134: Influencing Your Genes and Human Potential with Cassandra Vieten

Hi, it's your host, Dr. Lauren Brown. This week, we're doing one of our replays, and this is something special, where we bring back one of our favorite episodes from the very first year of the Conscious Fertility Podcast. - Today's episode is a replay episode that I'm bringing back with Cassandra Vieten on influencing your genes and human potential. I think it's a powerful episode and we're the second lesson, if you heard it the first time. And if this is your first lesson, then I am as excited for you as I am for myself to hear this one again. - By listening to the Conscious Fertility Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition and either yourself or others. Console your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guests or contributors to the podcast. - Welcome to Conscious Fertility, the show that listens to all of your fertility questions so that you can move from fear and suffering to peace of mind and joy. My name is Lauren Brown. I'm a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. I'm on a mission to explore all the paths to peak fertility and joyful living. It's time to learn how to be and receive so that you can create life on purpose. - All right, welcome to our episode today. We are with Dr. Cassandra Vieten. She's the executive director of the John W. Brick Foundation. She's also a scholar in residence at the Authorities' Clark Center for Human Imagination at the University of California San Diego. She's a senior fellow at the Institute of Neuetic Sciences where she worked for 18 years in successive roles as scientists, director of research, CEO and presidents from the years of 2013 to 2019. She is a clinical psychologist, mind body medicine researcher, and author of numerous articles and scientific journals. She's also published several books, one that I find quite fascinating, mindful motherhood, practical tools for staying sane during pregnancy and your child's first year, as well as she's co-authored, living deeply, the art and science of transformation everyday life, as well as spiritual competencies in clinical practice, guidelines for psychologists and mental health professionals. Dr. Cassandra Vieten, welcome to the Conscious Fertility Podcast. - Thank you, it's great to be here. - I'm glad to have you here, and I wanna actually read a little bit more about you just for our listeners, 'cause she just so you know she's a researcher, it focuses on spirituality and health and transformative experiences and practices, which is what a lot of the listeners are looking for, and the development of mindful-based interventions for emotional well-being, who doesn't wanna feel well, and it's worth noting that you received your PhD in clinical psychology and you completed your research training and behavioral genetics at UCSF. So all this is why I wanted to have you as one of my expert guests because of the publications, the training, and what you do in clinic, I think it's gonna be very interesting to our listeners today. - Well, thanks, it's a pleasure to be here. - Now, I had the opportunity, and I encourage our listeners to check out your website, 'cause you have so many videos and podcasts there, and so I've just been going down the beautiful rabbit hole, and I started to learn that big part of your work is about helping people have these transformative shifts and that if you have a change in perspective, your life can change, and I kinda wanted to talk to you about the work that you're doing and how you're helping people unlock their latent potentials and how this can benefit people. So do you wanna talk a little bit about that unlocking your latent potentials and the work that you've been doing in that area? - Sure, yeah, so my work in transformation and consciousness or fundamental shifts in worldview really took hold at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, whereas you mentioned I was working for 18 years, it was just such a pleasure to work there. And the Institute was actually founded by a Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who was the sixth person to walk on the moon, and on his way back from his moonwalk, he viewed the Earth from space and hadn't slept in like 36 hours and the space capsule is turning every 10 minutes, it's rotating and he's seeing the Earth and the Sun and the stars and the moon and he just was overcome with this profound epiphany where he felt himself as interconnected with everything that is and like the boundaries of his body and his ego dissolved and he felt one with everything and he also, when he was doing the Earth and getting closer to it was like, oh my gosh, we're crazy. You know, there are no boundaries between countries when you look at the Earth from space and yet we've been fighting over these imaginary lines for millennia, you know, so much pain and suffering and war and inequity and destruction of the environment when you look at the Earth from space, it's this, you know, little blue and green jewel in an infinite sea of blackness. And so he had this thing that we now call the overview effect that many astronauts have had, but at the time he was one of the first to describe it. And so that transformation and consciousness led him to want to be of service to the world and help people understand this essential nature of reality is interconnected that we in some ways are separate, you and I, but we're also completely connected and in a very real way there is no them, there is no other, we're all in this together and also to help people develop a social consciousness. So at the Institute, we were really curious about this and that's a big dramatic one. I mean, that's, you know, in space and global in nature, but what we also were interested in is people's individual transformations and consciousness changing their story about who they are or how things work, how reality is. And in particular, we were looking at what we might call positive transformations and consciousness or people moving from a life of feeling stressed and pressed and fearful or maybe very ambitious and craving and accumulating and to one that's really centered in love, that kindness, compassion, service, meaning, purpose. When people make that fundamental shift, it ripples out into all the areas of their lives and even into their bodies. - And that's the part I'm fast-dated about and I would love to hear you talk more about it 'cause sometimes we need a little bit of inspiration or motivation to wanna do this kind of conscious work and it sounds lovely like to feel connected and have this loving feeling or this feeling of connection. And trust me, we want to have peace of mind. Like we want joy. There are people struggling with fear and shame and guilt and so that is motivation enough for me and how if I can have that peace of mind, there are some people looking for biological upgrades or physical healing and I'm curious how this has been seen in your clinical practice and in the research that you have observed on a physical level. Is there evidence now to show what the sages have said a long time ago about this mind body connection? - Absolutely and I like to kind of say it's a little bit more complex than people think. It's a mind body connection and it's a body mind connection. So we know that whatever happens in our body affects our mental state, our subjective experience, what we eat, how we exercise, what our hormones are doing, what our brain is doing is reflected in how we feel and how we think, how we talk and relate and how we think and how we feel and how we talk and relate affects our brains and our bodies. And so it really is a two way street and there is something helpful about sometimes separating those two thinking about the body by itself or thinking about the mind by itself but now that we've sort of moved beyond simple diseases I guess I would call it, it was a really good thing actually to say let's just forget the mind and focus only on the body and trying to figure out how to fix this thing kind of like a mechanic that works for simple things but it doesn't really work for complex things when we're looking at things that are complex we have to take into account both the body and the mind and it's really a false dichotomy they're completely inextricably intertwined. Now some things are definitely physical like certain genetic diseases or you know there are things that there's no way out of it if you have the gene or you know if you've got an injury there are some things that might feel only subjective that it really doesn't depend on the body but those are very very rare everything else is both body and mind together. - So it's this bi-directional, we can give great examples you talked about the physical and we know now with the gut microbiome you can have physical symptoms but that can also affect your mental health and well-being and also your thoughts and your feelings can impact your biology and I don't remember which of your videos I was listening to but you're talking a bit about gene expression and so is this what you're alluding to this epigenetic effect of your environment and can you elaborate a bit about you have your external and internal environment that are going to change how your genes are expressed and how this can affect you. - Oh yeah that's only one of the ways that the mind affects the body but if we take gene expression for a moment, there are very, very, very important things. real ways, let's say, you know, we've looked at things like fruit flies, Drosophila, which is a model for science that's a really helpful model because they reproduce like every 14 days. So you can look at, you know, generational changes in a relatively short amount of time to see how does it work when, let's say, these little fruit flies are exposed to an extremely cold environment. And what we see is that, you know, the sort of selection, natural selection would say, well, it'll take, you know, hundreds of meetings and generations to have adaptive genes be selected for. So that the little fruit flies that have more hair on their bodies eventually will start to be selected in a very cold environment, but this will take hundreds of generations. What we learned though was that when you put fruit flies into a very cold environment, it takes not that many generations for them to sprout hair to adapt to the environment because they have this latent potential. And what I mean by latent is its dormant, it's sitting there waiting for an environmental trigger to turn it on. And so it's different than natural selection. So the idea is that we all have a lot of latent potentials that are waiting to be turned on or turned off inside of our genes. And really it's less about the blueprint that some of us learned about that is our DNA dictating everything that happens to us. And more about how that DNA is translated or expressed into our physiology. And it turns out that not only our external environment, like extreme cold or let's say extreme stress or food insecurity or things like that affect it, but also our internal environment. So again, if I live a worried, stressful looking at the negative all the times, suspicious, thinking that everybody's out to get me kind of internal world, then that will affect my genes expressing in a certain way. Whereas if I do something as simple as mindfulness training, let's say 20 minutes a day for even as short as eight weeks, or some of you may have heard of the emotional freedom technique where people tap on certain parts of their body and they repeat phrases, or I could probably mention 10 other kinds of practices that now there's promising evidence that it actually alters our gene expression. It changes how our physiology works. And this gives us that sense of some control back into the future we're creating physically and emotionally. Yeah, and I'd probably say control is not a word I would use. I would say it gives us a sense of being able to collaborate with our body and our environment. So what we don't want to fall into is thinking, oh, you know, I can think my way out of anything or if my attitude were just right, I would be able to fix my disease or my problems or a condition I have. That's too simple, but I really can have a huge influence on collaborating with my body and with my environment. And do you see the shift because I would think of having this mindset that it can shift you out of feeling hopeless and despair knowing that you can rather be a full victim like you have the opportunity to partake and help with the shift. Absolutely. And I, one of my positions is with the John W. Brick Mental Health Foundation where we are promoting and studying integrative approaches to mental health and well-being. Our founder, Victor Brick, lost his brother to complications from schizophrenia and throughout his brother, John's whole life, he received medication, hospitalization, psychoanalysis, but he never really received a whole person plan that included exercise, nutrition, mind body practices. So it was all about this receiving healthcare from professionals, which is very important. But what we don't want to forget is that for most conditions, there's a combination Victor says of healthcare and self-care. And yes, some conditions require healthcare, which is absolutely important and should be accessible to everyone and we really need to do a better job, having everything be covered by insurance and all that stuff. But we also need to do a better job at empowering individuals and families to understand that they can do something to collaborate with the recovery process or with the healthcare process. Right now we have a model where, you know, to a large extent, we do kind of think of it like taking our car into the automotive mechanic and so we take our body in and say, "Duck, what's wrong with my body?" And they try to fix it for you and I remember I had a friend a while ago who had a liver disease, not based on behavior, but just as a genetic or environmental problem. She went to her doctor, he gave her some medication and said, "Come back in six months." And she said, "Is there anything I can do in the meantime?" And he said, "No, not really." And I was just like, you know, that's insane. That's crazy. Of course, there's many, many things she can do to create a more optimal healing environment in her outer world and in her inner world. And you talked about one of those tools that I want to just bring up. EFT, it sounds like you're familiar with an emotional freedom technique. I'm definitely not an expert, but I was kind of sold on EFT. In fact, I will admit, I was quite a skeptic at the beginning because I was like, "This is weird, you know, this tapping and repeating things. I'm one to talk. I mean, I love all kinds of weird things, but for some reason I was like, "That's weird." But I was doing a transformational program at a home facility for shelterless folks. And so, you know, these were folks who had tons of trauma, tons of pain. I mean, just really mental illness, really difficult time. And we were bringing in meditation, yoga, all of these things. And so someone volunteered to bring an EFT. And I was like, "Sure, let's give it a shot. I'm telling you, these people were like, I slept for the first time in 20 years. Like, I slept through the night. My pain is reduced. And, you know, they liked it better than yoga or meditation. So it was really an eye opener for me." And I bring it up because so many of the guests we've had on here talk about as one of their tools. I use this in my practice, but we've had Dawson Church, Dr. Peter Stapleton, Dr. Larry Burke, they're talking about it. The reason I like it because you talked about healthcare, self-care. And again, just to put into the radar of our listeners is when I'm doing my treatment and my clinic, it's one of the tools I use in the clinic for them to go home and continue to use it. And they have a shift like you saw, like you witnessed, there's this experience where they're having this stressful experience to a situation or a thought or experience. And right there while they're doing the tapping, they feel that sense of relief. They feel different, right? Which is, and now the data is showing that there is changes on biomarkers, of course, or obviously gene expression. So it's one of those things I want to let my listeners know there's other episodes on EFT because it's a really good self-care tool that you can bring into your life to help have that perception shift because it's another tool to help you have a shift to perception. That's how I internalize, I interpret it. Is that kind of what you're seeing as well? Absolutely. Yeah, one of the things I like to talk about and I did a recent TEDx talk on the mental health renaissance that we really are in a very exciting time right now. You know, we talk a lot about the mental health crisis, which is absolutely true, but we're also in a very exciting mental health revolution right now where dozens of self-administered or peer administered practices are beginning to gain quite a lot of evidence for their effectiveness. And I do think that the way we view mental health and the way we approach mental health will be completely different three, four, five, ten years from now. Now I want to get specific with some of the work I believe you're involved in. We're going to possibly talk about virtual reality. We may talk about psychedelics. The reason I want to bring this up is in my practice, I'm trained as a clinical hypnotherapist and just for personal, I love to use my imagination to elicit certain feelings in my body and I use it to help me, you know, like help some people use goal setting. I use that to kind of help me create my future. And when I was listening to some of your talks on this, it sounds like you're using virtual reality and it really amps up that experience. And I think you talk about how maybe or maybe you've seen this, it can help you unlock some of these latent potentials. Can you kind of go into this? Because again, I want to phrase it pop like we have our imagination. It sounds like science and psychology is taking some of our digital technology and some of this ancient sage stuff of using your thought process, your feelings and you're really putting signs to it and you're taking it to another level to probably get even more benefit. And so I'd love to hear what you're doing and what you see maybe the future is with this kind of interventions. Sure. Well, for me, guided imagery, visualization, active imagination has always been a really big part of my personal journey. I found it very helpful. very transformative to use those techniques, hypnotherapy, to number one, enter an altered state of consciousness. So when we enter into non-ordinary states of consciousness, or, you know, like I mentioned with the astronaut at Grimitial, he felt one with everything he felt the boundaries of his body and his ego dissolve. That's one thing that can happen with these altered states of consciousness. The typical conventions and categories and assumptions and rules are ordinary reality disappear for a while. And when that happens, it allows for new possibilities to emerge in our consciousness. And that means that we might be able to tell a new story about who we are, about what's possible. And to me, that is just so fascinating. And so there are some people who have difficulty visualizing. It's really, really hard for them. In fact, some people can't visualize at all. It's called a fantasia. Whereas I'm like hyper fantasia. You know, if somebody tells me a story that's kind of gross, I'll be like, oh my god stop, I can't stop picturing it. You know, like it's right, right. There's this big range of ability to visualize. And we think not only for people who have difficulty visualizing, but especially for those people or for people who, you know, just may not have the complexity of ability to imagine putting them into virtual reality is one way that we can help them break down these boundaries, these conventions, these rules, because they can go in virtual reality and fly. And they can go in and go in and swim with dolphins. They can go in and, you know, sit in an ice cave and have a conversation with a Yeti. I mean, it's endless. What can happen in these environments. So we've been creating these environments to see if, just like I mentioned with the fruit flies and the cold environment. If we can sort of provide an environment for the brain. It seems like it's a different environment. It's possible that that could unlock the same kinds of dormant potentials as we mentioned with the fruit flies growing here. I want to be clear, I don't think we, we know this yet, like we're not sure. So we're just investigating what happens in the brain and the bodies of people who are going through virtual reality experiences right now it's a hypothesis and theoretical. But we do know, like I said, that people who meditate a pretty short period of time every day for about eight weeks do show changes and gene expression, do show changes in brain function, even brain structure changes. There's some good evidence emerging that not only gene expression, but the actual telomeres at the ends of our chromosomes, which are essentially the time clock that as they shorten over time tell ourselves when they're supposed to shut down or die. And those are affected by stress and they're also affected by stress reducing activities. So there's just a whole new world out there that may allow us to accelerate healing and expand healing by exposing ourselves to environments that even though they're virtual. And sometimes we like to call it digital reality. So sometimes people say, well, virtual reality is fake. You know, do we want people running around and fake worlds all the time. Well, it's a digital world. It's not fake. It actually is real. It's a world that we're creating and it's okay to spend some time in this new digital world and see how we can use it. And then we're going to be able to do a lot of healing, whereas right now 99% of it is being applied to shooter games and stuff like that. So there's lots of things we can do with it that we haven't even tried yet. And you know, although they say, should we be in it or it's imagination. This is what we're doing on our own. We're constantly imagining oftentimes worst case scenarios. And then the body, because you were talking early, it's this bi-directional, the body in the mind, it's bi-directional, they're impacting each other. And you're sitting in your home or in your office, but you're worried about something and you're thinking about it, your body can't tell the difference as in those stress hormones are being activated, but there's no survival benefit because you're safe in your office. And so this sounds like a proactive way of I'm turning releasing those feel good hormones and turning on those longevity genes, like you said, keep those telomers from excessively shrinking. So you're not having this accelerated biological aging basically and increase in disease. So this is a proactive way to feel good and influence your physical bodies. Am I understanding that correctly? Yeah, I hope so. And you know, I feel like there's it's also important to say that it's helpful to get guidance on how we can change our way of thinking, you know, it's not that helpful. Let's say to listen to this podcast and then say, okay, I'm not going to think negatively anymore. I'm going to control that. You know, I'm going to stop it. I'm eliminated. So then you're sitting at home struggling to not think negatively. Yeah. And for those of you who have done mindfulness training, you know that that is a futile attempt. Like you could try that forever. And it's not going to work. But what you can do. And one of the things that I'm developing in virtual reality is imagine that your train of thought is an actual train. And let's say that you put each one of your worried thoughts on to a train car, you know, what's going to happen with my kid and oh my god, am I going to have enough money and why won't so and so talk to me. And I wonder if I just said something stupid at work today. Put those all on a train. Have the train start to chug by you, you know, big, loud right in your face. And then you can move away from the train. You're still having the thoughts, but they're getting smaller and quieter, smaller and quieter until you're looking out over a vista and you're seeing this little tiny train, checking in the distance. And in practice, we can learn how to zoom into our thinking patterns and then zoom out of our thinking patterns. And as you were mentioning a lot of our thinking is either about the past, which we can't do anything about and half the stories that we tell ourselves about the past aren't even really accurate anyway. And thinking about the future, what might happen, what could happen, what should happen. And little of our attention is in the present moment and a lot of these practices like tapping or mindfulness or yoga or all of Tai Chi Chi Gang so many part of what they're doing is bringing us into the present moment because that is actually the only place that we have any power at all. The only time I can ever do anything is right now. I can't do anything in the future and I can't do anything in the past. So these practices in part are meant to bring us here now have most of our attention be right here and right now. And it's actually pretty unusual that whatever's happening right now is this giant threat. Most of the threat, as you were mentioning is imagined or it's being ruminated about in the past. And bringing your brain, it sounds like to be able to make conscious choices and it reminds me of Victor Frankl's quote which I'm paraphrasing here where he says at every moment in every situation there's a space where you either unconsciously habitually react. Or in that moment you can consciously choose to respond which would be this mindfulness approach and I often think of EFT as a tool to help you get into present moment. So you stop and you start to just actually lean into your uncomfortable feelings and by tapping and being present. I think this this is what I think I speculate is happening rather than trying to disassociate ignore it, run away from it. You actually come alongside it consciously so you're not fully at the effect of it, but you are feeling it. And that puts you into presence and now you have that ability not to quote Eckhart toly when you're present you can either consciously remove yourself from the situation consciously change or improve the situation. And if you can't do either those two if you continue to surrender what is you can be at peace in an unhappy situation. And so well said yeah exactly I think that's a great way to put it. A lot of the practices that we're talking about also are focused on creating just a little bit of space between stimulus and response. And what I mean by stimulus is something happens in the outside world or something happens in the inside world, one of these imagined things. And we react to it immediately automatically. And that leaves us kind of like pinballs and a pinball machine that we're just being knocked around by whatever random thoughts in our heads or whatever things happen outside of us. And what we want to do instead is when something happens that we're able to take just a few seconds or sometimes a few minutes or sometimes a few days and say okay I'm having a reaction right now I'm going to hold on that for a minute. How do I want to respond to this? And that response can be skillful action that is in alignment with my values and goals for myself, how I want to be, who I want to be. And the more often we do that, the more often we get to become the authors of our lives instead of the pinballs. I heard, and I wish I remember who said this, but they talk often about this free will. And what I'm about to say sounds really simple. I haven't found it easy, but they say that the free will that you have is how you respond, how you choose to feel to the situation. So you don't get to control somebody's reaction to what you do, but you get to choose how you react to the reaction. Are you kind of, is this kind of what you're thinking then you're through practices in these tools that you are able to consciously come along side yourself and skillfully consciously, how am I going to deal with this. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, the great thing is over time, you know, when we talk about this, that sounds like a lot of work all day, every day, right. But over time, you do start to create new patterns of responding. And I don't call them habits. Sometimes people will say new habits. And I don't like to say that because it really moves us in back into the unconscious. But developing new patterns of responding or new tendencies means that over time, you're not going to have to think about it every single time. And you're going to start to respond as a matter of course with more kindness, more patience, more, you know, positive joy, looking for what's working instead of what's not working all of these things, looking where you can help where you can make a contribution. So over time, there does begin to be the sense of flow. And that's what we called living deeply in this book that Maryland Schlitz and Tina Amarach and I wrote about this research we did on transformations and consciousness, living deeply being sort of dancing with life as it unfolds and recognizing that sometimes we are. We do feel completely out of control and thank goodness, you know, I like to go see movies, you know, there's many situations where I want to feel not in control or you know not having to make choices. But in general, you know, it's it's a dance between that and then having times where I really do need to be discerning deliberate make choices so that I can have good relationships, good work life, and kind of like the eightfold path of Buddhism, right speech, right livelihood, right relationship that does require making some choices. And practice, yeah, and a lot of practice and messing up a lot, you know, like messing up a whole lot and you know every time we fall back or relapse or make a mistake or some people, you know, that the origin of the word sin in Christianity really meant the distance from the that an archer misses the target. So the distance between the bulls eye and where the arrow lands is called the sin. And so if we can think of it not as a shameful evil thing, but oh man, I really missed my target there and just be like what do I need to learn from what happened there. And I was super tired, I wasn't giving myself enough sleep, I wasn't taking care of myself, I'm or as you said earlier, I'm just not in the right situation, you know, if I can't make the right choice over and over and over and over and over again, then it's possible that it's not the right relationship workplace situation, whatever. This is a practice of having kindness and compassion for self, because I think of myself in my 20s, where I was quite critical and I had that sin when I missed the mark. And now in my 50s, I'm much better at being curious and playful like all I got triggered again there's all there's that there it is again, I got something to tap on I got something to work and I find that intention that attitude. And it goes a long way being curious, being playful with this work so it's not for me, for me, conscious work, this kind of work is not serious work, it's important work, but it's not serious, it is playful and it sounds like if I'm interpreting well, that's kind of what you're saying, have some compassion for yourself, have some kindness for yourself as you do this journey. Absolutely, yeah, there's so much good research now on self compassion and the health enhancing benefits of a self compassion practice, which is that sense of, you know curiosity, gentleness, investigation, it's not like self compassion is giving yourself a free pass on everything, you know, and being like, oh well too bad, I'm self compassionate. It's more like fear self compassion, which is like good parenting inside like okay honey, why did you abandon yourself in that situation, why did you unkind, you know, why are you, why did you fall into gossip and just really kindly and gently and curiously investigating that and yeah, I love this sense of humor and just sort of the face palm, you know, like, oh god, what what did I do, you know. You said good parenting, so this is a great segue to get into one of your books, but also one of my favorite medalities is inner child worker in a child meditation, is that something that you're familiar with or that you like to use as well with your, your patients in yourself. Definitely, yeah, I mean, I think nowadays I don't really usually call it the inner child, but I do feel like there are younger parts of us and really great work, you know, on I think they call it now, you know internal family system and stuff like that, which way back in the day, you know, we had what was it called transactional analysis, you know, there's always been sort of this work on internal parts. And you find that really, really useful and not only in sort of the metaphorical pieces of us like the inner parent, the inner child, the inner teenager, the inner adolescent, but also sometimes it's helpful to have our bodies and our emotions weigh in on things. And exercise that I'll do with people quite often is okay, what does your mind say about this situation, you can tell it's the mind because it's going to give you judgments it's going to give you pros and cons it's going to give you logic and narration it's going to talk a lot, you know, it's going to have a lot to say categories, comparisons, all kinds of things like that. And then I say, okay, great, so that's what the mind says, what does your heart say, what is your heart say about this situation, meaning, you know, your emotions, your, and you can tell it's the heart speaking, because first of all, you often feel it right around your chest, you know, you can kind of feel it not coming from up here, but coming from here, coming from the belly. And it usually uses many fewer words and sometimes it is a younger part of us that's like, you know, I just want some rest and you're like, oh, wow, that wasn't even the question, the question was what should I do about work and you know the heart says I just want some rest and you go, okay, that makes sense. Then what does the body say the body has something to say about it and then we ask what does the wise oldest part of yourself that may have been present before you were born and will be present after you die say what what is that, you know, inner Yoda. Right. So you're in again, I'll say about this and often you can tell that that's speaking because it is very few words mostly and very quiet. And so that part of you might say something like wait and that's the entire message right. And if you can survey all of these parts of yourself about a decision you're trying to make or about a situation you're in that's a super interesting interesting practice giving voice to all of these parts of yourself can be very eliminating. Yeah, you get some really good insight and again, seeing when you said that I'm tired, I need rest, it reminds me of somebody going through massive fertility treatments or massive a long period of fertility treatments with lots of setbacks in some of the work we did when she asked that question, I'm exhausted. Yeah, and and to give herself permission to rest and just need these little shifts that have because she is now pregnant at the time of us conversation, but you know, and she did the physical stuff she did a lot of physical and but in the end it was just interesting when that part spoke in the relief right when you can just be honest with yourself. And so I'm just fascinating with the brain and I'm more impressed and relieved grateful to see how mainstream this is because in my work as a doing Chinese medicine and hypnosis work, this is kind of was a fringe stuff and you know this is cute stuff and it's really mainstream and now high tech. that you're using virtual reality, right? To emphasize this. I just think it's great that we're accessing our brain and making these changes that we can do on our own self-care and getting support, like with people with you. I wanted to talk about, you have not specifically but the book, but you wrote a book called "Mineful Motherhood, Practical Tools for Stain, "Sanger and Predictionary, Childs, First Year." I was curious what your take is from the research and the work that you do on mindful motherhood and the benefits to the child. Because in Chinese medicine, there is this idea and pregnancy, your emotions impact, the child, so they're very concerned. This is, say, long time ago it's written, they don't want the mother to be too stressed because it will change the nature, mentally, emotionally, and physically of the child. They had this idea. And also just in the podcast, I often share, we're going, the goal is conscious fertility, to conscious pregnancy, which we're going to talk about, to conscious parenting, right? And I'm just wondering, what's the benefit with healing ourselves, if that's the right word, becoming whole and complete? How does this impact the child that we are going to conceive and for the individuals carry? - You know, like many researchers, we all often like to study things that we're personally interested in. And so, you know, I had been using mindfulness and meditation for quite a long time, for emotion regulation and mental health and things like that, behavioral health. And then I got pregnant. And I was practicing mindfulness throughout my pregnancy in my early motherhood and I was like, wow, that is really, really helpful. Like I wonder if this could be helpful for people who are at risk for postpartum depression or a parrypartum mood disorders, things like that. And so I developed an adaptation of several different mindfulness programs and started trying it with groups of pregnant women. This was funded by the Belavista Foundation in San Francisco at the beginning. And, you know, every group we would do, we would refine the intervention afterwards based on people's feedback and try it again and try it again and try it again. And we did find that we had really good results on reducing negative affect, meaning difficult emotions, like, you know, sadness, anger, fear, stress, increasing positive emotions during pregnancy and then having better bonding with the baby and more peace postpartum. So we would have these mindfulness sessions with the pregnant women and then we'd have, we did a few groups with women with their babies which we thought this is gonna be a madhouse. How can you teach mindfulness with a whole group of women and their babies? And it was so fascinating because the women would come in with their babies and there'd be all kinds of activity and crying and feeding and, you know, all that stuff. And then we'd start to practice and they'd put the babies on the blankets in the middle of our sitting in a circle. And there would be like this symphony of baby noises while everybody was sitting almost as though they could feel what was happening in the room. So that was really fun. That program got adopted by a five-year project at UC San Francisco called the Momma's Study which was for overweight and obese low-income, high-risk inner-city pregnant women. So we did that study for about five years and we included some nutrition and movement in with the mindfulness training. What we found was not only did it help the women reduce their stress and in these particular women it changed their, for the better, their glucose metabolism. But it also, after the babies were born, the babies showed less stress reactivity when their mothers had taken the mindfulness training versus the babies of the moms who hadn't had it. And now eight years later, we're still following those moms and babies and we're still showing positive results. So we know for sure that there are stressed disorders and behavioral issues that are passed on from generation to generation. Some of those are purely genetic and so it's more about navigating that when it happens. And some of them are through this interaction between behavior and environment and genetics and we know that the fetal environment can be altered by reducing stress or improving mood. Now I don't ever want to fall into the trap of saying that someone who's in fertility treatment just needs to have a better attitude and then they'll succeed. Or that a woman who is living in a stressful environment that's out of her control, you know, in poverty or in food insecure areas or all kinds of trouble can happen and that somehow it's her job to make sure that her mental state is correct or else she'll hurt her baby because it's not that simple at all. But just like we were saying before, there is no doubt that you can collaborate with your body in the process of creating as optimal a fetal environment as you can by practicing some of the things that we have been talking about throughout this podcast, mindfulness, meditation, mindful movement, eating well, you know, all of these things are choices that we can make that can help us and a lot of it does have to do with treating ourselves with kindness, treating ourselves with nurturing and this does reduce cortisol in the body. Cortisol is very well known to be the hormone that influences the uterus, the placenta. It's cortisol is kind of a time clock for when a baby is gonna be born. There's a huge rush of this when it's time for the baby to be born. So it affects preterm birth and the time the baby's born and all of that kind of thing. So anything we can do to balance our interstates is helpful, you know, it's not determining, but it's absolutely helpful. - I wanna go back to one of the things you said about that not worrying about being stressed 'cause it's an important thing to emphasize. Two things I'm learning about that I'm reading in my own personal experience and preserving clinic. As one is, it's not the situation, it's how you perceive the stress. So that's key. And the other thing is that, you know, oh, I shouldn't feel sad then. It's actually if you can come along side yourself and accept yourself for the person who feels sad, a sense of relief comes over. So then it's no longer seeming to have that negative impact. If I'm in a situation like you said, food insecurity or an living situation I don't want, and you use these tools that you've been describing to help you surrender to what is. And that doesn't mean we're resigned to it, we prefer it, we're just lowering the resistance. Something mostly physically seems to happen to body. I call it the resistance lowers, people feel a sense of relief. And so even without the situation changing, using your word, your perception to this situation changes, and that can have physical benefit. Even though the situation is not what you want, you've made the shift inside and now you're not having that negative impact. That's my speculation. Can you elaborate on that? Am I off of it? - Yeah, I mean, some of the metaphors we use are, it's kind of like waves in the ocean. So you could go and sit on the beach and say, I am going to make these waves stop. You know, I'm going to create the perfect home life, the perfect relationship, the perfect interstate. I'm going to make all of the waves in the ocean stop. And you can imagine how effective it is to go sit at the beach and try to make the ocean wave stop. It's impossible. But what you can do is instead of fighting them or trying to make them stop or getting bold over by them all the time, getting knocked over, it's kind of like learning to surf. You know, how can I be more able to surf the waves of life? So if I have a wave of sadness, can I let it come through me without trying to stop it or suppress it? And then as soon as I feel like I've been able to feel that feeling completely, can I do some reframing in my mind of the situation and say, look, my job is not to fix X, Y, or Z or to control the outcome, but my job is to be as kind and loving to myself as I can, which includes taking care of my body, taking walks, taking time for meditation, taking time for yoga, seeing friends, art, nature, music, creativity, spending time with animals. You know, these become not like luxury activities. These become essential daily activities. So that's when the other metaphor I like to use is the obstacle course where some of us will try to get rid of all the obstacles internal and external, get rid of all of them and say, then I'll be able to walk peacefully across this field. You're just not going to be able to get rid of the obstacles. They are part of life. They're part of your inner life and your outer life. And so it's about becoming more agile and nimble and flexible to be able to navigate these obstacles with greater ease and grace, sometimes even to look at it on obstacle and say, I'm not going to make it over that. I'm going around, like I'm skipping that one or I can't do that alone. I'm going to-- going to need help getting over that one that's going to require a team, which is true in some obstacle courses. And so focusing on those things, I want to become more agile, nimble and flexible in the face of life's obstacles, which means stretching myself internally and sometimes literally stretching myself. Why do we do yoga? We want to increase our flexibility. We want to increase our connection between mind and body, which is what yoga actually means is yoking together the mind and the body. But there's also something very important that happens when we're holding an uncomfortable pose and not stopping holding it is that we are building physical resilience, but we're also building mental and emotional resistance. So I'm standing in warrior pose. It's getting really painful. It's getting very uncomfortable. The teachers like hold it for another count of 10, 9, 8, you're going to oh boy, it's really hard to hold. By doing that, you're actually stretching your ability to sit with discomfort. And that means that you'll be able to do it more in other settings as well. And I think this is the fertility journey. The describe it as fertility stress, fertility trauma, incredibly discomfortable. And again, it's preparing them when they have this child, they're going to be so grateful and they're so awesome parents because they work so hard to have this. And what I hope I wish, my intention is with the work that like you're doing and the tools that are available that even if they don't get to grow their family, they still feel whole and complete that they have that resilience for other things in their life and they go on feeling wonderful, right? That's what I hope. Yeah, I mean, I always like to say that acceptance as a concept in mindfulness or you know, people talk about acceptance based coping or acceptance and commitment therapy, it's not becoming a dormant. It's not like you're just going to let everything happen to you and just resign yourself or feel defeated, let life roll over you. This is a more of a actual like a warrior stance and it's saying I choose to meet life as it is and make choices that are in alignment with my values and goals. And that means I'm going to do everything I can to create the optimal environment for my fertility, for my pregnancy, for my motherhood and then I'm going to be open to outcome. And those two things can happen at the same time. I'm going to do everything in my power to create the best possibility, best environment I can have internally and externally and then the tricky part is and then I'm going to be unattached to outcome and I'm going to learn to surf the waves of whatever comes. There was a great teacher who passed away that I just loved Angelus Arian and she had something called the fourfold way and these four things were the four things that she recommends show up. Number one, tell the truth without blame or judgment. Pay attention to what has heart and meaning and be unattached to outcome. And I just love those, you know, boy, I mean you think about how many books and systems and everything else that's out there. We could just learn those four things show up, pay attention to what has heart and meaning tell the truth without blame or judgment and be unattached to outcome. It would be doing pretty good. And all those are simple and yet not easy. Not easy. And I want to add to the not attached to form and outcome because of the population that I get to support, they're like, what do you mean? Like I got to have this baby. I want to have this baby. I want to clear that, clarify what I observe is not being attached to form and outcome does not mean that you stop wanting this baby. You actually don't get to choose what you want. So you still get to want it as you do, right? It's just a reality. Otherwise you're lying to yourself. That's not being eating is a word authentic, but tell the truth was one of those. Yeah. Yeah. So you want this baby, but it's not this desperation. So there's a different change in energy. I want it and I'm going to do everything I can do to create the environment to have it. And I'm also accepting or knowing that even if I do all this, I may not have get the baby and I will be disappointed versus it has to happen. If it doesn't happen, you know, and so that's how I'm interpreting not attached to form and outcome. You still want that's kind of what I mean by the warrior stance is, you know, we can, we can look at this in terms of social justice too, which, you know, there's been critique of this idea of acceptance and, you know, like, so I'm just supposed to navigate the unfairness and the oppression and all of this stuff. And it's like, no, you, the stance is I will do everything in my power for the rest of my life to the greatest of my ability to reduce the amount of oppression and cruelty and racism and all of these things that are happening in the world. And I refuse to be defeated and to become bitter and angry and resentful because of it. I refuse. And there was a similar quote or maybe sort of a, a putting together a quote from the Dalai Lama, which was essentially, you know, I will never stop working for the independence of Tibet. And I will never accept a solution that involves the harming of one Chinese person. I mean, that's commitment, right? That is commitment. Cassie, I really enjoyed our discussion today. And we didn't have time to talk about psychedelics. Maybe we'll get together again and talk about psychedelics. I do want to let the listeners know how they can find you. I'm aware of your website of CassandraVetan.com. And I want to direct our listeners there because there's books and publications you can find there. She has courses and workshops and she has multiple YouTube interviews that she's been, she's done hopefully this one will show up there as well. Cassie, there are other ways that we can direct our listeners to and we'll put them in the show notes if you want. Sure. So one thing I invite people to see in addition to CassandraVetan.com is johnwbrickfoundation.org, which is the mental health, integrative mental health organization that I'm a part of. And we do have an upcoming summit, which will be April 11th through 17th, that is on a variety of integrative approaches to mental health and well-being that I think your audience would love. It's free. So that is called the global, the mental health and well-being global summit and the information will be at the johnwbrickfoundation.org website. You can also look for me at the Center for Mindfulness at UC San Diego and Center for Mindfulness at UC San Diego offers quite a few online courses in mindfulness-based stress reduction, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. If you want to learn more about mindfulness, you can go there. Thank you, Cassie, for making the time to share and all the writing and the stuff that you're doing and just for our time to meet. And then your friend and colleague from the noetic institute, Dr. Julia Mossbridge, she's by the way, episode 18, unconditional love for self, she introduced us. So Julia, thank you for the invitation. So appreciate that as well. I agree. Thank you, Julia. I love you. And thank you, Lauren. It's great to have spent this time with you and with your audience. If you're looking for support to grow your family, contact Accubalance Wellness Center. At Accubalance, they help you reach your peak fertility potential through their integrative approach using low-level laser therapy, fertility acupuncture and naturopathic medicine. Download the Accubalance Fertility Diet and Dr. Brown's video for mastering manifestation and clearing subconscious blocks. Go to Accubalance.ca. Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Conscious Fertility, the show that helps you receive life on purpose. Please take a moment to subscribe to the show and join the community of women and men on their path to peak fertility and choosing to live consciously on purpose. I would love to continue this conversation with you, so please direct message me on Instagram at Lauren Brown official. That's Instagram Lauren Brown official. Before you can visit my websites, warnbrown.com and Accubalance.ca. Until the next episode, stay curious and for a few moments, ring your awareness to your heart center and breathe.