babysitting, she had read biochemistry at Oxford.
She'd worked in the dot-com explosion. And then she just announced to our sort of closest circle one day at dinner, I'm going to give it all up and go and study a master's in sculpture.
And I remember thinking, that's incredible, but I could never do that. And it was only kind of like one and a half or two years later that I then said, I'm leaving medicine.
And I remember my brother said to me, I'm really proud of you, but I could never do that. So it's almost like there's a chain of, yeah.
And if you're around people who were only doing what you do, who also had self-limiting beliefs, who, you know, had maybe some things even against being entrepreneurial, you might've stayed stuck where you were. And then the next stage is a lot of people try and then give up.
Right. And I'm not saying this is for everyone, but when I changed career, I went from having a, you know, not very high, but stable salary to having nothing.
And that was the case for quite a while. And a few people said to me, please just go and like work in the hospital for one weekend.
You'll be able to pay your rent and like not, you know, kind of worry about money so much. And a lot of people hold down a part-time job when they're becoming an entrepreneur.
But I said, if I do that, I will feel like I failed. So for me, I had to burn my boats.
Like there was no way back. I had to succeed.
And like I said, I'm not saying that's right for everyone, but everyone will have their version of the thing that will really make them say, I cannot fail. That initial challenge of, like you're saying, that even becoming aware that we don't believe we deserve something or something's meant for us, it can be such an uncomfortable discovery because it almost starts indicating towards the fact that there are past experiences, past traumas, past relationships that you now have to go back to and uncover and unlearn and understand because you've almost been living in a sense of darkness in that area of your life.
And I think that can be really disconcerting because it requires so much time and energy to actually go back there and excavate and look at it and face it head on. What does science have to say about how can we look at our past? How can we look at our wiring in a healthy way rather than a judgmental way? Because we could just turn around and say, I'm the worst that I've been thinking this way.
You start criticizing yourself. I've wasted so much time.
I always hear, even sometimes I hear people and they're like, I wish I started when I was 18. I wish I started when I was 25.
And there's this regret that's underlying that feeling, even if they did change. How do we look at our past and look at change in a healthier way rather than a negative way?

I think one of the things that you're talking about is this idea of having really in-depth psychotherapy and having to like uncover every trauma in your life to like get to the point

where you're healed enough to move forward. I am obviously a fan of therapy, you know, for

many reasons, but I don't particularly think that you have to uncover every trauma in your life to, you know, be able to move forward. The career change that I made in fact was to coaching.
So coaching tends to be more forward looking, more, you know, sort of positive looking, unless there's, you know, some kind of major trauma. I don't think it's necessary to dig everything up in like years of psychotherapy.
But there are some sort of models in science that can be quite useful for people, whether it could just be self-discovery. So there's one called Ghosts in the Executive Suite.
And that talks about the childhood systems that you grew up in and the fact that the wiring that was embedded in the first seven and then also the first 14 years of your life are likely to be very non-conscious now in adulthood, but still driving a lot of your behaviors. And so the business side of that is called in the executive suite, because it's looking at CEOs who are behaving in a certain way because of those, but it can apply to anyone's life.
And it looks at things like the boundaries and the values and the secrets and the sort of identities that you had as a child. So, you know, you may have had a home where everyone was welcome to drop in and they would just be added into the family meal and they could stay the night.
And I may have been, you know, grown up in a home where you had to plan everything in advance. If someone was coming over, then, you know, people would make sure there was enough food and make sure that a bed was made in advance and all this kind of thing.
And then, you know, values tends to be a lot around money. So, you know, you may have grown up in a household where people say money is a bad thing.
It's not good to have too much of it. You know, even in many religions, they say that if you're excessively wealthy, that your chances of going to heaven are kind of lower.
So, you know, there's a lot of that rhetoric in our society. Identification is about things like, oh, you're just like your father, or you're just like, you know, your uncle used to be.
Secrets is, we never talk about that alcoholic uncle kind of thing. And roles includes things like, were you the peacemaker? Were you the go-between? And all of those sorts of things may influence you later in life without you realizing it.
But there is self-exploration and other work that you can do with people to help you uncover that. And also the really good news is that Freud talked about stages of child psychosocial development and things like trauma, neglect, abandonment, separation from parents, illness, and described in great detail what would go wrong with you for the rest of your life if you experienced any of those things.
And then later, a psychologist called Erickson came along and talked about the vice and the virtue. So he said, if you have a childhood trauma at a certain age, then this is what could go wrong.
But this is also your opportunity for something to go really right. And what I find is that a lot of the CEOs or really successful entrepreneurs that I work with had their first childhood disruption between the ages of five and seven, where the vice and the virtue are inferiority or industry.
And industry meaning hard work, so being industrious. So that means if you did have a trauma at that age, then you could either spend the rest of your life feeling inferior and undeserving, or you could say, I'm going to work so hard.
I'm going to get myself out of this situation of poverty forever. I'm going to be self-sufficient.
I'm going to be financially independent. You know, and there's several other, there's trust, mistrust, and, you know, other kind of vices and virtues that people can look up.
It's all on the internet. Yeah, that kind of opening of the idea that you went through this, but it could also be an opportunity of this impediment could also be an invitation.
Like that kind of understanding I find to be really powerful. And I would agree with you.
I think the most purposeful people I've met are people who went through a pain point and now they don't want other people to go through that pain or they want to help people through that pain. And that's what created their ability to do that.
Whereas someone else who may not have had that pain or may not have had that challenge almost can at sometimes feel less clear or a bit more lost because they don't know what the meaning of their life is or where they stand. Well, I think what often happens with those people is that, you know, life's just okay.
Life's fine. You're married, you know, your kids are healthy.
You're going to this, you know, sort of regular day job and you've kind of forgotten what you dreamed of when you were a child, what you're, you know, maybe you've just given up your real passion because it's fine to have this kind of quite easy life. And, and often it does take a later disruption, like a divorce or a bereavement to really, um, make people rethink that.
And so, you know, a big example that affected a lot of people is the financial crisis. So a lot of people in financial services lost their jobs, and then said, actually, I always wanted to be a teacher or a journalist, but I also wanted a more expensive lifestyle.
So I didn't make that choice. And now I have the opportunity to do what I really want to do.
So I guess it depends on how you define wealth, because wealth can be having a lot of money, but it can also be waking up every day and doing what you love. Yeah, or having a lot of free time or whatever it may be.
When people are trying, I feel like we live in a time right now where, and you alluded to this earlier, and and i'm kind of going back to it we live at a time where there's a lot of projected goals and expectations and a lot of people can feel like they're so far away from their own goals because there's goals from other people around them now my mentor i'm still good friends with him knew me very well and so he't projecting his entrepreneurial thing. He was seeing something that I couldn't.
But a lot of the times there's like society like, oh, let's live in hustle culture. Everyone needs to be an entrepreneur.
Everyone needs to be a CEO. Everyone needs like there's a lot of performance culture out there and productivity culture.
and I find that a lot of people either struggle with that weight of that expectation

or they actually curl up into a ball and kind of don't want to go anywhere and do anything. And it makes them hide from that as well, because it's almost like everyone's just pushing them to be more ambitious and be more driven.
At the same time, I would love to understand the psychology of being needing to open up to more challenges and more opportunities is just a healthy way of living. So if someone's stuck in that space of, you know, Tara and Jay, I'm just, you know, I'm kind of stuck because I do want more.
I'm trying to get there that I believe I deserve it. But then I don't know if that's what I really want or if it's what my parents want or what social media wants me to want or what my friends are doing.
I just want to go back to something because I only actually twigged when you said Tara and Jay that my brother's name is Jay. Oh, no way.
Yeah. And I hadn't put it together like that.
And I wanted to say something that he said to me when I changed career. And I was like in my mid thirties then.
He said the best time to plant an acorn was 200 years ago, but the second best time is now. So for anyone that's saying it's too late, you know, I regret things.
I think that's a really amazing saying. And then before you started really like posing your question and I understood like where you were going with it, I thought, oh, I wanted to tell you about, um, at the start of the pandemic, when I said said I sort of like saw that I thought there could be a really big mental health crisis quite quickly I would say within like a month or two I thought this is also an opportunity for a spiritual revolution or evolution and so in all the research I've done since kind of the end of the pandemic at the official end I I guess, which is more about ancient wisdom and neuroaesthetics.
I believe that returning to ancient practices like chanting, humming, drumming, singing, and neuroaesthetics is neuro arts. It's the science of why beauty and art and creativity and nature are so healthy for us.
So if you immerse yourself in nature, if you spend time making or beholding creative things like either singing or going to listen to a concert or sketching or going to an art gallery, etc. That actually opens up your mind in a way that the modern world and all that noise around you that you've just described doesn't let us.
So that allows a level of introspection. And there's so many other things in that category that one can do.
But that really helps you to separate your inner voice from all the words around you that are telling you what you should do. And I also always say, there's a certain age, and it could be different for different people, whether there's no more should, you know, you've got, you've got to an age now where what your parents should, said you should do or what you think you should do, what your friends are doing.
It's not, it cannot be applicable forever because that is probably the one thing you'll regret on your deathbed. Right.
So taking that time, but it is so hard because, you know, I still hear people saying, Oh, oh I go for my nature walk but I listen to a podcast at the same time that's not giving you time for introspection um and I'm sure you're one of the few people that will agree with me that we aren't doing it like enough or any being we're just always doing I often say to people when do you sit down and actually do nothing and I think think that people maybe, not if they know me well, but if they look at my career would say, she's, she's probably, she probably never sits down and does nothing. I do a lot of sitting down and doing nothing.
Me too. Um, I think, you know, to access yourself, nature is a massive mirror for us.
So time in nature, you know, and the science for that in the last few years has just rocketed um interestingly at the same time the science around having a purpose that transcends yourself so not one that earns the money that you need to just live your life not even one that just makes you happy and satisfied in yourself but one that is more altruistic is actually actually very expanding for our consciousness. And I think that's probably what we're really getting at, a conversation that I don't have with many people, but I feel like I could have with you, which is that we need to sort of be able to access.
We were getting where we couldn't pay the bill. PG&E asked customers about their biggest concerns so we could address them one by one.
That's terrifying. That's fair.
Joe, Regional Vice President, PG&E. We have to run the business in a way that keeps people safe, but it starts driving costs down.
I would love to see that. We're on our way.
I hope so. PG&E electricity rates are now lower than they were last year.
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Altered states of consciousness to really understand what our soul's purpose is in this life. And breathwork is a great way of doing that too.
Obviously, there's a popular sort of trend at the moment for plant medicine. And, you know, I'm watching the research on that at Johns Hopkins really carefully.
And there's a lot of positive stuff around it. But what I'd really like to say to people is it's nothing that you can't achieve through time in nature, breathwork, meditation, nourishing your body with really healthy food, sleeping really well.
And crucially, having that really like positive, meaningful community around you. What's your understanding so far about the soul's purpose of what you've been able to discover and uncover on this journey? I did do some research into near-death experiences and terminal lucidity and dark retreats.
The original scientific interest in that was to understand the nature of consciousness more in terms of how separate it can be from the body.

So if we look at the research on near-death experiences, then we see that people who had the physical signs, as a medical doctor I would say they were dead. So whether it was the amount of time that your heart had stopped beating or your brainwaves had gone flat, have then somehow, which we can't explain, been able to become conscious in that body again and describe an experience that they've had whilst seemingly not in their body.
What's really interesting about that research is you don't have to have had that experience yourself because people will say, well, you know, okay, that's great for those people if it made them understand their soul's purpose, but we can't all have that. Although you actually can if you go and do a dark retreat, which is why I then looked into those.
And, you know, in the ancient cultures like the Greeks and Egyptians, they used to bury people for days to mimic death. And then when they uncovered them, they were the people that became like the mystics and the seers of those communities so again just things that we've forgotten but if you you know there's an amazing book called after by dr bruce grayson um or if you just like look into the research around near-death experiences most common themes that people say are i feel more compassionate i feel more connected i feel more grateful i want to do things to help people and I just see beauty like in everything that's around me and that's supported by the modern science of neuroaesthetics.
We can all choose to do that, you know, we don't have to have a near death experience to do that. If we're living more like that then I think we get a greater clarity around the reason that we were put on this earth.
I mean I think the biggest blessing any of us could have is to wake up one day and think, I know why I was put onto this earth. I know what I need to be doing.
And it's not always going to be necessarily the thing that just gives you personal satisfaction. You know, it could be your calling could be something quite different to that.
terminal lucidity is super super interesting as a I mean I did my PhD in neuroscience

because I thought I wanted to become a neurologist, but then I became a psychiatrist, which is also super fascinating in terms of things like you can hear voices that aren't there and your mood can change, like, you know, not in your control. But in terminal lucidity is when people who either have had dementia for a significant period of time or have had a stroke, and so parts of their brain are physically altered or damaged, chemically or physically, and they have lost the personality and level of consciousness that their closest friends and family knew in them, can suddenly become completely lucid.
So we've got stories of, you know, parents who no longer recognize their children and their grandchildren, just suddenly saying one day, oh, Jay, darling, come here, I want to like, you know, give you a motherly message. And it's usually a sign that they will pass away within one to 24 hours.
But there's no physical explanation for how they could know the names and react in a completely maternal or paternal way towards an adult child that they didn't recognize for several years. So that starts to make you think, are we actually that connected to our body? And if we're not, what does that mean? And I don't have all the answers, but yeah.
No, please, sorry. Well, I was just, I was just going to say, it makes you think that what happens in this life and in this physical world and on this material plane can't be the be all and end all of everything.
And if it's not, what does that mean about how I want to live? And to me, that brings me back to, I want to live a life that's guided by love. And, you know, I don't mean romantic love by that necessarily, although that could be included.
If I've got a dilemma, if I've got a difficult decision to make, if I'm feeling like I'm in a really challenging situation, then I always go back to love and gratitude. And I've now included observing beauty as part of that too, because what they're all doing is moving us into the oxytocin state, which is our highest state and really the only state from which we can live our best life.
So it's really about doing everything that you can to move yourself away from stress and towards love. And overly listening to that chatter around you is pretty much going to do the opposite.
So it is a little bit about liberating ourselves from that, I think, at least for moments. When you talked about spending time in nature, you talked about chanting, you talked about humming, you talked about the art class, the kind of more analog tasks as well.
What do those tasks have in common from what's happening scientifically inside of us, like biologically, like chemically? What's happening that's similar across those, or is it different? Well, you know, I have this thing about if I don't know the exact answer, I always take it back to evolution. So what we know about our ancestors was that they had scarce resources and it was all about survival and reproduction.
So in terms of like, what was our life's purpose then? It was literally live long enough to have children and pass on your genes. And then it didn't matter if you get got eaten by a saber tooth tiger.
But those same ancestors who naturally in their life to survive, walked barefoot in nature, sat around a fire at night, looked at the stars in the sky at night, also chose with those scarce resources to make cave paintings, to dance around that fire, to sing, to hum, to drum, to chant. And we don't know why, but the only conclusion that we can draw is that there was a benefit, a survival benefit.
And what we know now is, and again, some of these activities are luxuries, I completely get that. But when we make or behold any of those activities, that the brain becomes more hyper-connected, we get the benefit of novel experiences, we open up more connections in the creative parts of our brain, which actually allow us to solve complex problems better, to think more flexibly, to override our biases and regulate our emotions better, all of which are obviously, you know, survival advantages.
Because if you think about just, you know, on the very most basic level, the implication of that in a relationship, you know, if we were in a relationship and I was much more able to regulate my emotions, to solve problems with you, to like overcome any biases that I might have about the way that you're behaving, it's obviously the relationship's going to survive better. And one of the pieces of research I've really looked into from the neuroesthetics is called shared trait vulnerability and it's about the fact that people with psychopathologies like schizophrenia also tend to be more creative than the general population so if you think about some of the symptoms of psychotic illnesses it includes things like magical thinking altered states of consciousness consciousness, you know, perhaps access to, I want to put this really carefully, you know, sort of data and signs that we are choosing to ignore in the real world because our brain is filtering out information to help us survive, you know, as people who don't have a mental health issue issue so one hypothesis could be that you could use creativity and all of those things are creative things to open up more of your consciousness and if you have a high IQ and you're mentally resilient but you can also do that I just think it's so exciting to think about what we could do with our minds that, again, is probably stuff that we knew that we've forgotten, but in our lifetimes or in the modern world, we haven't been practicing.
And that is also one of the hypotheses that comes out of the research on near-death experiences, which is that our brains are actually filtering down our minds rather than the other way around. Filtering down our minds meaning? So our consciousness is capable of a lot more than what our brain allows us to do to survive in this material world.
And would the brain ever allow for more? Or is it just so against survival that we couldn't experience it here? Well, the easiest way for me to demonstrate that to you is it allows for more when you take psychedelic or plant medication. Right, right.
And we know that a lot of like Kriya breathwork, for example, allows some altered states of consciousness and so does other breathwork. Time and nature alone can, you know, allow some altered states of consciousness or expansion of our consciousness.
So, so clearly it can. And I don't know if we're afraid of it, or, you know, there's some kind of survival or societal mechanism that prevents it.
I mean, if you think about the tides in interest in psychedelics and how it's been shut down every time, it does make you wonder about the reasons for that. It's so interesting to be in one of these rising tides at the moment and see what actually happens.
Yeah, for sure. Yeah.
I mean, I feel like as you referred to earlier, meditation has been such a powerful form of reaching altered states of consciousness and breath work you referred to, nature for sure. I mean, I've had the fortune of spending some time in some special, special places, both in India and just this year, I got to go to Bhutan as well.
And, you know, it was, I definitely went to places that I felt they were, it almost felt like there were places in the material world that were already in different realms. Like it almost felt that way.
Does that make sense? Yeah. Like places I went to in South India, I definitely felt that because some of these temples are like thousands and thousands of years old and they were built with that.
I mean, they're built with that kind of like Vedic mathematics and just the way they're, the architecture and everything kind of how we marvel at the pyramids. Or the Mayan ruins.
Yeah, the Mayan ruins. It's that kind of, I saw those temples in South India, which I guess have less publicity and PR but when i went there i was like wow this is just you know there's this i remember this one kind of uh hallway and it's almost i forget the exact name they've given it but it almost feels like a portal and it's just pillars and pillars and pillars for so long yeah but it almost is seen as this transitionary portal and so you kind of find these places in the world that have otherworldly other realm aspects that you almost feel like an automatic sense of connection to a part of you that's beyond and having had those experiences it's amazing to me as well so many of my friends who've taken psychedelics or clients that have practiced that no one ever comes back and believes that this four-dimensional world is all we have that that there is more yeah what what's the benefit of that or what is what do you believe do you believe that's the next stage of human evolution is that spiritual dimension dimension? Or is that what we're leaning towards, hinting towards?

Is that how you see it progressing?

I mean, that's the feeling I got, you know,

when I thought that things were just going to go downhill for humanity.

I kind of quite quickly thought there's an opportunity for it

to evolve to another level.

And personally, being a medical doctor and a scientist, I look at people like Deepak Chopra, Daniel Siegel, Bruce Lipton, and, you know, cause they're quite a lot older than me. I remember thinking, you know, when I was still a doctor that how could they be saying some of the things that they're saying? And like, I don't think I would ever be able to say that in my career, but I've just said some of the things that I've just said to you.
And, um, I just wanted to add that, um, again, in my research, I completely agree with what you said about certain places, but apparently there's three ways of seeing like a thinning of the veil, if you like, you know, let's say we, let's just hypothesize that we believe that there are spiritual planes or astral planes. Have you seen that Disney movie Coco? No, I've not seen Coco.
You haven't seen it? I thought you were going to say Soul. I've seen that, but I've not seen Coco.
Coco is about the Mexican Day of the Dead. Okay.
So that's obviously an example of a time of year when the veil is thin. But a lot of people around the world believe that some of the places that you've described and Ibiza and Hawaii are vortexes where the veil is thin and you can maybe access a a different spiritual plane in yourself or you know perhaps even more tangibly and then there are also certain people so you know obvious examples of the Dalai Lama and I know people who've been touched by him physically touched by him have said that they saw the interconnectedness of everything and it changed the way that they live their life so I think what you and I are really like saying here is that there are certain things, activities that we can indulge in that can change the way that you look at life.
And I mentioned dark retreats, which I don't think a lot of people have heard of, but obviously silent retreats are a way of doing that, that more people I think, you know, have heard of. Yeah, no, no.
And dark retreats too. Like, I think it's interesting that all of it's trying to get us to just be.
Like it all starts with this sense of just being, but some of these activities, I think for a lot of people, they seem so foreign, right? Like, I think dark retreats seem foreign, silent retreats seem foreign. Obviously, they're quite big differences to the way people live.
And even things like chanting and humming and being in nature, like those, I think coming from an Indian background, like chanting is somewhat far more accessible or normal or a practice that you grew up with, whereas in the Western world that wouldn't necessarily have been a practice. What has been the neurological impact of chanting? I'm intrigued by that because that's always been something I've been fascinated by.
Yeah. So I will tell you that.
But what I do now, which is just much more accessible to people, is I just listen to chanting on, I found a YouTube channel I just listened to. I have it on in the background.
I don't particularly chant myself now, to be honest. But if you've got it on in the background, then it's creating a certain vibration and resonance just in your home which just literally you know it's nothing magical it's through sound waves is having an impact on we see that sound can have an impact on water and we're mostly made up of water so it's having an impact on you and what we actually what actually happens in your heart and your brain is something called entrainment so particularly in the research shows that groups of people who are together, who are subjected to either chanting or certain pulsations of light, that their heart rates and their brainwaves will synchronize.
And this makes them much more likely to cooperate, to see themselves as not other, and basically to just be in that oxytocin state of love and trust more than. Well, I didn't know about the science behind that.
It's so funny because one of my teachers would always tell us, he said, if you have a conflict with anyone in the monastery, you should dance and chant together. Really? That was literally what he would say.
I saw your face when you went like this. Yeah, because he would always say that and he would always tell everyone that it's like if you're having a conflict with another monk or someone in the monastery or there's something you should dance and chant together and he and we'd always thought it was like a nice cute thing like we didn't you know you don't realize just how much you recognize there's spiritual depth behind it but to even hear the idea that it's actually creating trust on a chemical level is pretty far out because...
Well, it's clearly creating coherence in terms of you wouldn't chant out of tune with each other, would you? Correct. One of you will kind of fall in, you know, or you both do it.
Same with the dancing. But once you're doing that, your heart rate and your brain waves will change accordingly.
And that simple act of doing it, even subconsciously, is going to bleed into when you're trying to consciously operate. Yeah.
I mean, that's fascinating from a romantic perspective too, I guess, and from a relationship perspective of how often are couples spending time together in nature, or how often are couples spending time in the same frequency and vibration together?

Is there any research around that that suggests the same for romantic love? So those things I think are kind of a given, the two examples that you've just stated. But we know that, now most of this research is done in voles, little, they're quite cute, they're rodents, but they're quite cute.
But it's also been done in humans, which is, for example, that if you see your partner in distress, your cortisol levels will go up, your heart rate will go up, you will start sweating. You will then seek to move towards your partner and soothe them with physical touch.
We know that people who are in hospital in pain, that when their partner physically touches them, that their heart rate decreases, their blood pressure decreases, and they are in less. We were getting where we couldn't pay the bill.
PG&E asked customers about their biggest concerns so we could address them one by one. That's terrifying.
That's fair. Joe, Regional Vice President, PG&E.
We have to run the business in a way that keeps people safe, but it starts driving costs down. I would love to see that.
We're on our way. I hope so.
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Pain. If the couple are, you know, a really like well bonded couple, there's lots of bits of research around that.
So it's definitely both the fact that if you do things together like time in nature or chanting or dancing, that that will make you more coherent. it's also the fact that when you see or experience lack of coherence with you know and especially

the partner who's seeing the other one kind of out of coherence that there is a move to go towards

them and soothe them and it's and involves physical touch which like i said can reduce pain in your partner you you kind of talked about these two ideas of and even what we're talking about now is this kind of spectrum that exists between stress and love and you were talking about how like you know you're you're trying to move towards love in your life and you said not simply romantic love just love as a force and as an energy source and you were saying that you know stress of course sits at the polar opposite of that and so much of our decisions today are based on stress naturally whether it's stress to pay the bills stress to survive stress to take care of people we love, stress because someone we love has been diagnosed with the disease. Like there's so much stress and it's almost like, how could you ever infuse love with that? What have you seen when, is that even possible to measure what it's been like to infuse stressful situations with love? So I just want to go back and just like clarify something.
So the stress hormone, cortisol, correlates with five emotions, which we will experience if we're under stress. So that's fear, anger, disgust, shame, and sadness.
And then the bonding hormone, oxytocin, correlates with love, trust, joy, and excitement. And in between those two is surprise, which correlates with noradrenaline and it can flip people from one side to the other quite quickly.
So like, you know, sort of, you know, when like someone jumps out at you from behind the door, but the more positive side of that is if you asked me a really surprising question and it made me think really differently, then it could make me stop being nervous and think, oh, wow, this is really interesting. I'm curious.
Let's go down this road. So the thing about those two ends of the spectrum is that they're like a seesaw, so they can't coexist at the same time.
So the more you have trained your brain to go into the oxytocin mode, the less of the time it can possibly be in the stress mode. Physical exercise is something that we see if we use heart rate variability technology, that after you've done physical exercise, there's a time period where you're actually in a non-phase, but you cannot be stressed.
So there are things that we can do. I know you're talking about really difficult situations for people.
How do you infuse that with love? But I wonder if that's bringing us back almost full circle to manifestation and visualization, which is that with all the forms of loss that I see people going through, loss of sense of self, can't trust yourself, breakdown of relationships at home, at work, in community, and even loss through death. If we believe some of the things that you and I have just spoken about, like from near-death experiences and terminal lucidity, then I think that's the reason that it's important to expand your consciousness and have more spiritual beliefs, because there is a choice there too, to make a gift out of a really bad situation.
I can completely see why people's lives get ruined by a loss and they feel regretful and bitter for the rest of their life. But I also think that it's possible if you can find some kind of legacy or learning or gift to make something good come out of the bad thing.
Yeah, no, that reminds me of Edith Eger's book, The Gift, and the work of Viktor Frankl. Yeah.
And that idea of that future motion of how does what I do now, how will that make me feel in the future? and who will I be able to help and serve in the future even if I can't help anyone now? And I think there's another point from both of them and also Nelson Mandela, which is about the mental prison that we create. And I know that Viktor Frankl spoke about that a lot, but I really love the quote from Mandela where he says, I knew when I walked away prison, that if I didn't let go of my bitterness, I would be in prison for the rest of my life.
And I find all of those things really inspiring. And I've looked at a lot of the science that we've discussed today, to help myself understand how you can possibly override that when there are so many difficult things in life, and to try to bring that information to people.
And really, and I'm not just saying this, that's why I was so thrilled when you invited me to come onto your podcast, because I think, you know, you've just got such an amazing platform and I'm just so grateful to you for letting me like, you know, share some of my findings. I'm so touched.
The feeling is very mutual. I was so excited to have a platform that I could have this conversation with you and that you agreed to it.
And I want to make sure out of just my respect for your work that you feel you're being able to touch on the things that you really deeply believe in and talk about. Yeah, well, I'm talking about some things that I actually don't normally really talk about.
That's a good thing. That's brilliant.
Okay, good. Yeah, good.
No, I, what is it, I guess, that you're most fascinated by right now? Like, something that you're personally obsessed with? I imagine that when you're in discovery mode, just as when someone's healing, not healed. So in a scientist sense, it's like when you're just when you're learning, not teaching.
Like, what is that for you right now? Well, I think it's broadly covered by a lot of the topics that we've mentioned, but I think the tension that I'm interested in is how far you take these things, because as you well know, you could take these things so far that you just like run off into the wilderness and become a monk and then just disengage from real life, right? I think what I'm really curious about is how far do you take these things until you get to a point where you have some level of understanding or potentially enlightenment where you can live this life to the fullest? That I'm obsessed with at the moment. Yeah.
And I am too, when I'm listening to you, I always think about how does something stop being a fad and a trend and the moment and how does it become a real shift in lifestyle and a commitment to whatever practice it is that you feel is valuable? Because I find that as humans, we're always looking for the next thing to entertain us. And you can also have a lot of spiritual entertainment and you can also a lot of purposeful entertainment and it just becomes another thing that you kind of use in order to escape as opposed to no this is what I'm dedicating my life to and this is what I'm committing my life to if that makes sense yeah exactly yeah I think that's just another way of saying what I was trying to say yeah yeah no I was just trying to dissect and understand that because, yeah, I think for me it's been really interesting.

Having learned a very ancient philosophy and then grappling with trying to make it make sense in the real life that I live now has been such a difficult, beautiful, graceful, awkward path to walk. And I don't think I figured it out.
I'm

still walking that path and trying to make sense of it. But I know that underlying it,

and you talked about this, you alluded to this, this idea of having a purpose for life based on

service, being a place that we're all trying to get to. I think that's been the only guiding light.
Like that's, that's been the only thing that is the light at the end of the tunnel that makes sense. And, and I find that when I'm, I'm, I'm deeply want to help people find theirs.
And I find that what distracts us, me included from that is past desires, future opportunities. and ultimately, I'd say the biggest one, which is what I want to talk about now is this societal noise that keeps us bound.
And that could be news cycles. It could be entertainment conversations.
It could be, like we talked about before, the expectations of work and life and people around us. And so like, you're so swept up in all of that.
And naturally, most of the people around us, including us, are skewed towards negativity bias, confirmation bias, we're stuck. And so to override, going back to where we started, to override that kind of primitive self to say no i'm gonna find the answer i'm gonna push is so rare if not impossible that how does someone kind of let go of those shackles and going back to your prison point how do you how do you get out the prison because the biggest i can't remember who said this but there's this idea of like it's it's a vedic concept but i think maybe it's been said in a movie or something more recently the idea that the best prisons are the ones where you can't see the handcuffs right this idea that you you don't even know you're trapped right again so much there jay yes sorry we're unpacking like, I'm just downloading onto you because I'm like, you're super smart, Tara.
So I'm like downloading onto you and like, figure it out for me. That's, that's kind of where this, how, how our relationship's working right now.
It works for me. Well, I think something I just picked up from you that I think is really, really inspiring for me and I'm sure for many others is where you've talked about that beautiful but difficult journey.
I think if you were sitting here saying, I figured it out and now I want to help others, I don't think I would have had the same feeling towards you at all. And it just made me think, because I feel like I'm kind of interested in a lot of things at the moment and going down some rabbit holes and don't necessarily know like, you know, where it's going to end up that maybe that's the beautiful thing.
Maybe that's better than me coming here and saying, let me tell you everything I know about neuroscience, you know? So yeah, I don't know where I'm going with that, but I know I'm going to think about that overnight because I'm very reflective. That really touched me actually to think that there isn't some golden nugget that you've got to come up with at the end.
It's actually, you know, what you delve into and are curious about and where you go and how easy or difficult it is. I think that's actually like what the thing is for people.
So now if only I could remember any of the other things that you said. No, no, I'm glad you talked about that.
And I want to touch on that too. Like I do feel feel like I there was a point in my life where I believed I was teaching what I was learning and then I had to live what I'd learned and then it all changed like it just completely changed and even now that that's why I'm in that dance because you you don't know and the the situation is giving you as we said earlier, each impediment is giving you a new invitation to learn, live and react and respond and figure it out again.
And then that happens again and again and again. I think it's like, you know, that phrase healer, heal thyself.
I think that I've never understood that phrase in the way that I have until you said what you just said which is that you kind of create like an elixir that you can share with others if you actually do that if you keep just trying to impart not what you think you know I don't think that has I'm going to say I'm not sure it has like much effect at all but I think if you can impart a feeling of what you went through,

I think that has much more power. And I'm going to move on quite swiftly because I've just

remembered another thing I wanted to say. So you were talking about the noise around us,

but also earlier we were talking about all these ancient practices, a lot of which come from our

culture and maybe don't come from other people's cultures. I'll tell you the one thing I do that

expands my consciousness the most, that is the easiest thing that anyone can do from any culture. Do you want to guess what it is? No, go for it.
I have no idea. Digital detox.
So I don't watch the news anyway, but obviously I am aware of the most important things that are going on in the world because I've got people around me that make sure I stay informed. And that does not mean I make other people watch the news.
It's just that my family will tell me if I need to like look into something. But when I do digital detoxes, which I usually do if I take two, three, four weeks off over like Christmas and New Year, that is the biggest change for me in terms of my mental space, my perception of time, how creative I become.
At that time, I may also be probably spending a lot of time in nature and kind of, you know, doing more of the kinds of exercise that I love to do, like swimming in the sea and stuff like that. But that one thing alone makes a noticeable difference for me.
And it does take some time, you know, doing a weekend is great. Like, please do that if you can't do anything else.
else but if you can give it some more time I notice towards the end I just become like super creative it's so true I can relate to it completely I think that's probably one of my favorite habits too and it's it's funny because I was like no Jay I just saw you post yesterday I'm like no we've got to a point where we built the systems where we can be online and offline at the same time and and i

couldn't agree with you more i'm my best self creatively even productively if i'm if i'm not glued to doom scrolling or whatever else it may be and i think it comes back down to that's what i meant by the noise and that is the that is the answer that's that's a great answer because I do think that you just have to switch the noise off. There isn't a way to operate in the noise and hope that you won't be affected by it.
It's almost like you walk into a restaurant, you will walk out smelling like the food in that restaurant. Like you can't go in there, eat, enjoy it and walk out.
And I used to often think I could do that. Like I used to think you could engage with an energy and not be affected by it.
And that's not true. Like no one's powerful enough to do that.
And you will kind of absorb that energy. And I do find that we're just losing spaces of high frequency and vibration that people can go to to have that the other way.
So there's lots of places you could go to and we all probably know what they are we're like i don't like going there because my energy gets drained i don't like going there because i don't feel my best i think we're losing places in society that have the opposite effect like where does someone go to and you're saying nature is is definitely one of them and that one's free obviously to people and that one's free as well and accessible and it's it's become harder i i read this article a few years ago and it was talking about how what we value as a society has changed by the tallest building in the town and so back in the day the tallest building in the town would be the church so you can see the cross from anywhere and that would be the center point of community and then that to the government building, the Capitol building. You'd see that building, the state building became the tallest building.
And today, if you looked at any city center, it would be the commerce. It would be the business.
It would be, you know, the tallest building will be a bank. That's so cool.
Yeah. And it was just this idea of how society shows what's important and what's powerful too.
I'd add that as well, that it's also what we deem as powerful. And I wanted to get your take on what is your perspective on God and the source in that sense? Like what have you discovered or seen from your research in that space? I mean, that's a very difficult question to answer.
I think- You don't have to if you don't want to. No, it's not that I don't want to.
I mean, it's difficult for me because I have to put my scientist head on if I'm going to answer that question, which is that clearly God brings a lot of comfort to a lot of people. And probably you could argue that it can't be disproven that God exists, but with the science that we have at our fingertips at the moment, it can't be proven.
So I have nothing against people, you know, having that as their primary like source of comfort and guidance in life. But I can't give you any evidence that such a thing exists.
Even with the experiences that people have had under psychedelics or things like that, I've heard or met so many people who've had like God interactions or God-like interactions and things. I'm sure you have too.
Yeah, that's what I was trying to get at from the research point of view. But you're saying that that's still not, you wouldn't count as proof in the scientific sense.
No, I wouldn't count it as proof. And I would say that the person who described that in the biggest detail to me, who's someone that I really trust, who's a positive psychologist said, I had had what I can only describe as a godlike experience.
I don't think anyone can really say more than that. The people with the near-death experiences often talk about something similar as well.
And there are some common themes like a tunnel of white light, you know, a being that's like more full of love than anything you've ever experienced. It does tend to hold archetypes, depending on what religious or cultural background you come from.
Not always, but mostly. So, yeah, again, I'm curious, but I'm always going to be that person that is very happy to go down a rabbit hole, but will also say that this is the end of what we know, like currently.
Yeah, yeah, no, no. And that's totally, it's totally interesting and interesting and fair and it's yeah it's just been something i've been fascinated by from a scientific point of view because it's it's um yeah trying to understand the as we've talked about today the otherworldly or other realm is is something that's beyond us like we don't we don't even have like you said the brain doesn't even allow us to go there.
That's what we think. But I think if we even believe that hypothesis, there must be more that we can do to try to go there.
And I will say that science does say that a healthy, moderate amount of religiosity or belief in God is beneficial to our mental health and none or fundamentalism is actually negative for our mental health. We've talked about so much today.
I know. We've really gone there.
And it was more than I thought too. I've avoided every bullet point my team sent me and thought about.
I love that. Because it's been so much more fun just diving into your amazing mind and research and just getting an inkling.
Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you really want to touch on I don't think so I'm like just making sure but to sit with someone and really pick their brain and someone who can speak about so many different things in such a broad range of topics is so rare I'm so grateful to you for that because I love how much how you are. I love how much you're willing to push the envelope.
I love how challenging you are of both sides of the idea, whether it's spirituality or science. And we end every On Purpose episode with a final five.
So I'd love to ask you these five questions. Some of them are things we ask everyone and some of them will be geared towards you.
So Dr. Taraswar, these are your final five.
The first question is, what is the best advice you've ever heard or received? There's a few. You can say all of them.
Okay. So one is particularly to do with writing because the first time I had to write up my PhD and then every time I've written a book since then, which I'm actually doing at the moment, I struggle.
So somebody said to me, just write something. And I think that's quite an important metaphor for life.
Like you just have to start, you have to put one foot forward, you know, and then it's much easier than looking at a blank page. And then the other one, I think, which I didn't really understand at the time, but is kind of where I am now is follow your heart.
What do you understand about

it differently now? I think at the time I was probably in my late twenties or early thirties, and I thought you can't live life like that. You've got to do the right thing with your career.
And, you know, I sort of worried about what my parents would think. But now I just, I believe that if you do that, you can't go wrong.
I love that. Question number two, what is the worst advice you ever heard? I'm not going to say it's the worst advice, but I'm going to say that the concept around it is perhaps flawed in a way that, again, I understand differently now, which is that when I was at school, high school, my English teacher said to me, you're so good at drama that you should read English at Oxford and go to RADA and you could become an actress.
Now, in those days, there were no like Indian actors or actresses in like the Western world, really. And so my father said, over my dead body, and you will go to medical school.
I've obviously had a very privileged education. I'm very pleased to be where I am now, but I just wonder what could have happened if I'd actually been supported in that because I'm not doing medicine now.

And I'm way more successful now in something that, you know, my parents couldn't have imagined.

So I just think this clipping of the wings of children, I think, is bad advice.

Question number three, is it possible to manifest love?

A hundred percent. I did.

How?

I did it with my vision board.

Walk us through it. So I had been divorced for quite a few years and I basically become a workaholic.
And I'd had a lot of success with vision boards for my work. And then I remember just slightly thinking, I think I'm using my work to run away from love again.
And then I just pushed that thought aside. And the following year, I thought, okay, I'm going to put this tiny little heart on my vision board, but it's all going to be about business and travel.
And so nothing changed. And then I really thought to myself, okay, Tara, if you believe in this manifestation, if you really, really believe in it, you've got to prove it to yourself that you can manifest love.
So I put this like huge engagement ring on the top left corner of my vision board. I never usually put phrases on it, but I was looking through magazines and I saw this phrase that said, joy comes out of the blue.
It was actually a Tiffany advert. I just loved it.
So I put it like on the top of my board and various other things. So I did that for 2015 and actually nothing had happened by the end of 2015, but February, 2016, I met the person who was to become my husband on a plane.
So that's out of

the blue in the sky. And we got engaged that year and then married the following year.

Wow. I love that.
That's a great story. That's beautiful.
I'm sure that would give people a lot

of hope. What are people doing wrong with manifesting love? Where are people going wrong?

I think it's a lot to do with this noise around us that you talked about. So I think a lot of it is at a certain stage of life where you just think that's what you should be doing.
And personally, I will go with a theme that you sort of alluded to as well, which is that I think people are going for a lot of external characteristics when they actually should be going for like values and, you know, what the human being is actually like and what the relationship would be like rather than the material things that surround it absolutely and question number five fifth the final question we ask this to everyone who's ever been on the show if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow what would it be love everyone just give out so much love yeah yeah so it's so needed yeah so needed, Dr. Tara Swart, thank you so much for coming on On Purpose.
The book is called The Source, The Secrets of the Universe, The Science of the Brain. Please, if you don't have a copy already, go and grab one.
And of course, if you don't follow Dr. Tara on social media, please go and subscribe and follow on all channels.
I can't wait to share this. I want to hear what resonated with you, what connected with you.
Please tag us both, sharing insights, your favorite clips, things you're practicing, your action boards. I want to see it all.
And Dr. Taraswat, thank you so much for your time and energy again.
It was truly a joy. So thank you.
It was amazing for me too. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Hey everyone.
If you loved that conversation, go and check out my episode with the world's leading therapist, Laurie Gottlieb, where she answers the biggest questions that people ask in therapy when it comes to love, relationships, heartbreak, and dating. If you're trying to figure out that space right now, you won't want to miss this conversation.
If it's a romantic relationship, hold hands. It's really hard to argue.
It actually calms your nervous systems. Just hold hands as you're having the conversation.
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Hi, listeners. It's Emily Tisch-Sussman, host of the podcast, She Pivots.
This March, we're honoring Women's History Month with episodes from powerhouse Governor Gretchen Whitmer. I fell in love with public policy, and that's kind of when I pivoted.
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