Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Coast to Coast, George Nori with you.
Speaker 2: Bill Douglass back with us. Author, novelist, poet. His books
Speaker 2: on Mind, Body, for Health and Life Transformation are based
Speaker 2: on his forty plus years of teaching mind body and
Speaker 2: many of the world's largest health systems, corporations, schools, and prisons.
Speaker 2: Bill is the founder of two global movements, World TIChE
Speaker 2: Day and the Global Transformation Project. His websites are linked
Speaker 2: up at Coast TOCOASTAM dot com.
Speaker 3: Bill, welcome back.
Speaker 4: How have you been, Hi, George good. It's so good
Speaker 4: to be back and talking to you. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2: I was thinking about you about your second edition book
Speaker 2: of the Gospel of Science of Mind, blowing new science
Speaker 2: on ancient truths to heal our stressed lives and planets.
Speaker 2: And we surely need to do that right now, don't we?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 3: How'd you get involved in all of this?
Speaker 4: Well, I other had post traumatic stress disorder from World
Speaker 4: War Two, and so after I had my own kids,
Speaker 4: I started getting therapy, and the therapist he just happened
Speaker 4: to work at the VA and so he understood I
Speaker 4: was dealing with PTSD, and he asked me if I'd
Speaker 4: ever tried meditation or mind body practices, and I'd never really,
Speaker 4: and so but then he sparked my interest, and so
Speaker 4: I enrolled in a class and it just made me
Speaker 4: feel so much better that I stuck with it. And
Speaker 4: then I just did it for myself for years and
Speaker 4: years and years. But then at some point people started
Speaker 4: asking me, you know, what I was doing, and if
Speaker 4: I would teach them, and so I started teaching classes
Speaker 4: and then eventually I started my first hospital class, and
Speaker 4: that's that's where everything changed. That's when I realized that
Speaker 4: mind body practices can well. According to doctor Herbert Benson
Speaker 4: at Harvard, they can prevent or treat between six ninety
Speaker 4: percent of the health issues that send us to the doctor,
Speaker 4: and that was backed up by a Kaiser study that
Speaker 4: found that about seventy percent of the health issues sending
Speaker 4: people their doctors were caused by stress.
Speaker 2: I believe that is there a science behind this bill
Speaker 2: or is there something else?
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's tons of science behind it. Now. We kind
Speaker 4: of looked at these mind body practices is kind of
Speaker 4: a mystical thing. But as science is becoming more effective
Speaker 4: and able to see things in bigger ways. What we're
Speaker 4: starting to realize is that these things are actually high sciences.
Speaker 4: And you know, it's like a lot of people sometimes
Speaker 4: in the classes, they think that mind body practices like meditation,
Speaker 4: tai chi chi, going yoga, mindfulness, they think that they're
Speaker 4: kind of, you know, esoteric, mystical Chinese and Indian things.
Speaker 4: But actually what they all do is they all bring
Speaker 4: the brainwaves into what's known as an alpha brainwave state,
Speaker 4: and that's the most natural thing in the world. In fact,
Speaker 4: when we were children, we were in an alpha brainwave state,
Speaker 4: a meditative state up most of the time up to
Speaker 4: about age seven, and then that's when we started to
Speaker 4: lose touch without ability, and when we were young, that's
Speaker 4: when we healed much faster, and it's also when we
Speaker 4: learned at an incredibly accelerated rate. And so what the
Speaker 4: Indians and the Chinese did through the development of yoga
Speaker 4: and taichi and chigong and things like this meditation, is
Speaker 4: that they created these really effective mind body sciences that
Speaker 4: help us regain that youthful ability that we had as children.
Speaker 4: So it's really just a real natural thing.
Speaker 2: You nearly died several years ago. You weighed down to
Speaker 2: one hundred pounds. What the heck happened to you?
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, it was a common nation of things I
Speaker 4: was going through. It was just a horrific stressful period
Speaker 4: in my life on many levels. And unfortunately, when we're
Speaker 4: going through those kind of things, it's hard to you know,
Speaker 4: get yourself to do the mind body stuff, you know,
Speaker 4: because you just kind of wanted to distract yourself. But
Speaker 4: I wished I would have stuck with it and you know,
Speaker 4: and really kept doing it. I think I could have
Speaker 4: avoided a lot of what happened. But anyway, I did it. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I got really sick. I had an intestinal block and
Speaker 4: I ended up having to go to Mexico for like
Speaker 4: emergency surgery because you know, like many small businesses, I
Speaker 4: couldn't afford health insurance. And so I went down to
Speaker 4: Mexico and I had the block removed, but they wanted
Speaker 4: me to stay down there for six months to do chemotherapy,
Speaker 4: and I just couldn't do it. I couldn't do it financially,
Speaker 4: and you know, I mean, it just wasn't going to happen.
Speaker 4: And also I was so weak, you know, I was
Speaker 4: so weak. I didn't know if I wanted to go
Speaker 4: through with that. And so I just came back home
Speaker 4: and I just poured myself into these minds body practices
Speaker 4: and I just got stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger.
Speaker 4: And so today I'm almost sixty eight, and I think
Speaker 4: I'm about as strong as I've ever been in my
Speaker 4: whole life.
Speaker 3: Did you have cancer at the time, Yeah, it was malignant.
Speaker 4: It was an intestinal block that was malignant.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh my god.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And how did you heal yourself?
Speaker 4: Well, I, you know, I started, you know, lots of
Speaker 4: lots of vegetables and you know, natural things. But I
Speaker 4: just threw myself into the mind body practice and you know,
Speaker 4: and it was strange too, because I was teaching them
Speaker 4: at that time, you know, that was my career at
Speaker 4: that time, but I wasn't doing them. And in fact,
Speaker 4: when I first started teaching, my teacher gave me a
Speaker 4: little warning and she said she told me about a
Speaker 4: chigong master in China and he had gotten really sick
Speaker 4: and he discovered chigong and it healed him. But then
Speaker 4: he started teaching it, and when he started teaching it,
Speaker 4: he stopped doing it himself. He was only teaching it.
Speaker 4: And that's what I did. I did exactly what my
Speaker 4: teacher warned me not to do. And so then after
Speaker 4: that happened, and I went through that and I came
Speaker 4: back from Mexico. I just dedicated myself to these things
Speaker 4: and it was transformative. I mean, it just it heals
Speaker 4: us on so many levels.
Speaker 3: Bill tell us what consciousness means to.
Speaker 4: You, Well, it's our awareness. You know. What we tend
Speaker 4: to think is we tend to think that our consciousness
Speaker 4: is whatever we're thinking about. But when we practice these
Speaker 4: alpha brainwave state practices, these meditative practices, what we start
Speaker 4: to realize is that our awareness is just simply being aware.
Speaker 4: And so we actually do exercises in my classes where
Speaker 4: we just practiced just letting our eyes unfocused, where you're
Speaker 4: seeing everything but nothing in particular, and then it's an
Speaker 4: easy step from there to teach people how to just
Speaker 4: kind of let your mind on focus where you're present,
Speaker 4: you're feeling everything, but you're not focused on any one thing.
Speaker 4: And then that's when your brain weights start to go
Speaker 4: into that healing alpha wet state.
Speaker 3: And when it does, what happens tons of things.
Speaker 4: Our immune system gets profoundly boosted. There was a UCLA
Speaker 4: study with Taichi that showed that the Taichi practitioners had
Speaker 4: nearly fifty percent more helper T celles than the control
Speaker 4: group did. And T sales that's our front line of
Speaker 4: immune defense. And in fact, during the pandemic, there was
Speaker 4: a study and what they found was the frontline healthcare
Speaker 4: workers who had high T sale counts were much less
Speaker 4: likely to contract COVID than their co workers who had
Speaker 4: low T sale counts, and if they did contract it,
Speaker 4: they were much less likely to have severe symptoms from
Speaker 4: And that's just only you know that immune boosting, although
Speaker 4: that's a huge thing, especially today, you know, we should
Speaker 4: be teaching kids how to do that. But also at
Speaker 4: the same time, it's making your brain larger and more effective.
Speaker 4: It's increasing bone mass and connective tissue. You know, it
Speaker 4: improves your hard health. It really virtually every every aspect
Speaker 4: of our health is improved. And that's one of the
Speaker 4: amazing things because you know, like I've had doctors come
Speaker 4: to my class because they had hypertension, and while they
Speaker 4: were you know, literally curing their hypertension through the classes,
Speaker 4: they were also finding out that their coworkers thought that
Speaker 4: they were way easier to get along with, so it was,
Speaker 4: you know, it was improving their lives on multiple different levels.
Speaker 4: And in fact, one of the physicians that was in
Speaker 4: one of my first hospital classes, he was so amazed
Speaker 4: because there were a bunch of doctors in there and
Speaker 4: they were getting off of hypertension meds. There was a
Speaker 4: surgeon that got off of chronic pain meds and she
Speaker 4: had limited mobility from a whiplash injury, and she gained
Speaker 4: full mobility, no more chronic pain or anything like that.
Speaker 4: And he was so amazed seeing everything and the benefits
Speaker 4: that he was getting personally that he actually quit the
Speaker 4: er and he started his own naturopathic medicine practice that's
Speaker 4: still very successful all these years later.
Speaker 3: That's truly remarkable. Is it a miracle?
Speaker 4: It feels like a miracle, George, I think it was. Oh,
Speaker 4: it was some famous science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clark.
Speaker 4: He said that magic is science that we don't yet understand,
Speaker 4: and it seems like magic when you're experiencing the benefits
Speaker 4: of these things. Now it's gradual and progressive, so you know,
Speaker 4: you start doing it, you know you feel better when
Speaker 4: you do it. But the benefits it becomes cumulative. You know,
Speaker 4: It's like they grow as you do the practices over
Speaker 4: and over again.
Speaker 2: You have said that science shows that we can reduce
Speaker 2: wars and conflicts in the world.
Speaker 4: How Yeah. One of the things that happens when we
Speaker 4: go into an alpha meditative state is that our empathy
Speaker 4: and compassion parts of our brain actually get larger, physically larger,
Speaker 4: and the stress and fear parts of the brain get
Speaker 4: physically smaller. And so one of the things that happens
Speaker 4: when you teach people in a community or in a
Speaker 4: corporation or a city. In a city, what they found
Speaker 4: there's been really large studies, and what they found is
Speaker 4: if they bring in an equivalent of one percent of
Speaker 4: a city's population of high level meditators, they reduced the
Speaker 4: crime rates significantly. In the Washington DC study where they
Speaker 4: collaborated with the Washington DC Police Statistics.
Speaker 3: Department, was Lynn McTaggart's study, I think, wasn't it.
Speaker 4: I think it might have been Lynn McTaggart's study. I'm
Speaker 4: not positive about that, but I have it cited in
Speaker 4: the book so you can if anybody gets the new
Speaker 4: second edition of Gospel Science, I have it all with
Speaker 4: live links so they can go find it. But they
Speaker 4: brought the violent crime rate down I think twenty three percent.
Speaker 4: And what was interesting was that there was a correlation
Speaker 4: because they didn't bring in all the meditators all at once.
Speaker 4: They were coming in gradually, and there was a correlation.
Speaker 4: As the number of meditators increased in Washington, d c.
Speaker 4: The crime rates corresponding correspondingly descended. So the violent crime
Speaker 4: rates correspondingly descended. And this has been replicated in many studies.
Speaker 4: They did a study in forty eight cities and they
Speaker 4: brought the violent crime rates down in all forty eight
Speaker 4: of these study and the effect lasted for five years
Speaker 4: after the study wasd So we could be saving so
Speaker 4: much money. And I actually I actually taught Taichian meditation
Speaker 4: at Folsome prison many years ago, and I thought that
Speaker 4: I was going to be introducing the prisoners to mind
Speaker 4: body practice. But when I got there, I found out
Speaker 4: that they had already had a Taichi cha program, which
Speaker 4: is a kind of a tai Chi Chi gung meditative program,
Speaker 4: and they'd already had it for two years. And what
Speaker 4: they one of the inmates had looked at the prison
Speaker 4: statistics over that period of time, and he was like
Speaker 4: an assistant teacher. He was really dedicated to the program.
Speaker 4: And he said that the violent incident rates had decreased,
Speaker 4: not only for the meditating group, but for the entire prison.
Speaker 4: And you see this replicated in appadacta prison in Mexico.
Speaker 4: They had one of the most violent presidents incidents in
Speaker 4: modern Mexican prison in history. And they talked the whole
Speaker 4: prison how to meditate all of them, the warden, inmates,
Speaker 4: the guards, everybody, and they haven't had a violent incident
Speaker 4: rate since that happened. Why does it work, Well, you know,
Speaker 4: it goes right to the core of everything, and the
Speaker 4: core of everything is consciousness. And you know, and quantum
Speaker 4: physicists said the same thing, the early quantum physicists that discovered,
Speaker 4: you know, the energetic nature of the universe and the
Speaker 4: nature of the universe. Yeah, they said, consciousness is behind everything.
Speaker 4: And we see that in the research. In fact, there
Speaker 4: was research at Princeton Engineering and Omily's Research Laboratory, and
Speaker 4: what they found was that people's consciousness could actually physically
Speaker 4: affect physical reality.
Speaker 3: Are we dealing with the bodybill or outside of it?
Speaker 4: Well, when the consciousness goes into alpha state. It has
Speaker 4: this harmonizing effect and that affects us on every level mentally, emotionally, physically,
Speaker 4: and on this energetic nature, because that's what we are
Speaker 4: really when you get down to it, you know, we're
Speaker 4: just made of energy. But what's interesting and amazing is
Speaker 4: these ancient Chinese and Indian researchers they understood that, they
Speaker 4: understood that we're made of energy and that this energy
Speaker 4: field that we are, this consciousness that we are, it
Speaker 4: can get tangled up and nodded, you know, from unmanaged collecting,
Speaker 4: you know, too much unmanaged stress. But then they also
Speaker 4: realize that through a combination of visualization and breathing exercises
Speaker 4: you know, that make up these meditative practices, that we
Speaker 4: could actually relax this consciousness or this energy field that
Speaker 4: we are, and then everything starts to function at a
Speaker 4: much higher rate. And you see it expressed in all
Speaker 4: kinds of ways, you know, because I've been teaching in
Speaker 4: hospital settings for thirty five years. Like for example, just recently,
Speaker 4: one of my students, they had put her on a
Speaker 4: medication and I don't know what it was treating, but
Speaker 4: the side effect of it was that it would diminish
Speaker 4: bone mass, and so they were monitoring her bone mass
Speaker 4: very very closely, and her doctor was amazed because during
Speaker 4: that time she was actually increasing her bone mass, so
Speaker 4: instead of losing it, she was actually increasing her bone mass.
Speaker 4: And her doctor said, what are you doing? You know,
Speaker 4: how is this possible? And she said, well, I've been
Speaker 4: doing Taichi and she vung in meditation through the hospital
Speaker 4: program because they teached through the University of Kansas Hospital,
Speaker 4: and I want to tell your listeners about this in
Speaker 4: a little bit because the classes are free. But anyway,
Speaker 4: he was stunned and he said, you know what, he said,
Speaker 4: you should you should tell people about this. And I
Speaker 4: started laughing when she told me, because doctors, doctors should
Speaker 4: be telling people about this. And all the doctors that
Speaker 4: were in my classes years ago that got healed from this,
Speaker 4: they all we all thought that, you know, thirty five
Speaker 4: years later, because it's been about thirty five years since
Speaker 4: that happened. We all thought that every doctor in the
Speaker 4: world would be writing mind Body right at the top
Speaker 4: of every prescription pad. But they don't. And it's because
Speaker 4: our health system is just pharmaceutical driven.
Speaker 2: It sounds a little like the practice and teachings of
Speaker 2: Jesus and Buddha, doesn't it.
Speaker 4: Well, that's one of the things that I get into
Speaker 4: in the Gospel of Science, the New second Edition, is
Speaker 4: that when you you know, the main tenance of all
Speaker 4: the major religions is compassion, connection, forgiveness, gratitude, those kind
Speaker 4: of things, and what the science shows. And I have
Speaker 4: all this meticulously noted in the Gospel of Science. And
Speaker 4: also I wanted to mention the New Gospel of Science
Speaker 4: second Edition or the Gospel of Science second Edition. It
Speaker 4: just came out in audible just in the last couple
Speaker 4: of weeks, and so it's so easy to listen to
Speaker 4: it while you're driving. It'll change your life. It changed
Speaker 4: my life, you know, doing all these being thrown into
Speaker 4: all this science and throwing myself back into the mind
Speaker 4: body practices. But uh, I'm sorry, I kind of watched
Speaker 4: track of what you had just asked for.
Speaker 2: We're talking about that sounds like the practices of Jesus
Speaker 2: and Buddha, yes.
Speaker 4: Right, and uh and and so as I'm looking at
Speaker 4: all this science, uh, it's like bringing back my religious
Speaker 4: background because I was raised in the Lutheran Church. Because
Speaker 4: one of the one of the things and and we
Speaker 4: teach all these things in our in our classes. Again,
Speaker 4: we've got free classes. I'll get to that in a
Speaker 4: little bit. But Uh, one of the things that uh
Speaker 4: science has discovered is that when we really enjoy, you know,
Speaker 4: just the simple things in our lives, when we stop
Speaker 4: and smell the roses, when we enjoy the feeling of
Speaker 4: our body, when we're doing yoga, tai chi or chielong. Yeah,
Speaker 4: these mindfulness practices, they call it gratitude consciousness and gratitude.
Speaker 4: When we're in a state of gratitude consciousness, it's profoundly healing.
Speaker 4: In fact, it's so powerful that they can actually see
Speaker 4: molecular changes in the heart and the brain when we
Speaker 4: go into those states. So you have that gratitude consciousness,
Speaker 4: you know, and you know, all the major religions told
Speaker 4: us to be grateful. And then the other thing is faith.
Speaker 4: There was a study, a twenty year study with thousands
Speaker 4: of people, and what they found was that the greatest
Speaker 4: indicator for the people's future health and well being was
Speaker 4: their vision of their future health and well being. And
Speaker 4: so all the major religions profits that founded them, they
Speaker 4: all emphasized how important it was to have faith. And
Speaker 4: so if you look at this science, you start to
Speaker 4: realize that if we have faith that everything's going to
Speaker 4: be okay, it tends to be okay. That's what the
Speaker 4: science shows.
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