We’re looking to create an environment to support the body’s innate ability to heal. Um, the body has this capacity to self-regulate. We call it balance. And when it’s doing this well, um, we have health and vitality.
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Thank you. Um, again to the AAC for having me on their series called To The Point. My name’s Lorne Brown and a little bit about myself. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine. So my clinic is in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. It’s called Acubalance Wellness Center. I’m the founder of healthy seminars where we offer online continuing education. I’m the chair of the integrated fertility symposium. And I’m the author of this book of my past experience called missing the point why acupuncturists fail and what they need to know to succeed. And I’m a passionate about learning and passionate about consciousness work. And today I wanted to share with you, um, three mind hacks that your patients will love and you’ll love as well. If you incorporate these into your daily life. Um, my background also that I didn’t mention a moment ago is I’m also a trained clinical hypnotherapists.
So I really love working with the mind. Now, the reason I think this was real valuable tools to share with you for you yourself personally, and for your patients is because our whole goal often is to support the body’s innate ability to heal. Right? We understand this as Chinese medicine practitioners, that our bodies have this innate ability to heal. We’re not trying to override it. We’re not trying to suppress symptoms. We’re looking to create an environment to support the body’s innate ability to heal. Um, the body has this capacity to self-regulate. We call it balance. And when it’s doing this well, um, we have health and vitality. And when we ha when we catch a cold or we have an injury, we rebound, we recover. And if our body Lee loses this ability to self-regulate to a disability to heal, then we get a cold or we get, um, an injury.
But then we see this with our patients. They don’t heal, they don’t recover. And so these three mind tacks, I’m going to share with you how they’re going to support the body’s innate ability to be heal. And often I’ll share with my patients, you know, cause I want to educate them on why they’re going to use Chinese medicine and how those will benefit them. So I’m explaining some of our philosophies, um, how we see the body. And so one of them is your body has an innate ability to heal. And I often say, if you get a cut, you don’t sit there and stare at your hand and say, he’ll he’ll he’ll know, your body knows how to do this on its own. It can do this. And if you get a really serious kind of big gash, you may need stitches, but the stitches does not create the healing.
What that thread does is it creates an environment to support the body’s innate ability to heal by bringing the tissue together. It creates an environment which allows the body to do its job, to heal. And I often say Chinese medicines like that, red, we’re going to create an environment to support your body to heal. So the reason these three mind hacks are crucial in life. When we feel stressed, we often call this like cheese stagnation. Um, some people in the conscious world call this resistance or friction. You know what it feels like when you’re out of balance, you’re feeling stress. It doesn’t feel good. You can tell. And when you are in flow and she is flowing, you feel inspired. Your, your chest feels open. And like, there’s this expanse to you versus this tight contraction. So you have this built-in mechanism when you are off track and we call that stress or cheese stagnation.
And so when you think about our autonomic nervous system, this is the part that’s doing the healing, right? This is the part where you bite an Apple, but you don’t think about what digestive juices need to be released. You don’t have to think about what nutrients get absorbed and what waste gets eliminated. This is part of the subconscious mind is the body, the autonomic nervous system. When you sleep at night, your blood pumps, your heart pumps, I should say, in your blood circulates, you don’t have to think about that. And so really this innate ability to heal our goal, if we’re thinking of the body like a garden is if there’s weeds, we want to pull these weeds out. So the plant can do its things. We may pull away obstacles. And one of them is this stress, this chiefs technician. This is really key, especially in our time, people are living in stress.
They’re watching the news and this is putting us into the fight or flight, um, uh, nervous system, the sympathetic nervous system. And when you are feeling stressed, your energy is being mobilized for survival. And if your energy is being mobilized for survival, then this energy, these resources are no longer available for healing and creativity. And so by using these three simple mind hacks, you’re going to tell your body that it is safe. And it’s going to go from that sympathetic fight or flight where it’s mobilizing for survival or to fight. And we’re going to put it into the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest and digest the breed and feed system where healing, where healing can happen. And when we think about our medicine, it sets us up so beautifully because we understand the mind body connection. It’s bi-directional. So your physical being your physical can impact your mental, emotional, and the mental emotional can impact your physical it’s bi-directional.
And if you’re going to use these tools for yourself, um, I will share with you that you will also start to find more success in your life because by getting yourself into alpha brainwave. So parasympathetic alpha, brainwaves, sympathetic high beta overwhelmed brain brainwaves. When you’re in the alpha brainwaves, you get to tap into parts of your mind. That’s not normally available to you. These areas of creativity, that research is showing in these cool ideas. Ideas can just pop into your head that you get to grab and run with. And we mentioned that when you’re in the parasympathetic, you’re going to free up your resources for healing. Because if you’re in the sympathetic, in that high beta overwhelm, then your energy is being mobilized and it’s not available for healing because it thinks it needs to survive, but there is no survival benefit when you’re usually in this there, you’re not about to get eaten by wild animals.
So often this stress response that we have, we’re thinking about something that’s happened to us. We’re worried about something that we think may happen to us, but you really, there is no survival benefit to be engaging this stress response right now, it’s not going to help us, um, jump out of a moving car for example. And so we have to relearn or have to train our bodies to regularly elicit the relaxation response and by doing so, your patients will get more benefit from your treatment because our goal is to support their innate ability to heal. And so if we are teaching in these simple tools and they’re coming to your treatment for dietary therapy, Twain, acupuncture, mocks are herbal. They will get so much more from your treatment. If you also teach them these tools and who doesn’t want to feel good. So in my experience, patients on the table, and it takes a minute or two to teach them each one of these.
So every session I teach them one out of the three and I have many more I’m teaching you today, three of them and with the needles in and resting on a table. And then I give them this little mind hack that they can take home with them. Well, just on the table, they feel amazing. So the healing is amplified. It makes them want to continue the treatment because who doesn’t want to feel good. And they’re going to get so much more of the treatment because you put the needles in today. But if you’re not going to see them for a week later, you want to have that momentum. And if they’re using these simple mind hacks, then they’re going to benefit from this. And we remind our patients. It’s never, the it’s never the stress or the condition that causes the problem. It’s not, COVID, it’s not your clinic being closed.
It’s not a divorce that’s happening. It’s not bad weather. There’s always everything that happens is neutral. And then we give it meaning. So then we have a perception. It’s always our perception of the event that causes stress, not the actual stressor. It’s our perception, how we perceive what’s happening. And as soon as we have that perception, then we get a mental, emotional response. And it’s either positive or negative based on what’s happened. Often the response is based on programming. I say subconscious programming. So you see the world through the lenses of your subconscious program that you inherited, whether it’s negative or positive. And then you kind of have these electrical changes in the heart and the nervous system, which will affect your immune and hormonal response, which then affects a physiological effect. So your thinking leads to emotions. Emotions are, um, our end results of chemical reactions and these impact your DNA, your genetics, they turn on and off genes epigenetics. So your thoughts and feelings, positive thoughts and feelings, negative thoughts, and feelings can impact your biology, your gene expression, and turning you on towards health or turning your ons more towards disease and learning to elicit these relaxation responses throughout the day on a daily basis. As we mentioned, frees up your resources, your energy for healing and for creativity. So here’s the three, and then we’re going to practice them. And so I’m going to explain to you why I use each of these and why they’re kind of my favorite three.
And then I’m going to encourage you to
Work through these with me. The intention I’ll set out is that these are simple. They are powerful, and they are effective. Everybody likes the powerful and effective. This simple, ironically simple often has the risk of being ignored or dismissed because they are so simple. You know, in our life, we, things need to be difficult. We need things to be complicated. And my practice, why I think I kind of skip around the room is I don’t do complicated. So if you like complicated as a patient or as a student of mine, you don’t tend to gel with me. We don’t resonate because my frequency is about simple. I want things to be as simple as possible. And so, um, these are going to be very simple. So the first one we’re going to talk about is just called shaking it out. And there’s been some research on this. There’s some, um, books written on this and an interesting enough, um, I, the, the author of the book, I think it’s the tiger tail, but it it’s skipping my mind. Um, but that does not matter. Um, I’ll still teach you the technique and why we want to shake it out. When you go into this fight or flight, you’re in high beta, you’re in overwhelm, you’re in the sympathetic nervous system. The energy is being mobilized. This is a massive
Amount of energy. And
They, there are stories of mothers lifting cars off their children. And then the next day they can’t budge the car. This is an amazing amount of energy. And if you’re stressing yourself out through your thinking, again, there’s no survival benefit. You get all this energy because your body’s going to respond as if you’re being attacked by a wild animal. And you have all this energy, but it doesn’t get discharged in the wild with animals. Cause this is where this was observed. When an animal has a stressful experience, it’s fighting. So it’s discharging the energy it’s fighting or it’s running. And often what they’ve observed in the wild is animals. After there’s been a stressful experience, they see them shaking, twitching, everything out. And this is a way of discharging this excess energy. Because if you hold it in your cells, it leads to disease. We need to discharge Y yoga, chigong running exercises, healthy for you.
You’re discharging the energy. And so you can purposely do this. And so if you’re at your computers there, I invite you to stand up. Um, I know that I take myself probably a little bit out of camera, but I’ll come back to the whole Sarah. But if I was going to stand up, I’m going to move myself back and you really want to kind of pound yourself, like pound your heels to the ground and shake it, or really shaken up Twitch to edge. And you want to do that for about three minutes. I do this for patients sometimes before we put the needles in just because they’ve had a stressful experience, they’re telling me their stressful story and we just get them to shake it out like a duck. It was a story I share with my, when my son was a toddler, he was really stressed out.
And so you can do this. If you have young kids, um, he was upset about something and he was having his tantrum again. He was a young kid here. This is like before age of five and I’m listening to him and I say, Hey, let’s shake it out like a deck. And we start to shake and he’s crying. He’s looking at me and I go, come on, let’s shake it out. Let’s shake our tooshie sir, shaking our tooshie. And he starts shaking. He starts because children are in the moment. They’re great. They’re not like us. They don’t have all this baggage yet. And within 30 seconds, he is shaking, shaking his tail, his duck tail, and he is laughing. And he’s out of that experience. Same thing for us as adults. It’s a great, great way to create a change in state and to discharge the energy, to get you out of that high beta sympathetic and getting yourself more into that parasympathetic.
So remember I said simple, powerful, effective. Is that not simple? So I hopefully you have, um, stood up and you’ve tried this out just now just shake it out for three to five minutes, mind hack number two, the breath. I love the breath because it’s always with us and it is free. And the reason the breath is so important is again, as part of the autonomic nervous system. So as you’re listening to this lecture, um, you’re not thinking, Oh, I need to inhale and I need to exhale. I need to inhale. I need an exhale. It happens all on its own. You don’t have to really think about it. You sleep at night. When you go unconscious, you continue to breathe. You do not have to think about it. Your heart’s part of your autonomic nervous system too. And if I asked you to slow down your heart or stop your heart for four seconds, most of you, maybe one or two of you, of your super monks, um, cannot do that.
Um, I’m assuming none of you on here can do that, but your breath, you can control your breath. And so, although your breath is part of your autonomic nervous system, you do have some voluntary control over it to a degree. And by changing your breathing, you can communicate to your nervous system that you are safe because when you go into that survival mode, that fight or flight is your eyes. Pupils, change, blood flow changes, your breathing changes. And if you can, in the moment, start to change your breathing. It’s a mind hack. And if the body’s breathing a certain way, it tells the nervous system, Hey, we’re safe here because remember most of the stress responses we experienced, there is no survival benefit. It’s like, you know, when you pass a car on a highway and you accelerate, they say current enthusiasts, that that’s actually beneficial, healthy for the vehicle to clean up the exhaust or the engine.
I don’t know, I’m not a car enthusiast, but they say every once in a while, it’s really good to bring those RPMs to the read every once in a while. It’s good for your, your, your car. But if you drive a hundred miles, um, with the RPMs and red, you’re going to damage your car. So the sympathetic nervous system is not bad. It’s just that we’re in it too often. We’re driving a hundred miles with the RPMs of red and that damages the body. And so every once in a while, it’s okay. So going back to our breath, we can communicate, we can put on the brakes basically, and we can tell the body we’re safe. And there’s some literature suggesting that when you do the deep belly breath, um, it’s somehow stretching and impacting the Vegas nerve, which engages the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest and digest the breed and feed nervous system.
And they have shown through heart rate variability research, where they’re looking at the variability and the heart, looking at the autonomic nervous system. That is the exhale that’s engaging the parasympathetic nervous system. So the breathing technique that I have used, I first learned, and it’s a version of box breathing that I learned from Dr. Andrew Weil, who is a integrative MD. We spoke at a conference together many moons ago, um, at UBC. And he taught her version of this. And I’ve modified it because of the research of the long exhale is engaging the parasympathetic. So you breathe in through your nose for a count of four. Your mouth is closed. You’ll hold your breath for a count of four. And then you exhale through your mouth for a count of eight. We want the exhale to be twice as long as the inhale, because the exhale engages the parasympathetic nervous system.
The time at the roof of your mouth juice behind your front teeth. So do 26 area because we want to create that orbital circuit of the rent in the Duma. Okay. So that’s why we want to have her tongue up there. Also, I always like practical reasons because some patients don’t buy into the channels and the meridians. And so if your tongue is at the roof of your mouth, um, then it keeps you from clenching your jaw. When you are stressed, you often will punch your jaw. And if you put your tongue gently at the roof of your mouth, your lecturer close your teeth, we’ll have a little bit of separation in that will relax your jaw as well. The rhythm is up to you. If you practice this for a while, you can really have a slow rhythm of in, for four hold for four Oh for eight.
Um, I start my patients that are pretty quick rhythm because it can get them out of breath and be uncomfortable if, if the rhythms too slow at the beginning. But with, with practice, you can definitely slow it down. They say it takes about at least three of these in, for four hold for four, for eight for your brain to start to realize it’s safe. So do four to eight of these with your patients, um, sitting or laying down. And again, let’s do this together now. Um, and I’m going to add a few things to the breath that you can do as well. So I usually ask that you take a breath and just get rid of the, your mouth close into the nose. One, two, three, four, hold two, three, four. Now exhale through your mouth. One, two, three, all the way out. Five, six, seven, eight, inhale through your nose, big belly breath, three and four, hold two, three, and four.
And now slowly exhale through your mouth. It’s a gentle exhale. Like you’re almost blowing out of a straw. It’s not a forceful, it’s a very gentle, slow for count of eight and breathe in one, two, three, and four, hold two, three, and four. And as you let go, just release any tension, any worry on the exhale. As you count out to that age, just letting go of any tension. And this time as you’re breathing, I invite you to close your eyes and breathe in peace and calmness on the inhale for a count of four. And then as you hold just marinate and Bay in this calmness and peacefulness your choosing, and as your exhale, just surrender and let go of any tension, any worry and stress. And again, breathe in peace and calmness on the inhale, holding, just take it in and now surrender and let go.
Any tension, any worry on the exhale at all, the way on the eyes closed is always beneficial because when your eyes are open, you’re into an external, you’re looking at your external environment, more of a sympathetic or a high more beta brainwaves, and an inner experience. More alpha, alpha brainwaves are detached relaxation. So if you can close your eyes and start to create that inner experience, you’re just going to help elicit the relaxation response a little bit easier. Now, often what I will do is I’ll get people I’ll check in and people will notice, Oh, I feel a little dizzy, or I’m starting to feel a little different. It’s a mind hack your body can’t help itself, right? Because you’re changing your breathing rhythm. And when you breathe this way, your body tends to know that it’s a safe, relaxed time. Let’s do it again.
We’re going to add another, um, a feature to this another little mind tack. Um, so this is two, two eight two B I gave you. One is, shake it out to eight is the breath and imagining peace and calmness on the inhale and releasing tension on the exhale. This is to be part of the breath. So again, exhale and through the nose. One, two, three, four, as you inhale and hold two, three, four, and exhale out for count of eight, two, three, all the way out this time, you inhale. Keep her islands close. And as you inhale, roll your eyes up as if you’re looking through your forehead on the inhale, don’t strain that it hurts. But look as imagine if you’re looking at a moon, um, through your forehead is your eyes are up eyelids down and hold that during the whole. And as you exhale, keeping your eyes closed, lay your eyes, rest comfortably on the exhale all the way on for [inaudible].
Now roll your eyes up. One, two, three, four, eyelids down eyes up on the hold, two, three, four. And now as you exhale, let your eyes rest comfortably. And as I continue to talk, keep breathing in for four, rolling your eyes up, holding, keeping your eyes up, and then on the exhale, let your, um, your eyes rest. As you exhale the air, keeping your eyes closed the whole time. The benefit behind this, again, it’s another mind hack. When your eyes go up, if you notice your eyes are lids, you’re closing, your eyes are up. You may sense a little bit of a tremor, twitching your eyes, right? Well, this kind of mimics REM when you’re in REM sleep, how your eyes go up and there’s that bit of that, that Twitch. Again, it’s a mind tag, the body’s memories like that. Pavlov’s dog experiment, where you rang the bell for the dog.
And it was salivating. Even though there was no food there, hopefully you’ve heard of this experiment is quite old and well-known well, if you start to breathe and roll your eyes up, it takes you from a high beta into low beta unit to alpha because your body, when you do this every night, your body thinks it’s safe. It’s sleeping. You’re not asleep. If your body does not think it’s safe, your subconscious, our nervous system will have you alert. So if you are doing this, the breath remember engages the parasympathetic. We know through heart rate variability study, and you had the eye roll up. Um, then that also starts to bring you into the alpha brainwaves. And it’s just your body can’t can handle it. And not that it can’t handle it. Your body just responds to that kind of behavior. So if you do this, your body’s like, Oh, I’m safe.
I can turn off the alarm system. I’m safe, engaged parasympathetic. Now let’s do the third, um, uh, mind hack that your patients will love. And I’ll encourage you to do that as well. And it’s a form of open focus and the research comes from Les Femi, and we’re going to wrap up here. Less family did some research, trying to engage alpha brainwaves. He studied shamans. He studied Buddhism, different cultures, and he had people, uh, hooked up to the, uh, uh, the, I think there, the EEG machines, um, on their head. And I’m sorry if I got the term wrong again, a little brain lapse here, but he was measuring the brainwaves. So he’s going to see what’s going on and he couldn’t get into, um, he couldn’t get into alpha. And when he finally surrendered, um, and let go, um, he went into alpha brainwaves.
He just turned it. They just turned out automatically. So it shows you these techniques. A lot of this is about surrendering and basically getting to present moment to getting into alpha in his research though, what he also shared is what he talked about. Narrow focus and open focus when we have our eyes open and we’re focusing on the external environment and we’re very, narrow-focused, um, we’re more into the beta brainwaves. Um, and if we go high beta we’re into overwhelmed, medium, low you’re good focus, and alpha is a form of open focus. So it’s best done with your eyes close. And if you can start to sense your body parts, this is a form of awareness and open focus. So for you guys, again, I invite you to close your eyes and just do some nice breathing in. You. Don’t have to do the four, four and eight, but a nice in deep inhale belly raise and a nice, slow exhale.
And without looking at touching or moving, can you tell you have a right hand, just bring your awareness and notice if you can tell you have a right hand. Excellent. And can you tell you have a right thumb without touching, moving, or looking at it? Just, can you sense that you have a right thumb? What about a right baby finger? Just notice it, bring your awareness now to your left hand. Can you tell you have a left hand without moving or looking at it? What about our right foot left foot? How about your right ear low? Can you sense? Can you bring it up awareness to know that you actually have a right here, a little bit attached to your head, and if you’re really stressed, you’re not, it’s going to take a while to feel these things. If you’re in a high beta, this is an open focus in our awareness.
And again, it’s another mind hack because if you start to sense your body, then you are going from externally referred, looking into your environment and you’re going inside. And the practice of going inside is an open focus. And it’s more of a low beta alpha theta brainwave activity. And now you’re engaged in the parasympathetic nervous system. And from here in my practice, I jump off and do belief change work because once I can get them into alpha, then they are now in that suggestible stage, they’re in that state of ability to heal. And you’ve now allowed the innate ability to heal to you’ve amplified it. And so just like when you’re putting your acupuncture needles and by the way, acupuncture for most induces the alpha feta, they get that Accu buzz. So you’re inducing that already. For some, some patients, they get stressed. Don’t, don’t like acupuncture, you’re inducing high beta.
So some people don’t respond to our noodles, you know, this right majority do. And if you bring in the, the, um, the shake it out, if you bring in the breathing technique, if you bring in the open focus and it only takes moments, then you are going to enhance their, um, innate ability to heal their ability to self-regulate. And then if you encourage them to do this several times a day throughout the week, they are going to benefit so much more from your treatments because the autonomic nervous system is going to have more energy and resources available to them and their creativity. It’s amazing what happens to creativity. And this is why meditation is so becoming so much more popular amongst entrepreneurs is we’ve learned that by quieting the mind and engaging the alpha brainwaves, um, we can tap into areas of creativity and you don’t need to go to burning man and take psychedelics to tap in there.
Like some of the billionaires have done, um, um, in the past you, and now you can do without the residue of those drugs. You can sit there and tap in and tap into creativity, um, areas that aren’t normally available to you. And bottom line, you just start to feel happy who, who doesn’t want to feel happy, have that peace in comments anyways, that’s the wrap for today? Um, check out my website@healthyseminars.com. Um, I have lots of online courses, um, there, and also you can check out my website, lornebrown.com for more of this conscious work. And I want to remind you next up on to the point is Jeffrey Grossman. So please make sure you tune in and, um, hopefully you’ll pick up a copy of my book, missing the point and thank you for listening and please practice these three mind hacks. Your body will love you for it. And so will your patients