Ep. 61 The Journey From Anxiety to Healing with Dr. Symeon Rodger

[00:00:03] I'm Michele Simms and this is The Beauty in the Mess, a community where people who crave a shift in mindset, personal growth, and connection to like-minded people come together to start rewriting their stories. Through engaging, honest, and insightful conversations, the show will help you embrace the mess to

[00:00:23] recognize the meanings and lessons it holds and discover its hidden treasures to help you start making a mindset shift. Let's listen, learn, and reclaim who we were meant to be. Hi friend, welcome to The Beauty in the Mess.

[00:00:38] For this episode I'm very happy to welcome Dr. Symeon Rodger to the show. Dr. Rodger is a bestselling author who specializes in personal transformation. He's also helped thousands of people worldwide implement top strategies for dominating their mindsets and achieving peak performance.

[00:00:55] In this episode he shares how he has used martial art forms to help him overcome severe anxiety and even cardiophobia. He also discusses the significance of proper breathing and posture and touches on techniques for mental and physical healing.

[00:01:11] We also explore the concepts of willpower, inhabit formation, and the power of manifesting one's desires. Dr. Symeon Rodger's Morcidate side has expressed itself as a university professor, a married priest of Eastern Orthodox Church, and a bestselling author on the personal transformation methods of ancient traditions.

[00:01:33] On the more edgy side, Symeon is a martial arts expert, a certified emergency management professional, and he's also trained in counterterrorism by veterans of the U.S. and the Israeli Special Forces. And he has taught mind-body integration methods to thousands worldwide over the past 18 years.

[00:01:53] So join me for episode 61 of The Beauty in the Mess called, The Journey from Anxiety to Healing with Dr. Symeon Rodger. So without further ado, let's dive right into today's conversation. Hello, Dr. Rodger. Welcome to The Beauty in the Mess. I'm so glad to have you today.

[00:02:10] Well, thanks for having me, Michelle. I appreciate it. Thanks for coming. Now, I know you're a bestselling author among many, many other things, but before we delve into some of that, I was wondering if you could tell us some of your back

[00:02:22] story, like what led you down the path of becoming an author of a personal transformation book? How did you get to where you are today? Yeah, that's a loaded, multifaceted question. I think maybe for the purpose of today's discussion, it's really, I had a huge problem with anxiety.

[00:02:40] I was, and I didn't realize this at the time, but looking back, I realized I was traumatized as a child. And I was traumatized, strangely enough, by my father, not because he was deliberately abusive because he wasn't not at all, but he had this particular stance toward life.

[00:02:59] One of my aunts later characterized it as your father just didn't trust life. Well, no, he didn't. And so what happened was he kept emphasizing over and over in conversation, oh, you never know when bad things are going to happen, when you're

[00:03:14] going to die, you can just go like that. Doctors are useless. They don't know anything, which is fine. And so this kind of thing, and I ended up with this, what I only discovered there is an actual word for in the last couple of years, which is cardiophobia,

[00:03:33] like the fear that your heart isn't working right. You're going to have a heart attack. You're going to die and there's nothing you can do about it. And apparently thousands and thousands of people suffer from this, but the

[00:03:42] thing was back when this was happening to me, there was no internet, right? Right. And there was, in fact, even stress was very little talked about. So I'm going back to really hit me when I was about 13 years old, I'm going to say.

[00:03:57] So right at the sort of puberty, you might say. And I found myself to be really tense all the time. And so anxious maybe not just about that, but about other things too, I suppose. But still this tension created just incredible physical pain.

[00:04:15] And I suffered with that day in, day out for years. And I really never talked about it to anybody because I didn't know what to tell them. And so at one point, I'm going to say this was back about the year 2000.

[00:04:29] It was a Saturday morning and I was going to say it's probably early a Saturday morning. I married, I have three kids who were young at that point. And I'm pretty much a basket case sitting on the landing of the stairs

[00:04:45] just unable to really get a grip suffering from palpitations that are induced by anxiety and not really understanding exactly what the heck's going on. You're thinking I'm really sick and I'm not really sick, I'm fine. But there is nobody around to tell me that.

[00:05:02] There is nobody to say this is what's happening. This is what it's called. This is how you deal with it. And so long and short of it is that later that afternoon, I ended up at a Tai Chi practice.

[00:05:13] I was doing Tai Chi on a regular basis at that point. Although I would say looking back kind of more dabbling than anything. But I went to the Tai Chi practice and I felt a lot better.

[00:05:24] It was if the energy in my body resettled to where it was supposed to be. But that was relief, but not resolution, right? So that was relief that day. And relief is fine. No one's going to complain about relief. But the problem is it's not resolution.

[00:05:41] And then probably a couple of years later, I can't remember the exact timeline. I was at a Tai Chi workshop with a legitimate Tai Chi master, not just a teacher, but somebody who had been trained in the old country and was really, really good, very high level.

[00:05:55] And so we arrived there early Saturday morning for this workshop. And we were kind of, you know, warming up and doing stuff, talking to people. And there was this young lady who had driven all the way from Toronto for this workshop.

[00:06:11] Now, the distance from Toronto to where I live in Ottawa is about it's going to say it's four or four and a half, five hours of riding depending. So she was up early and she was dedicated. But she went up to the Tai Chi master and she said,

[00:06:25] I had this most extraordinary experience coming here. It was as if my body blended with the car. It was as if I in the car were one and I could feel myself making micro adjustments of my posture and my weight.

[00:06:42] And it would change how I control the steering wheel and how I exerted force on pedals. And she said it was this incredibly sort of blissful feeling. And so she told all this to the Tai Chi master, probably not knowing what to expect.

[00:07:00] And his face just lit up and he was not easily pleased. This guy, he was rather a severe type, but he was really pleased with this. And she said to him, you know, when I got out of the car,

[00:07:10] I felt like my body was almost like a balloon, like a balloon of energy. And he said, yeah, that's exactly it. That's exactly what you should be feeling. That's the whole point. And he stopped everybody right there and said, look folks, this is what it's about.

[00:07:26] It's not about the two, three hours of practice. We're going to get this morning and then again this afternoon. This is about how you use your body and your mind together all day every day. So get it through your heads.

[00:07:39] And it was at that point that a light bulb went off for me and I thought, wow, what if, what if I could use this knowledge that Tai Chi has given me, this knowledge wealth from Tai Chi and Qigong about the human structure and how it works.

[00:07:52] What if I could use that more efficiently, more effectively? Would that have an impact on what I'm going through? And it turned out, yeah, it had a huge impact.

[00:08:01] So that was kind of the icing on the cake, if you will, but of really decades of a lot of pain and anxiety, pain and anguish that I really never talked about. So you were doing six hours of Tai Chi and Qigong every day?

[00:08:18] Is that what I heard? You said two to three hours and then... Well, no, that was just that workshop, right? So it was an all-day workshop. So we were there doing it for that period of time. Oh, okay. Okay.

[00:08:29] But if you understand what the dynamics are, the principles, the fundamentals of Tai Chi and Qigong, then you realize, well, you should be doing this all day every day. And it's easy to incorporate into everything you do every day because we all have to move every day.

[00:08:46] We all have to stand every day. We all have to sit. We all have to breathe. So how do you do that? And the contention of Tai Chi and Qigong and people who understand those systems would be that we in the West

[00:08:58] do not understand how to do that. So we put ourselves into a kind of a psychosomatic mess. So what is the difference between Tai Chi and Qigong for those of us that don't know? Yeah, okay. So Tai Chi is...

[00:09:13] Most people are vaguely familiar with Tai Chi or they know what it means or they have a basket for it. Right? Right. And that basket is usually something about old people getting together in the park and doing slow flowing movements and all that.

[00:09:27] But Tai Chi actually started off as a martial art. So what we see people doing in the park is essentially a kind of slowed down version of a deliberately diluted version of the original Tai Chi. Oh wow.

[00:09:44] However, most people I have to say, most people in the world who practice Tai Chi no matter where they are, whether they're here or they're in East Asia doesn't matter. They are practicing for health reasons.

[00:09:55] So most people are not practicing it for martial arts purposes but for its health benefits. So Tai Chi is essentially because of its martial arts background, it's a series or it most often presents itself as a series of movements that you go through. So a sequence of movements.

[00:10:11] So if someone were from say a Japanese or Okinawan martial arts background, they'd be very familiar with the term kata. So a kata is a set form, a sequence of movements you go through, which in that case are fighting movements and these are fighting movements too,

[00:10:25] but they're used for health purposes generally speaking. And so when people see Tai Chi or think of Tai Chi, they think of a Tai Chi form of one variety or another because there are lots of different ones. But yeah. So that's what Tai Chi is.

[00:10:40] Qigong is less well known in the West. What is Qigong? You could use the shorthand if you wish, Daoist yoga, Chinese Daoist yoga. Okay. That's not 100% accurate because it's not entirely Daoist and is it yoga?

[00:10:59] It is very similar to what we would understand to be Indian hatha yoga, except it looks quite different. So Qigong is really a huge amalgamation of energy work and that's what the word means. Qigong is energy work. So it's a relatively new term.

[00:11:16] But what it means is there are different types of practices that people use to learn how to feel and integrate with the energy that flows within them and around them. And so there are lots of different facets to that.

[00:11:32] If you see people doing Qigong, you'll see a lot of people doing stretching and breathing and you might see them doing some self massage or whatever. So there are lots of different practices that go under that umbrella.

[00:11:45] But essentially Qigong is used for predominantly any of four different purposes. You can use Qigong to heal yourself. At a higher level, you can use Qigong to heal other people. There is also specific Qigong for martial arts purposes and there's specific Qigong for spiritual purposes.

[00:12:05] So really those four things is what it amounts to. Okay. I had never realized it. I think of Tai Chi, I've always thought there was like a relaxation part of it as well. Like you do the slower movements to learn how to relax or to calm, be peaceful.

[00:12:24] But I never knew that both of them involved all of that by any means. Well there's probably a misconception that the whole slowing down thing is to become more peaceful and more relaxed.

[00:12:36] That's kind of the, for people familiar with the sort of yin yang dichotomy and oriental cosmology where yang is the active sort of masculine principle and yin is the less active female sort of principle. Then the relaxation part is more that yin part of it.

[00:12:53] There is also the yang part, the yang part where, and you see this, and still see this in some of the Tai Chi styles, especially the original Chen style, where you will see people actually exerting force. And yeah, so it's both sides of the coin.

[00:13:10] It's not just a simple relaxation. And of course Tai Chi didn't originate to combat stress, right? Right, right. That's just a side effect, you know much like yoga was not invented to combat stress. It's just a useful side effect.

[00:13:26] But qigong is really, I think the best way to describe qigong honestly is it is the soup in which all of East Asian martial arts exist. Now a lot of East Asian martial arts, especially the modern sporting varieties have forgotten that connection.

[00:13:41] But it is the soup in which it all exists and it's what gives it its actual power and its usefulness in fact. Because without that qigong component, even a Shaolin monk would tell you without the qigong, all of this is useless crap. Oh wow.

[00:13:57] The martial art doesn't matter. They would say, look if you train in the qigong we give you, you won't actually need the martial arts techniques that we talk about. They're pretty and they're wonderful but if you learn the qigong we teach you,

[00:14:11] frankly nobody's going to be able to hurt you. It just won't matter. Wow. That's pretty impressive. So the qigong when you say it's energy work, I mean I'm familiar. I've heard people talk about like reiki energy work, the pranic energy. Is it similar or is it completely different?

[00:14:30] Completely different. I know that has movements with it. Yeah, there are a lot of similarities and differences I suppose you could say. I mean reiki is a very specific set of techniques for healing other people, dominantly speaking, using mostly based on the hindu chakra system.

[00:14:50] So the system of the seven chakras. The energy map that was used in ancient China still used by Chinese medicine is a little bit different. It's based on instead of seven chakras it talks predominantly about three danyan. Danyan is an elixir field.

[00:15:08] They call it a field of elixir, a field of energy. And the three elixir fields that are usually talked about are correspond basically to the brain, the heart and the gut. And the most important one for really for rebalancing people's energy is the lower one, the gut.

[00:15:27] So that is referred to as the lower danyan, which is your body's largest most important energy storage area because all the energy lines in the body, all those acupuncture meridians move through that place. And so entire cultures have been built on cultivating that energy field.

[00:15:46] I mean if you look at ancient Japanese culture, Japanese culture, pre-industrial or before World War II, you find the entire language is filled with expressions about just that, and they often refer to it as para or the belly.

[00:16:00] And they would use expressions like so and so has not developed his belly, which didn't mean he wasn't fat. It just meant he actually hasn't developed his character. He hasn't developed his human potential. He's flighty.

[00:16:13] He's unreliable because we in the West, we live in a very cerebral culture, right? So that's the whole problem. We're not in touch with our bodies. We live up here and we tend to treat the body as a transportation system for the brain. Very true.

[00:16:30] Because if you think about it, we're basically taught through the school system and our upbringing that we are our brain, our thoughts and our emotions. That's who we are, brain thoughts and emotions. Now the only problem with that is it's pure superstition. It's absolute nonsense.

[00:16:47] And you can see, you can experience the fact that it's nonsense. Even if you practice meditation, for example, so in something like mindfulness meditation, which is extremely popular, one of the first things you're told to do, of course, is observe your thought process.

[00:17:03] Be aware when thoughts come to you, if they come, don't react, just pull yourself back to center. Well, yes, but if you can watch your thought process, then you are not that process. So you're not your brain, you're not your thoughts, you're not your emotions.

[00:17:16] You have all of those and they're all fine as long as they're in balance. So our problem is because we're so much in the head and any ancient culture will tell you this, whether it's anything from old Byzantine Eastern Christian culture right through,

[00:17:32] right across to Indian culture, Chinese culture, Japanese culture. It'll tell you that if you're in your head, you're throwing your body's energies out of balance, you're going to become very easily emotionally disturbed, your breathing is going to go too high in the chest,

[00:17:47] you're going to open yourself to illness, you'll be very stressed. Well, yeah, that's where we're at. So I know you're referring to the get back to your body that you talk about,

[00:17:57] but we hear so many things anymore, to be honest, like meditation or the tai chi or the energy work or I mean, there's so many different avenues. And I know you're an expert on the ancient cultures and the things that they did for

[00:18:12] everything from healing to every everything. But what have you learned from your experience is the best way to get back and touch with your body? Is it meditation? Is it just some kind of other mindfulness technique? There's also hypnosis, there's all kinds of things.

[00:18:29] So what is the best way? Well, that it's true. I mean, there's an endless number of things you can try. The modern culture has become kind of like a smorgasbord with all these different possible things on the menu.

[00:18:41] And you look at this from a place of being new to it all and you don't know how to evaluate them, which is understandable. But I can't complain about the smorgasbord because at least it's out there. Right. I'm just asking from your experience and your knowledge,

[00:18:54] if someone's just beginning, what would be the best thing for them to try? To be honest, I'm not sure there is one size fits all. I really don't believe there is. I really think it has to do with the person, with what they're trying to achieve,

[00:19:09] with what they're going through. I'm not sure that there is one answer, but a lot of these things are not as separated as we think they are. Because if you go to a place like the, whether it's the Shaolin temple in Hunan or the

[00:19:28] Daoist temple in Wudang in China, it's very clear. I mean, you're meditating and you're doing these exercises. They're not separate. Okay. Right? Tai Chi is a form of moving meditation that can be used for meditative purposes.

[00:19:44] For my own students, I would tell them, okay, if you want to use it as a meditation, then we're going to slightly adjust a few things and how you're doing it. And you don't have to do it that way all the time.

[00:19:54] But if you want to use it as a meditation to calm yourself down, get yourself centered, then we're probably going to do a few minor adjustments in how you do the form just to make it work better that way.

[00:20:06] So there are a lot of things that, that's just that there is no one size. It's all, but in general, I think for human wellness, we're looking for things that allow us to fix some of the things that we have screwed up in the West.

[00:20:21] Things as simple as posture, which we often have wrong and it's often at the root of our problems. True. So getting the body's structure right, learning how to take that structure into movement because we have to move, learning how to breathe again.

[00:20:35] That's a really good start because people don't breathe properly. They're always breathing with their chest and you see their shoulders bopping up and down as they breathe. And then, you know for sure, okay, you're wasting a whole lot of energy and you're not doing very much.

[00:20:50] So you want to fix the posture, fix the breathing, get the posture into movement and then you're pretty much off and running because that will calm the mind down. Then you can actually focus on what you want to focus on and you get out of that monkey

[00:21:03] mind that mindfulness meditation is there to save you from. Right? Is that monkey mind that's running all over the place? Well, it's running all over the place because the way you hold your body posture, the way you breathe is causing that. It's causing those mental disturbances.

[00:21:20] As some of the not breathing right is just that we're not getting enough oxygen everywhere that we need oxygen or is it, is that some of the correlation or not? I think when we don't breathe properly, yeah,

[00:21:33] there is a problem with internal oxygenation but that's just a symptom. The thing is that the human body is not meant to breathe with the chest structure, it's meant to breathe with the abdominal structure. So if we're meant to breathe abdominally, then that's what we should be practicing.

[00:21:53] And anyone who's going to teach you meditation is going to tell you to breathe abdominals. Right? It doesn't matter who they are pretty much. Yeah, I followed one guy that talks about breathing and he talks about you have to breathe abdominally.

[00:22:05] And he said, I think it's 30 breaths a day can increase your life by seven years, something like that. I mean, he does research as well but I'm probably quoting him wrong. But it's pretty fascinating if I made a, that's true.

[00:22:21] I've never, I haven't heard the statistics so I can't say one way or the other but... This is like Wim Hof, it's not Wim Hof, it's Gary Brickett but it's Wim Hof breathing style. But yeah.

[00:22:33] And well there are different, of course, there are lots of different breathing techniques you can use for very specific things. I mean Wim Hof is doing a very specific type of breathing. But when we talk about just abdominal breathing, there are fundamentally two types of abdominal breathing.

[00:22:48] There's what we call normal abdominal breathing which anyone listening to this can practice anytime, which is when you inhale your abdomen expands. So what you can do is you can put your hand on your abdomen with the thumb on the navel

[00:23:03] and the hand below that and then just as you inhale you feel your abdomen expand. And then obviously when you exhale it contracts so that's what we call normal abdominal breathing. There is also something called reverse breathing which is also abdominal where

[00:23:21] you inhale and your abdomen contracts and you exhale and it expands. And these are used by different people for different purposes but generally speaking the default setting for human beings should probably be normal abdominal breathing.

[00:23:36] It's what the body does naturally when it's no longer been indoctrinated into chest breathing. So I've heard a lot about breathing as far as calming yourself down as well, like those deep breaths naturally kind of settle you down a little bit. Do you find that to be true?

[00:23:53] Oh yeah absolutely. If you get somebody who's really worked up, they're in a negative emotional state, maybe they're angry and maybe it's road rage, I don't know. If you can get them just to pay attention to their breathing and breathe abdominally

[00:24:08] then that emotional state will dissipate very quickly. So yeah it does work that way. Yeah I've tried a little bit of it with myself like at work if you start

[00:24:17] feeling a lot of tension or stress you know if I get a chance to go back to my office I try to do a few deep breaths and it seems to regulate you a little bit at least it works for me.

[00:24:29] Oh yeah yeah and it does and there are lots of different breathing techniques. It doesn't mean you all you can only ever breathe abdominally. There's a time to fill up the top of the lungs too and empty out all the stale air.

[00:24:43] It's good to go out in the morning and take a very deep breath and completely empty the lungs and then fill it up again, things like that. So it's not some sort of dogma you can only breathe this way ever

[00:24:55] but it's sort of what should be a person's default setting generally speaking from the point of view of health. So I heard you talk about healing earlier so what do you feel is there a best practice for

[00:25:08] if a person's seeking healing or is it again whatever works for you in your lifestyle? I mean that's a good question. I'm just thinking you have more knowledge as far as all the different cultures and what they do than probably anyone I've met.

[00:25:23] It's difficult to say from the point of view of healing because it depends on a lot of things what are you trying to heal from? Well like physical trauma to the body like heart, say heart problem.

[00:25:35] Yeah with anything physical there's almost always some sort of mental emotional component unless you were you know hit by a car it broke your leg okay but let's assume for the sake of argument that if something's not working right could be almost anything could be a joint could

[00:25:52] be an organ could be any number of things. If that's the case there are lots of options one sort of generic option is okay do I want to work on this myself for instance let's say I have a joint problem and it's giving

[00:26:10] me problems with range of motion okay well if I'm going to work on it on my own I might be looking for physiotherapy exercises I might be looking to do some yoga I might be looking for what's

[00:26:21] going to stretch that out in the right way without causing more harm. On the other hand you could go a different route if you wanted to you could go a complete energy related route and say you try something like Reiki get someone to do Reiki on that

[00:26:38] area of the body and see what that does and Reiki can be very effective but there are lots of other energy modalities that are also effective so it's really impossible to say to give a recommendation that's valid for everybody.

[00:26:52] Do you believe that the mind has the power to heal the body maybe I should have asked that. I think there's the huge correlation between mind and body and we really don't give the body

[00:27:02] credit the body mind organism credit enough for what it can do so definitely the case yeah. So what do you feel like people need to know about that mind-body integration then? Well I think mind-body integration is I mean it's a cutesy term but what does it mean so

[00:27:22] we have to understand or it's useful to understand that ancient cultures and some that have existed up until very recently or still exist don't have the same orientation to the body that we do

[00:27:36] so they don't see themselves as a brain that happens to have a body trotting around. Many people believe many cultures have believed that the center of intelligence is not even the

[00:27:47] brain that it's the heart or it's the gut and the interesting thing about that is if you look at those three things the brain the heart and the gut those are the three areas or chakras or whatever you

[00:28:00] want to call them that actually have neurological tissue so they actually have an intelligence related function in the human organism and people who do very deep meditations are very aware of

[00:28:12] this so it's not just the brain the heart has intelligence and we can prove the heart has intelligence there have been really interesting experiments done for instance experiments to show people expose people to images at random some images would be extremely beautiful and soothing and some

[00:28:29] would be extremely shocking and what the research revealed was every time because the person being exposed to the images was wired with both an electroencephalogram and eg and electrocardiogram what they noticed was the heart knew ahead of time and reacted ahead of time to the nature of

[00:28:50] the image whether it was going to be soothing or shocking oh the heart knew what it was going to be experiencing before it actually happened that's amazing it is amazing from so many dimensions

[00:29:02] right the heart goes beyond time space and we do know that the energy field of the heart is much larger than the energy field of the brain so it can be detected farther away from the body all of this

[00:29:16] seems to point to the fact that we have sort of multiple areas of intelligence so body mind integration is really getting back to the way we are actually structured not the way our civilization is told us we are structured because the civilization for various reasons has

[00:29:29] told us that everything is about everything's in the head everything is about rational thought that we're at the apex of evolution or what everyone call it because we think rationally but rational thought is not the only type of intelligence we have available to us

[00:29:48] and you know we know that whenever we're creative whenever we're creating something as human beings we feel wonderful about ourselves because when we create we feel very open we feel very expansive we feel just really really pleasant and we don't feel that way when we're

[00:30:04] narrowly using the rational mind to focus on a problem and try to solve it in fact if we over use the rational mind what kind of person is the kind of the poster child for overusing the

[00:30:15] rational mind well it's a highly neurotic person because if you've ever met somebody who's extremely neurotic one of the things you'll notice is they can't stop thinking but if you can stop thinking if you can get into the brain's creative mode then that tends to

[00:30:33] dampen down the cerebral cortex so the rational mind takes a back seat and what opens up is broadly speaking intuition which is why people get huge bursts of creativity when they can relax

[00:30:48] because that information seems to be coming to them and it's the same thing with a lot of great inventions when did people invent great stuff well usually it's not when they're trying

[00:30:59] to think about it and solve a problem it's when they're sitting back and staring at the moon or something like that when they're waking up in the morning or going to sleep at night or they're

[00:31:11] taking a shower and they're really not thinking about anything but these great ideas come to them same for people who are writing fiction for example so it's access to all the levels

[00:31:21] of intelligence that we have but if people want to feel what it's like to get back into the body really it's kind of like we have mental attention we can put our mental attention wherever we want

[00:31:32] so do you want to do an exercise do you think people would like to have a quick exercise on mind body yeah okay I would okay so anyone who's listening to this can do this easily just

[00:31:45] obviously don't do it if you're operating heavy machinery wait till you get home so pick a finger any finger on either hand it doesn't matter and then close your eyes and then focus your mental attention on the tip of that finger ask yourself what do I feel

[00:32:05] physically feel at the tip of that finger what sensations are there and just take a minute and ask yourself that and then when you're ready I can ask you Michelle did you do it yeah did you

[00:32:24] feel something at the tip of a finger I felt like tingling or like blood pulsing in the finger yep yeah totally normal people report things like exactly that tingling the pulse or hot and cold sensations or whatever and there's no right or wrong answer you feel what you

[00:32:40] feel it's no problem the interesting thing is that if you consider what you've done there you have used your mental attention to localize a feeling to become conscious of processes that are happening all the time in that remote area of your body right right so you've clued into

[00:33:01] that remote area of your body now that remote area of your body those sensations are you felt those are there all the time you just consciously don't notice them right right the interesting thing

[00:33:12] is if we were able to hook you up to instruments that are sophisticated enough we could prove that by focusing your mental attention on the tip of that finger you have increased the flow of blood

[00:33:25] to the tip of that finger also the flow of oxygen and the flow of energy all to the tip of that finger now if you can increase the flow of blood oxygen and energy to an area of your body

[00:33:36] is that a good thing I would think so yeah well it's basically a healing reaction exactly that that's what I was going to say the heal yeah yeah it's a healing reaction and that's why when we

[00:33:50] if we cut our finger accidentally it's going to hurt but that pain reaction pulls our attention to that area of the body which sends all of this healing energy the oxygen the blood

[00:34:02] energy the nutrients everything the body needs to heal the cut and you can do this really with any area of your body if I said to you right now put your mental attention on your left elbow

[00:34:15] now if you do that you can pretty quickly and pretty easily localize again the physical feelings on that elbow and then if you want you can also go around the elbow so go to the inside of

[00:34:28] the joint and if you focus your mental attention there you might get quite a buzz from focusing on the inside of the elbow joint because it's a very powerful energetic location oh wow I did not

[00:34:42] know that so these are just sort of fun things that people can play with but fundamentally to get back into your body is kind of what I would call combining three things your breathing your movement and your mental attention if you can increasingly combine those things then your

[00:35:01] energy will balance over time oh wow that's pretty neat to know I didn't realize the elbow was a big source of energy well it's one of the places on the body where it's easy to

[00:35:15] feel the energetic signature right there are others the the palm for example yeah I've felt it in the palms before yeah yeah I figured that's partially because there's so many nerves in your hand maybe not

[00:35:30] if the elbow does it too yeah we would teach people exercises in qigong class just for fun to close their eyes and you feel this finger which is inches away from the palm can you feel it going

[00:35:42] over your palm well actually yeah you can but then people would get distracted in class they'd start doing that all the time and you'd have to tell them to stop playing with their energy and listen

[00:35:51] and but anyway fascinating yeah so I want to ask you this is kind of a sidebar but I just want to know your thoughts I because I just interviewed a fellow the other day that was

[00:36:03] talking about more or less manifesting and I just wondered if you have the experience with some manifesting or envisioning something in the future and then it kind of leads that to happen do

[00:36:15] you believe in that oh I think not only do I believe it the science is in so it doesn't matter what I think okay but beyond the the science being in I realize a lot of people are still

[00:36:28] trapped in sort of the materialistic science materialistic idea of science that they were fed in school even though that paradigm was destroyed a hundred years ago by quantum physics but so what people take a while to adjust we understand that we were all taught the same garbage but

[00:36:47] manifesting yeah I mean it does work definitely because we do get in our life I think what we expect to get I worked for quite a few years as a clergy in the orthodox church

[00:36:58] was never my full-time gig but I was doing it for years and one thing that I noticed counseling hundreds of people was people always got in life what they expected whatever they

[00:37:11] fundamentally at a deep level if they assumed life would be like this that is exactly what they got oh wow so I really do I am have always been sold on that idea and I had a kind of

[00:37:23] manifesting experience of myself once it was a little bit over the top that I still can't totally explain but I do know my clients have had a few interesting manifesting experiences some that involve not just the future but even you might call it fixing the past

[00:37:43] at a client who his name was John he was living in Toronto at the time and he had neighbors who were really obnoxious it was a couple and for whatever reason they treated him really badly

[00:37:55] oh wow no idea why he didn't seem to know why and so what I had him do was just okay take the bad conversations you have with these neighbors and just redo them in your mind as they should have been

[00:38:09] replay them as they should have been so revise them right and he worked on that for about a week and then he one day is taking out the garbage and this couple comes up to him and

[00:38:20] they have this super friendly conversation like they've always been best buddies wow and he you know and he's okay but he goes back into his house and says like what the hell just happened but I would think don't you really don't these people realize they hate me

[00:38:36] what's going on the world is a miraculous place it is yeah so all kinds of things can happen yeah and I think to your point I think we've been taught and programmed with a lot of garbage

[00:38:48] and there's a few waking up to it I think but a lot of people are still stuck in it many more are waking up but yeah every time I see someone and proclaim that the great awakening is happening

[00:39:00] all I can think of is you happen you know 100 years ago people were saying that too and here we are I'm not saying it's a great awakening I'm just saying that I'm noticing

[00:39:10] more people realizing we've been fed a lot of garbage it also occurs to me that there are more people around us who are aware of that than admit to it right it's almost as if in public we

[00:39:22] tow the line but privately here's what we think but if we can find people who think the way we do then we'll admit it very true yeah yeah that is true too can I ask you a question

[00:39:34] for the audience who doesn't know you you've written a best-selling book called The Five Pillars of Life and I found it wow yeah I'm a I'm an actual physical book kind of person I like to

[00:39:46] have it in my hands I understand unfortunately I just got it last night so I apologize I haven't had a chance to read all of it yet I've skimmed through it but I know one thing you talk about

[00:39:58] in this book you've studied like I said ancient cultures and all of this but one thing you talk about is unstoppable willpower and I wanted to ask you just briefly and I know we can read the

[00:40:11] book to find out more but how does a person achieve unstoppable willpower because it feels like we can get momentum for a while and we can keep going for a while but then something changes and I don't

[00:40:26] know if that's motivation I don't know if it's just life distraction but to have something like unstoppable willpower meaning that it goes forever just seems so hard to achieve yeah it's not quite I think what people would envision I think willpower has more limitations

[00:40:45] than we think okay right we see people trying to use pure willpower at this time of year because we're recording this now in January right so all those New Year's resolution people who decided

[00:40:56] they were going to go to the gym they're probably still going because it's only January 26th right now but we all know but by March 1st they'll be done right because they're trying to do it on just

[00:41:10] you know just based on willpower trying to force themselves to do something they really don't want to do exactly on a deeper level something that's uncomfortable pulling them out of their comfort

[00:41:20] zone and a lot of people who realize that willpower is the terrible thing to base your life on and ancient cultures weren't big on it either they really basically wanted you to habituate yourself to something okay and because they realized that once something becomes a habit

[00:41:37] it's harder to not do it than to do it and you don't have to think about willpower that habit is hundreds of times or more more powerful than willpower and people will say well scientifically

[00:41:49] if you can persist in an action for depending who you believe 21 days or 28 days you've got it made because that will instill it as a habit from a neurological perspective so that's one

[00:42:03] answer to that question okay I would say the other is that we're in a culture that of course is very individualistic but part of that is this a culture we have a place and inordinate value on hard work and sacrifice number of historical reasons for that but not

[00:42:23] important but we all know that's the case so you know in the world of mindset mindset peak performance which is very important for human resilience what we find is in that world of mindset peak performance are basically two schools of thought one we've already talked about

[00:42:38] people who want to manifest whatever right and the other is to just work harder school like just work harder work longer hours stop sleeping for god's sakes just work work work you'll get there in the end you'll overcome your obstacles by brute force and all back

[00:42:57] and the only problem is that both of these schools of thought desperately need each other because each one has some valid points the just work harder school yeah discipline is necessary so you can be consistent consistency is necessary if you want to achieve anything including

[00:43:15] manifesting whatever so it's really important but what I've noticed I did a webinar last night that talked about this some of the people who you would think of as the biggest examples of

[00:43:29] the just work harder school they're really not one one and the one I cited was Arnold Schwarz Ineger so Arnold Schwarz Ineger often comes across as okay just work harder I worked really

[00:43:42] hard to get where I was but he did but when you listen carefully to his descriptions of what he did that wasn't the hard work wasn't really it so what he says is okay you know I came over from

[00:43:56] Austria in whatever it was the late 60s I knew and he was very gifted by having a very clear idea what he wanted to do right he knew at that time already he wanted to become Mr.

[00:44:08] Universe then he wanted to go into acting then he wanted to go into politics in that sequential order which he did but what's really interesting when he talks about how hard he worked is

[00:44:21] that he loved every minute of it he actually loved it it wasn't work to him this was his play even though it would sound like something totally unsustainable to anybody else because he

[00:44:33] was going to the gym for five hours a day then he was working a construction job then he took acting lessons till midnight rinse and repeat wow how often can you keep that routine up if you

[00:44:44] don't love it right not very long two days you know but if you do love it and he loved every minute of it you could tell so it was the fact was he was in love with it that was the

[00:44:58] he was in love with it and he says he was in love with because he knew it would get him to where he really wanted to go so you can't just force yourself without that love to do the thing

[00:45:10] and that's where that the manifesting part comes in where you've got to really find what's really important to you that dream that you have and be able to fall in love with

[00:45:20] that because if you can fall in love with that you won't have to push it will pull you and Schwarzenegger was being pulled he was not pushing he didn't have to is that partially because we attach that emotion love to it it's the emotion that

[00:45:36] draws us in isn't it yeah oh absolutely yeah it's absolutely that emotional reaction we have to it but you can't force that you can work at it to an extent but i mean you've got to fall in love

[00:45:50] with what you're aiming for say you want to get healthier and you're not in love with going to the gym every day but you fall in love with the idea of being healthy and having the body that you

[00:46:02] want so that would be what pulls you forward is that the end goal yeah oh yeah i mean you can very effectively propagandize yourself and it's a very useful skill i remember one guy saying that he

[00:46:14] knew his diet needed to change and he knew he needed to quit some unhealthy habits so what did he do he exposed himself over and over two videos about incredible health fantastic nutrition blah blah blah and he said after i'd done that for about a week

[00:46:31] i couldn't look at a cigarette i couldn't look at that bottle of booze no wow so we can and there's never been a time in history when it was easier for us to access the information that will make

[00:46:44] us feel good about where we're trying to go very true yeah right it's almost information overload anymore yeah you just have to know how to use it to keep the fire of your inspiration going because

[00:46:56] nobody else is going to keep that fire going for you right and i think it's perpetually stoking that fire that where a lot of us fall short we forget that and there is some work and that work

[00:47:07] is to keep that dream alive or get in front of you yeah yeah yeah and that you're right that does take work right that's why people will say write down your goal and plaster it and sticky

[00:47:19] notes on your fridge and your computer screen and i don't know where else right all right because you have to keep it front and center you have to keep thinking about keep thinking about to keep

[00:47:28] thinking focusing on the desire of having it very true well i want to be respectful of your time so i know we're getting close to an hour but i wanted to ask you before we wrap up

[00:47:39] is there anything we haven't talked about today that you would want to make sure that the listener heard not that i can remember we've talked about a lot of different things a lot of different things

[00:47:51] yeah so if someone wants to find you what's the best place to find you or to follow you or to okay i'll yeah i'll leave a link you can put a link in the description right so definitely

[00:48:03] i'll send you a link absolutely yeah okay with some resources so people can look at she going the essence of what we've talked about and some of that okay that'd be great yeah sure well

[00:48:16] i appreciate your time today it's me everything we've talked about is fascinating and i've got a lot to learn i know that but well thank you so much it's been fun yeah it has i've enjoyed it

[00:48:28] and i'm anxious to read your book so i will be doing that it's a big book well it's it's i don't know how you managed to to get it since it has been out of print for quite a while because we're

[00:48:39] thinking of another edition but it represents really what i was most focused on about 20 years ago when i wrote it right so are you updating this one like a new version of this one or a second

[00:48:53] haven't decided oh okay like likely i'm coming up with something as a follow on okay well i'll have to to follow you and see what comes out well thank you very much i've enjoyed it and i

[00:49:06] appreciate your time and your wisdom and you're sharing it with us so thank you so much bye bye as we wrap up today's episode i hope dr roger sharing his knowledge experience and wisdom has

[00:49:20] helped you in some way i have to admit that i am fascinated by how some of the ancient people dealt with problems versus how we deal with them today because i think we've been taught to

[00:49:30] ignore the intuition or intelligence of our body and i think that mind-body connection is very powerful for the healing of the body and i know dr roger you even helped us understand how we could use the

[00:49:42] mind to focus on a certain part of the body and he showed us how you can tell that that you're making a difference by doing that and additionally i loved how he showed us how the heart can even

[00:49:54] know something before the brain does that was simply amazing and he emphasized that willpower alone is pretty weak but if you can tie it to a positive emotion such as love then your chances of consistency

[00:50:07] become much greater and being consistent leads to success so what stood out to you today i would love to hear from you as always i hope this episode helps at least one person and with

[00:50:18] that i hope you have a blessed week my friend thank you for listening to the beauty in the mess if you enjoyed what you heard please share it with a friend and if you haven't already please subscribe

[00:50:32] rate and review this podcast on your favorite pod player if you have any questions or comments any topic ideas you would like to hear about or you think you would be a great guest on the

[00:50:42] show you can reach me directly at the beauty in the mess dot com thanks for listening