The Dark Side of Meditation

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Summary

In this engaging discussion, Dr. Alok Kanojia, also known as Dr. K, reflects on his journey with meditation, highlighting potential dangers often overlooked in spiritual practices. Meditation is not a one-size-fits-all remedy; it can vary greatly in its effects, sometimes leading to adverse psychological experiences or even manipulation by false gurus. Dr. K emphasizes a cautious and informed approach, advocating for grounding practices and professional guidance when necessary. The video also explores the underlying historical, physiological, and psychological mechanisms that make certain meditation practices risk-prone, urging practitioners to stay informed and vigilant.

Highlights

Meditation, though beneficial, can have a dark side; be informed before diving in. 🔍
Not all meditation techniques are safe; some require careful consideration. 📚
Understanding the science behind meditation can prevent potential adverse effects. 🧠
Beware of gurus with ulterior motives; seek genuine guidance. 🧙‍♂️
Guard your mental health with suitable meditation practices; not all are beneficial. 🛡️

Key Takeaways

Meditation isn't always peaceful; be wary of the potential risks involved. 🧘‍♂️
Not all meditation techniques are created equal; choose wisely based on your needs. ⚖️
The right guidance is crucial; avoid falling prey to fake gurus. 🤔
Practicing meditation requires patience; quick fixes can lead to problems. ⏳
Intense meditation can be both transformative and dangerous; approach with caution. 🔍

Overview

In this insightful session, Dr. K delves into the intricacies of meditation, challenging the common perception that it is an entirely beneficial practice. He cautions viewers about the potential psychological risks, such as depersonalization and anxiety, that can arise from certain types of meditation, especially without proper guidance.

The discussion also sheds light on historical and contemporary issues within meditative practices, including the risk of manipulation by phony spiritual leaders. Dr. K emphasizes the importance of informed practice and the need for professional supervision where appropriate to mitigate these risks.

By explaining the physiological and neurochemical aspects of meditation, Dr. K provides a comprehensive understanding of its benefits and pitfalls. He encourages a balanced approach to meditation, adopting techniques that are safe and suited to an individual's mental health needs.

The Dark Side of Meditation Transcription

00:00 - 00:30 [Music] wishing for the object of your met that these things happen to them so you'll repeat this thought may this person be happy may this person be free and may this person be at peace
00:30 - 01:00 [Music] [Music]
01:00 - 01:30 I [Music] [Music]
01:30 - 02:00 oh [Music]
02:00 - 02:30 so what we want to do is cultivate the compa cultivate a capacity for kindness So Close Your Eyes take a few moments to breathe in and breathe out
02:30 - 03:00 [Music] [Music] h oh
03:00 - 03:30 [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music]
03:30 - 04:00 all righty chat let's get started welcome to another healthy gamer GG stream my name is Dr Alo kenoa just a reminder that although I am a doctor nothing we discuss on stream today is intended to be taken as medical advice oh we can try to turn this up a little bit I think everything we discussed today is uh intended to be for educational and entertainment purposes only maybe I should open a window a bit if y'all have a medical concern or
04:00 - 04:30 question please go see a licensed professional hello everyone so I have been sick AF chat um and I don't mean sick AF as in I am like oh yeah I'm sick I mean like I was actually sick like pretty sick for a while uh I'm finally feeling somewhat better um but uh yeah um so it's been a while so I was supposed to stream quite a bit last week but I couldn't talk I hopefully I can make it through today's
04:30 - 05:00 stream but uh yeah so like I I couldn't speak and was coughing a lot and things like that and that's the joy of having children in the house because they are often times oh wait this is why there we go they are prone to illness um and then I am prone to illness as a result so sorry about that uh we're going to try to make up some of those streams we'll see what we kind of have time for um but yeah sorry about that chat couple of things let me
05:00 - 05:30 just get this stuff oh no work what is wrong with you let's reload there we go um so we're going to do a couple of things R quack before we hop into today's stream um and got a couple things set up so hopefully y'all have been well I missed y'all okay we're getting this set up getting this set up and um yeah so a couple of quick announcements before we
05:30 - 06:00 jump in uh and today we're going to be talking about the Dark Side of meditation so um super super interesting topic super important topic because everyone is like oh meditate meditation will fix all of your problems but it turns out that you have to be a little bit careful um and so we're going to review some of the scientific literature on the dangers of meditation as well as try to understand kind of from a spiritual tradition because they've been saying that for thousands of years that meditation is not been nine that you are
06:00 - 06:30 transforming the energies of the internal transforming your internal energies which should be done with a lot of care and caution so we're going to be talking about that today couple of quick announcements the first is that um we do have uh coaching spots open for like the first time in like two years over the last like couple months um so if yall are interested in coaching definitely check it out um and so we continue to make iterations into the program based on client feedback things are generally speaking going
06:30 - 07:00 pretty well I know sometimes we'll see a post on on the subreddit about people having a negative experience happens with some people um but the majority of people tend to really enjoy and appreciate their experience so if yall are interested in in you know really focusing on making changes in a set amount of time I think that's really the big advantage of working with a person um if yall have more of a mental health concerns so I'd say if you all have more of a concern that's like clinical in nature like depression or anxiety
07:00 - 07:30 I think working with a therapist or psychiatrist is much more appropriate but a lot of the things that we see in our community about motivation life purpose Direction you know accountability responsibility those are the kinds of things that coaching specializes in so if yall are interested check it out um so one thing I wanted to uh talk about real quick was um the we had an Autism stream we had a deep dive into autism and uh we um got a lot of feedback about it and so I think I think some of the terminology and stuff that I
07:30 - 08:00 used I think a lot of people in the in the neurode Divergent Community were very unhappy with we've tried to correct that um in the description in the video we're still learning about some of this stuff um and you know it's kind of like an ongoing process and we don't get everything right all the time so we're always grateful for the uh feedback for those of you all that felt alienated or misunderstood we really apologize for that it was not my intention at all um we're also
08:00 - 08:30 uh working really hard at at really making everyone feel safe and included here so we have actually started the process of collaborating with more people to bring in more diverse perspectives um which I I think is really important so we're working on all that stuff um and so we're always working to bridge the gap between lived experience and sort of like clinical expertise and I'm maybe somewhere on the ADHD Spectrum in terms of neurode Divergence but I I think it's really important to try to bridge that Gap and
08:30 - 09:00 it's something we're very actively working on um I think there was also a really good post about um you know don't call psychos don't call Pot psychosomatic and and that was a really that that really sunk in with me I I totally get where that person is coming from so we're still continuing to improve the work that we do as best as we can we're really grateful to youall for all of the feedback that youall provide and we're committed to doing better um
09:00 - 09:30 yeah so today we're going to talk about the Dark Side of meditation and I'll give you all a couple of choices today um in terms of how we approach this so there are a bunch of different top talking points that I have and basically I'm trying to figure out what y'all would prefer in terms of order so we can kind of do this like one of two or three different ways so today we're going to talk about the science of the dangers of meditation we're going to talk about about more like practical
09:30 - 10:00 um more like lived experience meditation dangers of meditation so what do meditators say are the dangers of meditation what does science say is the dangers of meditation and then we're going to dig into a couple of things like mechanisms so this is like super cool where we now may understand why some of these things happen and like what's going on in the brain and then we're going to talk about a couple of other like topics like when we're talking about the dark side we can't just restrict things to science we
10:00 - 10:30 also have to talk about some of these things like gurus and stuff like that and abuses of power and how that happens and why that happens so what do y'all want to start with do you guys want to start with um uh oh yeah scrap the birthday stream so oh before we get into that um I I understand that people made hold on y'all made a a bunch of birthday things for me and I want to express my gratitude thank you so much for
10:30 - 11:00 reminding me let's take a look at this chat so I had a birthday and um I guess there was some Community event where people were like uploading stuff so I'm thank you so much chat um okay start by clicking here and let it play in the background Okay cool so people did portraits thank you very much hun I have my tea can you turn on the air conditioner I like wearing a little blush yeah oh a little blush okay
11:00 - 11:30 um so yeah thank you guys so much for the birthday messages like I feel um as a spiritual Dark Souls 2 character let's go uh yeah oh my God this is great so I got to do this for y'all and give y'all more um I I have to upload I wonder if I have a recording of me playing DOTA and flaming my teammates so when I play DotA sometimes I flame my teammates um so yeah thank you so much for all the positive wishes oh this is
11:30 - 12:00 super cool um this is kind of scary but this is cool um oh it looks like there's a video playing here this is neat what is this birthday calligraphy very cool um and then there's something about there's a spoiler about Middle Earth okay there's lots of videos
12:00 - 12:30 [Music] okay this is intense what frustrates you so much about ayur vtic medicine it leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of healthcare for a large percentage of patients I'm not talking to someone who has an open mind CU I I think I'm right and if I don't try really hard to catch myself then I will start arguing this pretty
12:30 - 13:00 hype you guys want to watch this let's go but at this point I do feel confident that I can help you some or at least that's my hope my hope is that I can take those years of experience helping Gamers I I I I like connecting with people yeah right is doesn't that feel
13:00 - 13:30 good yeah an allopathic physician oh that's your deal I'm an osteopathic [Music] physician in a world everyone is looking out for themselves imagine what it's
13:30 - 14:00 like if you meet someone who actually cares about other people is this weakness is what we're doing weakness you should also accept that like you weren't perfect a year ago or 2 years ago or 3 years ago or 4 years ago shockingly you're not perfect now feels good to connect yeah yeah you guys haven't seen the DOTA flaming video
14:00 - 14:30 Gamers and helping parents of Gamers and helping spouses of Gamers so young chat in my years of training as a psychiatrist and to be able to put those two together and to to help you in some way and and I really hope that I can
14:30 - 15:00 have we learned our lesson yet chat is that the [Music] quote wow that's a good quote dude can't believe I said all right okay I don't think okay we're GNA have to there's too many of these so
15:00 - 15:30 we're gonna have to keep go oh God I don't think okay yeah I I I don't know if we have time to watch all this stuff but this is amazing y'all thank you all so much this is such a kind birthday gift oh a cake all right chat [Laughter] GG hopefully you guys did okay that's the last one where on this okay GG Get
15:30 - 16:00 Wrecked Get Wrecked gooner oh man so seriously this is awesome thank you all so much um for all all the love and positive well wishes I'm incredibly grateful it it's awesome you know people will say things like I don't understand the impact that I have it I think honestly I probably don't I don't know if I can um and you know that's this is uncomfortable for me too so just like we
16:00 - 16:30 talk a lot about you know oh like is it uncomfortable for people to give you praise like can you sit with that it's really hard that was really hard for me to sit through um because I I I really don't understand I think um because there was just so much uh love in what I saw there and um you know I sometimes get it when I run into people in the street and uh but yeah I'm I'm just glad that you know what we're doing here has
16:30 - 17:00 some positive impact I don't really think about it much I I'm really here for the memes to be honest so I I think it's important I don't know I just I do this because it's fun I don't I don't do this to try to you know make a difference like I know it sounds kind of weird but I mean I guess I kind of do but it it's not I don't know anyway it's affecting me emotionally so I'm not able to speak clearly so thank you guys so much for all the all the positive well-
17:00 - 17:30 wishes um it's awesome to be supported by all I I can't there are times where it matters a lot um and and so in those times I it's hard for me to describe how important it is to have your support so it it's hard maybe one day we'll talk about it but not today in enough of the self-serving birthday wishes and focus on me as a human
17:30 - 18:00 some good tea honey lemon okay let's get to what we're here for right so enough of the circle jerks chat let's get started so today we're going to talk about the Dark Side of meditation so I love this topic so like when I started getting into meditation about 21 years ago if you all can believe that I was super skeptical of it um so I was I was like a really big
18:00 - 18:30 skeptic and I'm still in a sense a skeptic but I really so I went to India and I stayed at in asham and I was like what is this BS and then people were talking about like energies and stuff and people are talking about manifesting and all this kind of crap and I was like what is this stupid BS dude what are these people talking about and this is scientific so I I practiced meditation for about 3 months and all kinds of different meditations and Brams and I I really started to like it a lot I was like okay this is actually there's
18:30 - 19:00 something here but I was still somewhat skeptical so the first thing that I actually did was join a research lab in India while I was still there so it's cool because the the first asham that I went to had a research division um so I did EEG studies on EEG on meditators and so I was trying to figure out okay like what does the science say and for the first kind of year or two I really focused on practices that had biological plausibility or research support as well as spiritual stuff so I
19:00 - 19:30 gravitated away from the spiritual practices and really focused on okay what can science really show is the benefit of meditation um and so that kind of ultimately started a journey where I ended up being a research assistant at this place called the OSHA Research Center at Harvard which is super cool I was doing somata sensory research uh research on the soat sensory cortex in on taichi um so it's very cool so like learning
19:30 - 20:00 really about the science of it and then you know when I was practicing meditation I encountered and we'll talk about this more towards the end you know a lot of weird stuff including personal experiences including people that I met with um you know I I had a teacher who was uh teaching me about Kundalini sadana so Kundalini is like this energy that is seated at the base of your spine and Rises up through your chakras and they were telling me that you know when you do this kind of meditation practice you can't be near people because you'll
20:00 - 20:30 become hypersexual so you and I so [ __ ] shady you and I need to go out into the woods into a cabin and then I'm going to do things to you that make you hypersexual and then I'll help you control it and clean out your chuckas and stuff like that and it's going to be dangerous for you to be anywhere else and I was like okay and it turned out totally fine it was great all that good stuff um but the problem is that when we look at that kind of stuff right it's like R for abuse and one of the big dark sides of
20:30 - 21:00 meditation I know it's sus is that there is a lot of room for abuse so we we have some of these things I don't know if youall have seen like wild wild country um so this is a a Netflix documentary about R Nish or Osho and he had like this cult that had this like Ranch out somewhere and they were like poisoning the water supply and they were like on an FBI like most wanted list or something and they started like arming themselves and things like that so we have these kinds of
21:00 - 21:30 things there was a there was a temple near me uh growing up in Texas so I I went to the University of Texas and there was a temple there asham near there where one of the gurus got in trouble for you know putting his we we where it didn't belong um and there there are stories like this all over the place so one of my favorite institutions is actually a place called Calo which is in Massachusetts and Calo is another one of these awesome ashrams that ended up having a guru who was doing
21:30 - 22:00 things that gurus shouldn't be doing so they did something super cool they kicked out the guru and they kind of secularized the asham they they kept the Dee rooted spiritual work without the figure head of a guru um which is super challenging so we'll talk about gurus and stuff so I I think that there's a lot about meditation that people don't understand I think there are dangers to meditation very real dangers that are scientific I've worked with people who have had negative psychological
22:00 - 22:30 experiences from meditation um you know I've had uh I've seen patients in the emergency room who um are there because they believe they're having a chakra Awakening and they're like acutely psychotic um and so you know it's super cool to see this stuff clinically I mean it sucks for the person but I I'm grateful for the experience in terms of my growth and learning um so there are dangers to it and I think what's going on with meditation is that so let's kind
22:30 - 23:00 of start with like kind of a bit of History okay and by the way this is going to be a little bit more classic Dr K where it I'm going to just kind of talk at yall for a little while okay so if we want to understand whether meditation is safe or not we have to understand first of all what has happened to meditation over the last 100 years okay so between let's say five 5,000 years ago to about 100 years
23:00 - 23:30 ago meditation was basically considered a spiritual tradition that was taught within spiritual settings by spiritual Masters so it's like for the spiritual people by the spiritual people spiritual practice about a hundred years ago some westerners started to learn meditation so a big part of this was Maharishi maheshi Yogi with the explosion of TM
23:30 - 24:00 Transcendental Meditation in the' 60s so Maharishi Mahesh Yogi like shows up and this is like the good old days of like psychedelics and spiritual gurus and Osho and and Maharishi mahashi Yogi and so they start teaching meditation and what happens is a group of people start to really benefit from it and these people also have a background in science so they see some beautiful progress with it and they're like we should study this and good job y'all so they started doing a lot of studies on meditation the
24:00 - 24:30 benefits of meditation a lot of this stuff is is was funded kind of by the the Transcendental Meditation people and then over time we started to explore more and more meditation um and then a couple of like really important Milestones uh I I think a big part of this was also John kaben so maybe about 20 years ago I'm not sure and apologies to uh John kabadan if if I misrepresent this but um so he sort of uh has runs
24:30 - 25:00 the center for mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts and I think there was a big movement to try to figure out okay if we're trying to study meditation how do we do this right because if you look at meditation there's thric meditation there's chakra meditation there's pranam there's chiong there's Transcendental Meditation there's Mantra meditation there's visualizations there's guided meditations there's yoga NRA there's deep relaxation Tech techniques these are all all kinds of different
25:00 - 25:30 stuff and how do we study this right because these are all different things like doing like a whm Hoff style nepes I'm going to be in Sub-Zero temperatures naked and not getting frostbite meditation is very different from do a guided meditation about let's take a walk through your safe space in the forest these are different things neurologically psychologically consciously physiologically these are are different things right so there's
25:30 - 26:00 some techniques of meditation for example that can increase the peripheral body temperature by up to 9° Fahrenheit okay about 5 degrees celsi four or five degrees cels that's very different from a guided visualization of walking through the woods so uh John kin Zen did something super cool so he tried to Define mindfulness so what he tried to do I think um you know I met the guy many years ago when I was doing research at Harvard um because we collaborated some collaborated some with my pis
26:00 - 26:30 but uh you know here's what I see as the Brilliance of what he did he tried to take all of these different spiritual traditions and boil them down to the most basic component which is what he calls mindfulness now the cool thing about doing that is this standardizes what we're studying so now we're studying mindfulness which is these four things like attention in the present non-judgmental awareness like a couple of these different things that constitute mindfulness but this is not meditation this inkit is called sakshi
26:30 - 27:00 bav which is the very first step of meditation so a couple of important things happened there the first is that we're now able to standardize it we're now able to study it because we're talking about the same thing so that's good but we lose a lot of the spiritual power and a lot of the esoteric practices because there's nothing about mantras in mindfulness meditation right mindfulness is not about mons there's nothing about energy or shaki or
27:00 - 27:30 accumulating or manifesting or anything like that it's just the basics of understanding your mind and so now what started to happen is we've had a division within this idea of meditation we have the secularized sterilized protocolized denuded of gurus tradition of mindfulness this is predominantly what we find in apps then on the flip side we have these more esoteric meditative Traditions that
27:30 - 28:00 do more hardcore meditation and these things are not all the same they're apples and oranges and as we'll discover there are many different types of meditation which we're now beginning to categorize so now we get to the issue of safety because is mindfulness safe is meditation safe well the answer is it depends what kind of meditation are you doing what kind of mindfulness are you doing because the kind of practice that you do will correlate with how safe or
28:00 - 28:30 unsafe it is okay so let's take a look at some really interesting articles that are talking about that okay so this I think is what we're going to start with so unwanted effects is there a negative side of meditation a multicenter study okay so what we're going to do this is a really cool study that looked at a lot of different uh no this is maybe
28:30 - 29:00 mean of 87 so this is not a metaanalysis so the first thing that I want to point out to you all is that this is starting to happen where people are starting to break apart the different kinds of meditation so one is something called focused attention one is open monitoring one is Imagination one is body awareness one is compassion and one is some kind of informal practice okay so we talk about this a lot in Dr K's guide to meditation we talk about about d right which is very different from
29:00 - 29:30 just an open monitoring which is like a mindfulness based practice so just to let youall know this is about you know sometimes when I meditate I'm just sitting there with my eyes closed and I'm just chilling right just monitoring just observing whatever comes this is mindfulness and there are other times where we're doing practices like charging the laser beam so I'm putting all of my attention into this point right kind of over here slightly above the eyebrow brows in the source of the Brahma
29:30 - 30:00 nari or I'm doing a focused attention practice on something like the muladar chakra and then I can add something like mulab bandha which is a contraction of my perenium which is also part of a meditative practice so the perenium is the area between your scrotum and your anus if you're a man it's somewhere you know around the vagina and it's kind of inside the vagina kind of near the G-spot for women so there there's a keegle exercises when you contract that
30:00 - 30:30 that's a different kind of practice and in the meditative tradition the benefits of meditation and the risks of meditation correlate with the intensity of the practice so the hypersexuality inducing practice that I I did was a muladhara chakra practice so this is the the root chakra this is where our Sexual Energy resides and so as you activate this through medit a all kinds of things will
30:30 - 31:00 start to happen and so even the safety of the practice depends so doing contraction of the muladhara chakra is generally speaking pretty safe uh gynecologists will teach this in their office right as keegle exercises but when we combine that with certain breathing practices when we combine it with Consciousness practices where we're focusing our attention plus contraction plus pronam when we're lowering our respiratory rate or we're High ventilating we're doing all kinds of
31:00 - 31:30 different things that will vastly alter the benefits of the practice The Awakening of the chakra as well as the safety concerns so the first thing that we have to understand about meditation is that it's not all the same okay so here are a couple of this is just one categorization there are other ways to kind of categorize it what is this what did I just do okay here we go um so and then we'll look
31:30 - 32:00 at a little bit more because this will this will actually change hold on a second I screwed something up okay so here are the different kinds of things okay and then they'll also look at things like years of practice right so there are other issues like how veteran of a meditator are you is hiking dangerous or is it safe well it depends on where you go how competent you are what your experience is how prepared you
32:00 - 32:30 are that determines whether an activity is safe or not so now what we can do is they looked at un unwanted effects so this is a sample size pretty small it's 87 people so 25% 1/4 of people reported some kind of thing that they didn't enjoy the majority of people who had an unwanted effect are not majority the plurality of people are individual practice and this is what's really interesting is that um focused attention actually
32:30 - 33:00 has the highest likelihood so 17% of people who had an unpleasant experience were doing focused attention and 8% of people were doing body scan so body scan seems to be the safest focused attention is the most dangerous and we'll talk about why that is once we get to the meditative Theory because yogis will tell you the same thing the other thing that we tend to see is that a higher duration of practice correlates with more adverse effects and
33:00 - 33:30 I don't know if yall have heard me talk about this but usually what I'll say is that we should meditate for about 20 minutes right so I've said this so when I if you yall watch Dr K's guide to meditation about 18 minutes is how long it takes to trigger um inhibition of cortisol production from the hypothalamus so meditating under 20 minutes is basically quite safe and the longer that you meditate greater than 4 minutes we see an increase in risk of side
33:30 - 34:00 effects let's look at the kinds of side effects people get so people will get anxiety including panic attacks so I think some of this is like physiologic in nature um depersonalization or derealization experiences are also quite common right so 10% of people have some sense of disconnection or disconnection from the self and then but half of the people don't report any kind of details about what is unpleasant um the good news is that very
34:00 - 34:30 few uh continuous symptoms are quite rare right so when we advise people about meditation we say you know if something weird is happening stop first of all and then go see a doctor those are the two things that you should do if you have an adverse experience in meditation and people may Wonder okay what is a doctor going to do if they don't understand the meditation You' be surprised at how decent they are right so we're trained in a lot of like basically simple clinical reasoning which is is like if you're doing something and it's hurting you stop
34:30 - 35:00 doing it and let's evaluate you for other things that could be going wrong right let's just do a thorough diagnostic workup for psychosis for panic attacks let's just see what's kind of going on here so we have systems even if a doctor may not be sufficiently trained in meditation we are generally trained in the things that are dangerous right so we know how to detect schizophrenia we know how to detect Mania and we're good at picking up that stuff so we can just make sure that something
35:00 - 35:30 else isn't going on and that you can be safe good news is that the majority of people don't have continuous problems for meditation um it looks like discontinued meditation yes that's kind of scary right very few people discontinued um and very few people sought care from a medical professional which I think makes a lot of sense which is why we try to encourage you to do that right so don't be like these people so once again we're starting to see some basic issues about or basic
35:30 - 36:00 understanding of side effects from meditation and then we're going to go on even a little bit more so now the paper what it really does is looks into a lot of different specifics of what kind of adverse effect people have right and we see some of this stuff in our community so 66% of people experience some degree of lack of interest in their surroundings this is arguably a benefit of meditation right that we become a little bit more detached lack of
36:00 - 36:30 interest in other people's conversations ID GF chat I'm just not interested in other people we start to feel bored by other people right this is a percentage of people who have some kind of minimum scoring of yes and the good news is that this is the percentage of people who experience maximal symptoms of this and this is very low right so it's not like people have a 10 out of 10 great emotional pain but 52% of people experience some degree of
36:30 - 37:00 emotional pain 45% of people experience some degree of self-criticism 59% of experience uh people experience some degree of more fear anxiety or depression 68% of people experience a lack of orientation less motivation in life right and so now the question becomes is this an unwanted side effect or is this part of the benefit of meditation um so these are kind of reported
37:00 - 37:30 negatively but I think this is important for yall to understand is that there could be changes if yall meditate in all of these different dimensions and this is why it's important when you learn meditation to learn from someone who is like a competent practitioner or a medical professional because they can help you navigate through these things which we'll talk about in a little bit okay so now what we're going to do is take a look at a couple of the conclusions of this study um uh
37:30 - 38:00 okay so first thing is most reported um unwanted effects are mild and do not lead to discontinued meditation or the need for medical assistance so that's pretty good right so even if something happens I think yall should stop but they don't lead to long-term consequences okay um so in fact uh uh What do e use can be related to
38:00 - 38:30 changes in detached perspective of the self different stages of insight or the use of meditation in participants with previous pathological disorders that have not been correctly diagnosed okay so what this kind of is talking about is that some of these can be psychologically challenging they can lead to a detached perspective of self they can lead to changes in the way that you see the world okay so study also confirmed the second hypothesis that a higher frequency of practice May generate more unwanted effects
38:30 - 39:00 especially in terms of duration of the uh session so the more you meditate the longer you meditate the more hardcore you meditate the greater the chances are of some kind of side effect this is why we generally speaking advocate for 20 minutes a day three to five times a week or even every day is okay um so there this is also really important uh confirmed our initial hypothesis that some types of meditation practices May interact to influence the prevalence of
39:00 - 39:30 unwanted effects focused attention is associated with unwanted effects I.E the most dangerous whereas body awareness practices are are associated with fewer unwanted effects so let's talk about this for a second why is this so if we look at the clinical use of meditation when we use meditation in a Clin setting not all meditations are the
39:30 - 40:00 same so if you look at something like dialectical behavioral therapy dialectical behavioral therapy is a therapy that has a lot of grounding techniques so these are people this is usually used for people who have uh things like Borderline Personality Disorder so intense amounts of emotional disregulation when things are bad a sense people with BPD can also have a tendency to experience derealization or
40:00 - 40:30 depersonalization they feel untethered from their sense of self they can have a lot of negative thoughts so we want to use meditations that ground them in their experience of self so when someone is having a borderline personality disorder crisis they're catastrophizing they think they're a terrible person they're also activating some hemispheric lateralization which means that their
40:30 - 41:00 brain is actually activating a dissociative protective mechanism okay this is all in Dr K's guide to trauma if y'all are interested so what happens when we experience too much is our brain just like tech support is like you know what this is busted why don't we try turning it off and turning it on again so if you have some problem in your computer what do you do you turn it off and you turn it on again we'll see if that fix is the problem works in the brain too the brain is a computer so the
41:00 - 41:30 brain is like you know what I'm going to do I'm a dissociate for a little bit I'm going let this physiology calm down and then I'll plug back in tomorrow this is what a dissociative episode is gets triggered by trauma we even know that the Neuroscience of this is we have our right hemisphere Which experiences a lot of emotion we have our left hemisphere Which experiences a lot of analysis and literally what happens is the traffic between the two hemispheres
41:30 - 42:00 starts to get reduced traffic ac across the Corpus colossum gets reduced Bessel Vander kulk made some did some amazing studies on this and when that traffic gets reduced we basically block off our emotions we don't experience them anymore when we dissociate and we become depersonalized our analytical mind is working but our emotions aren't active at all so when people talk about trauma right they can talk talk about it in a very very numb way because they're just
42:00 - 42:30 thinking about it very dispassionately because the emotions are too much to handle the brain is trying to protect you from it so the body will release natural endorphins to protect you from the sensation of pain right that's why pain gets better over time when I have an acute injury it hurts a lot and then over time it starts to hurt less that's because endorphins are kicking in our psychology our neurology has the same kind of protective mechanisms so body awareness practices makes perfect
42:30 - 43:00 sense that they do not lead to negative experiences because these are the exper these are the practices that we use to ground people in their body now focused attention is a different category and open awareness is also a different category so one of the things that we have to be careful about for open awareness meditations is this is when I'm just sitting there and I'm going to observe non-judgmentally whatever comes up in my mind now this works great if there isn't a
43:00 - 43:30 lot of toxic stuff lying dormant in your mind so remember that our mind has psychological defense mechanisms what is that so our mind in order to stay safe blocks off certain negative experiences so you all will know this if you've ever talked to someone who's in denial right you try to tell them hey your drinking is a problem bro and he's like no it isn't it's fine I'm not as
43:30 - 44:00 bad as this person it'll be a problem when I'm as bad as this person that's when it's a problem it's not a problem right now it's not my problem you can have a narcissistic defense which is like you know I'm great and you're wrong you're bad they they it's a very black and white way of thinking you're doing everything bad I'm doing everything right right because why why does the n nistic defense exists it exists because
44:00 - 44:30 if you screwed up and you acknowledge how bad you screwed up the guilt from that could be so overwhelming that it would [ __ ] you right so this is why we have defense mechanisms and defense mechanisms are there for a reason to protect ourselves so when we do some open awareness meditations we have to be very careful if you have a history of trauma or something like that because as we
44:30 - 45:00 non-judgmentally you know observe things the problem is that the non- judgmentalness is a skill if you just stop for a second and close your eyes and You observe whatever comes up the basic problem of being human is that we are not non-judgmental as a thought comes up I'm a loser we don't we can't view that thought non-judgmentally as a thought comes up oh my friends from high school are doing so much better than I am we can't view that non-judgmentally we may be able to view
45:00 - 45:30 some negative aspects of oursel non-judgmentally but there's basically a difficulty curve right it's like there's a level one mob there's a level 99 mob and these things have very different hit point pools very different damage very different armor ratings very different move sets and so the thoughts in our mind have different levels of difficulty different strengths for us to be detached from so open awareness medit I do not recommend if you're keeping a lot
45:30 - 46:00 of stuff bottled up so if you engage in a lot of avoidance strategies video games pornography drugs whatever oh I'm feeling bad let me go distract myself from my mind what is that that's another defense mechanism so open awareness is the process of opening that up letting whatever comes up it can be useful it can be good right because we want to level that up eventually but it can be very dangerous so so I think open awareness meditation for example I'll do that with
46:00 - 46:30 patients with a history of trauma if I'm there with them because then whatever comes up then we work through that right so you have to be careful about open awareness now we get to focus attention now why is focused attention the most dangerous because focused attention is the stuff that is activating all the chakras okay so now we have to like understand this very clearly see all the weird esoteric techniques are not body scans they're
46:30 - 47:00 not open awareness they're focusing your energy into a particular chakra so the ones that are more powerful the ones that are more dangerous are the ones that involve focused attention because it is a meditative goal that you are trying to achieve so there are easier versions of this and harder versions of this or more more powerful and less powerful let's put it that way right so and I'm
47:00 - 47:30 defining power as like there's more powerful explosions and less powerful explosions that's neither good nor bad it's just if we're talking about fireworks like great we want a less powerful explosion that does the job if we're talking about nuclear Fus fion Fusion cold fusion nuclear fision right we can't do Fusion yet that's a whole different ball game so with the more powerful meditation comes more just like the difference between a firecracker and a nuclear
47:30 - 48:00 reaction and all of the techniques that are more esoteric in nature usually involve focused awareness so that makes them both more potent and more dangerous okay um so uh let's look at focused awareness was found to be
48:00 - 48:30 positively hold on what is zoom so focused awareness was found to be positively associated with greater self-criticism and feeling that the time spent not meditating was wasted we're going to talk about that in a second um uh what else did I want to say I think that's it from this one okay so this paper let's just kind of recap right so this paper is looking at the different kinds of
48:30 - 49:00 meditation and recogniz the different kinds of side effects that we can have and we have a couple of like quick tldrs about safe meditation practice first of all if something bad happens stop if something bad happens go seek guidance from a medical professional or a spiritual teacher who's competent next thing is frequency and duration of practice increase the risk and focused attention is more dangerous and also more potent body scanning yourself for 20 minutes a day seems incredibly safe according to this paper
49:00 - 49:30 right and also as a clinician I've seen very very very few adverse reactions to body scanning I can't none comes to mind I'm not saying that they can't happen but I've never really seen one the only thing I can think about for and this will we'll talk about this in a second too is that sometimes if people are already not in a healthy state of mind then body scanning can be problematic so if I'm working with a patient for example with the coach Ard delusion so this is a manifestation
49:30 - 50:00 often times of schizophrenia the card delusion is the belief that a part of your body is dead or rotting so people just believe they're like my kidney is dead and you'll be like what does that mean and they'll say like my kidney is dead like it's rotting inside me it's no longer alive a part of my body has died and is rotting and it needs to be removed and we check their GFR GL glomular filtration rate seems completely normal their creatinine clearance is normal kidney looks intact we can ultrasound that baby looks like
50:00 - 50:30 it's working fine so the car so sometimes what happens in schizophrenia is we have all of these benign symptoms from our body signals from our body which that get interpreted through the schizophrenic mind as negative right and let's just talk about that for a second because it's cool so the problem with schizophrenia is that there are associations that get made that normally shouldn't get made so if I look up at the sky and I see a cloud and I say that looks like a dog
50:30 - 51:00 it's not a dog it's a cloud it's a random assortment of water molecules that have been vaporized and are in the atmosphere there's no dog there but our brain has a circuit that generates a pattern out of neutral stimuli in schizophrenia this circuit becomes hyperactive so when I'm walking down the street and I see someone walking by me and they nod I'm like like that means something we start
51:00 - 51:30 seeing patterns where they don't exist then I walk past this past the second person this person smiles and I walk past a third person and this person is on their cell phone and I think to myself hold on a second this is 1 two three and then I look at the door the address of the place next to me and it says 11112 three there are three ones and it's a one two three and then I see a car that that has 02 three because there are too many ones over there and there's
51:30 - 52:00 02 three there's an absence of ones so this is somehow connected there's someone there's one two three I'm seeing one two three everywhere and this is what happens in schizophrenia so now what we we think about is that sometimes with body signals this can happen so when I worked with people who have things like the cotard delusion I'll ask them what tell me what the sensory stimuli are and usually what happens is they have an old factory stimulus something is smelly something smells like it's
52:00 - 52:30 rotting I smell something rotting and then everywhere I go I smell the rotting smell therefore what do you conclude it must be some part of me and by the way I feel a twinge over here maybe you got a tiny little kidney stone forming right or you sleep on one side or something like that and then they combine these things so body scans we have to be careful if someone has some pre-existing things so if they have an internal hypers sensitivity which we can
52:30 - 53:00 see in things like panic attacks we can see in things like irritable bowel syndrome then we have to be careful about body scanning okay but generally speaking focused attention is more esoteric more powerful therefore more dangerous now let's take a look at a couple of other things okay so meditation induced psychosis and review and individual patient analysis beautiful beautiful paper let's
53:00 - 53:30 go straight to the discussion so the first thing that the paper talks about is meditation works on neurochemical level and seems to mimic the effects of things like psychedelics and we'll talk about that in a second too actually let's just talk about it now so what's the deal with meditation and psychedelics so often times I'll get asked this question hey I use my psychedelics is that the same is
53:30 - 54:00 meditation so the answer is yes and no so there are a lot of studies that show that meditation act activates certain neurotransmitters like the release of things like serotonin um this paper talks about DMT and how DMT there's some overlap between how psychedelics work in the brain and how meditation works in the brain we also sort of know that from a subjective experience standpoint right because people who have meditate deeply will start to trip and you can trip with psychedelics so
54:00 - 54:30 there's some overlap there but I don't think that one is a substitute for the other now let's understand why thankfully now we have a good answer to this so if you look at studies on psychedelics for therapeutic value now everyone's saying oh psychedelic can be used to heal right they can treat PTSD they can treat depression ketamine in the US can be used to treat acute depressive episodes psilocybin can be transformative we have to be super
54:30 - 55:00 careful though because psychedelics just like meditation can lead to mental illness they can induce psychosis they can induce panic attacks I've worked with patients who have PTSD from trips their trip was so bad that their physiology wires into a hyperactive State and they're left with PTSD and bad PTSD cripp PTSD the most common things that I see from Bad trips are something like a
55:00 - 55:30 trauma Spectrum Disorder something like an anxiety disorder and something like uh a panic disorder very rarely do I see things that are like negative mood and stuff like that maybe sometimes but here's what we know so it if it can be healing how can it be healing how can it be harming what's the difference so if you look at the healing the situations in which psychedelics are healing they are always done with guard rails so what
55:30 - 56:00 psychedelics probably do from a neuroscientific mechanism is they induce neuroplasticity so they create alterations in the they they they put your brain out of readon mode now we're in editing mode and this is what's so interesting it is the integration of the the Psychedelic experience through Psychotherapy afterward or when you work with a shaman or someone else who's like familiar with this stuff they integrate the experience
56:00 - 56:30 for you so if we look at the trials we see things like you know 14- we trial with 14 weeks of Psychotherapy with two or three doses of psychedelics sprinkled in the middle so let's talk about who you are let's understand what your issues are now we're going to use a psychedelic now we're going to you know see how things go the environment is very controlled many of these studies often times have a male female diad of therapists who will sit with you for 8
56:30 - 57:00 hours and guide you and keep you safe through the experience afterward now your brain is in edit mode and then when you do Psychotherapy after that you are shaping things in a very healthy and safe way so the trip itself doesn't transform you and both the spiritual traditions and the Psychotherapy tradition have found that healing through psychedelics requires not just the activation of the neuroplasticity we're putting it into edit mode but then what happens afterward what are we
57:00 - 57:30 actually writing in once it's in edit mode and what we see from negative experiences of psychedelics is people will trip and they have no guard rails so what gets put in there who the [ __ ] knows okay and it turns out that meditation is the same so when you have adverse experiences or similar I should say in meditation the guidance of a guru becomes very important because they can help you work through those negative
57:30 - 58:00 experiences and get you to the other side meditation also induces neuroplasticity the good news is that meditation the process of meditation also trains you mentally right so you practice this for days and days and days and days and days weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks until you have a psychedelic experience through meditation or spiritual experience right but during that time what is happening the Neuroscience of meditation shows us that your frontal loes are strengthening
58:00 - 58:30 very important they're the parts that can put breaks on other parts of our brain our emotional regulation skills are improving we're getting increased connections to things like the amydala we also are increasing our capacity for attentional control that's literally what meditation is doing I'm sitting down I'm focusing on this my mind wants to wander over there no I'm going to focus on this now now when you're having a bad trip and you have no attentional control and some
58:30 - 59:00 Demon is sitting in front of you and you cannot control your mind to return to the breath and ignore the demon then you're going to get caught up in the demon the Demon's going and then you get caught up in it and it traumatizes you so meditation in this way trains your brain in a way that psychedelics doesn't right because it's an artificial substance that is just board the roller coaster and it goes wherever the [ __ ] it
59:00 - 59:30 goes but we also see a very similar kind of takeaway which we'll show you all in a second so basically intense meditation even though meditation can be used for healing and has positive clinical effects it should never be used acutely to treat an acute thing just like psychedelics so for psychedelics if you're in the middle of a depressive episode you should not use psychedelics if you're manic you should not use psychedelics if you're and I've had
59:30 - 60:00 patients like this who've been acutely in a mixed state really bad mixed state bipolar disorder who are like I want to go to a 10-day silent Meditation Retreat and fix this I'm like no bro you need to be in a hospital not a 10day med I'll help you get to the 10-day Meditation Retreat but a lot of these meditative experiences are very stressful they're very difficult and you need to be stable and healthy another just really interesting tidbit which I love so some of these studies on
60:00 - 60:30 psychedelics psychedelic assisted Psychotherapy fascinating we'll also have something called a a wash out period so before we start the psychedelics we're going to detox you off of your psych psychiatric medications for two weeks in a safe setting sometimes including a hospital because psychedelics work on these neurotransmitters meditation works on these neurotransmitters and so there's certain SA guards around some of these clinical trials which people don't think about
60:30 - 61:00 when they think about using psychedelics for healing completely different situation do you all understand the significance of a medical wash out period before you do a clinical trial no one does that [ __ ] at home and furthermore it's not even safe to do that at home if you're on a benzo daene and you just go cold turkey you can have a seizure and die so they do this stuff in medically controlled settings okay so for going back to meditation though we know that there are a lot of
61:00 - 61:30 these neurotransmitters involved probably somewhat similar to psychedelics um we're not going to go too much into these but okay uh so we also know so it has been suggested that meditation should be contraindicated in people suffering from Psychiatric illnesses such as psychosis however looking at the evidence one could find that meditation combined with yoga has been shown have positive effects on negative symptoms in schizophrenia right but this is also important because it's not all the same
61:30 - 62:00 so yoga is a very good practice for schizophrenia but that's not the same as meditation um so metaanalysis showed that mindfulness based practices to be moderately beneficial in treating negative symptoms and can could be used as an adjunct for pharmacotherapy this is a quick aside by the way I know this is about side effects of medit dangers of meditation but so here's this is super cool so schizophrenia has I guess we're talking about schizophrenia classic Dr K
62:00 - 62:30 so schizophrenia has two kinds of symptoms positive symptoms and negative symptoms so positive symptoms are usually what people know about schizophrenia hallucinations delusions paranoia but the more crippling stuff in schizophrenia is actually the negative symptoms these are things like a motivation and hedonia the cool thing is that we don't
62:30 - 63:00 have great medications arguably some third generation anti psychotics are pretty helpful at at negative symptoms but most of our medications for schizophrenia are very good at treating positive symptoms not the best to treating negative symptoms but meditation can help with that and so the really interesting thing for those of you'all that are struggling with oh I'm not motivated things are not fun for me right I just don't enjoy my life I'm kind of like H I have low
63:00 - 63:30 energy if you're kind of one of these people that like life just has no zest and you don't really feel like doing anything meditation has been shown in studies to help with that in schizophrenia it invigorates your love and passion for life when done in the right way okay and thank youall in chat for defining things that I'm not defining for people who are newer
63:30 - 64:00 um [Music] okay so this is different from the meditation practiced by most of the cases where patients would get engrossed in chanting mantras and trying to get into Altered States of Mind indicating that Transcendental Meditation could be more psychosis prone uh with mindfulness based practice so now we're seeing once again in the literature this idea that not all meditation is the same there's a clear need to delineate between
64:00 - 64:30 traditional meditation practice and therapist guided meditation practice interventions practice in a clinical setting in order to explore their role of the trajectories of outcome from a patient suffering from psychosis well said right so what that means is like these are not all the same and we need to start being sophisticated with our language so now what we're going to now this is cool most of the patients described in this review who experienced psychotic episode precipitated by medit ation attended intensive meditation Retreats rather than practicing brief
64:30 - 65:00 brief mindfulness interventions um some of these patients were higher risk because they had a history of Psych psychiatric illness um adverse effects this is also really important adverse effects of meditation are confounded by factors such as sensory deprivation loss of sleep fasting all of which may serve as uh precipitants for a psychotic episode various other factors include history of substance abuse traumatic life events in the past right we've
65:00 - 65:30 talked about that um let me find there's one other yeah so I think that's the main thing that I wanted to take away from this paper so what does this paper tell us intense meditation is dangerous fasting for long periods of time is dangerous meditation and I've done that this stuff okay so like I've done very ended fasts gone 24 hours you know
65:30 - 66:00 meditating things like this and those things are very hardcore like these 10-day silent vipasana Retreats are very difficult they require a lot of resilience to get through so it's kind of like this more hardcore meditation we're getting further away from the firework and closer to the nuclear bomb and the data suggests that the more hardcore you are about meditation the more dangerous it is and some of these things like monra meditation this Chuck the activating stuff can be more dangerous
66:00 - 66:30 okay um let me see so this is a case report okay so I'll just show we'll just kind of um just show you all so meditation induced psychosis trigger and recurrence we're just going to jump to one or two sentences here the patient was maintaining well without medication for about 9 years after a first episode of acute psychosis and then a second psychotic episode recurred on the 16th
66:30 - 67:00 day of practicing similar intensive meditation okay um so there's also evidence suggesting that meditation alone is not the only causal factor for psychosis but other factors like sleep and sensory deprivation and fasting uh during meditation May precipitate psychotic episodes in our case various components of meditation like sleep deprivation fasting social isolation long hours of meditation past history of psychotic experiences have been contributing
67:00 - 67:30 factors an underlined uh by the as underlined by the review about chiong induced mental disorders a psychotic deterioration is the result of meditation that acts as a stressor in vulnerable individuals so much like psychedelics we don't want to do this stuff if we are not in a good headp space um uh okay when meditation is practiced under
67:30 - 68:00 proper guidance and in moderation meditation can enhance psychological well-being even individuals The psychosis can benefit if the practice of meditation is tailored accordingly okay so this is kind of our literature review so what's the big tldr at this point tldr is the more hardcore you meditate the greater the risk is so now we're going to talk a little bit about why do people do this kind of
68:00 - 68:30 stuff so this is where things get wild and then we'll talk about gurus because there's other parts of meditation so I want youall to understand like why do we do all this weird stuff when we meditate so I want youall we got to go back a couple thousand years right there was a guy probably today known as Shiva in the Hindu tradition but I think if we look at it from a more anthropological perspective if we look at it right this meditation
68:30 - 69:00 practice started somewhere so one human being had to be the beginning of it right someone had to figure something out and say like hey like look I'm meditating like this is cool and I think what happened with Shiva is someone he sat down presumably it's a he but could be shaki or barvi it's who who knows maybe maybe it was actually two people um sat down and started to
69:00 - 69:30 try to understand like what is the nature of what is going on inside me and they made a very fundamental discovery that there is a layer of something Beyond mental activity so most of the time when we're living our life we are living within mental activity I have this thought I have this emotion I have this perception these are all products of the mind and we think this is what reality is but if we look at the most
69:30 - 70:00 fundamental level of your reality it isn't thoughts or emotions it is actually that you are always the one who experiences your thoughts or emotions you can't experience anyone else's emotions and no one else can experience your emotions you are the one who's always living your life your thoughts change your emotions change your mind changes your body changes your identity changes Everything Changes in your life except for one thing which is that you are
70:00 - 70:30 always the one living it so then I believe what Shiva did is tried to get to that so realized okay this is not real this this is not permanent this is not permanent this is not permanent let me get to the source so they figured out some kind of technique to stop the activity of the Mind and in doing so they opened a door people think that this is the goal
70:30 - 71:00 of meditation is to stop the mind no that's the beginning that's opening the door it's not even walking through so we have brara which is sensory withdrawal this is the practice of pulling my mind away from where it wants to go so the first step is my mind is scattered all over the place first thing I got to do is restrain it because if I don't restrain it then it'll think about this and it'll think about this and it'll think about this
71:00 - 71:30 and it'll think about this and I'll never go beyond mind second thing is focus so we're going to pull away and then we're going to concentrate on one point most of the time the energy of our mind is like a light bulb it exudes light in a thousand different directions that same energy can accomplish very different things if it's concentrated into a laser beam this is the practice of dhana focused attention that's step two I'm going to focus my mind on one thing the
71:30 - 72:00 breath charging the laser beam the third ey chakra whatever Mantra whatever fundamentally there's focused attention then we get to sakshi bav in the no mind State theond this is step three this is where we have melded our mind with the object of meditation and we move beyond the self and then beyond that is samadi these are higher States Of Consciousness and meditation that's when you start walking through the
72:00 - 72:30 door now here's what they figured out so if you all have meditated you know this where every time when you sit down to meditate you may not be able to achieve the same state of mind some days your mind is more distracted some days it's less distracted some days you you achieve a quiet mind and then some days you feel something intense some days it just feels different your conscious is in a different state of mind the problem is that that is inconsistent you can't do
72:30 - 73:00 something to create that state of mind right because you can't just perform the same action because it's not about action there's physical action then there's mental action I'm trying to tell my mind to concentrate but once the Mind shuts off I can't tell it to do anything does that make sense telling and forcing is a mental activity so how do I get it to move if I can't tell it do anything where even a desire will shatter the
73:00 - 73:30 state okay this is where the fasting and sleep deprivation and intensity of practice come in so it's my scientific or medical belief that these more advanced systems of meditation are working on a very physiologic level there's one technique for example you guys know what the average respiratory rate is I'll drink some tea while we're you guys know how many breaths per minute most human beings
73:30 - 74:00 do I see someone saying 14 it's about right 12 to 15 16 yeah right so we'll we'll breathe every four to six seconds on average so there are some techniques of meditation where you breathe once every 6 minutes and some techniques of meditation where you breathe about 240 times a
74:00 - 74:30 minute think about it 240 breaths per minute both of these seem physiologically impossible now we have some you know free diving has become a thing so I think people have figured out low respiratory rates but the main thing that we have to think about at one and six how do you not die you you train yourself same way that free divers can breathe once every 20 minutes right when they're swimming so let's understand how do you
74:30 - 75:00 not die that is the operative question so what are the physiologic changes that happen when you alter your respiratory rate so the main thing that we're worried about is oxygen carbon dioxide it's really the carbon dioxide that is the bigger problem than the lack of oxygen so what happens is our our body has a balance between our body basically maintains its pH in one of two ways we can breathe off carbon dioxide which is
75:00 - 75:30 bicarb okay we can breathe it out or we have metabolic contributions so when I start breathing very slowly there are other systems of my body that will compensate so when I have a very low respiratory rate the pH in my body goes down as the pH goes down certain things like my kidneys and other parts of my body will start to create a metabolic balancing effect and when you practice
75:30 - 76:00 meditation for a very long period of time these compensatory mechanisms kick in and they develop it's kind of like you know in the same way that a liver of someone who drinks every day can handle lethal amounts of alcohol because the compensatory enzymes are ramped way the [ __ ] up so when you do slow respirations for an extended period of time years your compensatory enzymes ramp up quite a bit the same is true for the hyper
76:00 - 76:30 respiration it's just in the opposite direction and probably what we know is that when we alter this is where things get wild okay so this isn't like super scientific it's all extrapolated from science there's one other really interesting data point which is people who are dying so if you talk to to people who are dying or died they have some very interesting
76:30 - 77:00 subjective spiritual or psychedelic experiences now let's understand what is going on in the brain when someone is dying the most fundamental thing that is changing relates to the breath there are changes to CO2 concentration and O2 concentration that's what death is the basic source of metabolism the basic source of life is oxygen so when we safely and under the guidance of
77:00 - 77:30 proper gurus right because this stuff can be lethal if it's not done in the right way when we train our physiology we need a very fine-tuned physiology so I'll give you all an example this practice with the 240 respirations per minute cannot be done if you have caffeine in your body can't get it it's very fascinating but you just can't do it because the caffeine Alters the way that you breathe
77:30 - 78:00 impossible so this is why esoteric meditation is often times done with these things because what they're remember what they're shooting for is a state of consciousness and attaining that State of Consciousness through intense fasting right what do you think a prolonged fast is going to do to the brain probably do something very similar to dying metabolically on some level very particular activity of neurologically active substances so no caffeine no drugs everyone's like hey
78:00 - 78:30 can I meditate while hi I mean you can some people find it useful but you're never going to attain sadii if you meditate while high because the neurochemistry that is required to attain those States Of Consciousness has to be incredibly precise people won't even eat potatoes or onions or garlic because it Alters the body in such a small percentage but I don't know if this kind of makes sense you know if we look at something like like the top end of the bell curve a very very minute change what
78:30 - 79:00 separates someone who is the 99th percentile from the 99.9th percentile it's a very small thing right and someone's me mentioning FODMAP yeah so we understand this right so there's fod map which is a particular kind of diet that alters our brain chemistry in a particular way where it can help with things like depression and anxiety um you know one of the attendings that I
79:00 - 79:30 had at mlan hospital is a guy named Chris Palmer who's a big fan of the ketogenic diet has written a bunch of books about it how it improves things like epilepsy and mental health so all of this extreme meditation stuff is about attaining these higher States Of Consciousness and that's all dangerous right because this is the stuff where we're messing around with the Met metabolism of life and death breathing once per minute is lethal I mean sorry
79:30 - 80:00 once every six minutes can be lethal we call that asphixiation right breathing 240 breaths a minute is some crazy amount of hyperventilation that's very dangerous and what we see from the studies on the dangers of meditation is the more hardcore you go the more dangerous it is which is why this stuff is not taught publicly right so I don't know if yall noticed but I've stopped teaching a lot of meditation and that's because I taught
80:00 - 80:30 the basic stuff the rest of the stuff is not super safe to teach right so there's a lot I mean there's I've taught 10% of what I know but the rest of the 90% isn't safe to teach because you start playing with fire we're start creating that neuroplasticity and unless you integrate the neuroplasticity in the right way it's very dangerous now speaking of not safe to teach this is where we get to the other Dark Side
80:30 - 81:00 of meditation gurus now here's gurus are there's a lot to understand here not no more new ones we'll get back to it I'm working on it I have to think about what to teach because I can't just keep going so I'm working on it okay so why do we need Guru so since this stuff so if we think
81:00 - 81:30 about the Mastery in the realm of meditation Mastery in the realm of meditation is not mental it can because now we're we're dealing on the realm of experience right that's what a guru does so these old yogis and stuff from ancient India were called rishes Rishi comes from the root word c they're called seers so they developed certain
81:30 - 82:00 practices and were able to see things that's a subjective experience now the problem is that all of the stuff that these gurus do the good ones the real ones they're in the realm of experience in the realm of Consciousness and that's not a material thing right so we can't measure consciousness we can't detect Consciousness we cannot detect subjective experience there's no
82:00 - 82:30 instrument that can measure love how do we know that the amydala is where fear and anxiety come from because we ask people hey when this part of your brain is lighting up what are you subjectively feeling so all of our understanding of Neuroscience is rooted in in subjective Human Experience but Neuroscience can't touch it
82:30 - 83:00 yet this is why we don't know what animals experience right do animals experience anxiety the same way we do we don't know do they have activation of their amigdalas absolutely but does a cat experience anxiety the same way that we do we don't know why not because we can't ask them about their subjective experience so a guru is some someone who is an expert in that path of consciousness of what happens when you walk beyond the
83:00 - 83:30 door and this creates all kinds of problems because the first thing is that there's no way that we can verify the legitimacy of a guru because there's no external test right we can't measure it we can't tell if this person is a scam artist or if there there's no way to measure the quality of someone else's
83:30 - 84:00 experience now as you meditate and as you I know this stuff sounds super Shady right and I re this is not scientific it doesn't mean that it isn't real so this is also something that we need to understand the root of science is human observation the reality and the confirmation comes next so we're just at the the stage in scientific development where 10 years ago 15 years ago we didn't even think
84:00 - 84:30 about the differences in different kinds of meditation now we know okay there are different kinds it's not all the same and these things have differential effects on the brain we're just getting there we'll get there I think science will get there because science always gets there it's just we don't have the instrumentation to measure thought or Consciousness yet that's all so someone will make a breakthrough at some point so now the problem is that you have a
84:30 - 85:00 guru and you as a student don't know who's legit and who isn't and then we have some of these other doctrines like faith and the problem with a lot of meditation is that it is ripe for abuse so let's talk about this for a second okay so let's just talk about faith so here's why faith is critical for meditation
85:00 - 85:30 practice so if we're not operating on faith what are we operating on we're operating on logic right analysis data reality and you may say but Dr K that sounds good and sure as a medical doctor as a scientist as someone who loves my iPad I I'm huge fan of logic and Analysis and stuff like that the problem though is that see if
85:30 - 86:00 you have an expectation that something will work why should I meditate convince me to meditate give me The Logical answer to meditate so if I tell you okay if you meditate you'll have this kind of spiritual experience you'll get this kind of benefit this will happen this will happen this will happen but the problem is it's not a precise science yet because your mileage may vary it may take you a year it may take you two years may take you 10 years make you may take you 10 days and if we have to convince the mind then Things become really
86:00 - 86:30 difficult because if you do not get what the mind was promised it says no and so the perseverance won't be there the other problem in meditation is that if you tell the Mind here's the real problem is if you tell the mind this is why you should meditate that creates an expectancy and an expectancy prevents you can't move Beyond mind if the mind is looking for
86:30 - 87:00 something right if you're looking to attain a meditative State you will never attain a meditative State this is why the second meditative state is the hardest to experience the easiest not the easiest but the first one is often times easy because people aren't expecting it so this is why gurus and this is It's hard to describe but faith is incredibly important because the path of meditation will test you will test you in so many
87:00 - 87:30 ways and unless you have that stupid perseverance you won't make it now the challenge is that if we say in order to meditate you need to have total Faith what does that open the door to it opens the door to Total abuse power corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely so this is the core conundrum opens up
87:30 - 88:00 all kinds of dark sides of meditation we talked about all these gurus and stuff that are problematic that's why please don't don't make a guru of me I don't have the capability I'm not that good just I'm one of y'all and I'm a doctor sure I'm a streamer whatever but like I'm not a guru okay I don't want that [ __ ] just don't want it can't do it don't want it okay I'm not capable
88:00 - 88:30 so but this is the problem is that the path requires Faith the path requires perseverance the path requires sometimes stupid amounts of money and then but like that also opens it up to abuse so I think there's a bunch of false gurus out there right is we don't know how to judge
88:30 - 89:00 them now how do you tell the difference between a real Guru and a false Guru the the way you tell the difference is not through any external thing and this was part of my journey too where what I would do is make a judgment based on a price tag I'd be like if this person is charging a lot of money I you're a scam artist now I've become a little bit more open minded about that jury is still out but I realize you know what I need to do I need to be scientific about it and
89:00 - 89:30 test my hypothesis right why would I think about it it's not scientific at all to judge someone based on without studying it go to someone who charges a lot go to someone who charges a little and see if there's a difference and then there's also a challenge because there's a variability in people who charge a lot and variability in people who charge a little so there's a great question how do you level up your perception so I think it's through practice so when you practice a
89:30 - 90:00 lot okay now we're not saying that you should go to intensive meditation Retreats and stuff because we spent the first hour talking about how that's dangerous but what I would encourage you all to do is when you practice continue to practice practice practice practice practice and as you practice just pay attention that's it so we've given yall some practices so I I'll give you all one right
90:00 - 90:30 now so what I want you all to do is close your eyes and breathe in and out through your nose and what I want youall to do is pay attention to the temperature of the breath and localize it so this this is going to take practice I'll give you all the steps now some of y'all who've been practicing may be able to do it but breathe
90:30 - 91:00 in notice the location where you feel the temperature okay now we've done this before you guys may think you know what's coming next now what I want you all to do is breathe out and payer pay attention to the temperature of the breath as you breathe out and now what I want yall to do is notice the
91:00 - 91:30 location where you feel the temperature of the breath that's what I want you to pay attention to the location of the exhalation which can be found by first of all paying attention to the temperature right so close your eyes
91:30 - 92:00 okay so there's not a right answer or wrong answer now what I want youall to do is see how far out the breath goes how far out does it
92:00 - 92:30 go through the nose Okay so and this is where depending on what your awareness is so just to give you all a sense of like how long this stuff takes so it's my belief now that
92:30 - 93:00 meditation progress happens almost like pregnancy so when I when I look at the people that I've taught meditation to and when I think about my own practice what I find is that like they're basically nine Monon segments and I would say that for me like the first seven years of me meditating was basically broken up into like nine Monon segments and so what we're talking about here is like if you do a practice and you
93:00 - 93:30 meditate diligently for a period of about nine months I think that's how long it'll take to level up I I don't know why this is I haven't quite figured it out but this is just an observation that I have right so some people are noticing the air in different places fair enough keep doing the practice some of y'all I think very few will and I'm not trying to be like mysterious or anything it's just I'm looking at the answers and it's what I expected but as you do the
93:30 - 94:00 practice for a period of nine months your answer will change 100% now the really tricky thing is that you may be amazed at how much your answer is restricted by your mind and the more of a no mind State you enter the more your the more rapidly your answer will change
94:00 - 94:30 right and so if you guys look at chat you'll see there's different kinds of answers and I'm not going to say what's right it's just do the practice so someone saying but will the answer change because our power of visualization gets better no power of visualization we're not touching that with a 10-ft pole we don't want to visualize
94:30 - 95:00 something we want to observe right visualize is to create something observe is to see what's already there what we actually want to do is unisize we want to remove our perception and so what yall need to do if you really want to do this practice successfully is really experience it without looking for an answer and I'm I swear I'm not trying to be like confusing and like oh like I'm G no this like literally how this stuff works
95:00 - 95:30 because if I tell you what to look for that'll create an expectation If it creates an expectation you won't have as much of an observation and if I tell you what to look for so if I like like imagine for a moment that you're like trying to find I don't know like a hidden Easter EG and if I tell you where the Easter egg is you can go and find it but your
95:30 - 96:00 capacity to find Easter eggs gets diminished so this is a big problem today with like a lot of what I see about teaching meditation is that people are very very very easy to give answers everyone wants to give answers everyone wants to offer promises and this will happen and this will happen and this will happen and this will happen because we realize that the world doesn't like faith we all want to know what we're going to get ahead of time you know when you're interested in
96:00 - 96:30 a show I don't know if you all do this I do this now where I go to a bookstore if I'm interested in a book I check the reviews before I buy it before you try a restaurant check the reviews before you see a psychiatrist check the reviews we all want the answers ahead of time what am I going to get give me a promise the mind is getting very difficult at Faith and so this becomes a huge problem when the goal is refining your capacity of
96:30 - 97:00 observation if I tell you what the answer is your capacity to observe won't go up at all okay so speaking of the dark side of meditation I mean this is the problem is that I think there's a lot of good powerful techniques that should be taught and can be taught by gurus how do you find one how can you tell the difference should you be careful absolutely because we have lots of
97:00 - 97:30 historic evidence about abuses of power and this is a big problem with meditation that we see a lot which is that a lot of this meditative stuff gets hijacked by things like the ego right and this is what's so tricky is that a lot of these side effects of of meditation need to be worked through in the right way this is kind of the other Dark Side of meditation is that if we look at some of
97:30 - 98:00 the side effects some of those are like the goals of meditation being less interested in other people like I don't care about other people's stuff anymore I don't care about celebrities anymore is that it will change the person that you are and sometimes people don't like that because you get freed from some of your patterns and it can be very scary right there's this concept of The Dark Knight of the Soul which I think was a poem that was written by a priest and they talk about how you know
98:00 - 98:30 when we when we look at like growth and this person was talking about faith in God but we have some experience of God and then we have a lot of Darkness that comes afterward we have a feeling of distance we stop becoming the person that we are in order to become it's a step to become the person that we are growing into and when we meditate a lot of negativity can come up that's part of the process it's cleaning it out right so we talked
98:30 - 99:00 about the psychological defense mechanisms protecting us that's dangerous if you have PTSD but every human on the planet has some kind of suppressed psychological stuff and so cleaning that stuff out can see an increase in negative emotion so everyone talks about meditation like it's a good thing but the subjective experience of it can be be deeply painful at times we'll also talk about things like ego death where you lose sight of who
99:00 - 99:30 you are and when you when you're in that Dark Night of the soul and there's a cult around you they will turn you into something unhealthy right so that's the real danger but even if we look at yall should check out this video on quter life crisis which is super fascinating that we did but one of the things that we is Reinventing yourself requires distancing yourself from the old
99:30 - 100:00 you and so that's dangerous it's like dangerous dude meditation is all about playing with these parts of yourself right deconstructing yourself and it can absolutely be dangerous and it should be done with proper guidance and the challenge is the real challenge is that proper guidance is is hard to find because the people who supposedly can properly guide you are the ones who are the most likely to
100:00 - 100:30 abuse and so how do you find a guru I say you go first of all practice yourself and the second thing is go to places where gurus are to be found right so go to asham go to monasteries go to solid spiritual institutions go to places like Calo it's like secular it's good you don't have to join a cult right and that's the other thing that I would say is like don't go too deep into one thing or at least not until you're ready
100:30 - 101:00 there are times where it's not that you're going deep into one thing it's that you realize this is the only thing that you need which is kind of going deep but but you know I'd be like really careful about people this community included where like you know don't go super deep into this stuff like we're here to help you and stuff like that but you should maintain your own independence and don't over identify with this community and and like you know like you should have like the whole goal of this community is to help y'all build an independent
101:00 - 101:30 life right so we're here to help like it's cool like you know there's there's a lot of love here like I acknowledge that I think it's wonderful and also y'all should have a life outside of this I want this to be 5 to 10% of what y'all do not 95% of what y'all do and we see this as well people in the community will be I'm been watching all of Dr K's videos I don't know what to do now it's like go do other
101:30 - 102:00 stuff right that that's where like to be honest y'all we have to be very cognizant of this this is what I'm grateful for my training as a psychiatrist you can't pretend something isn't a thing you have to acknowledge it we have to be cautious of this right we have to be cautious of elevation of Dr K into a gou it's only going to lead to problems because I'm not enlightened and if you guys idealize me all I'm going to do is
102:00 - 102:30 disappoint you please no and honestly all I mean just I'm just some guy on the internet you should not treat me as any more or less than that and the cool thing is everyone's like oh Dr K has changed my life like think about that critically for a moment okay and this isn't me like uncomfortable with praise like who is it that does the changing of your life like literally I'm not trying to be some falsely humble Guru or anything like just think
102:30 - 103:00 about it right I'm not the one who's waking up every day I'm not the one who's cleaning your kitchen I'm not the one who's setting boundaries with your family I'm not the one who's you know being more proactive with the people that you love I'm not I'm not the one who's lifting weights in the gym I'm not the one who's meditating in your house I'm not doing that and so when I say it's not me it's not like some like oh like I mean like literally
103:00 - 103:30 like if we look at who's doing the actions in your life it's you I'm not living your life am I helping you along the way sure I'll take that take the Gratitude with that do I help my patients absolutely do I help my coaching clients absolutely I'm not saying I don't help but be careful because yall are doing yourselves a disservice when you when you look see this is the problem is that when you look at the
103:30 - 104:00 change in your life you're still operating from this idea that I can't change and so then what you do is you give me the credit you're like I'm going to go put the credit on his shoulders it's like cool but literally who's doing the work and if you stop and think about it why is it that it's so hard for you to accept that you did the work that's what
104:00 - 104:30 you need to be asking yourself right then help you help yourself I am I'm doing what I can do the question is what can you do okay let's take a couple of
104:30 - 105:00 questions so Dr K what do you think is the answer to the ship of thesis so I think this has been solved by yogis a couple thousand years ago right so the one thing that never changes so ship aesus is like okay there's a ship right if we replace the Mast is it still the ship of thesias sure we replace the sails then we replace some of the hull then we replace repl the ropes then we replace this at some point you can turn over the whole ship is it still the same
105:00 - 105:30 ship and this is where I think the true self there is a solution to the ship of thesis which is absolute which is recognition of the true self elimination of the ego moving beyond the aamar right so your thoughts change your emotions change your body changes your hair changes you get sick you get healthy your voice changes your identity changes your net worth changes your self-respect changes your self-esteem Changes Everything
105:30 - 106:00 Changes what's the one thing that never changes you are always the one experiencing it there the one unchangeable thing you can never experience me and I can never experience you that is the solution to the ship aesus you're right that everything else changes um are Coan a scientific way of proving someone's Enlightenment absolutely not
106:00 - 106:30 in fact they're the opposite so a [ __ ] can bring you to Enlightenment but it's not a test because a Coan doesn't have a right answer because a Coan by definition does not have an answer that's the whole point of it and once you understand see a Coan is beautiful it's awesome because a Coan is an instrument to move Beyond mind the whole point of a Coan is that it is not logically graspable so the
106:30 - 107:00 only way to understand a Coan is to move Beyond logic so any thoughts on krishy I think Krish morth is good right so I think this is where find the teachers that resonate with you what's the right way to meditate whichever way works so this is where we start with things like and we have a whole playlist on our YouTube channel you know Nishi pranam is
107:00 - 107:30 a great way to start alternate nostril breathing great way to start oh how to get out of freeze mode in cptsd that's a long answer so I would say we did a um we did a deep dive into cptsd which I think is still sitting on YouTube and we got really positive feedback about um there's also the guide to trauma which goes into a lot of that
107:30 - 108:00 stuff but I think um and then bestl Vander kul's uh body keeps the score is an excellent resource so I'd say those are the three places to find the answers um but I'll answer briefly now so I think you got to understand that freeze mode is a reaction so if you want to stop freezing there's some amount of physiologic retraining that you can do so this is why we have things like exposure and response prevention exposure therapy for phobias really understanding what your
108:00 - 108:30 triggers are and then strengthening some aspects of like neurochemistry or neurology so as your motion regulation improves as you feel more safe right which can be done by working through your triggers so I feel triggered by this but conscious decoupling of that trigger oh even though I feel unsafe I am actually safe being able to do that will Short Circuit the freeze response and then some amount of like
108:30 - 109:00 emotional regulation techniques even like physiologic stuff like yoga mind mind and body practices they can all help with that but it's like there's not like a thing it's rewiring all the stuff that has been miswired with trauma okay so someone's asking who is the person who experienced that's the question right that's the question you should answer a [ __ ] um is like a
109:00 - 109:30 meditative riddle so pretty popular ones are what is the sound of one hand clapping right it's like um yeah so I see a lot of people are asking asking particular questions about specific people who are meditation teachers we generally I'm not going to comment on them we don't talk about people we talk to people so I know I
109:30 - 110:00 commented on chrishan worthy but I can't talk to the dude um right so you can you can go like this right aha so that's it's a good example of this is kind of the pitfall of the one hand clapping because it's kind of like The Logical mind will be like haha I can defeat it but that defeats the purpose you're kind of falling into a trap yourself and you
110:00 - 110:30 think you've solved it and you haven't um yeah do I believe in life between life or past lives basically yeah um can you explain chakos colors Plus White Lines during Kundalini meditation sort of but I think I
110:30 - 111:00 won't what yoga books can you help to read to help with meditation so I don't know that yoga books are the best things to read for meditation which I know sounds kind of weird I mean you can read um you can read panel's yoga sutras I think that's a great book to read but he doesn't teach much about meditation a um what's a good book on
111:00 - 111:30 meditation I think the bear School of yoga has good books on meditation and pick the one that there are a lot of copy pasta involved so pick the one that works for you that you like what's the law of one meditation for ASD people so I saw that there was a question about meditating with music so with autism spectrum I think it's see autism spectrum disorder is so
111:30 - 112:00 patchy not everyone has the same degree of variation right so some people will have like arfid likee symptoms where they're very sensitive to certain physical Textures in the mouth other people will have you know super concrete thinking some people will have difficulty with eye contact some people will have difficulty with empathy so it's pretty patch work one thing that I will say about neurod Divergence and music is that if you have ADHD often times you need some kind of sensory
112:00 - 112:30 stimulus to calm your mind down so with people with ADHD I'll recommend sometimes keeping your eyes half open when you meditate or doing something like listening to music or walking is there something about a baseline level of stimulus that actually makes it easy for ADHD people to concentrate so in group the therapy often times what we'll do when we're discussing particular things is we find that it's useful to have people knit so I worked
112:30 - 113:00 on one unit uh a borderline personality disorder and Trauma unit where anytime we would do group Psychotherapy we would give everyone the option to knit and so we know there's something about repetitive activities or sensory stimuli that can actually help you focus the mind so I think that's where like you got to really look at the way that your mind works is Kundalini meditation dangerous yeah it
113:00 - 113:30 is um what practice would you recommend for people with irritable bowel syndrome so I'd say talk to your doctor about it and usually there are people now like the the field is good enough to where there are like Functional Medicine Specialists and IBS Specialists where you can usually find these people it was very different 20 years ago but I think that there's um a lot of Mind Body practices are very good for things like IBS I think there's studies that show that yoga and taichi can be helpful so I'd recommend those kinds of things so
113:30 - 114:00 with IBS a big part of it is reshaping your relationship with your body so the problem with IBS is that the body becomes an anxiety producing thing so when you sense things in the body that's dangerous so even gas in the bowels that can be completely benign gets interpret it as dangerous we had a lecture on psychosomatic medicine which you all should definitely check out if you're
114:00 - 114:30 interested can meditation help migraine I hope so but I haven't seen I haven't looked at the research into that and I haven't treated migrain very much with meditation oh gut health is huge from Med meditation so the question is what is the impact of gut health on meditation so let's understand something if we go back to these studies
114:30 - 115:00 right we see that right so first thing is like we look at this intense meditation correlates with all these melatonin acetylcholine glutamate nag DMT you know noradrenaline cortisol all this stuff matters for meditation now the question becomes where do we get that stuff a lot of it comes from the gut right so our our
115:00 - 115:30 um our helpful gut bacteria will do things like create neurotransmitter precursors for us and so there are some diets so there's some gut bacteria that are associated with anxiety some got bacteria that are associated with depression and stool transplants and altering your gut bacteria also leads to improvements in anxiety and improvements in depression so gut health is huge for meditation very
115:30 - 116:00 important that's also why if you look at ashrams and monasteries they all have very very specific diets and I think it's to cultivate the right kind of gut bacteria that you need to attain the higher States in meditation are there ever new babies or they all reincarnating personally prefer either I don't know it's a great question because the number of humans on the planet is increasing great
116:00 - 116:30 question are you excited for the self-esteem lecture absolutely it's going to be great so self-esteem lecture is over on the membership side which by the way FYI we have a we started memberships about a year ago we didn't know if it was going to last but it's going great um so just a quick heads up so someone asked a question about membership so a couple of things one is a year ago we we launched memberships and the idea behind memberships is that it's a chance for us
116:30 - 117:00 to go a little bit deeper so we the community votes on which lectures I do so I'll prepare lectures based on what y'all want to hear about um it's been a lot of work but it's been fantastic so I I want to say we have you know I think we do solid four lectures a month right for close to a year so we probably have like 50 lectures plus Q&A and stuff like somewhere around 50 um we actually have it on circles now so there's it's over
117:00 - 117:30 on the the YouTube side or on circles and the cool thing about circles is because as we kept doing it and it didn't die out and more and more and more people joined um so there were a couple of problems we ran into first is that some regions are actually blocked by YouTube so we have people in this community from 121 countries around the world at a minimum that we have data on but some of those countries people can't access stuff on
117:30 - 118:00 YouTube so uh on circles yall can access it we also needed to organize the vaud library so there's like you can find what you're looking for because now there's like 50 some odd videos on there um and YouTube doesn't let us do that so there's like more of a step-by-step stuff and there's also a centralized community space so we asked people and we even talked to YouTube about what features we were looking for right but it takes them time to build it and circles has a lot of the stuff built in so youall can take your
118:00 - 118:30 pick but circles also has spaces for discussion events you can work on quests together there's a lot of cool stuff in there um and then we got some feedback that Discord was like kind of too confusing because it was like stitched together across different places it's like some stuff is on Discord and some stuff is on the YouTube community so everything is kind of like in a One-Stop shop on on Circle but if yall like the YouTube experience yall are welcome to stay there um
118:30 - 119:00 hello okay I was just informed that it is not circles it is circle so it is on Circle so um on there y'all so don't confuse the two I guess they're very different um so there are topic primers courses groups for skill in community building and stuff like that that we're
119:00 - 119:30 hoping to build out on that platform too okay well how am I feeling I'm feeling like my voice is done for the day y'all stool transplant yeah OCD meditation it's a good question I haven't treated a whole lot of OCD from an integrated perspective I think we got to try to
119:30 - 120:00 find people who are a little bit better at that than I am but I'm I'm I'll definitely start working on it um but yeah thank you all very much for coming I hope this was helpful you know and let's take a break and I'll see yall I think on Friday so thank you guys everybody for the birthday wishes if yall you know want more in-depth stuff um people do say that you
120:00 - 120:30 a lot of our content on on the membership side is a lot more uh it's deeper on the spiritual side some of it um and I think the self-esteem lecture is a really great example of something that we talked about ego we talked about identity and so then I was thinking like self-esteem is redundant right we've already spent a couple hours talking about ego and identity but I actually was like okay if you guys want a lecture let me see what I can find and it actually turned out great so ego identity and self-esteem are actually
120:30 - 121:00 very different um and so I'm super excited about the self-esteem lecture because I think it's going to be awesome and I found a lot of cool stuff and it makes sense so I think it's sometimes also like you know talking about it once doesn't land with everyone but looking at what's the relationship between ego identity and self-esteem and I think we're also seeing that when we approach it from two or three different angles like people are like really stitching it together better and I'm seeing a really really heartening amount of like understanding so um yeah that's how I
121:00 - 121:30 feel about the self-esteem lecture thanks for asking and we'll see yall on Friday y'all take care everybody uh yeah I people are asking about Karma so we talk about a lot of that stuff I think there's a deep I think we did a deep dive into Karma on on the membership side so if you all are interested in that check it out okay take care everybody