11: Tapping Your Way to a Calm Body and Mind with Dr. Peta Stapleton

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 guest or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to Conscious Fertility, to show the 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 Dr. 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. I am so happy to have Dr. Peter Stapleton on the show today because back in March 2020, Peter was supposed to come to Vancouver BC as part of the Integrated Fertility Symposium. She had an EFT fertility workshop all set up for the acupuncturists and naturopaths and other healers that were attending. Most of you know 2020's when COVID hit and the world kind of shut down. Here we are recording this in late 2022 and off air we were just talking about, hey we should revisit that and so hopefully that will happen but let me give an introduction for those that may not know who Dr. Peter Stapleton is. She resides in Australia. She has over 25 years experience as a registered clinical and health psychologist. She is currently the associate professor in psychology of Bond University which is located in Australia. In 2019 she got the prestigious award being named Psychologists of the Year by the Australian Allied Health Awards. She is a world leader research in EFT, also known as emotional freedom technique, also known as tapping and she's established herself truly as one of not only Australia's leading health professionals but I think worldwide when it comes to the mind body techniques such as EFT and she often says her research focuses on the fourth wave of psychological therapies that we're going to talk about today which is a focus on mind and body and a big part of her significant contribution so far in her life has to has been to lead world first randomized clinical trials investigating the effectiveness of EFT which is why I invited Peter to have this discussion today because I'm always looking for the best evidence that we have on things that may not be considered mainstream yet and she does run a series of workshops and trainings throughout Australia and online and she teaches a lot of Allied health professionals and teachers about EFT so she's getting to reach the younger population through the teachers and she's a co-founder the mind heart connect it's an organization that raises awareness of the mind body connection through evidence-based practices and I think I was first introduced to you Peter through your book because you're an author also the science behind tapping at proven I'm a proven stress management technique for the mind and body. Peter nice to see you again and speak to you. It's lovely. It's lovely to connect. I will get back there soon. So we have lots to cover today and I thought and we're going to tie this into conscious fertility. Can you just explain kind of what exactly is EFT first of all for our listeners? Yeah so EFT as an acronym stands for emotional freedom techniques and anyone probably new to the field or might have heard about it many many decades. It has been around for a good 45 years now so certainly it's not new what has happened in the last two decades is it's been tested in clinical research in academic settings but EFT or tapping as you mentioned long is probably the descriptor of what we do so we actually focus the mind on what's happening so that could be a feeling or an emotion or a belief system and we stimulate acupuncture points so known acupuncture points on the body with a simple tapping technique. So now there's acupuncture points all over the body but for the purpose of research we just use eight of them in clinical EFT and lo and behold after 20 years down the track of decades of research we have this growing body that actually shows EFT indeed not only changes the stress reduction fairly quickly and it comes that part of the brain but it lasts a very long time so I know we'll get into kind of research and chatting about that kind of thing today but as simple as I would say EFT or tapping is a way to quickly reduce stress or the stress response in the body and we just do that by tapping on known acupuncture points. And can you share what some of the areas of research that has the evidence now using EFT what are some of the areas that come to mind that you've seen in the last little while? Yeah absolutely the research as far as kind of you know meeting our gold standards and being compared to other therapies out there with established evidence definitely in the trauma and the PTSD diagnosis space so post-traumatic stress disorder any of those kind of conditions or indeed you know lots of research has actually been done with returning war veterans so that's really quite robust we even have meta analysis that show the effect size there is very large compared to other therapies to achieve that outcome. The other body of the. Can I mention something about the PTSD and just tied into our space with fertility is so many women describe their journey as traumatic that having a negative cycle after cycle having a miscarriage losing the pregnancy late in the pregnancy failed IVF cycles they literally use the word fertility trauma so it's quite interesting that with the EFT and why I think this is an important topic is so many of the women experiencing trauma from the experience of infertility and there's research in the fertility space that a diagnosis of infertility is has a similar physiological effect as a terminal illness like a terminal cancer for example. So you're seeing this we're kind of speculating and jumping a bit from because it hasn't been studied robustly or I'm not sure if it's been studied in the fertility space but it's interesting that you say it's quite robust when it looks at PTSD and looking at people that have come back from war veterans and you're seeing a change and it's lasting. And it lasts so we even have DNA and studies like that where they've tested expression of genes in war that's with PTSD you know 10 sessions of EFT so one hour a week, 10 weeks and they don't make criteria but the genes that we're expressing themselves to give them those kind of physiological symptoms we see like you know hyper vigilance and nightmares and things like that actually all dissipate but the gene activity matches so the genes stop expressing themselves six months later they've stayed the same they still don't make criteria and they look at you like what do you mean I used to have those nightmares because the brain actually reconciled dates and it's like they're just the way they are now post EFT so there's lots of studies in the biological space particularly for EFT which I think is you know as a mainstream psychologist that teaches therapy at advanced level so I teach at masters level here in psychology we do teach cognitive behavioral therapy acceptance and commitment mindfulness and things like that there are rarely the number of studies in some of those therapies that measure the level of biological outcomes that EFT has so it's quite exciting to be part of that disircling back to and it reminded me as you're talking Lauren I have got colleagues in the UK who have started there in the EFT world but they have actually started to look at what they're terming child birth related PTSD so in women and they're using EFT for that so there's there is some ground work that's starting to happen there and acknowledging that some women in that birth process do develop a unique type of PTSD and they're starting to talk about with EFT so we'll start to see some of those publications coming out shortly. Well very interesting and you said something that I want to highlight and have you we're going to talk about the different things that you have the evidence for where the research is coming but on the stress and PTSD side not only did you say that they felt better they weren't being triggered they weren't having these behaviors anymore but you're seeing changes in gene expression and changes in the brain so there is structural changes not just like they think they feel better you're seen by a logical changes. Absolutely and I think that's what's exciting about these types of therapies that not only DNA expression another study showed one hour of tapping just for feeling stressed had 72 genes the tension expression and they were attached to things like immunity and the bodies immune system so it actually improved so one study actually showed 113% after one hour of tapping for stress so things like that not only you know do we get the inflammation response decreasing we get improvements in immunity and things like that so cortisol cortisol gets measured fairly easily through saliva in many studies we've done many here as well and just one hour of tapping again anywhere between kind of 25 to 45 percent reductions in cortisol the stress hormone which we know is implicated in loads of autoimmune diseases and the stress response and lots of different things pain as well but tapping for an hour whether you're alone or in a group you can actually reduce that cortisol level so there's a lot that comes out of that and I know we haven't yet touched on but in Australia we've done a couple of functional MRI studies where we've looked at brain changes so physical brain changes in the feed credit space but also the chronic pain area. So there's lots happening. You know, the fact that you're seeing gene expression changes because we are what our genes express, we're not necessarily what our genes are. It's very important what the expression is and the environment is always impacting our gene expression. So genes can be turned on or off for disease, but they can also be turned on and off for longevity, health, and reproduction. And so this is quite fascinating that you're seeing this. And in the immune system, if you're able to regulate and modulate the immune system, well, this is important for health and infertility, especially. So the body knows what to do and what not to do because it has that invader known as the fetus in the body as well. So really interesting stuff. Tell me more about kind of what you guys have been studying. So we just jumped on PTSD because stress is a huge component to so many illnesses and health and feel free to jump in. Why stress isn't great for even reproductive health, we can talk about that. I never like it when we say stress isn't good for fertility and then we stress out people that we're telling you this because EFT is a tool to help deal with stress. Exactly. And I totally agree that we don't want to stress out mums to be or indeed mums that are falling pregnant again with with subs of quen children because stress is inevitable. The reality is we actually need a spiking cortisol to kind of get us going in the day. It's just that it has its place. It's about I think if you do feel this stress response for whatever reason in life, do you have a tool available to be able to turn that off when you want to actually feel calmer and to me EFT falls into that that you know you might not have time to do a meditation practice or go for a long walk or whatever it might be but you might actually be able to kind of you know duck into a bathroom or something like that and do a bit of tapping and for an instantaneous tool that can actually not only make you feel better like you're saying calmer but physiologically change the body space. I just think there is nothing that compares and you mentioned the fourth wave and we talk about you know there are lots of things EMDR the eye movement therapy is part of that. These are somatic based therapy tools that target the body and I think traditional talk therapy is it's learning to acknowledge again that they really do play a role in in all of this so can we compare that so because you're trained in talk therapy right you're a clinical psychologist so it's always nice that somebody's trained in both and now you're trained in what you're called the fourth wave body-based therapy somatic as in body-based therapy when people go to talk therapy depends on this type but often you're just reactivating the trauma right and from a background hypnotherapy and conscious work that may not be a great a great thing may not be but I'm not trained in this so I'm asking your opinion on this in Chinese medicine we talk about emotions being trapped in the body which is why some of these tapping points interesting from a Chinese medicine perspective because they're in the sinew channel so in the tissue so you're helping release it I think you're a fan of the book the body keeps the score I think it was it's all a bit so radical yeah so can you talk why because I think so many more body-based therapies are coming so why is this important and and there's talk therapy and there's body-based why why do you think this is the fourth way to analyze this getting you optimistic or even excited about the future of integration using this type of therapy absolutely I think you know you've probably nailed it there long when you sort of said you know is just talking about our daily problems or you know life kind of events or even traumatic things in the past if we talk about them but don't do anything to kind of interrupt that process then we simply have a neurological hard wiring process that will happen for almost people and the hebeans principle you know kind of explain that neurons that fire together will wire together so I just said this recently to my own students here because they were wondering one of them came up to me and sort of said that my relative has been in talk therapy talking about a trauma that had happened and over the last 12 months she appears to have been getting worse why might that be and I said was therapy including anything to interrupt the stress response because as we talk about or even you know we complain to our friends something that's made us feel a certain way if nothing interrupts that it does hardwire it in the brain so traditional cognitive therapies of which we absolutely teach and aspects of those are really still useful if there isn't anything that can kind of interrupt that we know through other theories like memory reconciliation we're not giving the body a different experience of the story that we're telling and that's probably the simplest way to understand why things like tapping EMDR the i movement other somatic based therapies do work and last over time because if at the same time we're talking about our problem our stress something that happened to us we're interrupting it with for us tapping at the same time EMDR obviously moves the eyes at the same time is talking the brain can't hold a distressing story and a physical calming response which is what all these things are doing it's very hard to hold both so guess what you repeat that because this is a hot this is important right so so because you know you can't tap your head in circle right you can't we can't or chew gum and walk that idea so you're saying that it's hard very challenging for the body to hold a stressful thought and have a calming sensation at the same time right that's right and talking is the best way to activate what's happening so people often you know talk in therapy and we do in tapping tell me the story of what happened so it is very mindful and it's very exposure like we have to hear what's happening but at the same time we're doing a calming response now tapping to me is just an easy simple one that we can actually do I don't have to meditate at the same time I don't have to kind of you know have someone in front of me trained in EMDR so coming in off EFT compared to EMDR quite a few studies there show we identical outcomes meaning the mechanisms there are very very similar so yeah it's very hard for the brain to hold a distressing thought and do a calming activity at the same time it guess what wins the calming activity so if you do it long enough we get a brain change you get the brain change and again where I know we're kind of moving around here and there but you said you're open to that and listeners follow us on this journey it's a fun one for me hopefully you're enjoying it as well when you're tapping on these points what is happening that there's a because you have research to show there is a calming you're measuring calmness so what are you seeing change in hormones in the brain etc when you're tapping on these acupuncture points in this process that is telling the brain calm down yeah we are actually seeing so Harvard University originally did a 10-year study they included things like MRI brain scanning and things like that of traditional acupuncture while someone was inside there feeling a certain like so they started the ball rolling with now got lots of EFT research that supports it that when you tap on a known acupuncture point and of course we've got studies plenty of studies that tap on non identified acupuncture points what we would call a sham point none of those studies show an outcome so I'll give you an example there's no acupuncture points on the underside of the arm here so if that's done as a comparison therapy that actually don't show the outcomes we do need to hit that acupuncture point the brain gets a deactivating signal sent to the stress center which is the amygdala so we actually see not only if we've actually got studies and and we use them here in Australia where we use an EEG style mechanism so we actually have wearable EEG head sensors and we can tap at the same time that we watch the brain scan the kind of bands if you like of all the EEG theta delta alpha beta and as we tap the brain starts to calm down the amygdala is getting a deactivating signal regardless of what the topic is it's just about the words that we're saying which makes it really easy to kind of start to target different areas we then see the flow on effect in hormones cortisol adrenaline things like that where we then get obviously gene expression that changes and things like that as well so we did we got this deactivating signal that sent to the brain which you may see in other therapies too such as styles of breathing and things like that it's just that this is just another alternative way to actually get there and it's pretty quick you know I'm going to share with you and then we're going to go more into research more the conditions how I've incorporated this in my practice and why so what I should say that I didn't just share with you you're not aware of this but EFT is one of my favorite medallys as part of my practice and you said it and you went kind of real quickly by but you said brainwaves beta alpha theta delta can you imagine doing EFT and having acupuncture at the same time because I do the acupuncture first to help get them into alpha into that parasympathetic and then I get them to activate their story to and then we go into tapping so it's a pretty pretty fun experience but how does this sound to you because this is what I think is happening so this is me just asking you after just reading all the reading so so many books and materials and research papers and on consciousness. You know, reading your colleague, Dr. Joe, dispends that going to his retreats, the Bruce Lipton's and just all the conscious work out there. One day I kind of got an idea and you've said this a couple of times, so I'm going to, I think you're going to say, yeah, that's what's happening, but I don't know. So it's for my listeners, we have not rehearsed this. So feel free by the way to say, no, no, no, no, I'm really free because I don't have, I don't know. Meaning I haven't done research on this. All everything, including the EFT process, the Biring Katie process, I see a formula that they all do the same thing. And I call it NAC, they get you to notice, they get you to accept what is, which gets you into present moment, moment alpha. And then once you're out of the story and you're calm, then you can choose again, NAC, C's choose again. Now you get to choose how you want to feel, reprogram the brain. And I feel they're all doing this and with the reason I like EFT, so you said notice, so, you know, we talk about in consciousness and in hypnotherapy, you have a story that story leads to a last your thought leads to a feeling leads to behavior, at least to gene expression and that becomes your destiny. And we're looking for something to interrupt the story, which I think EFT is wonderful for the whole process of EFT, which hopefully you're going to go into, there is a surrendering or accepting what is process, not being resigned to it. There is an accepting and I use many tools. So I think EFT is just another tool like EMDR like side K, like all the other tools I bring into it, the bar and Katie inquire, they're just tools to get you in my opinion, they get you to present moment. So you're measuring the MIGLA calming down, you're measuring cortisol changing, hippocampus changing. I think that's what happens when you become very conscious aware. When you literally go into the present moment, I think there is a shift physiologically. I think there's something beyond what we understand and you tap into something and then new creativity, things happen. Joe dispends this as you can get a biological upgrade, right? These things are changing. I think this is what's happening that we're calling the present moment, some call it the zero point field, some call it the quantum area, whatever it is. And so if you don't get into the, just doing the EFT doesn't mean you're going to get there, you have to be in the work, it's a process. And if you can get into that present moment, then it's paradoxical when you finally get into the moment and you accept what is is when you can change. Yeah. That's what I'm seeing. NAC, notice except choose again, how to interrupt the story. And I think EFT is my favorite tool as part of that process. And so is that what we're doing? Do you think? Yeah, absolutely. Definitely. So Dr David Feinstein, who, you know, our list is my big familiar with, who's in the EFT energy medicine world with his wife Donna Eden has written some fabulous concept papers just about EFT, but about the words that we tap by. That's the title of one of the papers. Yeah, it's exactly what you're saying that, you know, it is the words that allow us to start to do that first step of notice and acceptance and the EFT phrase we typically start with is around, I've got this feeling going on at the moment, but I accept this is what's happening right now, but it's the tapping that will interrupt that to make that third step happen of I get now to have a, you know, more conscious choice or choose something differently because the frontal lobe has come down, we're in more parasympathetic and we actually can make a clearer decision, which obviously stress gets in the road with all of that. So Bessels book that you mentioned, you know, he really said and they did MRIs way back in the day when it kind of was really out there. And he said the minute that you're in a really distressed or stressed state, not just even trauma, the speech area and the brain goes offline where the frontal lobe is not connected, it's very hard to make a good choice when you're feeling in that state. So yeah, you're right, you know, so logic goes out the window. You're saying when you're stressed, speech goes offline and that so we go into the fight or flight sympathetic. So we're in survival mode, which means we're not in the logical rational, we're no longer rational. And we're trying to deal with somebody thinking they should be rational, but they're not, they've lost that. That's what you're saying when we're stressed. Absolutely, like the time. Yeah. And with reproduction, we know blood is diverted from the reproductive system. There's, you know, is this the time to reproduce or is this the time to survive? So can you, could you set it? But I'm familiar with it, but there's people brand new to EFT. You talked about the setup statement. Can you kind of walk us through then, more in slow motion of what you're doing with the EFT then. So what is the setup statement and why and what do you do just to kind of put it all together on this? Notice, except choose again, idea that we just introduce as a formula. Yeah. So this is, you know, really the original recipe and of course there's lots of other versions of tapping modalities out there. They all tend to start with the same thing, which is that notice section. And it does make tapping feel counter intuitive. If you've come out of kind of traditional talk therapies and certainly clients that might come in for the first time when we sort of say, so tell me, tell me how you feel. And if they say a feeling like anger, we say, okay, well, here's what we're going to do with the tapping sequence is we actually put it in a statement and while we're tapping, we will start with a sentence such as even though I currently feel angry, we might even identify where that is in the body. I feel it in my chest. And then the second half of the statement is always, I accept this is how I feel. Now there's variations of that, but that's as simple as it is. We actually encourage people to say out loud while they're tapping the setup statement, which is even though I've got this feeling, I accept this is obviously what's happening for me right now. Now it's the continuation of tapping on these eight acupuncture points that we're using clinically empty that helps shift that feeling. This is the most common question that we actually get asked that while they're tapping on these pressure points, they're actually saying mostly the feeling. And so that would be, I'm still saying I feel angry as I tap through, I feel angry. Obviously, I'm just tapping on some of the points in my face at the moment. I feel angry. And people that come to this for the first time sort of are horrified because they think we're instilling this feeling of anger and we might be making it worse by actually saying that we're not doing any reframing, we're not doing any meaning making and we're certainly not substituting it for the way I want to feel. Because to us tapping is a technique of truth. We actually have to be truthful and honest about how we feel for it to work. It's almost like we use the computer analogy. We need to bring the file up. We actually have to engage the part of the brain that is having that feeling about whatever happened long enough for us to hit the delete button so the file can be deleted and the delete button is the tapping. So we absolutely know through MRI studies, EEG, cortisol. We don't make the problem worse by acknowledging it and even way back, Carl Rogers and beyond, they were saying we need to accept for change to happen. You actually have to accept your current state and EFT very much borrows on some of those philosophies. Can we talk about this setup a bit more than I'd like to go deep inside. I have you here to talk to this conversation. You start to touch on it. People are afraid that if I'm going to activate this feeling, this memory, then and you're going to tap, you're going to imprint it on me. They're very afraid and they've heard, "Oh, well, we just talked about talk therapy. Is it beneficial to keep talking about the problem?" How do you address that? You talked a little bit about it because you have data to say that it doesn't, but this is the computer metaphor that you just gave then. You must have clients that say, "That's a common question I get. I don't want to feel it. I don't want to think about it." You're saying, "For neuroplasticity, to deal with this, we actually have to, it's exposure therapy. We actually have to make it present." I actually tell people when they book with me to do conscious fertility work, are you willing to be uncomfortable? They're like, "What?" And I go, "Because this isn't. " But you have to go into your emotions. There is that piece, but the beautiful part is if the process work, if you go through it, there is peace on the end of it. Absolutely. But you have to be willing to be uncomfortable. How do you explain and give them some comfort around? I'm afraid you're going to imprint it. Part two of the question is, "I don't want to accept this, like for the infertility. Even though I'm afraid I'll never get pregnant." We can talk about it because I know you have data on test anxiety. I'm wondering how that would translate to fertility testing, right? And pregnancy testing, right? Because you do have data that this helps for our listeners that are afraid that you're going to imprint it. How can you give them some comfort? And then what about, "I don't want to accept this. What do you mean by accept or surrender to what is?" Can you share a bit more on that? Yeah. Yeah. And we absolutely kind of try to build a bridge to pass what they already know and accept. And we will typically come back to what they currently might be using as their strategies. So you touched on it long, that typically what people are trying to do just to cope in their own lives, whether it's through a different therapy or just before they get to us, is they are trying to use avoidance strategies or distraction. And that's not uncommon because we're trying to make ourselves feel better. The only thing anyone ever wants to get out of a therapy process is to feel better. So we typically will ask, "How's that going for you? How's that working?" Does it work to try and avoid or does it make it grow louder and stronger? I've got actually decades of clinical research in the OCD field, obsessive-compulsive data. disorder because it overlaps with eating disorders in my other field. So, it's a strategy OCD sufferers use a lot is if I can try and avoid and kind of keep it over here, but what happens, and it happens for anybody that suffers these type of obsessive disorders, is it makes it louder? Ironically, and even our mindfulness research that sits over here shows that if we face our biggest fear, we confront it and we take the steps to acknowledge and then accept. It actually dissipates if you like, it takes out that power. So it's quite a funny kind of almost counter-intuitive. It's counter-tuitive, but you're right though, because what you resist persists. So when you try to deflect it or pretend it doesn't exist, I often use the metaphor as the beach ball underwater and you push, eventually it's going to shoot up really high, right? And so it's a strategy, but it's not really a solution. That's right, and it's not a long-term one, and typically they've been trying that one for years, if not kind of decades of their life. So we'll always ask about, what do you currently try, is that working for you? You've ended up in kind of my room for tapping, so something's not working. The other part of that question about, well, I don't want to accept that I have these feelings or that that thing happened to me, is a pretty standard one because they do sort of feel in that initial kind of start before we've even got into tapping. That if I accept this, then that means something about me and it means it's ever going to change. And of course, that's where we make the promise of, you know, EFT or energy psychology, that it's the tapping part that does the change. We only have to accept this as currently, however, for a brief moment, but it's the tapping on the acupuncture points that will get that shipped. Now the first thing I'll often do in therapy or clinical trials, we do this in session one, is we actually tap on doubt. So we start with the benign and we start with the mundane and we say, dear, doubt this thing will actually work and I can tell you, 99% of people in our trials or put their hand up and this is ridiculous. I hope they hope it will work because they've maybe seen stuff on, you know, carotabare shows and news and media. They hope, but they actually doubt it will work for them. So we actually target doubt with tapping. So I would do that one on one or in our groups. It's always session one. I doubt this will work for me. So we actually tap on doubt and then if there's any worries about, I think this is going to make me worse, we tap on that before we even take those first steps into what's really happening. So it's quite unique and almost a bit sneaky that we use the very technique itself to address almost some of the protective behaviors that people might hold because they worry. They're worried about will I end up worse? Will my pain end up worse? Will I end up gaining more weight, you know, whatever the story is? Yeah, because when I work with my clients and my clinic and we use the notice except shoes again and you have to use a big part of it, you know, if they, I have a fear of my partner will leave me if I don't have a child or or what will people think of me or I have fear that it will fail and it goes down to, you know, other programs, subconscious programs are running and it's very difficult for them to say, I accept that because they don't want accepted. And so I often share that this process of accepting surrendering is not saying that you're resigned to it. You're not saying you want it. You're just not fighting with reality because you actually have a fear that this will happen if you don't get pregnant. And so accepting it is just, it brings down the resistance because you're no longer fighting it. When you have resistance, the whole tagline part of our conscious fertility podcast is to receive life on purpose. And when you have resistance in Chinese medicine called cheese stagnation, some people call friction resistance in the electrical engineers. When you have a resistance, an electrical system, energy flows less. When you have no resistance, lots of flow, right, and receptivity. And so it sounds counterintuitive. However, you're not saying, I want this, you're not saying I don't care, you're not saying I'm resigned, you're just saying, actually, I'm accepting myself for the person who's really afraid. And soon as you start to say that, often tears and you're tapping after that, there's some piece that comes over you, right? Here's another question I want to ask you about the tapping. And this is me just thinking, I'm always wondering, I wonder why this is working, right? And so, my brain has to make sense of it, right? I've never been one just, I'm open-minded. Definitely look what I'm doing. Conscious fertility podcast, I'm open-minded. But I like to make some sense of it. And that's why I appreciate the research that you've been disseminating and getting out to us because that gives me some comfort, by the way. So with the tapping, one of the things that you said about when people are tapping on the points that are on the head and the body, that they're concerned that you're imprinting it. And how is this different than talking about it? So here's my question. Is when you're in the story, you're at the effect of it, you're literally in it and you're eating it. And so you are now in that sympathetic, high-bated brainwaves, the migdala that you shared earlier is firing. And so you are turning on genes for survival and all the stress homes are happening. I think what's happening when we're using tapping is there's a conscious part of us there. So we are uncomfortable and we're feeling the story, so emotions come up. But there's a witnessing that's happening, a part of me that's there, so I'm not fully in it. But I'm close enough that it doesn't feel good. The far away enough that I can witness it and not be at the full effect, which allows me to have change. And that's part of that present moment stuff. And that's why I think EFT works that you're aware. And so I want to say to another way and then please chew this apart or agree, either way, when you are in it, the amygdala is fired and you have, you said, speech goes off long, you're in survival mode. So you're only, you're reptilian brains being fired, so you're no longer whole brain. You are in survival mode. But with tapping, the amygdala, it's firing, but you still have whole brain access when you're tapping the way it, whatever it's doing, calming the amygdala and changing the hormones. And so when you're whole brain, you have access to other parts of your brain, you normally don't have access to. So you're not going offline. And so you can do some integration, which is the goal of integrating the emotional charge, the trauma story. So you have a friend dispens off and says, and he's not the only one that says this, a memory without emotion is wisdom, right? And so is that what we're doing here? Yeah. So the amygdala, funnily enough in location in the brain, lives next door to the hippocampus, which is A.E. memory center. So lots of research suggests memory is stored everywhere. It's a memory center. And as the amygdala quietens down, funnily enough, the hippocampus can come back online, which is why people will, when they start to calm down through a couple of rounds of tapping, start to think about or remember things that might be from the past that are related to the current situation. Now this can be problematic if someone is tapping along with a video on YouTube and doesn't understand that this is what's happening, because they might sit down to tap with, you know, how to attract more abundance and wealth into my life with a video. And through that process, as the amygdala is getting quieter, more access to the whole brain, the hippocampus starts to bring up a memory of when you were eight years old. And of course, in that moment, the person might become quite distressed, not realizing one, it's related, but two tapping is working very well. And they make a decision that this tapping thing is terrible and it didn't work, because suddenly it threw me back 25 years. But indeed, what has happened is the hippocampus has been able to, because the it goes offline. You mentioned testing, exciting. Happens in every example. Performance where someone actually knows the information, but due to the heightened stress state, can't access the hippocampus to get that out in a test situation or giving a speech. So hence, lots and lots of research has actually kind of been published in that test anxiety performance anxiety. Currently, have a student here who's doing her PhD in EFT for musicians. So for music anxiety with performance. So same thing. You do a little bit of tapping. Well, my students tap in their exams. Then you see them and they go, "Oh, I remember." And they write down the answer. And they just, "Let's chill out. Be a meagre dealer here and let's get access again to the hippocampus." So it is a little note to self-effing and I was listening and goes off and finds million videos on YouTube, fabulous. But if that is what happens, it actually means to have things working, not the opposite. And sometimes, obviously we do recommend that people get support by experienced skilled practitioners for some of those processes. So there was one more thing I was going to mention about mechanism if I may, or do you have a question for? No, I want you to do the mechanism that I'm going to go back to your testing hippocampus because you gave me, I just learned something that I did not know. So thank you very much. So for the first time ever in the world, in the EFT world, my team here in Australia, we have actually recently, so I've just finished a two-year chronic pain trial. So we did EFT for chronic pain. So our patients on average had chronic pain for about 14, 15 years. That went through a six week program. But as part of that, not only did we do functional MRI brain scans and we absolutely got changes that has all just been published. So we got significant reductions in the pain, pain modulation, catastrophizing areas in the brain. We tested vagal tone and vagal efficiency of the vagus nerve with Dr. Stephen Porges team. So they have some equipment that allows us to measure where someone's vagal tone and efficiency. So that's how fast you can get back to baseline if something happens, like your calmness. And we tested whether or not EFT as an intervening, so obviously they were chronic pain patients. intervening activity could do anything to improve vagal tone. And it was during the height of the pandemic. And obviously we had to see patients in person. So they did physically have to come into my office to be hooked up and do some movements. Guess what? We actually found significant differences at a statistical level in vagal tone improvement in efficiency after six weeks of tapping. What that coincided with was the brain scan improvement and the self-report. Where patients, literally, we're now doing six and twelve month forward, sending me, and I was saying, I forgot I was in your chronic pain trail during the pandemic because I haven't had any pain. Like I know, I can see you, but. So that is the first time that's been measured, but what we're trying to pick up is that parasympathetic, sympathetic kind of sweeping arc. To find out what else is a governing thing here, the autonomic nervous system is such a fabulous kind of thing that runs our lives. But how can we easily and are we affecting that? And the answer does at a preliminary level seem to be, yes. We are actually impacting not only the amygdala, but the vagus nerve, which is exciting because that's where we're going in the future for the alveic side. And the vagus nerve goes from the head down the neck, which is why we do a lot of laser therapy around the neck of my practice. Rue the chest, you know, our heart system to the gut, so so many people with stress have digestive issues. And I've just learned recently that, it doesn't end in the gut, it actually goes to the uterus in the top of the cervix. How fantastic. And so we have a guest that will be speaking 'cause they're gonna talk about sexual trauma and painful intercourse and how working with the vagus nerve may be able to impact that. So you said the autonomic nervous system. And to me, the subconscious is, that's the autonomic nervous system. And when it comes to reproductive health and fertility, it's the autonomic nervous system. We want balance 'cause it's the whole hypothalamus but two-otary ovarian axis, this whole hormonal profile to have ovulation timely to release the right amount of hormones to allow receptivity, that window for implantation, and there's so many things that are involved. And it's very difficult to try and make the body do everything it's supposed to do. And if you can give it that environment, where the autonomic nervous system feels safe, when your body feels safe, it's more receptive. And there's more better immune system, better, everything runs better, right? The only benefit of a stress response is when your life's really in danger. Then you want that. But if you're worried about your fertility or your relationship or money, there's no survival benefit to have all these hormones and things changing. So this is why I think EFT is such an amazing tool that I want to introduce to the fertility space because if they can help the body feel safe, then the whole nervous, we go into psychonormonology, right? The whole hormonal nervous system electrical comes online and hopefully that will put them into more optimal reproductive health. - Totally. - Questions I want to have for you then. So the hippocampus you're talking about. So and you mentioned in one of your pain studies, I think you had it in your eating disorder study too, that so the hippocampus is involved in memory. And so in the pain study and in the eating disorder study, did you have it then that participants couldn't really remember what things were like, like the memory, so the memory change, so the hippocampus change. Is that what happened in these studies? - Yeah, so basically sometimes, particularly because in some of these studies, our average kind of age of people, participants is sort of in their late 50s, mid 60s. These patients have been around for a long time. They'll typically come into trials like this, it kind of say, I don't remember anything earlier than 18 years or 15 years that type of thing. We never worry about that with EFT trials because what happens as you start to tap even on a current present situation or feeling is as the Immigulate Pines down, the hippocampus gets more access available to it. The memories come up and people genuinely surprised, and I've got 15 years, whether you know, food craving obesity research with EFT, where people are like, oh my goodness, I just got a memory. But we teach them the minute you get a fleeting thought like that, it's important and we need to know it, don't sort of discard it. It is very important because the hippocampus kind of just starts to throw things up as every the whole system is coming down. So yeah, it plays such a strong role not only in, and you know, lots of eating disorders, foods are not the issue, it's not about food. Pain, again, chronic pain issues, they might have been an accident or an injury that started, it for majority people in our trials, there wasn't. It's just one day, which means it's about something else too. It's just that's a way of expressing it that seems socially acceptable and has lots of different kind of, you know, outcomes, but really what might be going on tracks back much earlier in life and not related to the theme of what it is. - So do you subscribe to that idea that a lot of the effects, so you have pain, you have anxiety, you have skin stuff going on, even positive reproductive health, that there is some trauma or emotional, and trauma by the way, because some people are super sensitive and we've said this on other podcasts, just somebody could be picked up late from daycare and that could have been traumatizing for an individual if they're incredibly sensitive and pathetic that way, an impact. So do you subscribe to that idea that a lot of the effects that we see later in life, there's probably an emotional charge that needs to be integrated and that's where EFT helps with some of these physical symptoms, but you're really addressing some emotional and you like, not that you like, but you expect sometimes memories to come up that have nothing totally different story, but the feeling is similar and that's what comes up for them. - Yeah, and we are often using kind of really elegant ways to kind of find that with tapping with the words we say, and for a lot of clients with long-term kind of repetitive behavior, so if we've got someone in their 60s with these, eating patterns or chronic pain, that's been there for four decades, then we know there is an established pattern, and we're quite developmental in that we will look in the imprint years, that first 10 years of life, so we will look, and you're right, for us, at trauma is if a client tells us it had that impact on them no matter what it was, and the amount of school events that we've been told over these decades, that if you know I stood in front of a class to give my speech and the teacher had a bit of a snort and never unlapped at me, that's the trauma, like I've heard that story so many times, the school, but when you think about overlay that brain state as well, that little brain in the first 10 years for all of us was very much theater and delter and very hypnotic, so we do find, it's not that it's always there, sometimes it's, you know, we've got lots of single session EFT studies, where it's a one hit wonder, and not that this is always the aim or the goal, but one hour tapping in the moment done, never have a problem again, but it's the long-term problems that we will be going back and looking in that first 10 years to kind of point out, what happened, you might want to think of it as a significant event, you know, more so than a traumatic one, but something that set the ball in motion, and that's where it tends to lie, but we don't worry if someone can't remember, you know, when they're sitting in front of us, because we know that it'll come up if they keep tapping, so we just sit and wait for it and educate them as to when they get those thoughts, they actually need to tell us so that we can, sometimes I go home and dream that, come back in the next session to tell you, you know? So. It's interesting to hear you're doing it that way, because with the hypnosis background that I have, with the FTAV always wanted, I always, not in the first session, but unless it comes up, I usually do some form of regression, because it usually not upset for the reason you think, even with my fertility patients, by the third visit, they're not working on the fertility issue, they're working on something from before age 10, 'cause it just comes up, right? And it's very gentle. I usually just ask the question as I'm tapping or we've worked on stuff, I just ask just like when, you know, it's just really gentle. I don't look for, I'm not looking for a problem, I realize with the tapping, it will percolate up if necessary, and usually an earlier memory comes up. Going still to the hippocampus. So what I really liked about the test taking, 'cause I didn't, I never thought of it this way, is that when you dampen the amygdala, so that stress response, the hippocampus kinda comes online, we'll use that language, and so now you have access to memories. I never understood why it was great for test taking, just like some things you know, works but you don't know why. I like that. Thank you for that. I didn't know that. (laughing) - That's great. - That's great. And I could never understand exactly why, I just said the subconscious is bringing it up, it wants to work it. I was never totally understanding, I didn't have a good logical reason to say, the reason the memories come up is 'cause the hippocampus is coming online. So thank you, 'cause I just knew it, it happened, but I didn't know really, kind of why is that happening? - Yeah, yeah. - But then on the other side, always. like there's this yin yang to things, but also there's the other thing where the, it's not that the hippocampus goes offline, but it changes their memories because you have studies where people don't really remember their issue or believe they had the issue anymore. And that, to me, is a good thing because your memories are changing. In conscious work, one of the teachers I've had always says, and I don't know where she gets it from, but everything that happens is neutral, and then we give it meaning. So that's why picking up from daycare, you don't look at the situation, you have, it's how you interpret it. And so in your research, people would come in with, you said, I heard you talk about pain, but people in the eating disorders had trouble remembering why they, what craving they had, right? I don't have to be trial. And I like this, and I explained that this is a good thing because we're not using willpower and discipline to change because discipline willpower is like a muscle. It will, it will tire. And so that's why you're going to go back to, that's why the dieting won't work and you go back to those old habits. It seems like with the EFT from your trials that there is a change in the brain. And so the memories change because their personality's changed. They're not that person. They can identify themselves as the person that had that craving or wanted to smoke. And so now they're not using willpower. They really think you're crazy sometimes thinking they had that problem, right? Can you tell that story a bit? Absolutely, do. And you're right, we've done cigarette trials, major depression trials, food craving trials, so these are the drugs. Cornec pain trials, like the loads, all of us, kind of 18 news. And every single trial, and they do have a term for it in the EFT, well, called the apex effect. So it is, you can Google apex effect everybody and you'll absolutely see this happen. There, the outcomes they currently have in their life, EG, no willpower, don't eat that food anymore. They don't attribute to the EFT trial because they forget, they literally forget. But it is a neurological process and our functional MRI study showed the brain's activity is radically different after four week trial for food cravings or six week trial for pain. It's different. It activates differently. So we know that we've got the biological explanation. But memory consolidation seems to be the best explanation where same thing, when I bring up what's happening for me, that could be my pain or my food craving or whatever it is, my cigarette urge. And I do an opposite neutralizing activity comes myself down, which is tapping. And I repeat that enough, the brain men can't have that first feeling any more in the same way. What happens then over time? I think Joe dispenses to use the analogy and some of his teaching. It's almost like you've got this highway, this super highway in there. And then the highway gets kind of closed. And so over time, because no more traffic goes down there anymore, it just gets overgrown with grass. And then that highway doesn't exist anymore because there's a different one over here. And that's the explanation from a memory reconciliation point of view with no willpower. But if you're not using that neurological connection anymore, he begins principle, then it just loses its strength. And it just isn't front of mind anymore. And people tell us, they don't remember one being in the pain draw. That's happening at the moment until I get my email saying, fill out my survey. Or two, they say, I don't remember what food I did tapping on. And we remind them. And that could be, oh, you were eating five mudcakes a day. Actually, I had a guy who was eating a whole barbecue chicken every day. Barbecue chicken. Would you like us? But not one every day. Anything doing it for about 45 years. So he was caught obese. And we reminded him. And he said, he started laughing. And he said, I can't remember the last time I had a barbecue chicken. I said, well, I can. It was over time. You thought it into my trial. Because he exploded. And he found a memory that was related to something in childhood. It was about eight. And there was a lot of positive emotion attached to that chicken that was caught at his story. And he said, craving and everything had collapsed. He'd gone on in two years later. We've done two. Follow up on some of our trials. I can't remember. And he just laughed, went, I don't even think about eating those anymore. I don't even have a craving for it. If I think about it now, you're just like, yeah, it's like, I don't know why. And I'm like, you did my trial. Well, you just have to let me go. But the brain is no longer but I mean, you're allergic to connections. So you're giving them the biological upgrade or there's a change in the brain. You said it like synapses that fire together, wire together. And so they're changing the brain structure. And so we see two things happening. One is with this, the mygdala coming down, the hippocampus is accessible. So you have older memories. But also you're changing the memories as well. Sometimes they're being changed or how they perceive or identify it. And so they're not having that trigger anymore or now you go back to the very beginning when we talked. You've interrupted the story, right? So you've got thinking, feeling behavior. So he wants to feel good so he eats the whole chicken. You've interrupted it and now he doesn't need to eat the chicken to feel good. You've brought the story. That's the right answer. Yeah, that's a great, such an interesting space to sort of show people how having you and kind of loosen the power of food over people because they often kind of do, not just negative feelings, it's really positive feelings. They get attached that might be from a positive memory. So it's a really common one, but you're right. They just happily merrily go on their lives and I've even had people sort of say, I don't even walk down those aisles at the supermarket anymore because I don't even think about it. And of course they lose 30 kilograms along the way. So we get the kind of win-win. I'm going to ask you a couple things I want to know. A couple of conditions. I'm just curious if you know if there's research on this because I haven't spoken to for a while and I know more and more research is coming out. So you talked about pain. So I'm assuming that was a while back. Acute chronic pain, fibromyalgia. So that's happening. Yes, yeah. The emotional side of it. So stress, anxiety. Yeah, lots of research in the stress kind of anxiety. Anxiety itself has had a meta-analysis completed on a very large effect size. What about phobias? Yeah, lots of research. So early research 20 years ago came out in phobias and there's been a lot since. So yeah, plenty of research in phobia. PTSD you talked about, so there's that. Lots of it. Anything on depression? Yeah, so we've run a couple of depression trials ourselves here and we compared to cognitive behaviour of therapy. So finally enough, both conditions got similar outcomes at the end, but six months later the EFT people still didn't meet criteria for major depressive disorder, but the CVT people had returned a baseline and they met criteria again. So EFT lasts longer and obviously the lack of symptoms, you know, kind of things. So, yeah, there's some other research that is international around that space too. And then in the women's health, you did mention there's some research on fear of childbirth? Yes, so that's starting to emerge and menopause. So fell enough, menopause studies have started to emerge out of different countries where they're using EFT for symptomology. Obviously hot flashes, mood changes, hormone regulation with fabulous outcomes. Like they hear that. I've used it in my menopause of women for hot flashes. I've used it. This is all anecdotal. So I want to know if there's research on morning sickness and women in pregnancy. Yes, so no, I'm just thinking of my head now. There's one study that has been published on. It was used during the phases of pregnancy delivery. So for pain and things like that, but I don't think they captured morning sickness. I personally used it because I knew EFT before I had both daughters. I personally used it for morning sickness, particularly the nausea stomach point. And the whole pregnant people, one of my daughters, to great effect. So yeah. Yeah, I find I teach it when the women come in. And then in the fertility world, I know you have a colleague, Michelle, that's using tapping for fertility. I'm doing it in Vancouver at Accu balance. I really enjoy watching the women, especially the ones that are going through like IVF just to use it as a process for the to have a better experience and the stress, which will help out with that. And then obviously just my whole conscious fertility approach. So is there any research though that you're aware of or fertility at this stage? Not in the fertility kind of space at a clinical trial level. You tend to need around 100 participants when you run trials. So that kind of is a bit of a landmine. Anyone's wondering about sort of the skewer, red disorders and things. I get lots of emails saying it's really research on this or this kind of topic. But unless we have enough people at the same time that can go through research trials, it tends to be more case study sort of single case studies. Or people like Michelle that are out in clinical fields where that's their private practice. And of course they have the evidence that she runs programs as well as individual where the outcomes are all positive, women or pregnant and going to deliver happy, healthy babies. So yeah. Glad to hear Michelle doing that. Like I said, more and more people are doing it. You said something that I was kind of chuckling about at the beginning that if you're having a stressful experience, you can go find a little bathroom and tap. I have walked on the street and seen people tap you when they walk, which I think is great. So people are like, what the hell? I'd rather feel good than worry about what you think of me. I've seen it too. Like I think of why I had a conference. We walked up a volcano and saw this young girl tapping in both my daughter's like, oh, she feels tapping on my lever like. She's calm and I'm so calm. Yeah, I'm calm and I'm so calm. Can we do a review? Because we talked about it here and there, but just kind of the mechanisms of VFT. If you can tie it in just to how this is good for the physiology of the body, just because with the conscious fertility, it's a mind-body approach. So the question for you is, I want you to talk about the mechanism. I just want to set this up for our listeners as well. Mind-body approach, and I feel when it comes to this podcast, the ideas were addressing both mind and body. And there's two levels here. I believe right action follows right thinking. So if you're using a mind-body tool like EFT, your behaviors will change and you'll start to do behaviors that are congruent that will probably lead to better choices on a emotional and physical level. So just that part. Two is if you can calm down the nervous system, so it doesn't feel it's in alarm, then your resources are available for healing, for creativity and reproduction, 'cause when your body doesn't feel safe, and again, obviously you want your alarm to go off in your body when you're about to get hit by a car or a wild animal, when your life is really at risk, you need it to survive another day. But when it's related to fertility or money or relationships or anything else, it doesn't have a survival benefit, but it's wreaking havoc on the body if it's happening on a regular basis. And so physiologically, chronic stress leads to chronic inflammation and it can throw your hormones out of balance, your cellular environment, and this can impact your fertility. Just in a practical way, there's research showing that women often will drop out of IVF cycles, not for financial reasons, because of the stress. And currently it takes on average two and a half IVF cycles to get a baby, so you may drop out. And that next cycle might have been a baby. And so people, that's why acupuncture is one of the IVF clinics have embraced acupuncture, not just because it helps with blood flow and in some IVF settings, they see it improve pregnancy rates, but it keeps the women in care to get that baby because they won't drop out from stress. So as you answer the mechanism question, if things pop up in your head, how this can help health and reproductive health, please, please share. So what are the mechanisms behind EFT? - I think you just summed it up beautifully. (laughs) So definitely the mechanisms, if I just had to kind of condense and sort of say to someone's like, how does it work? 'Cause that's probably the second most common question I get asked. Not only is this gonna make me worse but how does it work? Is one, it's a way to reduce stress not only in the mind at that kind of thinking level, but physiologically in the body. And of course we have, you know, a couple of decades of research now that show, the physiological biochemistry changes that we get from tapping, particularly on things like stress and distress and trauma, are things like reductions in the stress hormone cortisol, normalization of, you know, e-u-g-brain waves, that type of thing. DNA expression, heart rate variability, blood pressure, lots of babel-toned kind of stuff is just starting to emerge. So if we look at the body of biochemistry changes that occur there, it's because we know that tapping on a known acupuncture point sends a deactivating signal if we're being really present in mind what's happening for us to the stress center and the brain. Now the relationship there, between that and the memory center means that if we're trying to find maybe the root cause of what's happening for us in the moment, then we're more likely to find it when we got that stress center becoming really calm what that coincides with is a person saying, "I feel much calmer just as a feeling state." Physiologically, we can measure that and say, "Yes, and do you are?" But they feel much calmer, which means they might then have access obviously to precipitating events from, you know, one year ago to 25 years ago, but again, then tapping can be applied to in order to use the word integrate or process or find new memory, find new meaning for that memory. So, yeah, so the mechanisms for us, I guess, as a field, have really developed in the last couple of decades. Used to always be talked about that tapping sort of shifted energy. We know it's much more than that these days. It's a biological cascading, the one thing affects another thing or affects another thing, which ultimately makes that whole mind-body kind of integration there become a much calmer kind of system. And in terms of the fertility space, obviously, if someone's in a calmer space, no matter what they're going through, whether that's IVF or financial stress, you can think more clearly if the body is calmer, which means opportunities to kind of find solutions to different problems out there, you will notice. 'Cause when we become stressed in that frontal lobe, drains of its blood, because, like you said, we're going to fight or flight, we become quite myopic, and we fail to recognize other solutions that might be around us as an answer to a problem, because stress actually makes us really kind of converging on the very thing in front of us, which is not helpful and useful for problems or weak. So it's kind of like the answer to everything is we need to become up. That's just the answer. - Right, we need to be in balance, the autonomic nervous system. Yeah, I like that. So to get your book, it's called Science Behind Tapping, Approved and Stress Management Technique for the mind and body. I highly recommend that for both the lay person and allied healthcare providers, and how else can people find you? 'Cause you teach in person, but you also have a lot of online programs. So what's the best website and IG, can you tell me where to go? How do you want people to find you? - Yeah, so on all the social channels, it's just my name. So if people just search me, Peter Stapleton on Instagram, or we share lots of stuff on Instagram about the latest research is in progress, and they're all free, but they're all to share and things like that. So Facebook, Twitter, obviously, all of the channels, probably in the best place to go to for our training materials as well as programs and things like that, or even just to join the mailing list for our upcoming research trials, 'cause all research trials are free to join. These days, we offer them worldwide, is evidence-based-eft.com. So just evidence-based-eft.com. And I can give your heads up that we have two clinical trials in preparation for 2023 and beyond. One is a, they're both online trials, so one is for OCD and trigger-til-amania, so body-obsessive disorders. And the other one is to improve eyesight. So we're actually targeting people that wear glasses, who would like to roll back their prescriptions, and we're replicating a trial from many years ago with Dr. Carol Look, and we are gonna offer that free of charge. And in the pandemic, I ended up having two eyeglasses for reading, so I'm gonna do that trial myself. - That's a good one. I know the pandemic destroyed my near-sativeness, for sure, so many of us talk about that. So, yeah. - I mean, yeah, that trial's actually coming up and a really exciting one, because of a motion that is held in, we touched on this a little bit, the physical scent in the body, a motion and philanthropy original trial show, the best emotion that got changes in eyesight, clarity was anger. - Yeah, all right, there you go. - There you go, a couple of trials coming up. So join the newsletter everybody and we'll let you know. - All right, so look for Pita Stapleton on her channels and check out her book. And if you're in the Vancouver area, come find me, or if the telehealth come by me at AccuBalance, and Pita, I really enjoyed our conversation today. - That's a great deal. Thank you so much. - Thank you so much for tuning in to 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, or you can visit my websites, LaurenBrown.com and AccuBalance.ca. Until the next episode, stay curious and for a few moments, ring your awareness to your heart center and breathe.