It's time to rip the cover off what really works to ditch addiction, depression, anger, anxiety, and all other kinds of human suffering. No, not sobriety. We're talking the F word here. Freedom. We'll share straight from the trenches. What we've learned from leaving our own addictions behind and coaching hundreds of others to do the same. And since it's such a heavy topic, we might as well have a good time while we're at it.
(00:34): Welcome back to the alive and free podcast. And today I wanna bring together a couple of things we've spoken about recently, give you a glimpse at something that might actually be beneficial as well as hopefully a practical way of going about it, or at least what I've been experimenting with so far, we're gonna start with a story, a guy by the name of Grover Cleveland Baxter, Jr. Otherwise known as CVE Baxter. This is the guy that back in 1966, opened up the possibility of human plant communication. So to speak. Yes, it does sound weird. What does this have to do with being alive and free Bob? Oh, just hold onto your pants for a second. All right. So here's a guy who he was, uh, a CIA agent at one point in time. He worked in the military during world war, uh, two working on polygraph tests and lie detection.
(01:21): Polygraphs was with the CIA, but lie detection. He'd worked on, um, with narcotics, trying to create truth serums and NACO interrogation as well as Hyno interrogation. And, uh, in the process of it, of course, he developed the polygraph, which basically it measures three things, pulse respiration rate, and then the galvanic skin response, which is what you would call sweating like micro sweats, basically not necessarily sweating that you would necessarily feel inside yourself, just of tiny fluctuation in the conductivity of the skin. And so in one day, this is Groundhog day, 1966 in the early morning hours, he is up and he sees a plant on his just, you know, in nearby him. And he decides to hook up the plant to the electrodes for his polygraph test. He hooks him up and he's like wondering, okay, cool. I'm detecting all of these falsehoods and lies and all this other stuff.
(02:16): And other people I wonder, you know, can I get the same kind of response out of a plant? So his plan was, let me burn one of its leaves and see if it produces the same kind of anxiety levels. But the problem was he couldn't even get to the point of burning the plant before his polygraph detector already shifted and spiked and showed readings that indicated that the plant had somehow read his mind and his intentions of fear. Now for a long time, people couldn't reproduce these kinds of things, but he kept on kind of pushing it further and further. And then recently I watched another MythBuster episode where they attempted to reproduce this. They got a similar polygraph scenario, uh, situation as the very first one that was used that Baxter had used, they hooked it up to a plant and then they swatted its leaves and they found that it spiked some.
(03:06): And then they had a guy just like, look at it and think about it burning. And it also created these massive spikes and things. So the plant had some kind of electrical, nervous system response in response to its environment. This very idea that plants have the ability to respond, not just to things happening directly to them, but to intention directed toward them, uh, has led people to start wondering, you know, maybe plants are far more conscious or far more, maybe not conscious is not a good word, but far more intelligent and active and have more choice in their lives than we assume. And so, as they started considering this, you know, they started investigating what plants do. There are mycelia or mushrooms and whatnot that end up funneling nutrients to trees. Trees can detect just based on sound, whether another tree in the vicinity is being eaten by a caterpillar and then they'll produce a different type of response inside of them as a result of it, just by playing the sound of a caterpillar, they'll also respond even if there's not a caterpillar present.
(04:07): So there's a lot of things that plants are doing to be able to read their environment and understand what's happening, that they have developed capacities to do, to enhance their own capacity, to survive and live their life and absorb sunlight and so on and so forth. Well, there was a company in Italy that, uh, some time ago, these people started studying like what, what are these responses to plants? And can we take these electrical impulses of plants and play them back to us in a sort of song form so that we can get a sense of the kind of communication that's happening between them or the kind of things that are going on within them. And so they attached an, uh, uh, like a ground wire and an electrode to a plant leaf, and they developed a way of reading these electric signals and then reproducing them back as music it's called music of the plants.
(04:56): They have a website, they have a device that you can purchase for some 500 bucks or, you know, 450 bucks or something like that. And it plays this beautiful music. There's YouTube videos that you can go and watch and listen to it. It plays this music that it doesn't sound like it's been orchestrated. It doesn't sound like a human made the music necessarily, but, um, it plays in a sense the music or reads these vibrations and these electrical signals happening inside of the plants and then plays them back. And what's interesting is that when these plants start to play, they start to respond differently. The more that they hear the noises or are interacting with the noises that are being made in response to their own electrical patterns. Now, you may recall that some time ago, I said, I had my brainwaves, me measured well, the way that they would do that.
(05:42): And the way that they would kind of look at well, are these brainwaves healthy or not healthy is that they would put electrodes on my head with a little bit of goop and they would read the signals that are happening in each of the different lobes of the brain. And depending on what was going on and what, what was the amplitude of the signal and whatnot, then they would sort of interpret it. And I don't necessarily think that their interpretations are all that helpful most of the time, but I was interested because my, everything that I'm interested in doing with people is taking them from a place of UNC to consciousness. So in order to change a behavior, whether it's addiction or whether it's an emotional behavior like depression or anxiety or panic or stress or worry, whether it's a thought behavior, whether it is a, uh, a nervous tick, whatever it is.
(06:31): And I've worked with all of them, you first have to make it conscious. You, you first have to become aware of it. And just the perception of it, seeing it for what it is, hearing it for, what it is and becoming conscious of it creates this almost instantaneous, be beginnings of a shift inside the person, no different than, you know, if you're running around the house and you you're blaming everybody for your keys, because your perception says my keys, aren't where they belong. And so your brain interprets that as, okay, cool. Will somebody stole them whatever. And then as soon as you detect, oh, wait, they're here in my pocket. All of the behavioral change happens almost instantaneously, including PO perhaps embarrassment at all the people that you accused of stealing your keys. And so perception is really, really critical. And it's one of the things that I focus heavily on in interception, as we talked about with the nine senses and proprioception and all of these other things, developing this inside of human beings, because it's not that you have to do something to change the behavior.
(07:28): Yes. There are things you can do, but it's not that you necessarily have to do something as your awareness of what is happening, grows, change, begins to happen. And so I was fascinated by this brainwave company, and there's a lot of neurofeedback companies around a lot of people that do neurofeedback, um, meaning that they're sending the brain back information about how it's operating so that it can see, oh, wow, this is what's going on. And then automatically changes begin to happen. And that's what happened with me. So I was a fan of it, of the idea of it, because I thought, Hey, that's what we're doing here. I'm just getting people to pay attention to themselves deeper. So I went and listened to my brainwave, so to speak, well, how did I do that? Well, they basically took, did the same thing they did with the plants.
(08:12): They took the electrical activity in the plants and in my brain that is, and they translated it into soundwaves. And so different frequency bands would play a different note, so to speak, and then those would go back and forward and they would have different tones to them. And they would have different things happening and low and behold, that sound that I experienced in a while ago has a similar kind of quality to it that the sound of the plants has now perhaps different in some ways, but there was a similar quality to this interpretation of electrical activity and making it into sound. And what's what began to happen is that the brainwaves in my brain began to change. And at one point in time, I was sitting in there in the middle of one, when I started getting really agitated, when the sounds would happen, it felt like there were entire nerves in my body that were being plucked like strings.
(09:05): And then at a certain point, I started getting extremely agitated and I felt this heat building up inside me and I had this, my eyes were closed, but I had this vision of my hands lying in my lap. And then all of a sudden there, there was this buildup, this holding on this tension that happened. And then my vision completely disappeared, disintegrated and almost pixelated and shut down like a computer screen. And then there was utter calm for a period of time. And it was almost like a psychedelic experience like I had had on mushrooms or something like that. It was, and, and I'm, I don't know that everybody has experiences like this, but for me it was absolutely incredible. And then from, from then on, there was just quiet and the chatter sort of ceased in my brain for, for a good period of time.
(09:48): And I think that that was because my brain was hearing what was going on and in response to hearing what was going on, started to see, oh, wait, there's this agitation here. And it tried to hold onto it because that's the pattern it had survived in. And then once it couldn't, it just did the system reset. And all of a sudden we're back to quiet. And once there was quiet, there was more clarity of thought in some other places. Now the difficulty with this and something I'm always thinking about is this then becomes a crutch or it can become a crutch. Okay, well, one more health fad, one more pill to take one more, uh, technology, bit of technology to explore and to need to have access to so that a person can be fully adjusted and well, and I thought that's not what I'm interested in.
(10:31): It, I'm not interested in looking for crutches or, uh, recommending crutches to people. I think that they can be very useful. Sometimes crutches are helpful when you have a broken leg. Uh, but the goal with any crutch would be that you use it until you don't need it anymore. So the question I had in my mind was how do I begin to understand the brain and its brainwave patterns in such a way that I can allow it to listen to itself and then make adjustments and changes in a way that doesn't require this technology. And funny enough, I realized that's something that we're already doing. This is something that we're teaching people at retreats, and that is every neuron in your brain. All these things that are firing are connected to your physical body, they're changing your heart rate. They're changing your, uh, your circulation and your circulatory rate.
(11:21): They're changing your muscle tension patterns, your posture, the way that you walk what's happening with your eyes, where you look how focused or blurred your tension, your vision is and so on and so forth. There's this massive cascade chain of all the things happening inside of your body as a result of brain activity. So last week when I spoke about in interception, that is in part a re re a result of me, dis kind of discovering and exploring for myself, what is happening inside the body and how that then begins to translate into freedom. See what happens is, as an example, a while ago, I was starting to get super agitated. And then all of a sudden I realized, oh no, all I I'm not a, this was years ago. I'm not actually agitated. That's a label I have put on an emotional experience. And as soon as I put a label on it, it's hard to see what's inside the jar.
(12:15): So when I ripped the label off of agitation, I realized, oh, wow, there's some tension here in my rib cage. My jaw was a little bit tight. My eyebrows were a little bit raised. My breathing had changed and it was a little bit more shallow. My throat had constricted a little bit and I was, my eyes were kind of darting back and forth agitation. My legs were jittering. I'm like, okay, cool. Well, all right, well, let me start to work with that. And as I just simply started noticing and narrating what is happening in my body, I was in, in effect being the polygraph detector for my brain. I was in effect noticing the stories that my brain was telling my body to reenact. I was noticing its activity. And as I did, so the emotions began to quiet down. And then I learned how to adjust the breathing and adjust the muscle tension patterns and adjust the posture in such a way that I returned to a state where I was no longer agitated. And I didn't have to sit there and think through the problem. I didn't have to go to a therapist. I didn't have to analyze why I was educated or go into the past and look for reasons or justifications for it. I didn't have to go make amends or find a different solution for it. I literally, all I had to do was pay attention to what was happening.
(13:33): If you or someone, you know, is looking to drop the FBO of freedom in their life, whether that's from past trauma, depression, anxiety, addiction, or any other host of emotional and personal struggles, but they just don't know how or want some help doing it. Head on over to the freedom specialist.com/feel better now and check out some of the things we've got in store for you, or book a call. So we can look at your unique situation and get you the help that you're looking for. Now, each of your senses, all nine of them function, uh, primarily in different areas of the brain. And so I wanted to go through this for you so that you could kind of get a sense of this, your taste and your old factory sense, meaning your sense of smell, those kind of, uh, their kind of up in the front part of the brain. Okay. The olfactory bulb is up there and they're interrelated in, in many ways. And so the frontal lobe of the brain does have some relation to the things that you smell and the things that you taste. We look at the paral lobes of the brain. Those are on top, but both sides kind of like a saddle on the head. And those are the ones that deal both with the development of a sense of space and 3d, as well as your sense of touch.
(14:51): And so touching different things, finding textures, and that makes sense, right, where you are in space. So your proprioception would be in there as well as your sense of touch when you go to the temporal lobes. And those are the ones that are like in the temples right down and below and behind the ears a little bit, and the bony stuff right down in the bottom of the ears, your, your ear canal goes into the temporal lobe through the temporal bones. So you're dealing with hearing there. You're also dealing with your sense of time, and those are connected to your sense of memory, which is a linking together of things in relation to time many times. And so those are all kind of built inside of the temporal lobe. And so they touched the hippocampus, which we've talked about with regard to emotions before and with regard to memory before.
(15:36): And so that's the area where those couple of senses are your sense of time, your sense of balance, your inner ear and stuff. Acceleration. I don't know if that's a, that's a different sense of where that would be located necessarily, but also your sense of hearing. And so then we go into the occipital lobe, which is down in the back at the back portion and that, that deals with your vision. And so your five senses really are all built in there. The other senses are as well, like in the front is the ethoid bone. And that's, uh, that's where a lot of your sense of direction would be coming from some of the Biogen magnetite where that's processed in the brain. I don't know exactly, but I would imagine it's either possibly there or in the occipital lobe, because a lot of that stuff would be then passed through the retina and the eyeballs.
(16:23): So then the question becomes cool. How do I pay attention to these different lobes and what it is that they're doing? Well, one way that you can pay attention to it is simply to stop. And, oh, by the way, down at the base, then of your cerebellum at the very bottom of a skull, right in the back and your brain stem, then your breathing, your heart rate and all your involuntary functions are happening down there. So if you wanna start to pay attention to what's happening in the subconscious or in the involuntary area of the body, you can start to pay attention to your breathing or your heart rate and just listen to them. And instead of trying to make them be something different, oh, I need to bring this way because powerful people in the past breathe this way. There's so many thousands of breath methods, and they're wonderful, but they're, they're meant to be training practices and training drills.
(17:08): And then you relax and just let things take their course, your brain. If you don't want to have to be constantly controlling everything in your life, then you need to train it and relax it, train it and relax it, train it and relax it. And that's what you can do with breathing. Spend some time watching your breathing and then relax and let it do its own thing. Spend some time training your breathing to do something specific and then relax, and then watch what happens as your brain kind of digests that stimulus. So watching your breath is a powerful way of seeing how your brain is operating on so many different levels. Watching the sensations in your skin would be one way of listening to one area of the brain, watching the twitching of the eye and how the vision blurs. And unres when you're like present or zoning out.
(17:50): And all the other stuff might be a way of paying attention to something that's going on in the occipital lobe. For instance, in other words, all of your senses can be used as ways of paying attention to what's going on in the brain. And then if you want to stimulate it and try and give it some sense of what's happening, then you get a head massage. So you can do this with your own fingers. And I'm just gonna give you some three areas to consider like really relaxing in order to help the brain kind of quiet down its chatter. And these are the ones I'm always looking for something that's, that's constantly practical because I can say, okay, relax this neuron, but that's not gonna help you. And so there's three things that I've found that have been very, very helpful in kind of getting your brain out of.
(18:33): It's like tizzy focus on specific things that may be stressing you out into a place where you're just alive and aware and awake. So the first thing is to relax the eyes by relaxing the eyes. I mean, there's muscles in the eyes. And so if instead of focused vision, you just focus on like peripheral vision, like let the eyes kind of sink back in the head, so to speak or imagine them singing back. And you're catching the full panoramic view without focusing on any one given thing, you already do this. When you're driving down the road, you're not busy solely staring at the road. You're taking in the whole seat. And on occasion you focus your eyes to pick up a, a detail here or there, but then you relax your eyes back. And the same thing here, if you just relax your eyes, even let them blur a little bit and just try and focus on taking in all the information instead of one particular piece, then you'll find a very different sense of relaxation and even more, uh, like stimulation neurological stimulation in your head, your head might begin to tickle or buzz or tingle.
(19:32): The next thing is to relax your jaw, particularly the backside of the jaw or behind the jaw, just below the ear lobes. If you just let that hang a little looser, a lot of people's stress and tension and anxiety responses happen inside of their jaw bone. And that jaw bone has muscles attached to it, which hook up under the temporal bone hook up onto a little bit of the frontal bone hook up over the sphenoid bone, which is behind the eyeballs and runs through the center of your head and holds your pituitary gland and all your glandular function. And it might even have some tendrils that, that touch the occipital bone, maybe not, or the parietal bone up a little above, but very, very powerful muscles. So the more that you are clenching your teeth, drawing, moving about talking. Even you can create tension patterns in those bones, which then translate into connective tissue in the brain tissues.
(20:17): And as you squeeze it, it'll produce some other kind of activity. So relaxing, the jaw can be powerful, the powerful way to do it, then relax the root of the tongue. So the not the front of the tongue, just the back of the tongue. And as you relax the back of the tongue, kind of making it feel like your mouth is taller than what you'll find is a different sensation happening. And if you just do those three things, you might be surprised just how simple it is to get yourself into a place where you're not stressed out. Know your brain, won't be running a million miles an hour. No, you won't be like thinking about all these different things, but it'll give your brain a break from all the incessant chatter, even in the, in the old traditions, the Kung Fu that I studied for so many years, uh, Zen tradition, the notion of the brain is that it's a chattering monkey.
(21:01): So I want you to imagine that you're in a, a big room and there's just a few people in the room and you're sitting there talking to each other and it's fine. You can have a great conversation. You can be really engrossed in what's happening. And then all of a sudden, imagine 16 billion people walk in the room and all of them are all having just one little conversation with one person or one with another person. But that incessant chatter then makes it difficult for you who is just sitting there with your friend the whole time to turn and have a conversation. You can hardly hear each other. You have to like cut your ears. And it takes a lot more effort for basic communication to happen. Let alone to see what else is happening and going on in the rest of the brain. But if you do what happens in sleep, which is gather all that activity into a simple, coordinated movement, which is what happens with all these brainwaves in sleep, where there's actually more activity, but it's like a wave in a soccer stadium.
(21:54): If everybody's doing the same kind of dance and you're watching with each other, it's a lot easier to see what's happening and harder for each of these individual neurons to chatter. And that means coming back to well for stimulus on the head, relaxing the jaw and whatnot, that will create a different sensation that the brain now has to pay attention to massaging the head will do that. And that'll gather the attention in that way. And there are other techniques and other things that, that I've been developing over a period of time to try and help with this. But, you know, this is just a simple way of, of getting yourself to be relaxed, right? Relax the eyes, relax the back of the jaw, relax the root of the tongue. And then if you really want to allow the breath to happen on its own, if you focus on the exhale, just being as long as possible, it'll now the inhale will happen by itself.
(22:43): And so now you're relaxing the breath a little bit and then relaxing other body to body parts and whatnot, where you might find tension. But this simple mode of relaxation is a way to downregulate the nervous system. So the brain gives a chance to rest when it's not able to rest. What happens is that the brain cells swell with water cuz they're busy operating. And this is how plants by the way, communicate as well. They don't have a nervous system. They don't have nerves. They're not busy sending information that way, but their cells either expand or contract with water in order to send electrical signals between each other. And when there's all this chaotic chatter or static in the background going on in the brain, the, these cells swell. And that means the cerebral spinal fluid, which is trying to get rid of all of the waste products of the brain and all of the bits that happen because of normal activity.
(23:33): It can't get down in there and wash it away. Only when the brain relaxes and goes into this coordinated global movement, do the cells stop swelling. The fluid then connects and becomes a big river. And the cerebral spinal fluid can then wash the metabolites and waste products out of the brain. And that allows the brain now to function at a higher level. And this is what sleep does among and also what meditation can do. And so many other things it's not just sleep and so relaxing that activity and allowing it to be just present and staying with the present and being with the sensations that are happening, does something that allows for your brain to be cleaned out and washed. Yes, folks, you can brainwash yourselves, uh, in such a way that you can operate at a higher level. You'll have more energy inside of your system because you're not leaking that energy in chaotic static in the background.
(24:24): And the most fascinating part about this is that the less static there is in your brain, the less energy leakage there is in your emotions and whatnot. But on top of that, the less static there is in the brain. The more you can perceive it would be like turning off background noise and suddenly hearing the silence. It was there the whole time. But if you get used to the background noise, then you don't realize how much you are missing from life. How much perception is actually there? How much of those nine senses we talked about you could actually tap into and maybe you, your body's already perceiving all those things, but how much of it you could finally be aware of when there's not so much static running in the brain. And that means your ability to connect with other humans will grow your ability to understand what is needed in your life.
(25:10): And what would act in harmony with your life situations will increase your overall immune system will function better. Your, your intuition, your capacity to communicate at a deeper level will increase. Your health will increase so many different things will happen when you start to just reduce the chatter going on inside the head, or you quiet. The chattering monkey, the, the corollary to that would be taming. The wild horse and the wild horse would be the body. All the antsiness of the body really ringing out the tissues in such a way that they, they also are nourished with new, fresh blood and great nourishment and so on and so forth. So as we wrap up today on a strange Odyssey of adventure, talking about plants, communicating and making sound and it's it's vibrations really that's all that it is. It's an energy frequency vibration, according to Nicola Tesla, and that's all that my brain was doing.
(26:07): And yet that could be translated into music. There is a musical world all around us. There is so much going on that we have trained ourselves to believe we're not in harmony with, or that we, that it's impossible for us to be in touch with. And as a result, when some people are in touch with it, it seems like miraculous things are happening to them. It's not miraculous. It's the birthright of every human being to be able to really engage with life at a deeper and deeper level. It's just that we've trained ourselves with the notion that it's not possible. We've trained ourselves with the ideas of limitations in the human system. And that limitation that I started with in the beginning was, oh, addiction, doesn't go away. How many people are spending week after week, day after day, training themselves to believe that, and as a result, their brain produces that and here is just an invitation for you to consider the possibility that every limitation you've considered is only a limitation because that's what you've been trained to enact and trained to live in the world.
(27:08): And that if you can really cut through the chatter and see what's real, some of the limitations that you've assumed are bedrock are actually just ideas. They're like board games that people are playing and when you quit the board game, other games are possible and that's it for today's alive and free podcast. If you enjoyed this show and want some more freedom bombs landing in your earbuds, subscribe right now at wherever you get your podcast from. And while you're at it, give us a rating and a review. It'll help us keep delivering great stuff to you. Plus, it's just nice to be nice.
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