Latest / The Inner Well Podcast / The Truth About Alzheimer's: A Genetic Certainty? Not With The Inner Well!
Transcript
- The Inner Well Podcast: We all contain a space within that when enlivened and nourished will support us with unwavering stability, expansion, and peace of mind. Join us each week as we dive into honest, grounded conversations about transcendental meditation, consciousness, and growth, and what it means to live an integrated life supported by a foundation of creativity and calm. This is the inner world. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Inner Well. I'm Emily, and I'm so thrilled to be with our guest today, Dr. Alaric Arinander. Dr. Arinander is a neuroscientist, an educator, an international lecturer, and a leading researcher in the neurobiology of brain development and human potential. Over the past 55 years, his work has helped establish the field of neuroscience for exploring human potentiality. And Dr. Arinander has conducted pioneering research at University of California, Los Angeles, Penn State University, among others. And he helped conduct the first research documenting the sustained high levels of EEG coherence, a primary marker of a fourth major state of consciousness. And this is a thrilling topic because we talk here on the podcast a lot about brain coherence. And so having an expert like Dr. Arinander to really dive into the research of what is this EEG coherence? How does it happen? And how does it actually lead to human potential? In the past 25 years, Dr. Arinander has focused on programs to enhance human potential and reverse and prevent Alzheimer's disease, which is very important and critical right now. And he's also been a transcendental meditation teacher since 1971. So Alaric, welcome to the inner well. So happy to have you here. Thank you. It's a great joy to be with you. You gals do a great job. I'm pleased to be part of this. Wonderful. Well, we're thrilled that you're here. And before we dive into some really interesting questions, maybe you can just tell your listeners a little bit about your background. What drew you to studying the brain and aging and consciousness? I know you asked that question. I'm going, I think it happened because when I was young, I inexplicably lost my mother. And all of a sudden there was like this need of trying to figure out what the heck was going on in the universe, right? Young kid, it's like no explanation. We just move on. It's like you drop the cup, cup's broken, time to move on. So I found myself in science and then later on, after going into my graduate career, I learned all this stuff about how the brain works and physiology and DNA and had all this knowledge. And then I realized one night sitting in laboratory that things weren't good out there. People were weren't that happy. All this technology and solutions society had developed over last hundred years or so, they weren't working. They weren't making any progress. And I was going, this boy, I was going it just hit me that they gave me all this knowledge to contribute. And I realized the knowledge I already had wasn't working. It wasn't gonna actually contribute. So I started looking around and Within a year I found transfer meditation and it's just like, wow. And I go, if if that is that good for my life and what to change for me and my friends, so I became a teacher right away. But I went back into the laboratory because that was the thing. And Marcy says, continue your research and so forth. So I got into brain and glial cells. Glia are one of the two main categories of brain cells. They're the ones that make all the wires, the neurons people hear about, and all the digital stuff going back and forth. And then there's all this other packing material. Glia means glue. So it's all the glue and then the important stuff. But it turns out the glue is probably the important stuff. It's the embedding, connecting value. They work together, obviously. So I did my PhD and a lot of other research at UCLA studying glial cells, and it became obvious that glial cells were very fundamental to health, to anxiety, to stress. I studied how stress hormones influence glial cells and how they change the brain and so forth. And it became obvious that also. 'Cause I was at UCLA where Alzheimer research took off, I realized glial cells are involved in Alzheimer's as well. So aging in the glial cells, I found myself in the middle of the whole thing. And so that's where we're at now, just trying to help as many people as possible because there are solutions and this whole problem with aging has just been left behind by modern science. But it's catching up now and there's much you can do because aging in Alzheimer's is all about lifestyle. And it's very little to do with the genes, although the genes are obviously in there important. It's what you do to your genes every moment, every day, how you handle your genes, they're just there to respond to whatever you want. And you gotta ask for a long, healthy life in a certain way. So that's where we're at. So beautiful. And I you know, I love that you you know, you had this sounds like a a quest for kind of what what's What's the meaning of all of this, right? From that young age and science becoming the language of how to really discover the meaning and then having that experience early on of finding transcendental meditation, which, you know, we know opens our awareness to even more possibility than what we can sort of see. And then going back into the lab and really approaching it from this beautiful angle of the connectivity between just those material things that we're seeing. I love that perspective. I think it's such a really important discussion to have about aging. And we know there's so many Americans. I think it's seven point five million Americans are currently living with Alzheimer's. Yeah, it's just getting bigger and bigger. I mean, one in every five dollars in there our economy is healthcare. One it's like what? It's trillions of dollars. Like seven, eight trillion dollars a year is spent. And what are we getting for it? We're one of the six sickest societies on this planet. We're doing everything possible to reverse all the good things in our physiology and our DNA. It's just we're t we're starting to change a bit, but obviously we're going com as a society, we're going down the wrong road. And it shows in terms of Alzheimer's in particular. And why do you think that is? I mean, I think you said these are sort of lifestyle issues. And while I know that, you know, certainly we we love modern medicine and there's incredible advances that have been made, but why do you think that we're sort of failing People with Alzheimer's? Why do you think that that's the case? What why do you think that conventional medicine sort of misses the bigger picture or that people are not really improving in the way that we we could see them improve? I think it has to do with the fact that there has to be an education medically and societal that says that what you do in your life impacts who you become. And you were just not this robot thing, but we have a complete control of our destiny. And though we have this destiny of our genetic components, most of those risk factors are only engaged if we do the wrong thing. And there's a just a general ignorance in society, as you know, we're moving from this particular age into a greater age of possibilities. But it's going to take time. And in the meantime, people need to know that they can can take control of their lives. They just have to do some simple things, but the medical and the industrial situation. hasn't found money to make that happen. That's the problem. Yeah. And you said that that, you know, it's not just genetics. But what what is that, you know, what does that look like? And what are some of the lifestyle things and changes and ways of thinking and being that people should be adapting pre preventatively at any age to really offset this later in life? Well, at the center of this. probably it's easy because most people relate to it is stress. We have stress. A little bit of stress is fine. This is how the body works when you have to go out and work or hit something gets hit or something like that. So stress in general is not a bad thing, but chronic, unrelenting stress is found in our modern society. Just sitting in your chair for six hours is stressful. They've just shown recently that you should get up out every twenty, thirty minutes and just do a little stretching or something. It changes your whole physiology. We just can't continue being sedimentary Eating processed foods, you know, foods that have full of pesticides and stuff like that. All this stuff is pretty obvious that if you put toxins in, you're gonna hurt yourself. If you put stress in, you're gonna hurt yourself. So the point is that society is built around this thing where we're not thinking about how to make the best possible brain. And we're always putting these symptomatic palliative things on top of it from modern medicine, which don't adjust the root cause, which is how coherent your nervous system is, how orderly your nervous system is. And almost everything we do in modern society is to create more disorder. Well, we feed in terms of food, what we feed in terms of environment, what we feed in terms of the air and so forth. So if we feed in stuff which is caused then the brain has to respond that way and survive best it can, and we have these problems. I love that. And you and I both practice transcendental meditation and so we know that beautiful byproduct of of of the coherence that's created. But how does that show up? Could you talk a little bit about how the coherence that is developed by practicing a technique like transcendental meditation actually shows up in the brain and in the physiology. So it's important to realize we have so many cells, hundreds of billions of cells, and each cell has more than 10,000 connections and they're changing all the time. They think that maybe at the end of a year almost all your connections have been changed and yet you're still here and you still remember who you are. So there's a lot of change and that change is driven what body you do every day. If you put the same thing in every day, you'll get the same brain out every day. So if you want to get a better brain, you have to put something different in, right? And so we need a better educational system. We need better food. We need exercise. We need to detoxify. We need to have better oral health. All these things impact every moment of our day because all this stuff filters down to the DNA. DNA goes, this is the impulse, and this is how I'm going react to it. And if you put orderliness in, Then you get an orderly system. And TM has been shown by the modern research to be probably the most powerful single tool to create brain ordliness, which is shown to be fundamental to Alzheimer's. Because Alzheimer's and aging is basically a progressive disconnect. The wiring we have gets more and more fragile and disconnected, disconnected, things get thinner, we can't remember where the keys are, can't remember the car, and eventually we can't remember who we are. So it's a progressive disconnect. Starts around thirty years of age and it's just slow or fast depending on the person. And we either fall off the cliff or we kinda slide off the cliff. But these sliding isn't necessary because we keep not putting in order. TM allows you twenty minutes twice a day to put in massive orliness into the brain to compensate for anything that might be going on outside and then contribute to a better life. So it's coherence. It's just to put that orliness in as a way of living. If you have that lifestyle of putting in orderliness, then you'll respond and live a long time. I think that makes a lot of sense. It really brings it together, that orderliness, that coherence that has to develop as the foundation for everything else that we're doing. And I think that is oftentimes, you know, we we live in a very input heavy society. I I feel that myself, right? We're always being inundated with all of the stuff and social media and and the emails and the texts. And it's almost like we are being bombarded with disorderliness. all the time. And if we don't have coherence naturally in our nervous system that we're building up through these things like TM, excellent tool, but also diet and exercise, then when that disorderliness comes, there's no defense against it, right? Our nervous system can't even combat it, it feels like sometimes. Yeah. And it's all there's also this platform of who are we? And knowing who we are and what we want in life. Is a powerful center for what people do in their world, how they create waves of desire over years and years and years. And with this digital universe we're surrounded by now, you have to realize people are already more and more sucked into this outward flow. And there's less of that inner rested, silent stability of our awareness. It's being eaten up by all this stuff outside. And what's outside. It's very glorious and very beautiful and has some real technological value and so forth if it's efficiency. But what it does is over time it eats away of who we are. Because what the digital and and everything's going on in the phones now is that it says this is who you are. This is what you want. This is what you need to have. And you have to ask the question, who's telling you that? You're not telling yourself that. It's the people who own the social media and all their little Tools saying this is who you should be, this is what you should buy, this is what you should think. So we're giving up who we are and our essence really to this digital age and forgetting and not even learning who we really are as these beautiful human beings. So beautifully said. I I think that, you know, as a TM teacher, I see this, and I'm sure you see this, that when people come to learn TM, it's often that they're feeling disconnected from their self. They they're like, There's a they're in a they're in a transition point. They're looking for an anchor. And they've lost any sense that there is maybe that self that's in there, that's not just the way we look, the things we do, the car we drive. The and so I think even the value proposition of TM sometimes of becoming more yourself, it's like, what do you mean? Because that selfness that you're talking about, that beautiful, centered, anchored, coherent self. is so lost and it's lost earlier and earlier and earlier today. Yeah, and our educational system doesn't really develop it. The educational system over the last hundred years was created because they needed people in the marketplace in the workforce, which means here are the rules and this is how you had a how you stay out of trouble. It wasn't saying how do we get enlightened people or happy people or healthy people. It's always been how do we facilitate, you know, the income of the system and not the quality of the human being. In our education system today is the same way. You can get a beautiful education by a mathematician, but you're not a happy mathematician, or whatever the case may be. And so we we need to incorporate into the educational system these simple tools that allow an individual to become more self aware, bring more of their inner awareness and creativity and happiness to b balance out all this growing objectivity, this being lost and all these points of something that have very little value. It's just I mean it it's an addiction and addictions are hard to break and the flow now is that every system's trying to make the human being an addict. Right. And and it's a f unfortunate thing. It's just but we're a situation we'll kinda switch that. We c teach more people if we can have a profound influence and counteract that. Yeah, I I think you're you're right on that it is. It's it's like an addiction and and there's sort of a, you know, the system is wanting us to be addicted to all of these things because it sort of helps feed more of the system and that self is lost. I'm really curious in your work and your research, back to this point of you know, can we recover when our nervous system has become so bombarded? You know, it's one thing if you learn a technique or you've been very, very healthy for a long time, starting at an early age, but have you seen things sort of reversing these signs of aging or people that were going down a road of having Alzheimer's type symptoms manifesting. Have you seen evidence of things reversing or changing or calming down as a result of these practices? It's true. So I started really getting into giving lectures and so forth around the world on aging and TM and so forth about twenty years ago. Back then Modern science wasn't even sort of thinking about that. They had all the things about amyloid plaque and here's all these antibodies and here's all these medicines and of course none of that's worked and nothing none of it will work because that's not the solution. So what I found is that slowly but surely people pick something up. In particular Dale Bredison at UCLA, he's not there anymore, but he was the first one to start with private money and he showed, and he's continuing to show, and more people are now getting on the bandwagon, that you can reverse Alzheimer's up until a certain point. If it's really bad, then you can slow it way down. But you can do a tremendous amount. And his components are you got to remove the toxicities, you need exercise, you need a proper diet, you have to take care of this and that. And you need to get deep rest, like sleep and meditation. So in his early studies, he had a number of meditations, including transcendental meditation, in the research. And it showed that you could reverse these people's aging problems. So it's the first scientific studies, which are now continued. So meditation is now considered part of the regimen for reversing the aging process and preventing or reversing Alzheimer's. So it's great, right encouraging that the research moving that way, although most of the money's going elsewhere, but still there's some momentum. And people, when they see there's a solution, and it's a huge problem. I mean, just having your parents be that way is just It's mind boggling how it consumes a a whole family's life and their funds and everything. So Yeah. I'm at I'm at the age where I I know a lot of people who who are in that situation where their parents are in a state that it, you know, their health is deteriorating and it the mind, when the mind goes like that, it's just devastating. I wanna come back to something that you said because a lot of people listening to this podcast may already practice transcendental meditation. But some people may be just hearing about TM for the first time. And I always like to position TM very clearly because I think that meditation as a, as a, as a thing, is just everyone hears meditation and they maybe sort of check out. Or like, I think I know meditation, I know what that means. It means, you know, clearing my mind of thoughts, it means focusing, all these things. Could you just talk a little bit about why and why in the research, why is TM specifically Helpful in creating this coherence and showing up in the research as preventative compared with other meditations, which may be valuable, but what makes TM unique? Yes. There are many forms of meditation. And they all c most of them come from cult old cultures and so forth, but many of the ones on the market now have been redesigned and re-revamped and organized and mishmashed and so forth. So there's a many forms of meditation which include TM. I think the understanding is best there. If you understand the mind as an ocean on the surface levels of awareness, that's where our attention is. And up there, thoughts bubble up into our awareness. And then the next thought, the next desire bubble up all day long. Thought, thought, thought, thought, thought. They bubble up from deep inside, in this deep, you could say unconscious, subconscious, whatever scientific term you want. But in the meditative terminology, there's a whole range to the mind. And at the floor of the mind, the source of thought is there. And that's a very unbounded structure of Consciousness, where all your thoughts and happiness and intelligence, they just keep coming up moment after moment as all your thoughts and so forth. So there's an entire range of the mind. That range of the mind allows you to, in a sense, pick and choose where do you want to function? Deep level, very stable, powerful level, or on the surface, riding the waves and trying to keep track of what's happening. Most forms of meditation either keep you stuck on the surface because of the effort and the strenuousness of them. Or even with mindfulness where it's a little easier going and you can just watch the breath and watch your thoughts and so forth. But there's still the intention, and there's still the effort of keeping track. Okay? Transcendental meditation is fundamentally different. It doesn't involve any intention, it doesn't involve any effort, doesn't involve any desire. You have the simple mental technique and the sound. The sound allows the mind to, without any effort, find increasing charm and transcend. That's why it's called transcendental meditation. When the mind settles down to the very deepest levels of its functioning, the brain has to follow sort because the mind and the brain. So what happens is that, and this is what we found back in 1974, it's just unbelievable, is that when the mind settles down, the brain becomes massively coherent. Before I had some coherence, because that's the basis of how anything works. You have to have things working together. So we want interconnectivity. But there's only so much in the average human beings. If you meditate, every time you go in, you create massive coherence and you bring that out into your daily life to support a better lifestyle. So TM is a simple way of building brain coherence, brain orliness. It just makes all the systems work that you have. It allows the DNA to function in a way which is unbounded, to be able to embrace all the values you can give to it in life. So TM is fundamentally different. It allows you to reach the source. You create massive orliness. And when you come back out, you just function better. You think better, you act better, you're motivated, you make better choices. So it just is spontaneous. It's not an intellectual thing. It's just you just are more awake and happier. I I love that. It's so beautifully said. And it and it it is. It's that being more awake, you know, and and we all know that. Again, for anyone who's not practiced any meditation, or maybe you have, but you know that feeling when you just feel a little more clear, a little bit more awake. This is like being more awake at every level of your awareness. It's like the most maximum awake. And that coherence that's created as a result of that experience is also part of what's responsible for clearing the body of that stress, reducing the inflammation that you talked about a little bit earlier as one of, if not the primary reason that we're experiencing these signs of dementia or Alzheimer's, is that. the the stress, the buildup, the disorderliness is there and it doesn't have a way to to be released through the system. That's true. It's absolutely true. It's that when we're getting this brain order in this, it basically rem releases or dissolves all that stress from the day, from the week, from the years past. It dissolves the stress which is this burden, this huge burden on the physiology and the brain and the DNA. You dissolve that pressure and the whole system gets lighter and lighter. When you create a orly brain you get a happy brain. It's just a long-lived happy brain. It's the way the brain was designed to be, not constantly suffering by stress and putting in the wrong things and not getting exercise and poor sleep and so forth. We're just not using the system properly. It's like just being abused instead of used properly. It's a magnificent organ and a magnificent structure of life to be a human being. And we're we've never really as a society tapped into that unbelievable Powerful thing of being a human being. I want to go back to some more of the the science. And when I was doing a little research on on your research, I didn't know this term before, the gymphatic system. But could you talk a little bit about the gymphatic system and sort of what that means and how that operates in the brain? So I think it, you know, really relates to what we're talking about here. So if you live in the house, you have to keep things clean. 'Cause just life, things get disorderly and you have to throw things away. If you're in a kitchen, if you don't clean up, it's it's hard to work in the kitchen. So as an everyday event, things have to be kept clean. And your brain is cranking all the time, twenty-four-seven. You may be sleeping, but during dreaming, it's more active than ever during waking state. So there's no time when your brain is like sleeping and not doing anything at all. Okay. So there's all this activity, which means there's all these byproducts and things you've got to change. You've got to get rid of the garbage. If you want to call it that, all the things your brain doesn't need anymore. Maybe throw away this cell, throw away this compound, throw away this, get rid of amyloid plaque, all this stuff. So the brain has a system that was discovered about 10 years ago now. This lymphatic sort of, in other words, something can come out of the brain and into the system being disposed of. It's called gymphatics because it's related to the glial cells, related to what I was doing with my research and UCLA and so forth. So basically, during slow wave sleep in particular, the first sort of hour of your sleep at night or ninety minutes if you're really good at it. And then following off during the different dreaming and s isolation during the night, the system is pumping out all the garbage. The lymphatic system is removing all the garbage. And if you don't remove the garbage, the system gets encumbered with toxic stuff and it's not going to work well. You can't work in the kitchen that's not clean. It just doesn't happen. Okay. So the same thing's true is that lymphatics are very crucial every day to clean up the mess that we just created. It's a byproduct of just being active human beings. And so the idea is that sleep is so important, in particular that first 90 minutes. Okay. In addition, since TM has that same deep value of profound rest, it's probably more restful than deep sleep, or something equivalent to it, but now you're awake. So it's an interesting thing. You're in the deepest level of consciousness, sort of like deep sleep, and in deep sleep you're not aware of. But here you're now completely aware. And so Probably during TM there's this massive flow of lymphatics, which means that for people who practice transal meditation because of the transcending and not thinking and trying to do things, because we're transcending, we're probably getting two major flushes of of the lymphatic system every day in addition to our sleep, which means we can have an even a cleaner, more efficient brain to function. So most likely in the future they'll study the lymphatics of meditation and they'll find that TM is a very powerful tool to keep the nervous system very orderly and remove all the Byproducts of our metabolic activity. That's really exciting to hear that said in that way because it's certainly the experience that we have. We know that, you know, we can get to the end of our day. And and and I I always share this when I'm when I'm talking to people who come into TM specifically because they are, let's say, having trouble sleeping. When we're having trouble sleeping, it's often because we're lying down. And the processing is starting, the brain is so active and our body is so active and we just can't go to sleep, or we wake up in the middle of the night because that processing is too much. But now a couple times a day, we have that opportunity for that very deep rest or that restful alertness that you described. And now that processing takes place. So by the time we get to our bed to go to sleep, to get that 90 minutes that's so critical, the first 90 minutes, we can fall asleep faster. Quality of sleep is deeper. And This is something I feel like people notice often within the first couple of days of starting their TM practice. But it's beautiful to know that that lymphatic draining, that process is happening, that flushing is happening couple times during our TM technique if we're practicing regularly. Yeah, I I c I I have no doubt that's probably the case. And we'll have to wait for some research to show how beautifully or how well it's done. But it's true. When somebody comes out of their meditation after twenty minutes, after a whole day of work, you sit down. You meditate. You come out like I haven't done anything all digit. My brain is so clear, so settled and so open and aware. It's amazing how it can just flush out all that and create all these waves of orliness. So it's a combination of getting rid of the stuff you don't want, releasing stress and so forth and all the toxins and all the byproducts, and gaining what you really do want, which is massive connectivity. Because aging is really disconnect, starting at about age tw thirty or so, and it just goes on in the future and we want to prevent that disconnect. So the earlier we learn to him, the earlier and the later we're gonna stay on that track. I'm sure almost everybody who's listening, and myself included, has someone in their life who is dealing with some memory issues, or maybe they're experiencing memory issues of their own, or they're simply wanting to make sure that they prevent those issues from coming up. Maybe they have a you know family history of things like Alzheimer's. So If someone's listening and and feeling those concerns and particularly interested in this topic, what would you tell them to do first? What would you tell them to do today or tomorrow to really help with this process? See, TM is like a it's a game changer. It allows you to do everything you want to do, but do it better. So if you have a desire to improve your aging process or prevent some problem, even cardiovascular disease, you have to be able to be aware and awake and make best decisions. If you think diet has to be better, you need to have the motivation and ability to actually make changes in your diet. Okay. You have to be able to function in a more flexible way, be able to be more adaptable, more resilient. And so basically the fundamental thing somebody wants to make any improvement in their life, whether it's get better grades or better sleep or get rid of their anxiety, depression, or get rid of their PTSD, or get rid of their addiction, or get rid of whatever the problem is that they're faced with, big or small. It all comes down to how well your brain is wired and how settled it is in that connectivity. If you add TM, you've already added the fundamental ingredient ingredient for you to then move forward in whatever way you think is most appropriate to solve that situation. But unless you have your awareness broadened and deepened, you're always going to be in the waves and never be going to be able to make any sustained progress. It just doesn't happen. It's been shown. It's just evident. People have a hard time. Making progress. Yes. And I I love I love that. Thinking of TM as like the engine or the catalyst to help do all the other things we're doing. It's not like anyone is sitting here saying you just meditate and that's it. No, you have to do all the other things. But how hard is it? We know it's hard to get that thing to I used to go to the gym. Right, I gotta eat that thing. You know, it's hard. And when we have the the engine or the impetus, then actually it becomes very easy and very natural. And people often find when they start TM. That other habits they're trying to implement, it's easier to make all those things happen naturally and spontaneously, right? To your point. It's all effortless. I think part of it is that there's so much noise in the average person's awareness. There's so much distraction and incoherence and lack of clarity that when you want to make a change, it's easy for it to get lost or dis disoriented and so forth. So what TM does, it just broadens that awareness and makes things more settled. So that you can be more sensitive. I did that. Well, that worked pretty good. And you can follow up on it. Otherwise, it gets lost in the everyday shuffle of the noise and the incoherence and all the stuff that's driving at us. And so basically, we become more aware of who we are, more sensitive to what is useful for us. People find when they, for example, with smoking, they just say, I I don't want to do that anymore. I mean, and that's not an intellectual thing. They just, I don't like that anymore. Or this thing or that thing. It's just they realize. That's not helping me. I don't feel good. At that deep feeling level, that's not what I want. I want whatever it is, I'll take that and then try that. But they're more sensitive. They can be more glued into what's good for them as what somebody's telling you is good for you. Like do this, eat this, try this. This is all coming from the outside, but what is it you need? Maybe you need to be vegetarian, maybe not need to be vegetarian. That's another issue. You have to decide that from inside, not from outside. Yes. Bringing it back to the point you made from the beginning. Who are we? And where is that coming from? And is it from all the outside noise or is it from inside? And that inside can be different for all of us, but we want to have that ability to tap into that self. Yeah. It it we have each one of us has a whole universe inside. And these desires do not stop. They just keep flowing out. It's best if we could have a pure, more orderly way for them to flow out so we can find out, this is who I am and this is where I want to go. I find when I teach people TM within a week or several months or even a year, they go, I just went this way, or I just did this. And spontaneously they've been going along as this all sudden like that. They just realize I have to do that, or I'm gonna be that way, or I'm gonna do this. They just they finally get to a point where they get more connected to their inner values, what it is that's gonna make them happy. If it doesn't make you happy, you're not gonna do it. And if you don't know what happiness is, you don't know how to evaluate it. So this is the problem. Is happiness scrolling on my Instagram or is my happiness running down the road? What is my happiness? And if we're lost in this noise, we're being told this is your happiness, but we don't feel that. And so we never get satisfied even though we're constantly running for the happiness when it's all inside. And so if you start with happiness, then everything else works. You can't find happiness out here. Happiness is not out here. Happiness is what out here pulls out of you because the happiness comes out of you. And so basically TM just it creates that well of happiness, right? Just to because this is the show you're you're just trying to help people find that inner well, you know. Well, you know, you segued perfectly into my question that I like to ask everybody at the end of these these episodes, which is, you know, this is the inner well podcast and we talk about these topics. So what would you say, what does the inner well mean to you? Well, the the inner. Is it the outer well or the inner well? Which well is the well that you want? Because the idea is that the well is where the the flow of nourishment comes from, right? The w well represents water. Without water, that's the end, right? You need water. So wells represent water. They represent that essence of life, that thing which is so abstract but fundamental. And so it's all inside. And if somebody just easily contacts inside, then they find that. In a very spontaneous, effortless, completely innocent way. The innocence returns, the the effortlessness of being s a person again as opposed to an an issue and an item in the cultural society. So the inner well is the ability to be yourself. And to be yourself, you have to find yourself. And to find yourself, you don't have to go anywhere. Just close your eyes for a moment. Realize that there's this infinity inside. Bring that back out and then you'll remember during the day. And you just keep remembering more and more of who you are. It's just memory. It's just memory. Everything is memory. Nobody knows anything without, yeah, it was that. Everything is based on what you remember. And if you remember that you're unbounded, this huge, beautiful source of happiness, creativity, if that's lively, not intellectual. If that's lively, that memory of happiness and intelligence and creativity is there, then that's what you represent. That's what you radiate all day long for everybody. I want to echo something you just said that was so beautiful, but that it's not intellectual. We're we're not sitting here trying to like, right, I'm unbounded. right, I'm orderly. This is not intellect. It's just lively in our awareness so that there's nowhere it isn't. It's our experience. It's expressed naturally, innocently, organically, effortlessly, not an intellectual task or a way of being or a lifestyle thing we're now trying to remember. It's just there. I love that I love that reflection of of memory, remembering who we are. Yeah. Emily if I say Emily, you go, yeah. It's not like Emily goes, Is that my name? No, I don't I have to respond. It's not at that level. Life is a spontaneous flow of information flowing in and we react to it. And if we can react in that simple, unbounded innocence, then we get the best out of everything. Because remember projecting happiness everywhere we go. Because that's all we can project. You can't not project it. You can only you can only give to the world what you are. And if you're troubled, stressed and unhappy and a little sick and that, then that's the whole bubble you're living in and expressing. But if 20 minutes twice a day you create this vast ordiness and levels of happiness and intelligence, you have no choice but to give that out. You have no choice to to just live that. You can't. You can't not do it. You can't say, I'm not gonna be that way. No, I'm gonna be bad and stuff like that. You can't not do it. I mean, that's why you can change people that are murderers, people that are addicts, people who have PTSD. All these people can change. And they change from within. They're not changing because I'm intellectual. You need to rethink that and transform this and organize that. There's nothing wrong with trying to imagine a good future. That's just fine. But it all depends upon who's imagining and where you're imagining from, right? So And and that's a beautiful sentiment that the brain is always capable of these changes, that it's never too late to make changes in our own physiology, that any of us at any moment, at any time, you know, we're talking here about aging and the aging rate. It's not too late, even if our brain is quite aging, it's never too late to repair and reestablish that connection with ourselves. Very true. And it the brain is it's so flexible. You gotta love it. I mean, it's just it's an amazing organism that can just take what you give it and then respond. And if you give it orderliness, it says, Fine, I'm going for that, you know. Beautiful. Well, I can tell how much orderliness you have in your own physiology and I'm grateful that you spent this hour with us today because these conversations are incredibly inspiring and incredibly empowering because it shows that our own inner intelligence is right there. And so I'm just so grateful for all the work that you've done and for spreading your beautiful knowledge for so many years. And I hope you continue to be sharing with everyone. We'd love to have you back again next year to talk about any new research that's developed and any insights. Thank you so much for being here. I'd really appreciate you. It's a great pleasure, Emily. Thank you for the opportunity. I wish the best for all everybody. That's a wrap on today's episode of The Inner Well. Please subscribe and leave a review. Your support means the world and helps others find us. And if this conversation added something to your day, don't be shy. Share it with someone it might resonate with. 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