From Burnout to Breakthrough: The Neuroscience of Gratitude & Breaking the Stress Cycle | Thayne Martin

Welcome to the Transforming Stress Podcast. And today I'm really delighted to invite Thane Martin on the show. Thane is an experiential neuro neur experiential neuroscience architect. I know there are a lot of words. He's the CEO of it'spure.com. Thane is really passionate about helping people all around the world to transform their stress, whether it is acute or chronic, into what he calls joy, what he calls pure love and growth. So please help me welcome Tin from Phoenix, Arizona. Tin, I'm really delighted to have you on the show. Thank you so much for joining me.

Absolute pleasure, Dr. Rash. I'm a huge fan, so thank you for allowing me this privilege.

Very welcome. I would love for you to explain what it means by experiential neuroscience architect. I understand that it's neuroscience, it's based in neuroscience, but I will leave it for you to share with the listeners.

Yeah. So my company, it's purelove.com, is pioneering a new form of learning. And specifically, what we're focusing on is five levers of neuroscience, but delivered through experience. Because when we learn things by experience, we retain them. So, generally speaking, a general rule of thumb: when we create an experience and I experience something as a human being, I'm I'm taking in all of my senses at one time. And not only am I absorbing all of these senses, but I'm integrating those senses and what I'm learning into the physiological experience that I'm also getting from the body. So, what's unique about experiential neuroscience is that the exercises are designed for you to experience, to feel, to live real time. So, what I do is I design experiences that people go through. Some of them are short duration, others might take a little bit of time to complete, but it is a lived experience. And when you live the experience, you learn the experience, and then you retain the experience. So that's what I do. I create learning environments where the human being can learn in ways that'll that'll drive it to remember. That's what experiential neuroscience is. So I study neuroscience, but I don't consider myself to be a scientist like you are.

Thank you. Thank you so much for that. I think this is this is a really very meaningful work because in today's world there is there is so much amount of information around, and it's always been there for last couple of decades from the time of IT revolution, and now with AI it has gone to a completely different level that one could get personalized information. We are getting it in healthcare now but information can only be the starting point. if information was the only thing, then one could one could think that transformation would be easy, but we still do not see transformation in people. And I would like to hear from you that where does experiential neuroscience fit into that? How do we convert the information into real embodiment and transformation?

Well, I think the first thing is Dr. As you have to find those things that I call are in your shadow. So every human being has lived a life of challenges. And every time we have a challenge, we have an opportunity to write a story. And oftentimes when we were little, particularly children, when we encumbered challenges, we wrote a story about the challenge. And if we had emotionally intelligent parents that taught us that sometimes life just happens and they teach us resilience and they teach us, hey, wait a minute, that sometimes failure does not mean stop. Failure means feedback, failure means course correction, it doesn't mean stop. So emotional intelligence is built in our childhood by intelligent parents and schools that teach emotional regulation. But in the end, the problem is that we are we're emotional creatures that are not only conscious, but we're also attached to a physical thing called a body. And the challenge is that we have things that are in our mind that are not necessarily always attached to the feeling that's in the body. And so when the feeling in the body doesn't match the feeling in the mind, it leads to dysregulation. And that dysregulation is shows up in the form of shadows. Those are little things that came from my past that I wrote the wrong story for, and now I'm carrying it from my childhood into my present and then sadly into my future. So the first thing when I work with people, it's to start with awareness and let's look at those things that may have come from your life experience and what is in there that could possibly be holding you back from living your life to the fullest potential.

So the first thing you do is to bring to their awareness that they might be living the stories from the past, which in many cases could be very one-sided, which in many cases could be a very how should I how should I articulate it? It could be a very lopsided way of synthesizing the events of your life, because as you said, that if children did not learn the emotional intelligence at an early age, they could go into what we call is the fight, flight, and the freeze mode at the limbic system. And then whenever new challenges come in life, they are by default going back to the same level of the stress response, and what you were describing in scientific terms, in medical terms, chronic stress, and then what it causes is disease, whether it is physical disease or mental and emotional up here, mental and emotional health. So where do we start? Now, what I would l love to know, from you is what was your own journey that really inspired you to do what you have done in terms of bringing this great work of neuros based in neuroscience and experience.

Yeah. so it's from my life experience. I was born into a lovely family. I have an incredible mother and father, older brother, younger sister. And my life as a child was normal up until about age four or five. And then I started being groomed by another boy in my neighborhood. And grooming is ultimately what led to being assaulted as an as a young boy by an adult. So I was brutally assaulted by an adult, and that began six years of severe abuse at the hands of people that I went to church with. Sadly, I should have been safe going to church, but it wasn't a safe space for me. So my brain did what my brain was designed to do, and it protected me. And I developed coping mechanisms inside my brain to deal with the harshness of a difficult reality of being abused by people and yet also surrounded by love because I had a loving family. So ultimately, it led to some pretty challenging mental health conditions. at one point, I was diagnosed with some pretty severe disorders that caused a lot of challenges throughout my life. You know, this all happened when I was a little boy, but yet here I was in my 30s and 40s, still be encumbered by things surrounding, say, fear. Like there were people in my world that I avoided simply because of the color of their skin, the age of the person. I avoided interacting with that person because they reminded me of somebody that had hurt me. So I spent most of my life trying to outrun that, trying to find happiness, trying to stand back up after life had knocked me over. And I found addiction. I found pills, I found an establishment that was willing to medicate me. And ultimately, I know that I know that the intention was good, but I ended up with seven pillboxes. And that was alarming to me that I was operating on seven pillboxes to wake me up, to live my day, and to put me down. That was too much. Well, for me, Doc, it was a near-death experience. I had a very, very successful career in business in a number of industries, and yet despite the success on the outside, on the inside, I was broken. And that you see a lot in the professionals and the academics. We perform, we go on stages, we do what we do, and then we go back and we hide and we kind of bury those things that come from our shadows that sadly still affect us. So my life's work came from a desire to be normal. I wanted to know what it would be like to wake up and not be encumbered by ugly thoughts of self-harm or I'm not enough, or that person's better than me. I just wanted to be normal. That's what I started out. And then I had a near-death experience, Dr Ash. And I drowned in my swimming pool. I lost consciousness and I went someplace, and I have a very distinct memory of that place that I went, the knowledge that I gained there, and I brought that back. And instead of going back to corporate America, where I did very, very well, I realized that the most important thing for me to do was to not only heal myself, but to take what I had learned and help people heal themselves. And that's where my quest into experiential learning began. It began from my near-death experience and a fascination for the cosmos and a fascination about how this world has maintained perfect balance. And I'm not capable of that. And I've got to do a better job balancing because I'm not doing that so well. And that's literally what started me down the path of experiential neuroscience. And specifically, you're gonna laugh when I say this. One word, and the word was gratitude. I had taken a photograph, Dr. Kumar, of a morning sunrise, and I posted it on social media and I said to my neighbors, what are you thankful for? And I ended up getting this massive response about the positive social media and about the importance of this word gratitude. Well, gratitude was a word for me that had been used as a weapon. And so when you said the word gratitude with me, I would roll my eyes because my grandmother used it as punishment. I would have two scoops of ice cream, and before I finished that second scoop, I was already asking for more. So what did grandma say? You need to be more patient and more what? Grateful. Grateful. So pretty soon that word grateful was punishment. And I and I saw gratitude as punishment throughout most of my life. You said gratitude, I roll my eyes. So then one day I decided to get up every morning and watch the sunrise. And that's what I did. I made a I made a commitment. I would wake up for 365 days, watch every sunrise, and I was gonna learn about this word gratitude. And so I did just that. I did 365 days of podcasting in the park live, meeting strangers in the park, podcast on mental health. But the key for me was my first experience with gratitude. So I had an experience, Dr Ash, where I met somebody in the world that blew me away. And they blew me away with kindness and in such a way that I knew I had to do something different. Like normally I tried everything to learn gratitude. I wrote lists that lasted a couple days and I got irritated. So then I tried, I tried using an app, and the app was helpful, and then I felt like it was punishing me. I was getting dinged for not filing what I was grateful for today. And so pretty soon I felt like I was being chastised, and so I deleted the app. And I'm like, okay, so hey God, the thing upstairs that's supposed to be teaching me gratitude, I'm not learning it. so I guess I need some help. So please send me some help. And then one day I met an angel. I met an angel, and she was an angel. There was a young lady named Carla, and I had walked into a fast food restaurant because I needed to go to the restroom. I had been driving a long way, about an hour across town. I had a fresh cup of coffee right first thing in the morning. So by that time of time, I needed to find a place to use, and I could not find a place. That side of the city is closed off, the restrooms aren't open to the public. So I struggled. So about the time when I was literally about to lose it, I pull up to this fast food restaurant and the door was locked, which freaked me out because it should have been open. And then the woman in the front points to the front door, and I see a sign that said the side door doesn't open till 11. I look at my watch, it's 10:30. Great, I'm coming in the front door. So as I'm walking in, she gives me four numbers. She says 4263. I don't know what that is, but I'm beelining it to the back of the restaurant where I can find the restroom. So I get there, and lo and behold, I needed that code. Well, that code was at the top of my brain because she gave it to me. So I got in, took care of business, and the reality is when you take care of business, you're gonna feel better. And I did feel better. And then I walked up to this lady and I had my first experiential learning moment. And what I did was as I thought to myself, I'm not learning gratitude. I need to thank this woman. I need to thank this woman from the bottom of my heart because she literally just saved my bacon. Because had I not gotten into the restroom, what I did, had I needed to go back up there to get the code from her, I wouldn't have made it. I would not have made it. And then sadly, Dr. Kumar, that would have triggered me because of the humiliation that I endured as a child. Had I endured something like that, it would have ended up with complete disassociation for me. I would have disassociated and I would have most likely gone catatonic. That was the response that came from my body because of the trauma that I endured at the hands of a pedophile organization. Okay. So it was significant what this lady did. And so I decided to pour my heart into her. And I used her name and I said, look, hey, my name is Thane Martin, and I don't know you, and you don't know me. I see you that your name is Carla. But Carla, I before I order anything, I want to thank you. And I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart because you did something for me, and I don't think you know what you did, but it was significant to me. And so I explained that I needed to go to the restroom really bad. And I also explained that when I was a little boy, I was humiliated by people that hurt me. And one of the ugliest triggers for me would have been had I accidentally wet my pants, because as a child, I would have been beaten by an abuser. So the mere fact that she took the time out of her day for a complete stranger just to give me the code, that was just something that she didn't have to do. She did that from the kindness of her heart. She didn't make me buy something, which she could have easily done. She helped me because of the goodness that rested here. So I said to her, I don't know that you see yourself in the right light. I know you stand behind that counter and you see yourself selling hamburgers. I said, but you're actually doing a lot more than that because you actually changed my life today. Because had I not gotten the code to that restroom, I would have disassociated literally right here in the lobby of your restaurant. I would have gone catatonic as a trigger from the response of humiliation. But instead, what I got was kindness and kindness from you. So about that time, I grabbed my wallet and I had a hundred dollar bill and I carry cash so that I can give it away because it makes more sense and brings me more joy to give money away than to keep it for myself, especially when I don't need it. So I looked at her and I made eye contact and I said, Hey, Carla, I want to acknowledge you in a way that I think will have meaning to you. Something tells me that this hundred dollar bill will have value to you because I know that you're an amazing person, and you showed kindness and love and gratitude to me, and I don't want to return that. So I'm gonna give you this hundred dollars on one condition that you spend it on yourself, because I know that you're the type of person that would take care of everybody else in this line that didn't have money. So promise me you'll take care of yourself. And then I let go of the bill. And when I let go of the bill, I got a physiological response in my body that I've never had before, ever. And I will also say, Dr Ash, that in my travels of living life, I have tried a number of alternative substances, some which weren't legal. But what I would tell you is that this feeling that I got from that interaction with a stranger was so profound, it literally made me weep. And I began weeping with a perfect stranger at the counter of a fast food restaurant. And I was so deeply moved and filled with love, I had to figure out what this feeling was and where did it come from? Because I felt the most amazing I'd ever been. So that was my first quote exercise in experiential neuroscience. And I wanted to figure out could I replicate the feelings that I created in my body? Because I created them what? Naturally, naturally, I got this feeling. And not only that, but it was abundance. I've never felt that happy. I've never felt that much love. So I went out into the world that day and I went up to another person, a coworker, and I tried to create gratitude with him. And sure as heck, it felt good, but what I didn't get was the physiological response from the body. I wanted this tingle, I wanted my vagus nerve to activate and wave like it did. In that interchange with Carla. And I wanted to know why. And so then I started studying neuroscience because I realized that there had to be something specific taking place for me to experience the most profound love and joy and connection I'd ever felt. And then I started studying these little things called hormones and these little things called peptides. And then I started studying the parts of the brain and my amygdala and my prefrontal cortex and my default mode network. And I started realizing that my brain was sick. My brain was full of self-fanning beliefs and stories that I had told myself as a dysregulated child, doing the best I could, but I had a lot of things that were false, that my amygdala automated as if they were true. And then I started realizing that my amygdala was not always my best friend. And that in fact it would lie to me and keep me from experiencing things that could bring me joy and happiness. But I closed those off because of the self and beliefs and the stories that I had written as a child. So you see, we all have an average of 68,000 thoughts a day. I found that in a study at UC Berkeley. So 68,000 thoughts a day, only 5% make it to our conscious awareness. So if 95% of who I am and how I show up in the moment, in the now, is based upon some system that I barely even know, I better start looking into these 95% of these thoughts that are being automated by my brain. Because chances are what it is automating is incorrect. And so I started realizing that I had begunten trapped by my own brain. The brain that had protected me, the brain that had wired me to be safe from being abused by ugly people was the same brain that had trapped me and closed me off so bad that I wasn't experiencing life. That led to depression, that led to addiction, that led to dopamine addiction, and frankly, really bad behavior. So I for me, I tried to outrun the ugly things that happened to me. And then ultimately it was a suicide attempt, Dr. Kumar. It was a suicide attempt in my early 40s that made me realize that I was not okay. And that I had many things in my subconscious brain that had been put there by a mind that did the best that it could. But I had to re figure out how to reinvent myself. And then I leaned into experiential neuroscience and I learned how to duplicate that crazy phenomenon. And from that phenomena, quarter of a million dollars, and two and a half years later, I know how to replicate that phenomenon. And I've been studying it, and it is amazing what I have learned in the way that our body can heal ourselves using experiential neuroscience. So that's how I got there. So I've got this point.

Well, thank you so much for sharing such personal stories. And really they were very touching. And thank you for being vulnerable and I'm sorry to hear what you went through. and now what you are doing is trying to help millions of people around the world who had childhood adverse experiences and adverse childhood experiences. and you mentioned that when you had that near-death experience, that near drowning experience, you went to a place and from that place you brought something which you are now trying to share. Could you please tell us something more about it?

Yeah. So I wrote something called the equation of life and abundant happiness. We call it Ella for short. It's an acronym. Ella. And Ella is a philosophy, it is a decision system that came to me while laying on the side of the pool that evening underneath the stars. I realized that everything in the universe maintained perfect balance, and that the language of the universe was actually math. Literally, everything in existence can be described with math. And balance is described and defined by math. Literally, there is math in every element of life. That was something that was a profound discovery in my near-death experience because I was looking at how could this incredible universe maintain perfect balance? Because the universe is always in perfect balance. Always. So it led to this understanding that if the universe can maintain perfect balance and mathematics is the language of the universe, what is balancing is physical matter. And human emotional energy is also physical matter. So would the mathematical and scientific principles that govern physical matter therefore apply to human emotion and our lives? Because amazingly, it matches perfectly. And that's what the equation of life and abundant happiness is. It's an understanding of applying the five operators of mathematical expression, which we all know. That's the beauty of this, is that you learned this in elementary school. So you already know it. So I'm going to teach it to you very quickly. Dr Ash, what's the first mathematical operator that you learned when you were a little kid? Do you remember the first thing?

Is it would be something like, are you referring to multiplication, division, addition? That kind of a thing?

Yeah. So the first thing that we're taught is in the kindergartens is addition. We learn one plus one. Okay. So addition in life is about adding those things that bring forth goodness and joy. That is addition. Then we learn subtraction. Subtraction is letting go of those things that don't serve you, that don't bring forth joy and letting them go. So what the creator of stairs, which everybody gets to define what that is, okay. The thing that I learned is our job is to maintain balance in the moment, which is where awareness comes in. Because if you cannot stay balanced and aware in this present moment, then you can't actually learn how to become emotionally intelligent. So awareness is the key to anything. Because if I'm not aware and focused, how can I change my behavior? So that's why awareness always comes first. So my awareness is that I add and subtract what I need in this moment to bring forth balance. What do I add? What do I subtract? So think emotional energy. I'm angry right now. I'm hot. What do I need to add? And what do I need to let go of? I need to add oxygen because I'm holding my breath because I'm angry. So the first thing I'm gonna do is add oxygen and begin breathing and give my prefrontal cortex that charge of energy that it needs. So I'm adding breath. And the second thing I'm doing is I'm letting go of this physiological feeling of wanting to reach across and strangle you. Okay. I'm letting that go and I'm balancing this in the moment. Okay, add subtract. So we always have to add subtract in the moment. Then we move into embodiment. Embodiment is about taking action and intention and moving to the next thing that you learned in grade school: multiplication. You learned how to multiply. You multiplied and you memorized all those times tables. And what multiplication is in the equation life and abundant happiness is growth. It's about expansion. It's recognizing that if I take my action and intention and I embody that and I in and I and I bring in the efforts of my family and friends in the world around me. Oh, and I'm gonna engage the higher power. I'm gonna let the higher power know what I'm doing. That is multiplication. So multiplication is about taking our balanced goodness and growing it in a neutral manner and making it bigger. So now I've got a much larger piece of pie, right? Let's use math. I started out with a hundred action and intention, embodiment, I now have a thousand. What did we learn after multiplication? We learned division. And division is about taking this expanded goodness and sharing it with the world around us. But there's one really important thing that we have to talk about. That's called heartfelt abundance. Okay. Heartfelt abundance is a cost that comes from the heart. All right. So think about that example. I had a hundred bucks, I took it and I created a thousand. Now, of that thousand, how much do I need to pay my rent this week? I need about$600 of that thousand to set aside to pay my mortgage at the end of the month. So I need$600 for that and to cover the rest of my bills. Okay, so the other thing we know is as human beings, we like safety. We have to have a sense of safety in order for us to function optimally. So we also know that we need a little bit more than that$600 to feel safe. So for me, that heartfelt cost is another$200. So I need$800 out of that thousand. That is my heartfelt abundance, which means that there's$200 of what? Excess goodness, and I need to distribute it. That's division. So where does it go? It goes back into the world of which it came. Remember, you took it from the world. The world helped you create it. So now you give it back to those that need it. Maybe I give that extra$100 to my sister because she needs it that week, because she's struggling. Okay, you can have the hundred bucks because I don't need it. Why? Because I know that more money will be there for me next week. That's called faith. It's amazing how that works, right? All right. So division is about sharing this expanded goodness and putting it back into the world, taking what we need a little bit more to be safe, but never holding on to the excess. When we put it back into the world, it just allows the system to keep going. You see, when we hold on to the excess, we starve the system. And then what happens is the middle disappears, and then we move to the extremes. And that's the world that we live in today. We can see it, right? We're gonna have the world's first trillionaire, and yet we have people in other countries that have distended stomachs. That's not okay. There's a responsibility with wealth, and let's be real about that. There is a responsibility with wealth, and those of us that have it, we are that is a responsibility to do the right things with it. All right, so adds attract, multiply, divide. That brings you to the last operator, which is the equal sign. And the equal sign is what I learned in my first experiential learning when I met Carla that day at the fast food restaurant. What Carla taught me was gratitude. And gratitude is neuroscience. Gratitude makes your amygdala shut up and it makes your prefrontal cortex take over. A word could literally change the molecular structure of my brain. How is that possible? Okay, I need to learn about this word gratitude, because gratitude is neuroscience. So that's where I started studying. And then I started studying this peculiar phenomenon and could I replicate it? And then I learned that I could replicate it and that I could teach it to people. And when they learned the phenomenon, they literally learned how to fill their body with the most intense form of love known to man: unconditional love and gratitude. With who? Strangers. That's right. The most powerful healer in the mind, in the body, is love. It is love, love, love. But the problem with love today in the world, you can't just love people anonymously. Because if you did, you're gonna get knocked in the head. You can't walk up to people and just be loving and kind. They think that you have an agenda and you're trying to do something that's unscrupulous. That's the truth. So, how do you get there? Gratitude. It's gratitude, and gratitude is the spark and fuel for love. And gratitude is neuroscience. I started studying gratitude, and I started studying love, and I realized that love is such a powerful pro-social emotion, that is there a way that I could teach the average human being how to overcome their trauma and the crap that they had as a as a child, if I could teach them the power of unconditional love. So when I realized how important experiences were into remembering things, because you got to realize I have a brain that doesn't remember like most people. Okay. My brain was damaged because of what happened to me as a child, which means that remembering things is challenging for me. I had a brain that would go, nope, you don't want to recall because you might bring that ugly monster back with you. So don't remember that thing. So I developed a brain that was literally in and out, which means that reading a book is challenging for me. And I told you that earlier, Dr Ash. But I love your book because of the way that you wrote it. It's it's it's designed for it's a great read because anybody can adopt it and learn it. It's got the right amount of mix of photographs. You got right brain and left brain. It's brilliant. Your book is brilliant, Dr Ash. Brilliant. Thank you so much, Tim. Thank you. Absolutely. Okay, so what is experiential learning? I use 101 exercises that are carefully designed so that you can find those things that are hidden in your shadows. Now, I'll give you a great example. I went to lunch with a CEO and I was talking about what we do because you want to change culture, you have to change the hearts and minds of the employees. Corporate America is getting it all wrong. We've been hiring motivational speakers that come in and do a seminar and leave. But the problem is when they leave, so does the motivation. So if you really want to change an organization, you have to change the hearts and minds of the people, the frontline workers. How do I teach that frontline workage to balance their emotional energy so that when they show up at work, they're not bringing the challenges from their life into work? Because that's what affects our culture. When I get an argument with my wife before I come to work, do I bring that negative energy with me? Yeah. And then do I take it out on my staff or maybe my patients? Yeah, let's be real. But what if I could better manage my emotional energy at home so that when I showed up at work to work with these patients, I wasn't hot. I wasn't angry. I learned how to balance my emotional energy in a positive way. That is what you learn through experiential learning. Because you only retain 10% of what you read. You retain generally 90% of what you experience. And if you can trigger all five of your learning experiences at one time, your body will do an amazing thing. It's going to remember all of it, which means it's a more pertinent and impactful memory because it's been deeply encoded with what? Emotion. Emotion. So every exercise that I do is driven around emotions, specifically the pro-social emotions. So what I do is in 101 exercises, every single one of them starts out with safety, polyvagal safety. Okay. If the body and the mind doesn't feel safe, they're not gonna learn. So the first thing that has to be present in every exercise is safety. And that is paramount in everything that I do. Psychological safety, number one. The second thing that has to be in every exercise is there has to be something in it that you resist. Okay? Because when I ask you to do something that's an experience, I want your brain to predict failure or average. Because it will, when I ask you to do something that's a little bit outside of your comfort zone, your subconscious mind is gonna go, you want me to do what? And it's gonna draw a picture. And the picture that it draws is going to be failure or average. I need that to happen. Okay. All right. So now in my experience, I've got safety. My brain has predicted average or failure. Okay, so I've got step one and step two. And the other thing that I've done is I've created enough tension in the exercise to make my brain enter that very important, malleable phase where it's paying attention. And in the work that I'm doing, I know that there are certain hormones in play in this physiological state, one of them, which is vasopressin. Vasipressin, in my opinion, is the most misunderstood hormone peptide out there because it's heavily involved in prosocial emotion. And I've seen the studies that show it. But what's very interesting is what happens when vasopressin begins working with other hormones. The two most important ones, oxytocin and dopamine. So when you get oxytocin and dopamine present with vasopressin and acetylcholine, you get magic, okay? Because the body is aware, the body is awake, the body is learning. Okay, so now I'm paying attention in this exercise. Thane asked me to do something that's a little outside of the box. So I'm paying attention, okay? And then, oh, wait a minute. I just experienced unconditional love and kindness and gratitude. And I predicted failure and average. Oh my gosh, this is love. Release the dopamine, release the oxytocin. That's literally what the body does in these exercises. Because I deliver each exercise with a pro-social emotion. And that pro-social emotion is the hardest, the biggest healer of all. Love. It's love. So in this exercise, I predicted I would experience average or failure with this other human being, which is a stranger that I do not know. Okay? And I just created goodness and gratitude with a stranger. And what I got was love and dopamine. So the body responds and you get this cocktail of goodness and it waves your vagus nerve. You feel it. It's euphoria. So what does the brain do? Well, it says, number one, we predicted this incorrectly. I predicted average or failure, but Thane, you just showed me unconditional love and gratitude. And oh my gosh, that is important. We better remember that. We better remember it.

So what you are helping is shifting people just from awareness to embodiment.

Yes.

That they feel through the those strong emotions inside their inside their bodies through the 101 exercises you have you have engineered or you have architected. Have I got this correctly? I really I really am very fascinated with what you said that everything in the universe is maths. I've I've never heard of that before. And when you explained it, I found it really fascinating, and actually it made sense. Actually, what when you described it, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division equal to it really made sense. So that is absolutely profound. Because first of all, taking people from awareness to embodiment, because we know that knowledge alone does not shift behavior. I mean, if it if it was doing there are so many small Smart people in the world who are stuck and they are in their they are in their stuckiness for years and years and decades in spite of knowing what is correct. Instead of knowing what is correct, intellectually knowing something, but still not able to shift. So really found that really very profound. Thank you for sharing that thing. One question I would like to ask you that when you take people through these experience experiential phenomena, if I'm putting it correctly, can is there a kind of universality that you can replicate in every person, or it's very individual that some people are able to do it better than others?

Great question. So I've learned with the protocol itself that it takes practice, and so what I would tell you is you know, my cards, I have 101 cards, they're organized into eight behavior systems. So they move into things like I have cards that deal with identity, I have cards that deal with courage, I have cards that deal with empathy, I have cards that deal with awareness, I have cards that deal with multi-awareness integration of multivariables at one point. So each section or area of the cards teaches something different, but they're all designed, you know, again, to help you find the shadow. The biggest, the biggest problem we have as human beings is our brains protect the things that we don't want to know about. The brain protects us. So when you do traditional therapy, of which I did decades of it, I will tell you that only maybe 30 to 40 percent of what was in my shadow actually came out of the shadow in traditional therapy. It wasn't until I used experiential learning that all of the shadows came out because you can't hide from an experience, you see. When I ask you to do something, if you have resistance to it, that means that you have a self-limiting belief, something in your childhood that's keeping you from enjoying it. There's a reason, right? So for I'll give you an example. I have a card called Dance Out Loud. Okay, Dance Out Loud is a fun card. And in Dance Out Loud, I'm gonna ask you to go into a public place and I'm gonna ask you to put on some music, and I'm gonna ask you to be visible, and I'm gonna ask you to dance out loud. That's right. Right here, right now, you're gonna put on some music, and you're just gonna start dancing and having a good old time by yourself, by yourself in public. Wait, you want me to do what? Yeah. We're gonna dance right now in the middle of the lobby of the hospital. You and I, and we're gonna dance and we're gonna laugh and we're gonna have a good time, and we're gonna do it right now. Oh, no, no, no, no. I'm not doing that. People will think differently, people will look at me, people will stare at me. Oh, oh, so there's a self-feminine belief. Why do you feel shame and humiliation? Because you want to dance out loud and express joy and happiness. That tells me you got a self-familian belief that somewhere in your childhood, you did dance out loud, and your mother or your father admonished you and made you feel very small. And at that time you wrote the story that if I dance and exact and act exuberance, that I will that I will attract negative attention and I will be humiliated. So from that day forward, I never danced out loud anymore. In fact, I don't dance at all because I don't want to be humiliated. So the next time in eighth grade, when you got asked to go dance with that little boy that you wanted to go dance with, you didn't dance with them. Why? Because you told the story that if I dance, people will laugh at me. My mother made that happen. So you see where these come from? So with dance out loud, I asked them to go into a public space and start dancing out loud. Okay. And I did this exercise recently with a woman, and she went out to a gas station and she opened up the doors of her car and she started dancing at the gas pump because she knew there were people that could see her from the street, but she did it because she felt safe. And lo and behold, she started dancing at the gas pump. And then a stranger pulled up at the gas pump next to her and she panicked. She's like, Whoa, what do I do now? And then she realized she invited him to dance too. So now this lady's dancing at a gas pump on the side of the at a at a gas station. This guy pulls up and she says to him, Hey, I'm taking a course in emotional intelligence and I'm learning how to let go of a self-limiting belief of being humiliated in public. Do you want to dance with me? And so the guy got of his motorcycle and came over to that side of the dance and he started dancing with her. And she recorded it. And then she got in the car and she called me and she's like, Zane, you're not gonna believe what I just did. And she was euphoric and she was happy. And what did she just experience? She just experienced that she could dance out loud and that it was actually a positive thing. And what did she get? Love. So, what just happened there, Dr Ash, was the physiological response that came from the body of fear and shame. Just got a new story immediately updated deeply into the memory because we experienced joy and happiness inside of the memory consolidation window that was opened because of the perceived risk. Okay. So then imagine the very next day I asked her to go begin creating gratitude with strangers. And before she couldn't do it, but after Dance Out Loud and a couple of other exercises, she was able to go into public and create gratitude with strangers and thank them for how they're showing up in their life. That woman today is completely on fire. In two weeks, I completely reinvented herself by experiences. Because when the body learns, the brain remembers, right? And that's really the key. That's the key.

Thank you so much for sharing that thin. Really profound, but of course, it has to be contextual and with done with awareness. But I completely get that there is that release in that which can be which can be really profound. so then thank you for sharing that. And you know, earlier what we were talking about, we started talking about the stress, how people are holding stress in their bodies from something which would have happened in the past, sometimes in very remote past, something which I describe in the boiling frog metaphor and the book I in the two books I did on that topic. Now what is what is the way or what strategies is that one could break that boiling frog cycle? And I know a lot of things you mentioned just now in the last half an hour, 40 minutes are so intuitively aligned with breaking that cycle because what happens in successful people, the ultra-successful people, they are adapting, or shall we say, maladaptive, maladapting. And those are those vicious behavioral loops which one is trying to uncouple with the positive experiences, experiential learnings which you have crafted. So could you speak a little bit about breaking that vicious cycle of stress?

Yeah, so I mean the reality is when you when you realize that in any moment you can balance anything and achieve stability, that is ultimately the goal that I try and teach everybody. That no matter what happens, in any moment, you can throw anything at me and I can balance this with perfection. I do not have to lose my composure, I do not have to lose my focus, my awareness. I do not have to give in to what the body is necessarily wanting to do. So, you know, I think the thing I love about your book is how it references how micro stresses and these little things that build up throughout our lives. And they're little things, they're little self-fanning beliefs, they are little failures where I failed at something and I wrote the story, and then I embellished the story, and then the next thing you know, I'm closed off in life, and I'm not experiencing the fullness that life could offer because I've gotten closed off. So becoming aware of your present moment and being aware that you can balance anything at any time. What do I add? What do I subtract? What do I multiply? What do I divide? And what can I do at this exact moment to balance the emotional energy? Where can I infuse kindness, love, and gratitude into this present moment to make it better? Because kindness, love, and gratitude will fix every situation, every single one of them. And gratitude is probably the strongest of them all because it creates respect. Like I love there was an example in your book of a doctor who was constantly grumpy. I think it was Dr. Damiana, or was it Damiania? Yeah, I think that's his name. Yeah, and I and I when I read about that character in your book, I was thinking of a gentleman that I used to work for. And that was a gentleman that struggled to balance their emotional energy, and they didn't, they didn't carry it well, and they showed up at work as kind of edgy, kind of grumpy. And then pretty soon you know, people don't like to be around you at the lunchroom. And then you're the topic at the water cooler, right? And the reality is that you didn't learn how to balance your emotional energy. That's all. And you're still carrying it with you. So the real key is letting that stuff go, right? Mindfulness, being reflective, taking care of what you need. That's that's probably the one thing I think high achievers don't do well at all. Is we constantly sacrifice, but we don't take care of ourselves. And if we don't take care of ourselves, we can't take care of the very people that we're in charge of taking care of. And that's why, in all of the businesses that I work with, burnout is the most challenging in healthcare because you're dealing with human emotion and strong human emotions. And unless you learn how to balance that emotional energy, you know, when somebody codes on you and you've busted your butt to make sure that guy lived and they didn't, how are you managing that emotional energy to be able to walk away at that moment and go, you know what? I wasn't successful in saving that person's life, but I did the very best I possibly could, and I'm okay with it. That's important. Because if you take that little, that little failure and say, I could have done more, little by little, there's your micro stress. There's that little movement, and the next thing you know, you don't even like going to the hospital anymore. I hate even pulling up here because as soon as I pull up, I feel it in my heart. My body responds with negative energy. Yeah, I better learn how to balance, right? It's really all balance, isn't it, Doctor?

It's really all balance.

It's all balance. What do I add right now? What do I need to let go to balance this moment? And the cool thing is when you learn how to balance the moment and you learn how to hold on to the moment, the moment becomes a minute. And then the minute becomes an hour, an hour becomes a day, day becomes a week, becomes a month, month becomes a year, and the next thing you know, your entire life is balanced. Why? Because you never let go. And where did it begin? In the precious moment. That's why awareness is so key. If you can stay aware, you are you are heads and shoulders above most of the population who's running most of their day in the default mode network.

Well, then that is really profound because you are balancing your perceptions in that particular moment, and that is where you can shift the entire physiology, your thoughts, and the cascading, cascading emotions from there. You know, then I can really complete continue to go on and on with you. This is such a profound conversation. You know, one final message you would like to give to listeners who are stuck in the challenges of life, or if they have gone through serious unfortunate abuse or what you traumatic events in the past. What is the first thing they should do and where should they start?

The first thing that you need to start is with the self, okay, and recognizing that you are perfect exactly as you are. That's the first thing. Like, go find a mirror, stand in front of that mirror, look at yourself, look at yourself in the eye, and tell yourself that you are amazing and you are enough because you are. Everybody's enough, we're all enough, and yet we're also our biggest critics. So if you want to get help, you want to change who you are, start with that exercise. Go stand in front of a mirror, smile at yourself, and tell you how amazing you are, because you really are. That's what I would say.

Thank you so much, Tene. now, anybody who wants to learn about your work and your 101 techniques, where can they where can they find them?

Yeah, so if you go to it's purelove.com, that is my website. we're also doing some really amazing things right now. We've partnered with a company called workplace.io, and we're actually using AI to measure culture real time using company communication systems. So we can actually measure burnout executive capacity, and I can measure it real time. Then I come in with my experiential learning course, I fix the behavior employees, and then you watch those scores improve real time. That's the amazing thing that we're doing here at it'spurelove.com. So that's how you hold it.

Thank you so much, Tina. Really, it's been a very inspiring conversation with you.

Likewise.

Thank you for joining me at Transforming Stress. And you've given a lot of inspiring techniques and strategies to be really able to transform stress, not just with knowledge, but real practices which are based in your embodiment practices. So thank you for sharing and really grateful for your sharing your personal stories and how far you have come. Thank you. And I'm sure the listeners would have got some insights and hopefully we are going to continue our conversation.

I look forward to that.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, sir.

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