Doctor John Douillard: Magical Vision, Biophotons, and the Life-changing Power of Ayurveda

Elizabeth Rovere:

Hello and welcome to Wonderstruck. I am your host, Elizabeth Rovere. I’m a clinical psychologist, a yoga teacher, and a graduate of Harvard Divinity School. I’m really curious about our experiences of wonder and awe, and how they transform us. My guest this time is Dr John Douillard. One of the world’s foremost natural health experts, and a leading voice in the fields of Ayurveda and sports medicine. He is a prolific author, podcaster, and YouTube presence, where millions of viewers have watched his videos about topics like sleep improvement, brain detoxing, healthy aging and longevity.

As a certified Ayurvedic practitioner, John Douillard draws from ancient Indian medical knowledge and cutting-edge medical research to treat the ailments of the modern world. Coming up, John Douillard shares his most powerful teaching. He talks about why getting older means embracing the spiritual world in deeper ways, and he reveals how a magician’s prophecy forever changed his life.

I really enjoyed doing some research and learning a little bit more about you. There was a couple of details that, well, you’ll hear me sort of say them, but I was just like, ‘What? I didn’t know you were a pilot.’

John Douillard:

You definitely dug in a little deep there. It’s been a while, yeah.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I mean, literally, every time I have an interaction with you on Zoom or just a recording on your website, I feel like I learn so much and I come away with much more than I could have even imagined. And so, I have to thank you for that. And just in general, most recently, my experience that I learned from you was about the Pratiloma Pranayama breath work and the breath hold.

So, I just wanted to tell you this past couple of weeks, I’ve really been doing that breath practice in the mornings and, I mean, I have been feeling more awake and brighter. I’ve got more energy. My husband and my kids think I’m much more pleasant to be around in the morning, and I don’t even have coffee. So, I think it’s pretty profound, actually, and amazing. And, you know, I hate to say this, but it’s almost kind of easy. Like, ‘Just do this,’ and it works. So, I thought maybe we could start with that.

John Douillard:

You know, I started teaching breathing techniques – pranayama techniques – when I first came back from India in 1987. I used to travel around with Deepak Chopra and we’d go to a different city every weekend, and I would do all these consultations and give breathing techniques. And I would tell people, “This is the most powerful thing that I’d teach you, that I have. Like these herbs and all these things. But nobody does it.”

And the compliance is generally really low, because the rib cage has a thing called the elastic recoil, which means that it’s constantly breathing out, clamping down, getting all the air out of your lungs. And if your diaphragm isn’t working fully and contracting fully to suck the air in and open up your ribcage, you’re going to slowly begin to shallow breath, which happens to most folks.

In fact, a study came about maybe a year ago now and it showed that 91% of athletes do not have a diaphragm relaxing and contracting fully. So, if they don’t have it, you know, you and I don’t have it. Most people don’t have it. Because we sit around all the time. Even if we’re sitting on the way to yoga, on the way to the gym, on the way home from the gym, you know what I mean?

So, we’re moving maybe more than we have in the past, which is good, but when we sit, the ribcage slowly gets pushed down into the abdomen and pushes the diaphragm in a downward, pre-contracted position, which means it can’t fully contract to suck the air in and open up your ribcage. Because the ribcage is like a big balloon, as soon as you let the air out, whoosh, the rib cage collapses.

We end up starting to shallow breath. And this can affect how you sleep, it can affect snoring while you sleep, it can affect your energy during the day. It can affect your brain respiration, which is, like, they now know – only about 15 years ago – they discovered that there was lymphatics in the brain called the glymphatic system, which dumps like three pounds of plaque and trash out of your head every year while you sleep.

And if you don’t sleep well, you don’t drain well, and if you don’t have good glymphatic function in your body, you don’t sleep well. And so, it turned out that the diaphragm, the more I dug into the research over the years, because I was always trying to do – what I write about, always, is kind of the ancient medical wisdom of Ayurveda particularly, but others as well, with the modern science.

So I started digging into the pranayama and the breathing exercises, and started digging into the science. And I was just wonderstruck, really. It’s just amazing how much science there was there, and how important and how unsung, and how unappreciated and how underutilized our diaphragm is. I mean, it is just a muscle that nobody thinks about. When was the last time you said, “I’m going to go work out my diaphragm,” you know what I mean?

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, never.

John Douillard:

“I’m gonna work on my biceps, I’m going to work out…” whatever muscle. All the muscle groups except for our diaphragm. And as a result, we started to shallow breath more and more and more. And once study showed, this is an amazing study, that 75% of the oxygen that people are breathing in, they breathe right back out unused. Which means that most folks are, over time, starting to more and more shallow breathe. And as we start to shallow breathe, we breathe in more oxygen than we can use.

You go to the doctor, put an oximeter on your finger, the doctor says, “You’re 98% saturation. You’re fine, everything’s good.” And that’s how much oxygen is actually in your blood, that is not how much oxygen’s in your brain and your heart and your tissues and your muscles that give you the energy and the vitality and the detox and the rebuild and the repair that we need. That’s not what we’re talking about.

We’re just saying, this is what you have in your blood, that’s a good number. As you begin to shallow breathe, that oxygen number stays ‘98% saturation’. But as you shallow breathe and breathe more than you should, trying to get all that oxygen in there, your body’s just pushing it right back out. The carbon dioxide levels get blown out as well, and you end up with very low carbon dioxide and very high oxygen.

And that is the perfect storm for anxiety. That’s why when folks have an anxiety… a panic attack, what do they do? They put a paper bag over their mouth and they re-breathe that carbon dioxide, bring their CO2 levels back up, and they feel calm again. So, that’s one of the most amazing things, is that we kind of think that, you know, CO2 is this terrible, terrible thing. But the reality is, is that we have become so intolerant to the littlest bit of carbon dioxide, that we constantly find ourselves breathing again and again in short order; quicker, faster and more shallow.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Can I interrupt you for one second? Because, like, I have been reading about this on your website and, you know, I feel like – and you know it like the back of your hand. But it’s complicated, because I think people are like, ‘But wait, don’t we want – I mean, if I’m breathing tons of oxygen, and I’m over-oxygenated, isn’t that great, and it’s showing up on the little pulsometer that I’m 98%?’ I think it’s really hard for people to understand that actually that’s not saying what’s actually in your organs and your tissues.

John Douillard:

Exactly. I mean, it is great to have 98% saturation in your blood. We’re not debating that. We’re just saying that if you’re not also allowing that oxygen to get into your tissues, your tissues could be struggling: hypoxic. Vulnerable to hypoxic-based mutagenic stem cells that can do all kinds of damage. Cause the inability to detoxify, rebuild and repair the way that we need.

So, it is sort of a weird thing. But here’s an example, right? The free divers who dive under the ocean, right? Three hundred feet or more with all the sharks, it’s pitch black, it’s freezing – to me it sounds like the scariest place in the world. You know what the record is for holding their breath down that deep?

Elizabeth Rovere:

No.

John Douillard:

Twenty-five minutes.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Wow, that’s incredible.

John Douillard:

Can you imagine holding your breath for 25 minutes? That’s, like, impossible. To hold my breath down there with all the sharks, where you’re kind of freaking out, that’s another level of scariness, you know what I mean? So, we have a gene inside of our – a receptor in our brain stem that allows us to hold our breath for extraordinary long periods of time, like mammals like whales and dolphins do.

The problem is that we have conditioned that receptor to become hypersensitive. Super-reactive to the littlest, tiniest bit of carbon dioxide and then we breathe again. So, what we have to do is retrain ourselves to slow down and lengthen our breathing. And it turns out that when you actually slow down and lengthen your breathing, what happens is you’re still getting plenty of air in, because you’re actually breathing air all the way down into the lower lobes of your lungs. And that’s where 70-80% of the oxygen, or the blood supply to exchange that oxygen, lives.

When I first wrote my first book, Body, Mind, And Sport – about comparing nose breathing to mouth breathing, exercises, we did a whole bunch of studies on that – I kept talking to comparative anatomists and medical doctors and pulmonologists, and they would go, “Oh, it doesn’t matter, you know? Nose or mouth, it doesn’t really matter.” No one could even give me anything, you know, useful in comparing nose or mouth.

And I go, “What about breathing into the lower lobes of your lungs?” And they go, “You don’t even need the lower lobes. You can breathe into the upper lobes and you’re completely fine.” Now we know – so, that was like in the early ’90s – now we know that was probably completely not true, that the lower lobes are loaded with alveoli, which are oxygen with blood saturated, and that’s where the exchange takes place.

So, if you’re shallow breathing, you’re going to have to breathe really fast, because there’s not as much blood in the upper part of your lungs – because it’s a gravity-fed system. So, you have to breathe really fast to get up there. But if you’re breathing really deep the way we’re talking about, getting your diaphragm back on board, you’re breathing the air into the lower lobes of your lungs. And it takes a little bit more time, but it’s filling up, the oxygen is filling up these completely saturated alveoli to do the exchange more efficiently. So, you can breathe longer and slower and deeper and way more efficiently.

Elizabeth Rovere:

And I remember you also saying that once you started breathing in this way, and utilizing… exercising your diaphragm, that you were, like, running these triathlons and winning in your age group. And it was like, ‘Wait, this is, like, the best-kept secret!’ I mean, I am suddenly, like… it’s almost, like, superhuman. And all I’m doing is breathing. Like, I’m breathing and deep breathing and getting my diaphragm on board.

John Douillard:

Yeah, it was really – I called the last chapter of my Body… my Sport book, which I wrote so long ago, but it’s all about nose breathing versus mouth breathing. I called that chapter Jet Fuel. Because all my friends who I would train with in the South Bay – triathlons – they all thought I was on steroids or I got a new bike or something. But I didn’t. I actually… the funny story was I was just beginning to learn Ayurveda at that point in time.

I went to an Ayurvedic doctor; it was a lecture. And after the lecture, I went up to him and I said, “So, what do you think about doing an Iron Man?” And he goes, “What is that?” And I said, “Well, you know, you like swim two and a half miles, you run 112, and you bike 26.” And he goes, “Why do you do that?” And I had like never… no one ever asked me that. I had no answer. And I was like, “Uh, I don’t know.”

And he looked at me like I was an idiot, and he said, “Do you meditate?” And I said, “Yeah, I do meditate. In fact, my mom taught me and gave me the TM instruction when I was like 17. So, yeah, I do, and it’s great.” And he goes, “Do you sleep when you meditate?” I go, “I get the best sleep, you know? And I sleep really deep and it’s amazing.” And he looked at me, again, like I was an idiot. And he said, “If you sleep during your meditation, you’re exhausted. Meditation is not about sleep, meditation is about being restfully alert. You’re resting, getting deep rest on demand, but you’re also alert. You’re not conked out.”

And I was like, “Oh, wow. You know, I was just, like, knocked out.” And so, I said, “Does that mean like if I can meditate and not fall asleep, then it’s like cool to do all this crazy exercise, and Iron Man and all that, from the Ayurvedic perspective?” And he said, “Yeah, yeah.” I think he was just trying to get rid of me. But he gave me the nod, and I went off and did that. I started meditating more, I started doing retreats, and really getting rest.

And all of a sudden, the deeper rest I got, and then I would train very, very exclusively. I wouldn’t go out and do like four-hour bike rides and just kill myself all the time; it was very concentrated. And I just started getting better and better and better. It was amazing. It was like… And now, you know, a lot of books have been written, now, about recovery and rest and how that’s so much more important than the training and all that.

And I was like, wow, rest. We don’t know, none of us really understand how deeply exhausted we truly are until you give your body permission to actually rest. Doing rounds of yoga breathing and meditation day after day, and then you just feel like you just want to sleep for hours on end in the middle of the day. It was just mind boggling to me. And I just felt like I became bionic.

It was… something happens where I had no fatigue in my body. I couldn’t exhaust myself. It was a crazy experience. And that’s what made me want to write the book. And then I went to India after that, and then studied nose breathing, and then I wrote the book about that. But yeah, it’s crazy.

Elizabeth Rovere:

It is really fascinating. Because it’s almost like there’s a way that it seems so commonsensical,  it’s about being in balance, right? As you talk about, and Ayurveda talks about, where it’s like you do have a balance with rest. You are in some ways sleeping and waking up when the sun rise. You are actually breathing and using the musculature of your body that was meant to breathe, and balancing the oxygen and CO2. And it’s like we don’t do it. We somehow exhaust ourselves. And we could be, arguably, as you’re saying, bionic by resting and engaging in the proper breathing.

And then you also have mentioned in other podcasts and writings about how nitrous oxide is in… is something that gets activated in nose breathing, which is this profound molecule that we have the capacity to build up in our own bodies, but is depleted through exhaustion and just through our life experiences, aging and so forth.

John Douillard:

Yeah, 100%. And just to pick up on that last piece you said. Don’t forget that the lower lobes of your lungs, when you exchange oxygen in, you’re exchanging waste out. The primary detox organ of your body is breathing. But if you’re breathing shallow, like a rabbit, you’re breathing into the emergency receptors, telling your body life is an emergency, 26,000 breaths per day.

When you start accessing the lower lobes of your lungs with the functional diaphragm, you’re breathing into the calm, rebuild, repair, rejuvenate and detox receptors. So, you’re going to be way better off at handling stress – not getting exhausted and depleted and fatigued – if you’re actually taking the trash out with every breath. But most of us aren’t doing that. So, that’s the piece of the puzzle that I think is why the rest and the deep breathing is so critical.

Because you’re breathing into the part of your body that can actually rebuild, repair and detoxify you. But if we’re up here, it’s creating more stress. So, you’re right, nitric oxide is this 1998 Nobel Prize-winning gas. The gas didn’t win the prize, but the… I forget who won it. But it was called the panacea gas that cures everything. And studies have shown that you produce it while you breathe through your nose, through the paranasal sinuses – and when you breathe through your mouth, you produce zero.

So, for example, if you were going to breathe through your mouth while you go to sleep at night, you produce zero nitric oxide. If you breathe through your nose while you go to sleep – which is traditionally trained for Native Americans and Indian traditional cultures, they train their babies and kids to do that – you get 100% nitric oxide, which is the most powerful antiviral gas that we have, right?

So, when you breathe through your nose at nighttime – after talking to people and eating and all of these things, exposing your respiratory tract to all kinds of bacteria and viruses – then you go to bed at night and you close your mouth, which you’re supposed to do, and breathe this nitric oxide gas into your lungs; it is the perfect immune response to all the exposure that you had during that day.

So, when you have your mouth open and you’re snoring, you wake up with a dry mouth. It’s really bad for you. Not only are you not getting any nitric oxide, but when you dry out your mouth, the mucus… I mean, the saliva in your mouth has thousands of good, healthy bacteria and antibiotics in them. So, if you dry out your mouth, you completely lose all of them and that makes you, again, more vulnerable to that viral or bacterial infection. So, this whole breathing mouth thing is, like, critically important and we just don’t put any radar on it really.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Is that something that doing this breath work – where you’re exercising the diaphragm and taking these long, kind of, pranayama or pratiloma breaths – will facilitate more nose breathing at night? Does it have that impact?

John Douillard:

100%. Now, because what you’re doing is you’re training your ribcage to become more elastic and your diaphragm to become stronger. So, at night when you sleep, that muscle has been trained to fully relax and fully contract. Most people have a ribcage that’s like a cage, squeezing your heart and your lungs 26,000 times a day, breathing like a rabbit. So, the diaphragm really can’t contract very well at all. So, we have to force ourselves to take an emergency breath.

But if you get this respiratory tract designed and elastic and functionally the way it was created, then you will sort of naturally become a nose breather. Now, sometimes you can use some mouth tape. The one that I like to use is this 3M micropore tape. It’s for sensitive skin. And so, what I would do – and I don’t do it every night because I’ve trained myself to do it – you take a little piece of this, and you just put it over your mouth like this. Just like that.

And then you see if the tape is on the ceiling or on the window or on the door handle somewhere in the morning. When you’re, ‘Where is that tape? It’s not on my mouth.’ Because you just threw it off. You can still breathe through the sides of your mouth; you’re not going to suffocate. But after a while, you’ll start to wake up with that tape right there, which means you breathed through your nose the whole way, kind of.

But then eventually you can actually put it all the way across your mouth. And if you can do that with 100% seal, and wake up with it at 100% seal, you’ve trained yourself to nose breathe. And then you can stop doing it. If you ever wake up with a dry mouth again, go back and retrain.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Fascinating. So, you can train for that? Okay, that’s good to know actually.

John Douillard:

Absolutely, you can train for that.

Elizabeth Rovere:

And so, I have to circle back for a moment, because when you talked about talking to the Ayurvedic doctor and doing the transcendental meditation that you learned from your mom, is that how you became interested in Ayurveda and going to India and these… this ancient wisdom? Or how did it start for you?

John Douillard:

Yeah, I guess so. I guess my mom… she didn’t teach me the meditation, but she paid for it. It was, like, 35 bucks.

Elizabeth Rovere:

At that time, it was 35 bucks?

John Douillard:

It was, yeah. Like 1970-something or something, yeah. So, I guess so. But when I went to chiropractic college in LA in the early 1980s and I was taking an acupuncture certification course – and the word Ayurvedic came up. And I don’t know what it was about that word, but I heard that word, it’s the first time I ever heard the word, and I just needed to know what it was about.

And then I started doing research and trying to learn more. And there wasn’t much in 1980 about Ayurveda in America, I can tell you that. And so, I had an opportunity to go to India for a five- or six-week vacation. My sister was going to be there at a meditation retreat. She said, “You can just stay with us, and then you can go learn Ayurveda.” And I said, “Cool.” So that’s when I went and I ended up meeting my Ayurvedic teacher there; ended up closing my practice in Boulder, Colorado, over a scratchy phone.

I stayed there for a year and a half. Came back here later, my car was being driven by somebody I didn’t know, my stuff was in five different houses. I had to just pick up my life and start over or whatever. But yeah, I just went to India and really never came back. Because the opportunity was just so great. I was just so blown away by everything I was learning and everything, yeah.

Elizabeth Rovere:

So, it does sound like that was a moment of awe and wonder for you, being in India, doing those studies.

John Douillard:

Yeah, and I’ll tell you what, if I could ever give kids or people advice, it’s like, “Say yes,” you know? People would say, “You’re crazy.” I didn’t pay my taxes for a year and a half, I didn’t do anything, you know? Like, I just checked out. And it was the best thing I ever did, to just say “Yes” to the opportunity that was in front of me. A lot of times, “Oh no, I can’t because, you know…” And that was just the – I don’t know where I got the gumption to do that, but I’m sure glad I did, because it was life changing.

Elizabeth Rovere:

What does Ayurveda say about wonder?

John Douillard:

I’ll tell you a story, I don’t know if it’s going to be in your recording or not, about wonder. My brother-in-law was Doug Henning, the magician, who was all about wonder. His whole thing was to create wonder; that was his tagline. I don’t know if you remember him, he was before David Copperfield, he was one of the top magicians in the country. He did like two Broadway shows, and he was really a world-famous magician.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Cool.

John Douillard:

When I was on my way to India, I was actually initially going to go and ride my mountain bike from Lhasa, Tibet to Katmandu. The Indian government had just opened up the road, so we could actually do that. And we had everything planned, and then I get a phone call from my sister who was married to this magician, Doug Henning. And she says, “Doug,” and he got on the phone. He goes, he “had this vision” – and he’s all about real magic and everything – “that there was an avalanche and the road collapsed, and you were really seriously injured and I saw you playing wheelchair basketball years later, and please don’t go to this trip.”

I was like, “You guys are kidding me.” It took six months to get the permits and everything to go and do this mountain bike trip, you know? And I said, “You guys are nuts. There’s just no way.” My mom calls me up two or three weeks later and she says, “John, I didn’t want to say anything at the time, but I had this lucid dream” – before Doug had his vision – “that there was an avalanche and you were severely injured, and I’m really just begging you not to go.”

Elizabeth Rovere:

Oh, my God.

John Douillard:

So, anyway, my sister and Doug Henning, who were going to India to meditate, and they said, “You know, don’t go to Tibet, but you can come to India and learn Ayurveda because you always wanted to do that anyway.” And that’s what got me to India.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Oh, my God.

John Douillard:

Yeah, that was the wonder of the whole thing. It was just wonder. But you know, the whole idea of exploring inner space is it’s such a road less traveled, but it’s so full of wonder and awe and joy. And I just wish that people would take away that, you know? Realize that sitting down and meditating and breathing can change your life, and give you an experience of life that is so joyful and so fulfilled that you become what I call weatherproofed.

You know, you’re not happy only when good things happen, and you’re not sad when bad things happen. You experience them, but you’re weatherproof from letting them change who you are. Nothing has the power to change who we are. But we let everything from the outside world change our behavior, change our happiness. And being weatherproofed allows us to experience who we truly are, and who we truly are out, all the time for no reason, because it’s natural to do that.

And that’s really the beautiful thing about Ayurveda, is… it is a wonder-based science, you know? Because it’s about exploring the unlimited, infinite potential of who we are as a human being. Raising our vibrations, you know? Refining this human instrument to perceive the subtle in ways that no other instrument can. And thin that veil between the physical and spiritual, and have a glimpse of the spiritual while you’re living in this body. Man, that’s pretty cool. That’s pretty wonderstruck.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, that is pretty wonderstruck. And it’s, like, that is… it’s so exciting, and it’s full of joy and wonder, and it’s profound. When we talk about it like this, it’s so much better than just acquiring stuff or wealth. It’s like it’s so much richer. Ayurveda is… it’s like a natural state, finding that natural state of wonder and joy and awe and the profound. It’s so cool.

John Douillard:

Truly is.

Elizabeth Rovere:

That’s such an incredible story. I mean, what a beautiful story. Wow.

John Douillard:

Yeah, it was really. You know, that’s how I got to India, and that’s where I met my teacher, and that changed my life. And then that’s when I came back and co-directed – I met Deepak in India after that, during that period of time, and that’s how I met him and he asked me to come back and co-direct his center, which I did, and did that for eight years. And, yeah, so that completely changed my life in a direction that was meant to be.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, it sounds like it. And doing a little bit of reading from your work, you talk about how things like distant healing, things like that that you saw in India, where it’s just kind of like, ‘Yeah, there’s a bunch of people that they do the distant healing, it’s kind of a thing, not a big deal, you know? Seems like it works a lot of the time.’ And then in the West, it’s like, ‘What?’ Nobody’s doing distant healing, or they think it’s nuts.

But now there’s actually – I couldn’t believe it, and again, of course I find this on your website – but there’s studies that are looking at this now, which is blowing my mind. You know, prayer and distant sort of intention and healing. So, I was just curious about that experience, maybe that you had in India, and how that manifested itself now here in the US.

John Douillard:

Well, we used to, sort of, for fun go to the next local – in India – distance healer or, you know, jyotish astrologer, or whatever. It was sort of, like, the things that you would do in India, because it only cost you 50 cents or something, you know? And you could go have these amazing experiences. And then, you know, my whole thing is about ancient wisdom and modern science.
And as I was doing more research on the pranayama breathing techniques and it became, kind of, really clear to me that… well, I stumbled upon these things called ultra-weak photon emissions that our bodies release out of the DNA. And they are information-carrying particles in your body and they travel at the speed of light. They’re photons, that’s what they do. And they carry information, and a lot of research is saying that’s why we think fast, right? It’s because a nerve traveling to a nerve travels at about 268 miles per hour, which seems fast, but that is nothing like the speed of light in terms of thinking, you know what I mean?

So, the nerve-to-nerve thing just didn’t really add up. But the biophotons, like, speed of light-carrying information, that makes more sense. But the interesting thing is that these photons can be either coherent as a result or incoherent. And when they’re incoherent, which are the vast majority of our photon releases, they’re very damaging. They’re as a result of DNA damage. And then studies show that when you meditate and do yoga and breathe, the DNA-damaged photons dial down and you’re left with these coherent photons.

This gets really good. And then they found out that these photons are also affected by our intention. That not only do they carry information and thoughts throughout our body, they also carry our intention. And because they’re photons of light, and they don’t care about your flesh and blood, they go right through you. They are literally blasting out of us and they’re actually blasting through us all the time, thousands per second out of our DNA.

And they carry our intention. So, the interesting thing is that if you are – and there’s a lot of really crazy studies about prayer that are so incredibly phenomenal, really good studies, that just prove it to within no shadow of a doubt. And then there are studies that tell you, ‘Eh, it didn’t really work so well.’ So, it sort of makes sense that whoever’s doing the prayer healing would have be releasing coherent biophoton releases versus being stressed out or incoherent as a result of the practice.

And so, when you actually meditate or in prayer – and then initiate and settle your nervous system down, and dial down all the noise and all the DNA damage that’s constantly happening – and then you have an intention, there’s good science to support the idea that that would actually be the mechanism for why prayer would work. And it makes really interesting sense.

Elizabeth Rovere:

It’s actually… I find that fascinating because when we first spoke about the biophotons, I didn’t know about it. It wasn’t familiar to me. And so, I did a little digging around and apparently, like, it was discovered or theoretically addressed back, like, 100 years ago. Like, scientists were talking about this phenomenon. The fact that… Again, I don’t know how well known that this is known. And I did – through reading a couple of your articles and looking at the citations, I have to just read this – because I thought this was really interesting.

It seems like this is a big jump for Western science, is it not? Like, to, sort of, address this kind of a question. This is from one of the articles in something that you had written about biophotons in one of your recordings. It’s from the January 2022 Neural Generation Research by a bunch of neuroscientists in London and France.

And they say, “When do neurons generate light, and should it be surprising? Surprise always arises from expectations, and neuroscientists have had to learn and relearn to manage our expectations lest we miss the obvious.” And I thought it was great, because it’s like it’s not expected. It’s like we expect it not to be the case and it still kind of – we’re still opening up into this… I think, this more consciousness aspect of the paradigm where everything is not such physical, tangible. Unless like biophotons, are they considered physical, tangible? Kind of. They seem in between.

John Douillard:

Yes. Well, that’s an interesting point, because they live – by definition, a photon of light is either a particle or a waveform, right? So, the science behind the double-slit theory and all the studies they used to do years ago – and they would find that they could clearly see that the photons would actually manifest themselves as frequencies of light or a particle of light. And that is kind of really neat, because from the Ayurvedic perspective, the cause of disease is something called pragyapradh, which means the mistake of the intellect, where the mind starts to think of itself as separate from the underlying field of intelligence that we come from.

So, the idea is that… quantum physicists have pretty much theorized again and again and again that there’s an underlying field that manifests into matter, but when that matter forgets that it came from that field, it loses its source, connection to the source. Well, the connection to the source happens at the junction point between field and physiology or consciousness and matter. And at that junction point, you’re going to find something that exists as both particles and field at the same time, and that is photons of light.

Elizabeth Rovere:

So, these protons are at the gap in this way?

John Douillard:

They’re at the gap. So that’s sort of, like, you know, we’re beings of light. People say it’s metaphysical and you know, people, like, roll their eyes. But we are. We are carrying particles of light as information particles that can enlighten us literally. They can change our vibration, they can change our frequency, but they can also do damage if they’re released by DNA that’s under huge amounts of stress – partly because the life we live, the stress we live, the world we live, and the lack of breathing we do. All of that can contribute to some pretty significant DNA damage.

Elizabeth Rovere:

It is really fascinating. And this is an aspect where Ayurveda has talked about this, right? For like 3,000 or so years. And we’re, kind of, just coming to this understanding, and looking at this phenomenon of being a being of light, right? Like, this is kind of new for Western science. And yet we’re starting to get there it seems. I don’t know if you know this guy, Iain McGilchrist. He’s a philosopher and a psychiatrist, and he talks about matter or physicality as being a stage of consciousness. Kind of, like, water is like ice or steam or liquid. Matter… We’re just in a stage of it, in this physical plane. I just thought it’s interesting.

John Douillard:

Yeah. No, I think that’s – I mean, I would agree to that. Because you know, there was a study done by, I think it was Ervin Laszlo or one of his – he’s a big think-tanker. And he said that if you took a hurricane and it blew into a junkyard, and the hurricane assembled a perfectly working airplane, that is how impossible it would be for everything we see on this planet to be random. Everything, even Einstein and Max Planck, the father of quantum physics, they all talked about a higher power. They all talked about an intelligence. And intelligent field.

This intelligent field is actually what is underlying everything. So, we’re just one manifestation of that intelligent field. We’re not the manifestation of the intelligent field by any means. You know, just look up at the sky at night and you’ll kind of get a feeling for that. We are a small little flick in what this intelligent field can accomplish.

Elizabeth Rovere:

You know, when you say that, it takes me back to this whole point of the podcast, with wonder and awe, and one of the manifestations of that is that we realize that we’re just that little point. That we’re a part of something greater. And I think it is parallel to the idea of being conscious of this consciousness that we emanate from, or at least an aspect of that.

John Douillard:

Yeah, 100%. You know, we are – and at the same time that we’re this little tiny point, we’re also everything at the same time. You know, we all are. Because our biophotons that are carrying this intention, our thoughts, at the speed of light at great distances, Einstein called it spooky action at a distance, where these photons can actually be affected by our intention instantaneously at great distances. You know, even beyond the speed of light, which is sort of really, really weird and out-there.

But when you actually function on the level of field and consciousness, that’s beyond the speed of light. And that’s the level of quantum understanding that is still completely like, ‘Whoa!’ you know? But it is true, and we do have the science, staying in the science realm right now, that shows that these photons are a part of us, and they’re being blasted around the universe. Because there’s nothing that stops them, it’s light. Light doesn’t stop at the atmosphere, and then we’re… stop it from going into space.
They don’t stop for anything. So, we are taking our intention, our thoughts, and we’re sort of uploading them into this great field of intelligent consciousness. And that is a scary thought, because a lot of great thinkers believe that our thoughts are being uploaded into this intelligent field of consciousness, then the universe is evolving based on our thoughts. And our collective consciousness, our collective thoughts.

And that we are like antennas, and we are downloading and picking up those frequencies from the field of intelligence if we tune into that. But most of us aren’t tuned into the field of inner space, we’re completely distracted by the field of outer space. Now I’m talking about things around us: money, power, fame, sugar, candy, Coke, coffee, whatever. We’re constantly attracted by our senses. So, we have no desire, hardly, anymore to explore the silence and the infinite potential of inner space. We’re not doing that.

But that is what, when you go there, you tap into the antenna that’s perceiving this infinite field of intelligence that created the flying airplane from the junkyard, you know what I mean? It’s that. But we don’t do that. Hopefully… you know, after the 1918 pandemic there was a massive surge in spirituality and religion. Everybody went to religion because they lost so many folks. I’m sure hoping that after this pandemic people turn towards – they realize that this world that we’ve created to satisfy us with a cell phone and all this technology is really distracting us from something that’s really real.

And it doesn’t mean that you can’t have both, but having one without the other, particularly having the phone without the experience of self, inner space, dialing our nervous system down we can at least breathe, experience composure and calm – have a lake that’s calm and still, so the body can see clearly itself at the deepest level, and then recognize problems as problems at the deep level and repair spontaneously at the deep level. That’s what we’re designed to do. But when you’re so distracted, and there’s DNA damage as a result of that, we pay the price with disease and degeneration, and then so on, and things like that.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I love that you said that we’re designed to do that. That we are, like, designed to be a healing mechanism, a regenerating body or mechanism. That we can do… that we do have access to that through these things like we talked about in the beginning, like resting or breathing. And a couple of things come to mind as you were talking. One was, I think you also called disease – or Ayurveda calls a disease – crime against wisdom.

And you know, we need wisdom, like the internal wisdom, the wisdom that, kind of, can come from the inside, that can connect us to greater wisdom, which is not just about, like, acquiring fun stuff, you know? Finding some balance with wisdom. And then it brings up the question, too, about spontaneous healing. And I know that is also a manifestation of our capacity, and certainly in Ayurveda. And I thought maybe you could share a story about that, either from your experience or from a client. Anonymously, of course.

John Douillard:

Sure. Well, you know, let’s talk about wisdom for a quick sec. As you get older, you move into what Ayurveda calls the wisdom years, where you can either be wise or dumb. That’s why they call it wisdom. You have a choice. And in Ayurveda, as you get older, and we see that your body becomes thinner, you lose some weight, you become more air as opposed to earth. When you’re a young baby, you’re earth – you can roll down stairs, nothing happens, you feel great.

In the middle of your life, the summer of your life, you’re making things happen, you’re changing the world, doing all your things. And the last third of your life you’re in the air or vata time of your life where your nervous system, which is governed by air, because it moves really fast, is predominant. And during that period, the wisdom years, we are hardwired to perceive subtle energy during that period of time.

To, sort of, thin the veil between the physical and the spiritual. It’s sort of crazy that – this is an Ayurvedic concept, that we live our life as a body, and we’re just bodying, doing our body thing, and all of a sudden, we die and then we do the soul thing. It wasn’t like we didn’t have a soul before. We had a soul the whole time, we just didn’t have any experience of the soul for most folks, right?

Then all of a sudden, we die, we have a soul. In Ayurveda, it was all about raising our vibration, raising our frequency, thinning the veil between the physical and spiritual. We’re finding this human instrument to perceive subtle energy in ways that is, really, our birth right. It’s what we’re really here designed to do. And as you go into the last third of your life, after you raise your kids, and hopefully made your money, and you’ve made a dent in the world to make it a better place, it’s… there’s a natural inclination to want to find God before it’s too late.

And I think that’s really the ultimate goal. And Ayurveda talks a lot about that, and I go on and on about it, but that’s the goal of life in Ayurveda, is to align yourself with the truth of you, the part of that ‘you’ that never ends, which is your thoughts and your spirit. And to have some awareness that you’re all that. You’re body, mind, spirit and soul, all together. And we can have that experience.

And that’s what’s neat about all the Ayurvedic tools. Not just about fixing your heartburn, which is a nice thing to know, Ayurveda will do that for you, but it’s really designed to raise our frequency, change our brainwave patterns so that we start functioning at a higher level. It’s just a really neat, neat science.

Elizabeth Rovere:

At 67, does it mean you’ve entered the wisdom years, or as my mother would say, it doesn’t happen until you’re at least 80?

John Douillard:

Good for her. I’m not quite 67 yet. I’m going to be 67. I’m 66 still, so not quite there. Don’t want to push that. But 100%. I feel like as I have gotten older, the awareness of spirituality has become so much more prevalent in my experience. You know, there’s three goals of life in Ayurveda. They’re called the four purusharthas. Purush mean soul, artha means for the purpose of. And these are the four goals of life in Ayurveda, this is what it’s all about.

The first one is Kama, like Kama Sutra, pleasure. But the real goal of the pleasure is to realize that the greatest pleasure comes from giving and caring and loving and being kind to others. The giving is what makes you feel the greatest. I can go off on that, but I won’t take too much time. The second is artha, which means wealth, and it means gaining the wealth you need to raise your family and put a roof over their head, but not being attached to the fruits of your outcome, not being attached to that material possessions.

And the third one is dharma. Dharma is aligning your life with the laws of nature. Being in sync with the natural cycle. And it’s not like getting the perfect job. It’s having a level of integrity. In the Vedic books, 2,000, 2,500 years ago, it was written that the cause of epidemics – literally written down – the cause of epidemics are due to corruption at the highest heads of state.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Wow.

John Douillard:

Twenty-five hundred years ago. And it said that that corruption would filter down into the merchants, and the merchants would make decisions, and they would cheat, and they would lie, and they would start doing things that would pollute the earth, make the water so impure the birds wouldn’t drink it. The air would become so polluted you couldn’t see through it. The seasons would change, the droughts and the floods would come. All this was predicted as a result of making choices that would destroy the environment.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Oh, my God.

John Douillard:

They predicted that. And that’s not dharma. Dharma is aligning yourself with integrity, right? And then finally is moksha. Moksha is having the veil be thinned between the physical and spiritual. And so, I really believe that that is – you know, I feel like I’ve been able to know Ayurveda long enough to keep myself healthy enough to have a physiology that’s not in pain all the time, where as I go into my later sixties, you know, the desire to… Like, I made a living, I know I’m not going to go broke, my kids are almost raised.

I’m going to make it financially, I don’t have that stress, you know, of raising and taking care of my family. So, now my natural inclination, which should be, when you go into the wisdom years, is to find God before it’s too late. And you know, that’s when I really started taking – I always had a spiritual practice, but I really started taking it seriously. Spontaneously. It wasn’t like I knew, ‘Oh, I’m 60, I’m in those years, I’ve got to do it.’ It’s just that… in fact, I preach about it now because it happened to me.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Oh, cool. Wow. And so you just feel more aware of that, the spiritual side, or God?

John Douillard:

Yeah, like it’s the most important thing in my life these days.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Wow, that’s very cool. Fascinating.

John Douillard:

But when you’re 40 and 50, that’s not the most important thing in your life. You’ve got to raise your kids, you’ve got to take care of the… you’ve got to put them through college. You know, you have to do that. So, it doesn’t have to be that your whole life. Having that foot in that boat is a good thing your whole life, you know? But it doesn’t have to be the – I mean, you know, my wife and I, when we first got married we were both meditators. We both meditated. And we looked at each other and we said, “We have one kid.” Then we had two, next thing we had six. Like, we’re not going to meditate. Like, who has time? What, are we going to tell the kids to go watch TV for an hour while we meditate?

I mean, you know, it was like our kids became our priority and we just love the heck out of them, and did the best we could. And so, we put all of our attention there. But now that they’re almost gone – out of the house, whatever, you know, we still have one in college – it’s time, you know? It’s time to go within in a much more deep and concerted way.

Elizabeth Rovere:

That makes a lot of sense, even though that sometimes taking care… well, actually taking care of kids is another type of spiritual practice. It can be very challenging.

John Douillard:

Yeah, I don’t even know. I don’t even know how we did six kids. In fact, you know, we have a granddaughter now who’s here a lot. She’s just two years old. And we just look at them and go… you know, she’s amazing and we just love her, but six of them? There’s no way we could do that. I mean, I can’t even – I think we were on a drug or some hallucinogen of some sort, because yeah, I just couldn’t imagine ever doing it again.

Elizabeth Rovere:

One of those Ayurvedic herbs.

John Douillard:

Yeah, something. Yeah.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Do you have perhaps an example of some type of spontaneous healing that you’ve seen in your work?

John Douillard:

Sure. I can tell you a story about a woman who came to me and she had a goiter in her neck about the size of a grapefruit. And she had hyperthyroidism. She had talked to her doctor and her doctor, you know… and I worked with her doctor to make sure everything was okay, because I was going to give her an Ayurvedic detox protocol. I administered panchakarma Ayurvedic retreat detox therapies for about 26 years.

We closed our practice in 2013, so I could do more writing and research and so on. And so, one of the techniques is actually sort of a crazy technique, but it’s called nasya, where you sniff medicated oil up your nose into the sagittal sinus. Now, I mentioned earlier that we dump three pounds of plaque out of our head every year while we sleep, and that’s linked now scientifically to anxiety, depression, cognitive decline, inflammation, infection and autoimmune concerns.

And she had an autoimmune concern. She also had a goiter, you know, in her neck that was really big. And Ayurveda always talked about cleaning out this brain lymphatic system here – it’s called the sagittal sinus, like a mohawk haircut – and that’s where we dump all the brain lymphatic trash. And Ayurveda said that system is linked to old emotional trauma. Sort of, like, the mind records that. So, if you got chased out of a cave when you were 10 years old by a bear, you would remember never to go into that cave. It’s species survival.

Well, Ayurveda understood that, and understood that there were brain lymphatics that they just recently discovered, and they developed a therapy to clean out the brain lymphatic system. After 26 years of administering panchakarma, that was one of the techniques – to sniff this medicated oil up the nose and kind of dump some of the old traumatic trash out of the head. And it was a game changer.

As a matter of fact, after I had closed my clinic, it was such an important therapy that I put together a video for doing it yourself at home, because it’s such a critical piece of transformation. Removing and getting rid of all of the emotional trauma, patterns of behavior that don’t serve us anymore. Doing the same dumb thing again and again and again.

So, anyways, after she did her third treatment, she was writing in her journal and she said, “You know, it was really weird, I had this epiphany I was abused when I was 14 years old; sexually abused.” And she said, “I had blocked it out of my mind. I hadn’t thought about this in decades.” She said, “But what’s really strange was I wasn’t so affected by the actual abuse, I was affected by my childhood before then; happy-go-lucky kid, not a care in the world, and then I saw that event – and then I saw my life after and I became a type-A, hyper-vigilant, 90-hour-a-week corporate executive, push, push, push to be – my safety was my drive and my perfectionism.”

She had a color-coded closet. Literally, I hadn’t seen it, but I asked her, and she did. You know, nails perfect, house perfect, car perfect, everything. Someone came to her house, three hours of cleaning to make it perfect, you know? She burned out adrenals, her blood sugar, and now her thyroid was exploding.

She said, “I looked at my life before, my life after, and I saw that event and I was like it wasn’t worth 25 years of my life. I just saw it there and I just dropped it. That old emotional trauma.” She said, “I was just able to drop it.” No exaggeration, you could not see the goiter in her neck after one week. Her thyroid numbers came down by 200 points. Within six to nine months her thyroid normalized.

Six, seven years later or so, I saw her at a Christmas party in Denver. She came running up to me with two kids in tow, and she wanted me to meet them because she said, “These little beautiful kids wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t done that therapy,” you know what I mean? She would have just burned out, you know? So, stuff like that that you see all the time, that the body can definitely heal once you shine the light, enhance the awareness. And breathing techniques are designed to enhance self-awareness so the body can see the problems and then heal.

But also, recognize old emotional patterns of behavior that lock you into repetitive patterns that are simply not serving you. Keeping you locked in the mud. You know, hitting the bottom of the river, every day you go to work you’re just bouncing off the rocks, feeling the wear and tear of life. And it doesn’t have to be that way. That’s a big struggle.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I find that really fascinating and profound, and in sync with the kind of work that I have done as a psychologist. And you know, looking at the history or the patterns or the old traumas. And like you said, it wasn’t, like, necessarily that one incident, but it was like how then she had shaped her life or the ways that she had engaged the world post that experience. And that there’s kind of such a – she was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ Like you said, it’s not worth x amount of years of my life that this has caused; I am done.

And there is that incredible, like, just surge of energy and realization and healing. And you know, I’ve seen that with things like John Sarno’s, like, healing back pain. Like some of those stories. And it’s like people are like, “Oh, it’s crazy” or “Back pain is back pain.” And it’s like, well no, it’s very holistic. How could it not be interconnected? And I just think it’s an important reminder, that we have that capacity to be more self-aware, to have some aspect of healing.

And you know, this technique of cleaning out the brain lymphatic system is also fascinating. I had never heard of that before either. I mean, that brings me to another question that I have. All the Ayurvedic herbs, and their fascinating and interesting names like, you know, the shilajit – the destroyer of weakness – and shatavari, the woman with 100 husbands. It’s like they’re very powerful. So, I just thought, I don’t know, is there a favorite one for you that you think is like… if you had to take one?

John Douillard:

Well, take one or more – I think there’s one, we call it the sugar destroyer, which is the actual literal translation for the name of the herb called gurmar, which is also called Gymnema. And if you put that on your tongue and then you eat… and I always used to do this with herb classes. When I would teach herb classes, I would have people taste herbs, and they would just think and kind of feel what the herb would do, and try to figure it out just by tasting it.

Then I would pass around the Gymnema and have them put that on their tongue, and it was pretty bitter. And then I would pass around a chocolate Kiss, little chocolate Kisses, and they would taste it. And I would say, “Just have this.” And they would put that in their mouth. Then I would pass around the garbage can because they would spit the chocolate Kiss out. Because it wouldn’t taste as sweet. It literally blocked your ability to taste anything sweet.

I mean, it just completely blocks the receptors, both in your tongue and in your intestinal tract. So, it blocks the uptake of sugar in your intestinal tract. So, it forces you to burn fat, which is a more stable source of fuel. So that’s a really neat thing. There’s so many neat herbs like that, you know, that really work beautifully. And the really cool thing about herbs that’s coming out – and this is something I’ve been talking about for years and years and years now, we have a science coming out – is that the herbs, that when you buy them in the store or nutraceuticals that come from a laboratory, they’re sterile. They’re 100% sterile.

And you know, if you take you and I sterilize you, killed all the bugs in you, you would be a shadow of yourself and wouldn’t last very long. If you take plants and spray them with pesticides, they’re not the same anymore. So, when you take an herb, and natural whole herbs are loaded with microbes, beneficial microbes. They’re called endophytes. They increase the growth, the potency and the power of the herb.

So, what we use at LifeSpa is just the whole plant, organic. We test them when we get them, we test them after we test them – twice to make sure they’re really clean and they have nothing but beneficial bacteria. So, the real intelligence of our food is not just the chemistry of your broccoli, it’s the broccoli that has the naturally occurring bugs that are naturally attracted to that broccoli. Or the Gymnema or the turmeric, or whatever it is.

You take curcumin, which is like the big thing now, it’s a sterile compound. It’s one compound out of 300 parts of the turmeric root that we took out, and we say we’re going to make this into the new best thing for you, and it’s 100% sterile. The studies, and I’ve written articles about this, we take the whole plant of the turmeric with all 300 constituents, organic, and then you add a little bit of black pepper – 16 parts turmeric: one part black pepper – it increases the absorption of that turmeric into your blood by 2,000%.

Just by doing that natural thing. And then you find that when you study that compound versus the actual curcumin, there’s just no comparison. Now, curcumin has become a drug, which has consequences. At a certain level it’s healthy; at a higher level it actually was shown to be toxic. At a certain level it would boost a stem-cell activation; at a higher level it would block stem-cell activation. Where the whole herb, you can eat it all day long every day, because it’s a food we’re used to – it has all 300 constituents that nature made with the naturally occurring microbes in it that make it a complete package.

And that allows something to not do the job for you, where you have to become dependent on it forever, it actually encourages your body’s natural ability to heal itself. It resets function versus do the job for you. And that’s the beauty of Ayurveda, it’s like, well, let’s go back to, you know, recognizable food. When you eat something, you should know where it came from, and recognize it by looking at it. And when you take an herb, it should be in its natural form, which includes the natural microbes that are particularly attached to the root of that turmeric.

Otherwise, you’re taking something that will have consequences. And it’s true, the consequences are sometimes, you know, really good. Like if I take curcumin and it reduces my colon cancer, which in studies it’s been good for, that’s great. But there are consequences for it. Just like on the TV commercial for all the drug commercials, those are the consequences that they’re telling you about. The same thing happens at a lower level with herbal extracts.

Now, they can be very effective for the short term to do the job for the body. But long term, as foods, to restore function, you want to have all the constituencies of what God created in place. And that is the intelligence of the microbiology as well as the biochemistry of the plant. They’re synergistic and you shouldn’t take them apart. And that’s the beauty of what we’re beginning to understand about nature and about herbs. Like, well, we really have messed things up with all of these pesticides, you know?

Elizabeth Rovere:

Well, and also just separating pieces and parts, you know? Thinking that maybe it gives us more potency, which in the moment maybe it does, but over the long term not so great. Like, having the whole plant. It also makes me think of – this is plant-based medicine, and I know that psychedelics are getting, like, a huge audience these days. But this is another way of healing with plant medicine that also affects mood and trauma and everything else, that you don’t even have to have a psychedelic experience to heal, which I think is kind of cool looking at this whole plant medicine.

John Douillard:

Yeah, you know, I don’t think that you do. I think that there are so many – I mean, with psychedelics, you know, a lot of people are in a bit of a rush to see God. So, you know, you’re going to get there faster that way. But if you really look in the Ayurvedic world, in India where spirituality, you can say, was at least perfected in a way, you know? One of the earliest disciplines, the Vedic sciences.

There was nothing really about psychedelics there. You know, there were different uses of them as drugs for certain conditions, but they weren’t the tool to enlighten you. That came from self-exploration, you know? Taking the time to turn off the volume and become self-aware. And, you know, sort of do it the old-fashioned way. Now, there are herbs that can help you get there by keeping you in balance and strengthening you, supporting your weak links, you know, and making sure you have a healthy, balanced physiology.

But the psychedelics I feel like… And I think the micro-dosing, I mean, as a medicine for depression and things like that, in micro-dosing of that, I think it’s just an amazing science. But I just think that it’s becoming a little bit too – personally, just a little bit too casual and used. And I have been watching people do ayahuasca for, I don’t know, since this happened. You know, people would come and go, and I would always ask them, “How was it?” when they came back, and “How was it?” a year later, five years later, ten years later.

They’re the same people. There wasn’t a massive consciousness expansion that I saw from those experiences. And I’m not saying that those experiences are bad, I’m just saying that that’s not what Ayurveda or what the Vedic sciences would suggest. Although a lot of people would argue with me. I was at a conference recently, at an Ayurvedic conference – I was doing the keynote at an Ayurvedic conference – and there were so many Ayurvedic doctors standing up telling me how great all this micro-dosing and this is and that is.

And all of a sudden, it’s like the bandwagon. Everybody gets on the bandwagon. But it’s not traditional, you know? It’s not how the… when you go to ashrams in India – and I’ve been to many, and I’ve worked with Ayurvedic practitioners all over India – that stuff didn’t exist, you know? It just didn’t exist. There were herbs that would raise your consciousness, but they weren’t hallucinogens, you know? So, anyway, but I do think the science is finally now happening on what micro-dosing can do to repair people and restore balance to folks. I think that’s phenomenal.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, no, I hear what you’re saying. The thing that I was struck by, you said that there are herbs that would raise your consciousness. And I think that’s also something that is important to know too. Is that bacopa, that particular herb, or herbs like that, that – and you tell me if I’m wrong, but the Ayurvedic concept is to sort of take them to engage in this… to help elevate, but then your body takes over, so then it really does shift you for a more longer-term experience. Is that accurate?

John Douillard:

Right. Yeah, there’s a lot of herbs and they’re called soma, herbs that increase soma, and they… and when you look at the chemistry of them, they’re not hallucinogens, but they are definitely herbs. Like bacopa is a brain-derived neurotrophic factor. It literally builds brain cells, right?

Elizabeth Rovere:

Wow. It really? Wow.

John Douillard:

Yeah, it does. And ashwagandha is also a brain-derived neurotrophic factor. Turmeric is a brain-derived neurotrophic factor. So, those are three really popular herbs that really do change your brain chemistry, support healthy mood, energy, vitality, all that kind of stuff. So they’re really, really amazing herbs and they’re just the whole plant. Just, you know, that were used as foods for thousands and thousands of years.

They weren’t extracted and made into a super-potent something. They were taken in their natural form. And I think that that’s a good golden rule to have. Even if it is a psychedelic, in the natural form, it’s going to be a lot safer than an extracted version of it. One chemical out of it.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I am aware of our time, but I do have one last question that I would love to ask you. You’ve mentioned that in your twenties you had digestive stuff going on and you even had some blood-pressure things. And now you are healthier, basically, at 60 than you were when you were 20. And I’m just kind of curious if you would tell our audience – I mean, we kind of have already talked about it, but what for you is the single most important thing that you do to maintain your health?

John Douillard:

Yeah, well, that was an article that I wrote a while ago, when I was 60. I’m 66, going to be 67 here soon. And I do still feel like that Ayurveda has really helped me – and this a great thing for everybody to understand, is like a lot of times we have a problem and we just sweep it under the rug and we ignore it, you know? And that’s just not a good idea. But what Ayurveda provided for me was tools to fix those imbalances before they became big imbalances, you know what I mean?

Like, I didn’t run to the doctor for my blood pressure when I was 27 years old and got diagnosed with high blood pressure. I didn’t run to the doctor and get a medicine. I started having a big lunch. And it turns out that the circadian clocks are on for digesting in the middle of the day. We now know that 20, 30 years later. And in the afternoon, the nervous system is wanting to fuel, wanting the fuel from that big lunch.

So, if you go into your afternoon with no gas in your tank because you had a salad in front of your computer, you’re going to crash and burn, and you’re going to feel like you need Starbucks or some chocolate or something to get you out of that hole to get you to finish your day. And you need a glass of wine to calm down when you get there. And so, all I really did was, the Ayurvedic doctor who diagnosed me with that said, “You know, you don’t need a pill, you just need to go home and have a big lunch.”

And I was like, “What, are you crazy? Give me one of those little Ayurvedic pills,” you know? Something. But he said, “No, no, no, you don’t need anything. You just need to stop and relax, and enjoy a nice big meal.” And that was a game changer for me, because it got me into not… I would just work straight through from eight o’clock in the morning until six o’clock at night, because I was always running late with my patients, and I would have like 10 minutes to have, like, a little piece of chocolate and then just go do it again, you know?

It was just like crazy intense. And so that was a really… you know, understanding the circadian rhythms and how to align your biological clocks with nature’s circadian rhythms is really what Ayurveda 101 is really all about. I think that the thing that I do… yeah, there’s no question that the most important thing that I do today – and that is the pranayama with kumbhaka, or breath retention.

Learning how, like I said, the free divers for 25 minutes, right? I’m nowhere near there. But I think learning how to hold your breath, because what I didn’t tell you was that when you hold your breath or you breath really slow, carbon dioxide levels have a tendency to build up, right? So, if you’re not breathing, CO2 levels are going to rise. The trigger to release the oxygen from your blood into your tissues is going to be rising levels of CO2.

But if you’re shallow breathing, you keep blowing off the CO2, they never rise and your body stays tissue hypoxic. So, it turns out that when you actually do a breath hold – and gently, calmly, without dizziness, just no strain; it’s not like an endurance event, it’s not like how long you can hold your breath. It’s really just gently allowing it to happen longer and longer – what happens is CO2 levels begin to rise and that’s the trigger to release the oxygen into your deep tissues.

And when you’re doing that, and you have your breath holding, the oxygen in your blood starts to drop. You go from 98% saturation down to 95, down to 91, and when you’re in the 80s, you’re in something called the intermittent hypoxia. Intermittent hypoxia has been studied to give you neuroplasticity, change old emotional patterns of your brain, it increases stem cells, it increases nitric oxide, the panacea molecule.

It increases what Lance Armstrong got busted for injecting, the EPO – the erythropoietin. It increases erythropoietin growth factors, protects your arterial lining. And it protects your genetic code with transcription factors called the guardian of your genome. All simply because you trained your body, the brain stem receptor for carbon dioxide, to be less reactive to carbon dioxide.

You became CO2 tolerant. And as you become… to do that, you get the absolute hyperoxygenation of your tissues, so you have deep rejuvenation and repair, plus you get the natural intermittent hypoxia that has been studied again and again and again; that all these amazing kind of emergency vehicles come to the rescue because they think – because oxygen is dropping in your blood, they think, ‘This is bad, we better go do some fixing.’

And that fixing is like autophagy when you do calorie restriction or fasting. The same kind of chemistry. I don’t have any food; I better do cellular recycling. I don’t have any oxygen; I better go do some deep tissue repair. It’s like it’s a little bit of a hermetic effect, which doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger. And we need that hermetic effect in our life. Just like wheat and grains and lectins are hermetics, they actually irritate the lining of your gut just enough to create gut immunity.

And the studies now show that when people take all the hard-to-digest stuff out of their diet, bubble wrap their diet, they end up with compromised immune function. So, we’re already seeing now, with all this bubble wrapping the diet, making it so easy for you – taking out all the nuts, seeds, grains, legumes, the nightshades, the oxalates, lectins, all that – we’re seeing people’s digestion becoming weak and their immune system becoming compromised.

So, we have to expose ourselves to these little stressors, because they create… the body reacts to that by becoming stronger. Studies even show a little bit of pesticide, when people are exposed to that, they live significantly longer. So, it’s okay, a little bit of toxicity. But not too much.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Like, we’re built to be able to handle it. And we’ve got to have…

John Douillard:

100%. 

Elizabeth Rovere:

…something that we can push against and that’s going to challenge us a little bit, or what are we doing? We’re like living in a bubble like you said.

John Douillard:

Worst thing you can do for someone is take away their motivation. Worst thing you can do for your body is take away the motivation to have an immune system…

Elizabeth Rovere:

And take away the agency.

John Douillard:

…or make it so easy for you to digest, right?

Elizabeth Rovere:

You know, I think about it a lot as a psychologist, if we take away someone – by constantly doing things for someone, we take away our own agency. We give up our agency in that way. And it’s like then we never have any way to grow.

John Douillard:

Right. Yeah. Yeah, it’s beautiful. Like in the macrocosm and the microcosm, right? They’re really the same, you know? We just have to look a little bit more carefully at the details, at the subtle. In Ayurveda, the more subtle something is, the more powerful. Like the microbiome. You can’t see them, but they’re running the show. Like the circadian rhythms. Nobel Prize-winning science. They are absolutely running the show. But we’re completely disconnected from them because of our lifestyle. But you can’t see any of that and it’s the most powerful stuff that we know.

Elizabeth Rovere:

That is pretty exciting. I like that, because that’s about biophotons and consciousness and the things that we can’t see, but that are, like, more powerful than anything and more fascinating. It’s pretty cool.

John Douillard:

Don’t underestimate the power of the subtle, for sure.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I love that.

That was Dr John Douillard. Thank you so much, John, for rounding out our first season on Wonderstruck. To learn more about John’s work, check out lifespa.com. For updates about Wonderstruck’s next season, our guests, and some really exciting upcoming events, check out wonderstruck.org. And please follow the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and subscribe on YouTube.

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