Andrea Nordling 0:01
Hello, my friend. Welcome back to the profitable nutritionist podcast. My name is Andrea Nordling, you know that if you’re here, I think I feel like I’ve never podcasted before. Let me tell you a little bit about my current situation. I’m gonna do a little before we jump into today’s episode, I’m gonna just do a little informal behind the scenes what’s going on here. So it is five o’clock in the morning. I am sitting down my voice is a little, maybe a little froggy. Because I haven’t been talking yet. This is my favorite time of day to podcast. But maybe my voice isn’t the best at this time of day. And I am coming back to sitting in my office after being gone for five weeks. We’ve been traveling for a long time. And I’m back and I’m sitting down at my regular desk with my regular podcasting setup to do this episode. And I’m sat down here like what do I do now? This is go I think I forgot. So my family and I I’ll do a quick little, a little recap for you, my family and I’ve been traveling, right after Christmas we took off to go to the gulf coast of Texas with my dad who loves to fish is an absolute fisherman’s paradise. He said, we went to the town of Rockport, we were hanging out in Rockport. And he said, You know what, I think that they need to just change the name on the town side to Rockport. This is the place where old fishermen come to die, which was like, Would you quit trying to die? First of all, it’s second of all, I understand the sentiment, you love it here. You love that there are a lot of other retired fishermen here and that you get to go catch big fish all day. So that’s what we’ve been doing. For the last five weeks, we stayed in a vacation rental. And we were hanging out in the much warmer weather than it is here in Minnesota, which is home for me. But we’re home now. And before I left, I had Bache recorded all of the podcasts that went out while I was gone. So now I’m back. And I had purposely saved this podcast episode to be the first one that I did when I came back, because I knew that I wasn’t going to I was gonna be just jumping right in. And I wouldn’t have given myself much time to outline an episode. And this one is kind of a different type of episode than I normally do. And it’s going to be very, very unscripted, not that my episodes are ever scripted, but it’s going to be just very casual and informal. And I’m going to answer some questions that my students in the profitable nutritionist program have asked me about my recent attendance at a Dr. Joe Dispenza week long advanced meditation retreat that I went to in December. So I have been very excited to just tell you all about it, if this is something you’re interested in, or even if you have no idea what I’m talking about, you might be interested in kind of the evolution of how I found myself in Cancun for eight days in December, and doing 35 plus hours of deep, deep self hypnosis slash meditation. It was very, very, very interesting. And I’m doing it with a cup of decaf coffee in hand. I know it’s weird to get up at five in the morning and tuber decaf coffee, but it’s just it’s all about the ritual. And here we are, I find myself telling you all of the things this morning. So for you, it’s just February 14, it’s Valentine’s day for me. It’s my first day back in the office in a long time, and I’m excited to share with you all of the things. Okay, so here is where we’re going on this roughly, like kind of my rough path of what I want to share with you about my Joe Dispenza week long retreat. First of all, how I found myself there in December, what that really How did that even happen? Because I’ve well, we’ll talk a little bit about this, but I’ve come a long way in my thoughts on meditation and the brain and all of that in the last year. So I’ll tell you all about that. Then I’m gonna give you my honest thoughts and takeaways from the event. And I’m going to answer some very specific questions, like I said that my students had asked me inside our private community, so I’m going to answer a bunch of those. And then I’m going to wrap up with some suggestions on where to start. If you are interested in dipping your toe into this, this pool this this type of meditation, it’s a very, very specific different type of brain work. And it’s very different than anything else I’ve ever seen for sure. So we’ll talk a little bit about that. Okay, now, like I said, first, I had to start with a bit of a medical buff on my previous thoughts on manifesting. And meditation in general. I don’t know if the two really went together. Let me try to unwind this the best that I can. I did a podcast early last year, so probably January or February of 2022, where I gave my very true honest real judgments. Let’s just cut right to the chase my very really true feelings on manifesting being complete bullshit, and hating that word and thinking it was kind of sacrilegious or like gross and just misleading like I didn’t like it, I did an entire episode on it, you can go back and listen to that episode, if you would like all of my thoughts. Since then, I will say that although I do not use the word manifest, I think I have a little bit better understanding of the different words that I can use to substitute for the word manifest. So I still just don’t like that word I don’t like the concept I don’t like that God is or the universe or anything is a is like a genie with a lamp type thing that just doesn’t sit well with me. I don’t like it. But I did find myself. So anyway, I’m not going to belabor that point, I did an entire podcast episode on it. And a lot of that I still feel very strongly about or still feels true to me. However, I’ve opened up my mind to the fact that maybe I just don’t need to use those words. And I can still, I can still have a meditation practice, I can still like leverage some of I think, what are the good points of manifestation? Or of Oh, my gosh, I can’t law of attraction. There we go. It’s very early. The law of attraction. Another thing I don’t generally like to label things with I it just doesn’t sit right with me. Right? It just fundamentally, I just don’t like it. I don’t like replacing the word God with universe and all that. So anyway, I think and the reason I say this is that I think I was an unlikely candidate to be at a Dr. Joe Dispenza week long advanced meditation retreat, because a lot of the a lot of the meditations that people do there. And a lot of the reasons I think that other attendees find themselves there is because they are leveraging his very deep, specific brain hacking, meditation techniques to manifest things in their lives. And I think a lot of people are they’re specifically trying to manifest better health and to change their bodies, which is very interesting. And actually, that’s going to be kind of the rabbit hole that I found myself being interested in his work. So anyway, all that to say, if you listen to my previous episode on why manifesting is bullshit, and you’re now wondering why I was at a Dr. Joe Dispenza, meditation retreat for a week, and you’re thinking that one plus one does not equal two in this situation, you’re right. And this is my full disclaimer that I my thoughts on this have changed a little bit. And I also feel like, I have a better understanding of my own bias on this and have kind of come full circle and just just not using words that don’t land with me and moving on. Okay. So last spring, I had Alyssa, though this would be late spring, early summer 2022. I had one of those situations where I kept hearing about Joe Dispenza, from several people. And I had before he had kind of been in my periphery, actually, a student in my program, shout out to Beth had mentioned Joe Dispenza, to me years ago, and I had made a mental note, just you know how you do that, like, oh, he should look into that. That’s probably interesting. She’s a genius lady, I probably should look into that never did. And then I had other students who were telling me that they were going to one of his live events. I had another colleague of mine that was telling me she was reading his book and just popped up on my YouTube, I think, I don’t know. Anyway, it was just one of those things where there was lots of synchronicities, where I was hearing Dr. Joe Dispenza, Dr. Joe Dispenza, from various places all at the same time. And I was like, Okay, I’m gonna figure out what what is this guy? What’s going on with this guy? So I did, and I ended up downloading, I think how this one is, I downloaded his audiobook. He has several books, he has a YouTube channel, he has a website with lots of material on it. So there’s lots of ways that you can tune in to Dr. Joe’s work. But here’s the short story. He is a chiropractor, that got a very bad injury himself, injured his spine really bad. And he used like he used the power of his mind to heal. I’m really bastardizing the story, but he used the power of his mind to heal his body with some very specific techniques that he learned and then perfected and then taught to other people, and they got really good results as well. And over the last many decades, he has like created kind of an incredible body of work around the mind body connection, and leveraging very, very deep, what he calls meditation techniques, although I don’t know that you that this is the mean, this ain’t your mama’s meditation. So if you’re thinking of meditation as downloading the calm app, and sitting quietly for 10 minutes, this is not what that what this is at all. I would say it’s much closer to like self hypnosis. It’s putting yourself into a deep, hypnotic state, I believe. I mean, I could be wrong, but that’s what it feels like to me. And I’ve done hypnosis before. And Dr. Joe is also trained in hypnosis. So this makes sense to me. That’s kind of what we’re you’re you’re doing, you’re actually changing changing the
Andrea Nordling 9:44
the brainwave patterns systematically to introduce new thoughts and new order and more patterns of basically taking chaos and making order of it in your brain in a measurable physical way with your brainwaves. which is really cool and can quickly allow you to reprogram your subconscious mind and subconscious beliefs and thoughts, but also allows your body physically to repair and to regenerate and to do some really cool physical stuff. So not only is his work really fascinating in the, in the way that people’s attitudes and minds and lives change because of their brain, but truly people have an incredible healing in their bodies. And he has a ton of testimonials, if you’ve, if you’re into this at all go to his YouTube channel. And there are literally hundreds, if not 1000s, of testimonials of people with wild, absolutely wild physical healing that has happened in their body when they have used his meditation technique. So very cool stuff, all that to say that I think I listened to his audiobook in the summer. And I was dabbling with some of the meditation techniques in the book. And I’m gonna tell you all about those at the end, what order I went in, and what I would do differently if you’re interested interested in doing this for yourself. So I was doing some of these meditations. They were different than any meditations I’d ever done before. But I’m kind of a gamer for stuff like this. If it’s, if it’s a little bit weird. If it’s a little on the fringe, I’m probably down. Like, let me try that. Okay, let’s go. So I was kind of getting into my meditation practice. I was doing it like loosely, daily, I would say, and these are long meditations. So these are about an hour. I was doing them in the morning. And a friend of mine was also doing this. We were kind of comparing notes. Like, do you think we’re doing this? Right? I don’t know. What are you? There was a lot of texting back and forth. Like I don’t know, if it’s supposed to be like this. Is it supposed to be like this? It was kind of fun. It was very, very experimental summer 2022. But I was really liking the the consistency of doing it almost every day. I would say probably I was doing it about five times a week, in the morning before I started my day. And I was feeling very, like just the consistency of doing that of mentally just slowing down and not feeling like my thoughts were just so frantic. And not frantic is even though we’re just like so fast. Instead of feeling like my thoughts were so fast. And moving on to the next thing. And the next thing and the next thing and planning so far into the future, I just was feeling a lot of calm. I was feeling like I really like how my brain feels. I like how my thoughts feel like how my body feels when I start my day this way. So like I said, I was probably doing his meditations about five times a week. And as I was getting more into it, I was like, Oh, I had heard that he did these live events these week long, advanced meditation retreats. So I purchased his course I don’t really remember how this was on my radar. But I had heard from someone or I had researched on his website or somewhere I had seen that he has a an online course. It was really inexpensive. I think it was like 300 bucks, 299, something like that. And it was a pretty comprehensive online course, that taught his material. It taught the meditations it teaches it basically teaches foundational, like his foundational principles of why the meditations are structured the way they are, why they’re so different than anything else you’ve done before. And then introduces meditation, and you actually do the meditation, then you watch a few more hours of lectures and more deeper material, then you he introduces a new meditation that brings you through that material. And it’s very systematic, which I really liked my I don’t know, my brain really likes that type of learning. So I purchased his online course. And I knew that that was a prerequisite for going to any of his live events. So I must have seen that on the website or something which cued me to look into what are these live events I love? I love me a live event. What are these live events?
Andrea Nordling 13:41
So it was in my Sunday, I should list of Oh, yeah, I kind of want to look into that. And because I had purchased the online course I was on his email list. And so I started getting emails about upcoming in person advanced retreats and his in person stuff. So I saw why. So I had that, well, I kind of have a lot of travel on my schedule. If the dates work out. If I see one that’s coming up, and the dates work out, I’ll look at it. And in August, I think it was August, I got an email that they were going to be taking registration for an upcoming week long advanced retreat in Cancun, Mexico in early December, the dates worked perfectly for me. So the way that these registrations go, and I didn’t know this at the time, but the way these go is they open up at a very specific time. They sell out within just a few minutes. So if you don’t get in when the first five minutes, you’re probably not going to get in. I happen to be a pretty regimented calendar type of a person. So I had it in my calendar for the exact time that it opened. And when it happened, I was right there just filled out my little registration. Got right in booked my hotel. And I was like, Okay, I’m going this is kind of crazy, but I’m gonna go figure this out. Then afterwards. I kind of went down a YouTube rabbit hole And I wanted to find out more, I guess, here’s what I think happened, there wasn’t a ton of information about what to pack and what to bring and how to prepare for this event. So I hit YouTube. And I was like, I’m gonna go, let’s see other people that have gone to these events, see what they say as far as what to bring in what to do. That led me down a very, very deep and windy rabbit hole indeed, where I, this is where I realized that it was so hard to actually even get into these events that they sell out so quickly. I had no idea about that. Before I learned what to bring. I learned what to expect. I learned a lot about it. So one of my student questions, and I wanted to cover this was was it more? Was the retreat more woowoo? Or was it more science based. And here’s my understanding, which I got a much greater understanding of when I was down my YouTube rabbit hole prior to actually going to the event is that Dr. Joe’s approach, like maybe this is why it really resonated with me, it’s less Zen, it’s less, he doesn’t use the word manifests very often, maybe other people in his community do, but he doesn’t. He uses other other words that are much less loaded and have less of a connotation of anything and are much more scientific. So I think that that’s why his approach really resonated with me, he really talks about the research that they’re doing. And at these live events, what’s really cool is they have, they have the opportunity, wherever that they have 1000s of people that are there for seven days that they’re able to take a sampling of and measure their brains measure there. Oh, my gosh, they’re doing amazing things. They’re measuring their gut biome, their heart coherence, their labs of their urine and tears, they’re finding like, amazing changes in people’s like body secretions is down to their tears, which is kind of crazy. They’re able to look at like blood pressure, all of that stuff, of course, anyway, it’s very sciency. Okay, and so they’re doing a ton of research on what changes happened in the body, even in this very condensed period of time over one week, and then they continue with the people that they’re studying for months and years afterwards, which is really cool as well. And he presented a lot of this research at the live event. So we were able to really get into that. I mean, it was it was really, really cool. So I think that I was much more drawn to his work because of the way that he presents it in a very science based way. And so that’s in his books and through listening to his audiobook, which is how I was first introduced with the concepts that he builds off of, it’s very sciency. And but it’s not in a hard to understand science way, but it is very sciency. So in answer to that question, definitely science based and really, I think like fascinating concepts that I was not fully aware of about alpha and theta brainwaves and opening up the subconscious mind to reprogram limiting beliefs and thoughts. And that’s a lot of the work that I do is thinking about our mindset and fixed thoughts and fixed beliefs and how to shift those. And I just looked at this as another tool to kind of experiment with on myself on how to even reprogram on a deeper level, quickly, old thought patterns, which I like I just geek out on this stuff, I love it. So I think his approach is very sciency about looking at what what you can do in your brain. And what’s actually happening in your brain that then manifests in your body and then the rest of your life. So you can just get to the source. And you can reprogram any limiting subconscious beliefs or emotion patterns, or just chaos in the brain that is then becoming apparent in the body so that you can physically change your body and your life circumstances which I love. So I decided that I was going to this event I was going to be prepared. I was going to be a star student, it would be really fun. Like I said, I went down this YouTube rabbit hole in preparation and realize, oh, wow, it’s I’m pretty lucky that I even got in to this event. Not everybody gets to go. If you’re not Johnny on the spot at registration time, you’re probably not going anyway. So I then realized also that there were going to be almost 2000 people there, just a huge group. And so I was pretty excited. Okay, I got to Cancun, December 2022 For let’s see, I got there a couple days early, because I like to, I just don’t like to cut things close with travel. I’ve seen so many people, especially recently that have flights ticket, cancelled, delayed all of that. And then they end up missing the beginning of an event. It didn’t want to do that. So I got there a little bit early. The event started at evening on Monday. So I think registration was all day Monday. And then because there’s so many people, I mean, there’s literally 1000s of people so the room is divided into different color sections. So there’s smaller units within the big group that are all color coded and you know what color you are based on the lanyard with your nametag on it and then you stay with your color group for the entirety of the event. Do they put different seating positions throughout the room the colors move around? It’s a very well oiled machine as far as how the event is coordinated. They’ve been doing these for years and years. It’s a pretty Great system, but it’s a huge event. However, you also have a smaller group. That makes sense. So we got assigned our colors we got checked in. And then on Monday night, I think we had a couple hour, Dr. Joe came out and talked for a couple hours. It’s it’s wild to watch him present. He has no notes, he has no screens, he just just jumps in and just goes wherever the conversation takes him. And it’s always very fruitful. So that was fun to watch. Just as somebody who hosts events myself and who presents in that way. I was like, wow, this is kind of insane. That he, he just goes and he knows exactly what he’s talking about. He has no prompts. It was it was cool to watch from that point of view as well. So Monday, we started with this short intro, it wasn’t actually short, it wasn’t even an intro. I’m just kidding. He kind of just jumped right into about what we would be doing all week. And then we hit the ground running early on Tuesday morning. So Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday was the rest of the event, we went half day on Sunday. Well, I think we were supposed to be done at two, but we went to like three or four or something like that some people had to leave to go catch flights. So that’s just a very fluid schedule. This is something I would say if you ever attended Dr. Joe event, the schedule is very fluid, and he goes long most of the time. So you can’t really make plans. On the days of the actual event. Don’t even think about trying to micromanage time, it’s not gonna work because it’s very fluid. So we start early, early in the morning. And the reason for that is the level of melatonin in the brain is the very highest early early in the morning. So we actually, I mean, one of the days, we started a meditation at four o’clock in the morning, meaning you had to be there in your seat at 330. So these are some very, very, like interesting timetables, I’m an early bird. So I actually love that. But we started as a rule, I think we started at 530 or six at the latest every day. And then we had some earlier days. So Tuesday, hit the ground running with a group meditation. Now just imagine being in a room, they have this room, very, very customized. So it’s a huge ballroom at a huge resort in Mexico. And they do these all over the world by the way that he does, like goop travels all over the world, and does these events, but they clearly have a very well oiled system. As far as how they prepare the room, I’ve never been to another one. So I can’t I can’t compare it to anything. But I will say that the room was completely transformed with lots of blackout curtains, amazing speakers and sound. It was it was like a sound box, a very dark sound box in this room intentionally because there are a lot of the time that we spent in this room when he wasn’t up on stage talking. And he kind of walks around the room and talks as well. But it’s a really big room, the lights were off, and it was low lighting. And we were actually doing the meditation. So the room is really set up for that the sound was fantastic, like I said, and it’s pretty quiet, it’s cold, they keep the temperature really cold so that you don’t fall asleep during the meditation. So this was something I learned on YouTube prior to the event was needing to bring layers and have like a little blanket type thing with you. I also had a yoga mat, because you you do the meditations seated, but a lot of times you lay down at the end of them or there’s actually was one that we did laying down. So it’s it’s weird to think about how that many people are going to have space to do that laying down and then moving round, but it all works out. You just figure it out. It all works out. So we started with those meditations, I think that we did I believe over the course of the entire event. We did like 35 hours. So what were we doing five hour, five, six, sometimes seven hours a day of meditating, which is just bananas for me to even
Andrea Nordling 23:38
tell you. I feel like that is the craziest thing. It didn’t feel like it was that much at the time there was you know, you’d have a couple hours for breakfast, a couple hours for lunch, get out, go to the beach, sit in the sun, go back to your room, whatever. And then come back there would be a talk then that would commence with a meditation. Usually that would be like an hour, hour and a half long. Sometimes they were a little bit longer. We did one that is the big like his his really big transformative. I mean, they’re all very transformative in their own way. But his really big meditation is the Pineal Gland meditation. And that one was four hours and 45 minutes long that when we started at four o’clock in the morning, and it felt like it truly felt to me like it was an hour and a half. Maybe if I had had to guess it was just wild that we were so deep in meditation for so long. Again, it feels a lot more like hypnosis is guided he’s talking the whole time he’s giving you prompts and telling you what to do. It feels like guided hypnosis isn’t all hypnosis guided? I guess? I don’t know. Anyway, that’s what it feels like to me rather than meditation. So that’s kind of what the event was structured like it was days and days of practicing the meditations practicing being more focused practicing getting deeper just like letting whatever happened happened. There’s a lot of people have really intense breaks throws in the room during these meditations. So sometimes sometimes you would hear people like screaming it sounded, I in case you’re listening to this with your kids in the car, I won’t tell you exactly what it sounded like. But it was very explosive at times, which I thought would be really distracting. But I was able to actually just tune that out and kind of stay in my stay in my own lane. It was cool, it was a great opportunity to just practice meditating over and over again. And then at the end of each one, you leave. And then usually though, the meditation will be right before a long break. So then you go on a break, and you come back and then to start the next session, he’ll say, What did like what did you do really well, that time that you want to build on for next time. And so that’s kind of an evaluation technique that I teach to my students, and then I do in my own business, as well, and in other areas of my life, is thinking about what went well. So that was very, you know, in line with what I do anyway, but I really liked that we would turn to our neighbor, we would talk about what went well, and get other people’s perspectives, other people’s experiences and get better to do the next meditation, which would come in a few hours, and there were just so many different at bats, I felt like we just kept stepping back up to the plate and doing it again, and stepping back up and doing it again, that I felt like I got so much better at focusing. And I’m getting really deep into the meditations over the course of the week, because we just did so much practice, it was very useful. I again, I just was going there, we’re not really knowing what to expect. But I said, I’m here for it, I’ll just go see what happens. And it was really a great experience. I learned a lot about myself, I learned a lot about my expectations and judgments of my own, wanting to be great at things right away and my expectations. And that way, I think everyone in that situation was feeling the same thing. So it was great. Like, it just was fantastic. These were very long days, I will say I was tired mentally, I just was tired. Events like this, I tend to meet really cool people. I love going to live events. For this reason, just meeting new people. I don’t think I’m extremely extroverted. But I must be more than I give myself credit for. Because I always find the cool people. This is just something I know about myself, I always find the good people, and then I want to go to dinner with them. And then we have long conversations late in when we should be sleeping. So I was tired. I will say I was tired at this event. I actually ended up sitting next to Dr. Joe’s attorney. And that was really cool. I got to hear he had never meditated before. But he was very familiar with his work because he had studied it. And he had, like he knew it from the illegal perspective for defending it against lawsuits. And people. Just I mean, when you’re as big as Dr. Joe Dispenza is people I think, are a little bit crazy and come after you. So he knew about this work from a different, like a different angle. But he had never meditated before we had so much fun. He was telling me, you know, like the things that he knew from a legal perspective that he had studied and why he told me a lot of Dr. Joe’s story, he told me a lot of like, well, this is where this came from. And this is where he learned this. And this is how it all came together, which was really cool. Again, just meeting the coolest people in person. And then watching him do the meditations for the first time because Dr. Joe had just told them, Hey, you gotta go, you just got to come to this event, just come and do it. And so he was there with just, you know, kind of as a blank slate, like I’ve never had done these meditations before. I know a lot about them. But I’ve never experienced that myself. And so that was really fun. We had a lot of great conversations about what he was experiencing when he was doing the meditations for the first time. So which brings me to another thing I wanted to say if you aren’t super experienced with doing his meditations, you could still show up to the event and just jump in. And so there are people that have gone to like 1020 of these. And they just keep getting to a new level. And they just love the community and they love the experience. And they’re very advanced meditators. And then you also have people I will say there’s like husbands there that I don’t I think that their wives just told them we’re doing this they had never meditated before they hadn’t. They they didn’t even know what they were in for. Or like my friend that was the attorney like he’s just okay, I’m just gonna do this. And here we go. And they had equally great experiences. So you don’t have to be really advanced as a meditator to go to one of these events. If you look on his website and you see something coming up, put it on your calendar to register register the exact minute that the registration opens and just go I’m sure you’ll have an amazing experience. Okay, so I have a few notes here of things I wanted to talk about let me just make sure I’m covering them. I was less critical of myself I over the course of the week definitely found that I was getting more playful and more light in my meditations instead of going in with an agenda like I have to go really deep this time I have to he calls it getting into the blackness which is just clearing your mind. Almost getting into what I think is like the state of right before you go to sleep. I’ve just like I’m going to sleep now shut your eyes. You just tuned everything else out like getting into that state but not actually going to sleep. It’s hard to do is hard for anyone to do because we were humans with very chaotic lives, we have a lot on our minds literally all the time our minds are, are on focusing and going a different direction, we have to intentionally bring it back. So instead of making that a really big deal, like I said, there were just so many opportunities to try it again. And I found that that was really helpful for me because I was like, Okay, I just have no expectations, this one might suck, who cares, we’ll do another one in a little bit. And releasing that judgment of myself and letting it be just no big deal was very helpful than obviously, I will maybe not so obvious. It wasn’t obvious to me. But what happened is, then I did way better at sting deeper into the blackness and in having better meditations because I wasn’t putting so much pressure on myself. Shocking. I know. I know. Here’s what another question that I had from one of my students, she asked, and which was really cool, by the way, it’s just in the community, they just knew that I was there. They’re like, Hey, are you going to share anything about this? And I said, Yeah, I actually am gonna do a podcast on it. List your questions here so that I have them all in one place. So I just went and grabbed these questions before I jumped on here. Here are the questions. Another one was I’d love to know why you wanted to go who you saw yourself as beforehand and who you became afterwards I say this because I see you is so put together and so all over the mind stuff. So why would you even need Dr. Joe’s help? Which I giggled when I read this. Oh my gosh, I giggled so much. Here’s my answer. A new level new devil always I have a very, very human distractible, distracted, negative, judgmental, bitchy brain, for sure. And so I have lots of work to do, always. So do we all I don’t think you’ll ever get to any point where you just Yep, I got this brain stuff figured out. I have all this mindset stuff figured out, I can move on. It’s always changing in the same patterns come up in new ways. New Level new devil seriously, if my thing. So I’m a work in progress, just like everyone else. And I have the exact same thoughts that you have. And I have the exact same patterns that you have, they might have a slightly different look and flavor about them these days. But they’re the same ones. They’re still there, I’m still dealing with all of the same stuff. And I like I said, with the mind body component, I was really intrigued with what’s possible in my body. So I just like I love to experiment on myself, I love to guinea pig with myself. So that’s kind of why I wanted to go there. Like what would be possible, like, what if I could stop growing gray hair.
Andrea Nordling 32:26
I kept telling people while we were there. I mean, some people are have extremely serious terminal cancer, Ms. Like very, very serious health conditions. I am very blessed not to be experiencing any of that my own body. But I was watching people and they share a lot of stories and people just firsthand when you’re just sitting at lunch with a new person, you’ll hear these amazing like mind blowing stories of physical healing. So I started to think well, I don’t have anything like that to work on. But like what what would be possible in my body, I really hate that my hair is growing in gray, like I really hate this a lot seems a little bit inconsequential in comparison to what a lot of people are dealing with when they go there. But that was something I was like, I don’t know, I’d be kind of cool. If I could intentionally stop growing my hair gray or my having my hair grow in gray and it would grow and brown again, that would be fantastic. I actually had an experience where was not something that I was thinking about at all. But in one of the meditations, I felt like this very, very warm sensation going through all of my guts, like I could feel it was like a, like a really warm, almost hot but not uncomfortable. Like a snake, which is so gross to say. But it wasn’t it was just like felt like a little energy bolt actually like going through all weaving through all of my intestines. And I just got in it started on the left, and it moved all the way through to the right, it was very unexpected. And I just felt like oh, I just had this knowing that something was really healing inside my guts. So that was cool. There was a lot of little things like that. And actually, I journaled after each meditation of these little things that happened that I probably would have forgotten, but I wrote them all down. And it was really cool. Like little, just little things like that. I didn’t have any massive, like, I’m a completely different person after this one moment. And I can pinpoint this one moment. But there were lots of little things that were that happen during these meditations that was like, Oh my gosh, I like I would see something or I would have an understanding of something or would feel like I got a message about something or something happened in my body. It was really cool. For a few of them. I felt like my heart like I was running. I’m a runner. So I felt like I was running for like 45 minutes, like my heart was beating really, really, really fast. But I could feel like I just had an understanding that my body was just downloading the energy in the room and like my heart was just processing this energy in a good way. And I just was like, it was really weird. I was sitting completely still, but I knew that I was it was like I was running felt really, really trippy. Like, in a good way. Anyway, those are a few of the things that happened to me And I hope that that answers the question. I think that new level new devil, there’s always, always things to learn about ourselves always work to be done. And plus I just like to be a guinea pig. So the weirder the better is if you’re listening to this, and you’re some sort of an alternative wellness practitioner or the holistically minded, I bet that you feel the same way. Like if it’s a little fringy it’s almost even more intriguing, like, Well, I gotta see what’s up with that. I gotta, I gotta go tune in a little bit. That’s how I felt about Dr. Joe’s live events like what if some is good, more is better, obviously. So if I’m liking these meditations on my own, I have to go fully immerse for 35 hours of meditation. It’s the next logical step, right? Oh, it’s true. I want to laugh and tell you it’s not true. It absolutely is true. That’s how that’s that was the thought process there. So I want to wrap this up with what I would recommend people doing this as another question that came up is what would I recommend that people do to get started? If you are interested in any of this for yourself? What do you actually do? Where’s the starting point? So I’ve had some of my students who have reached out said, I want to start with this. And here’s what I suggested to them. First of all, Dr. Joe has an official YouTube channel with like I said, a lot of resources, a lot of his teachings on there, he has a ton of testimonials, you’ll get a very good taste of the work that he does from his actual YouTube channel. And there are 1000s and 1000s of people that have been to his live events and done his work, and then also do their own YouTube kind of reviews and thoughts, comments, questions, concerns, all of that about the work that they’ve done personally. So if you hit YouTube, you will get a wealth of information, believe me, he also works with some and has done some very high profile podcasts. And he has had celebrities that have done this, and then talked about their experiences as well. So I think that he’s, he’s kind of the go to, and he has a lot of people that talked about him. So if you go type in his name on YouTube, you’re gonna get a smattering of information. He has his own YouTube channel that his team does a good job of kind of compiling people’s most meaningful testimonials and putting them on there, as well of some of his teachings. But then you’ll hear other people’s just candid reviews as well. So that would be a great place to start on his website, Dr. Joe dispenza.com, he has a ton of resources. So you can actually download his meditations on his website. And then you access them from there. Like I said, all of his meditations are very, are guided, there’s very specific music, we learned about this at the live event that he’s very, very picky about the music that he chooses, that goes behind the prompts that of him talking through the meditation, which just a side note, the entire event, the live event that we were there, he just was sitting up on stage on a couch with a microphone, guiding the meditation, just there were no prompts. It was insane. When you’re thinking that some of these meditations were almost five hours long. And he’s just sitting up there, reading the room, watching what everyone’s doing, seeing how deep they’re in, how long do we need to stay here before we move on? It was crazy, to absolutely crazy. So super cool. All of I mean, I just have so much respect for his stamina in conducting these events. It wasn’t like he would shut up on stage a little bit. And then he went and did his own work for a while he was there for like 17 hours a day. Sometimes we were in this room, it was just insane to watch. So he has the guided meditations on his website, Dr. Joe dispenza.com. I would recommend starting with the breaking the habit of being yourself, or well, okay, so he has several books. One of them is called Breaking the Habit of being yourself. That is the one that I started with with the audiobook. And then there are related meditations that people refer to as the space meditations because in these meditations, he says the word space in this very trippy way about 1000 times. So I really liked those meditations. That’s what I started with. So those are available on audiobook, the they’re literally called the meditations for breaking the habit of being yourself. And there are four meditations in there. So on Audible, you can download them and go, this is not obvious, but I have learned this. So I will tell you this trick out of the four meditations in there, one and two go together, and three and four go together. So you don’t do them as four separate meditations. You do one and two at the same time. And then three and four, you do together and there’s he teaches it in the book, but there’s a very specific induction technique that you’re learning in these meditations to bring your brain low levels, your brainwaves part of me down into alpha, low alpha and theta brainwave states through this very specific induction technique that he teaches. And then the second part of the meditation goes into the actual subconscious mind programming work and what you want to be working on and you kind of introduce some intentions there. So it’s very formulaic, wanting to go together, three and four go together, that is not obvious when you download them on Audible. So I just want to tell you that if that’s where you decide to go, he also has a book called You Are the placebo. And I have not personally read that book or done the meditations that go with it. But I have some students who have that say that that was a great place to start with reading or listening to that book, and then doing the you are the placebo meditations, also good beginner meditations. And then once you get into the flow of it, and you kind of understand what you’re doing there, then you graduate from the space meditations into his more nuanced, advanced, specific meditations for whatever it is that you’re trying to create in your life. So on his website, there’s tons of meditations for, I mean, there’s like physical healing, there’s financial healing, there’s lots of very specific topics. And you can go download your meditations and do them just from his website, which is super cool. But I also would recommend doing the self guided course that he has, which is just a video course where like I said it, it teaches the concepts and then introduces the space meditation, space meditate,
Andrea Nordling 41:11
teaches you what you’re doing, then you do them, then he teaches you some more than you do the next kind of meditation. And I think that he has five different meditations in that course. So I would highly recommend if you are into this, to just start there, because that’s a great, it’ll just walk you through step by step, you don’t really need to think of what comes next, because it’s just going to introduce them in order. And you’re going to get a lot of the foundational knowledge that you need to understand what is actually happening in your brain and in your body during those meditations. And he’s a big believer that building a model around what you’re doing and creating meaning for it is really important, I happen to agree. So I found that to be really helpful to know actually what is happening in my brain when we do this, and how may I be seeing changes in my body and in my life because of it. It’s a very sciency mixed with a little woowoo. This is just a really good blend together. It’s my takeaway here. So I would highly recommend any of his books. There’s, like I said, You are the placebo. There’s breaking the habit of being yourself. There’s also becoming supernatural, and becoming supernatural. I have in hardcopy, and it goes really deep into the science of the meditations and what’s happening with your brainwaves. Exactly. So if you were like, really want to get into the science part of it, that would be a great place for you to also spend a little time in becoming supernatural. I would also say that, okay, well, I didn’t know if I was gonna say this. But I’ll say that’s one of my favorite meditations is a little bit more advanced after you’ve been going through some of his other stuff and getting familiar with the meditation. So you’re more focused, you’re able to get into kind of get into the blackness and, and unfocus so that you can focus on the blackness when you’re better at that, because you had more practice from doing the other meditations, I would highly suggest one called the alchemist, it is my very, very, very favorite. It has very specific music that is hypnotic in a, like an interesting way that I might can’t even explain, you just have to experience it for yourself. But we did this one at the advanced the week long retreat. And then afterwards, he said that this was one of his favorites as well, because he had worked with the composer at length to get this perfect music and it taken them months. And it was it’s very specific to the goal of that meditation, which is creating patterns and order in your brain. And he shows a lot of the mean if you’re into this, you’re gonna go watch, hopefully watch his progressive course. And you’re going to see this for yourself. But he shows the, like what people’s brains look like. It’s like this is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. He shows this is your brain in normal life. And it’s just crazy, like basically looks like a scribble, like a, like a one year old, took a crayon and scribbled all over with people’s brains. And then he shows this is your brain on order and patterns after doing these meditations. And everything is in line. Like it’s like you took five crayons and you held them all at the same time. And then you made up and down lines, and they’re all together. They’re all cohesive, they’re all there’s a pattern, there’s an order, there’s a method to it instead of the scribble. And they’re able to measure this in people’s brains because of the amount of people that are at these live events. They have lots of willing participants and are able to, like actually see this happening in real time. So I think that any of the meditations that you do, are going to help create that effect. However, this one called The Alchemist is just the best as far as in my experience. It’s like the best because it’s there just something about the very hypnotic, very trancy music. That’s not music, it’s I don’t even know it’s something in between. You have to experience it for yourself. But I leave that one feeling like oh my gosh, I can actually feel that My scribble brain just got very orderly and very patterned, and very, this is another. Okay, now hold on, I missed two things. I have to go back. I told you that I had a loose outline here. I’m gonna go back to two things I wanted to talk about that I somehow forgot. There are two I think two or three times, we did meditations that involved a kaleidoscope. So he has this he these huge screens that they put kaleidoscopes on. Not, I mean, obviously not actual kaleidoscopes. But what like images that look like you’re looking through a kaleidoscope, which is very trippy and very, it just like really quickly changes your brainwaves down into lower brainwaves like low alpha and theta state, which is where you want to be if you’re reprogramming your subconscious mind at that point, your subconscious mind is wide open for interesting experiences or to introduce new thoughts or to reprogram old beliefs for your body to change all of that. So the goal is always to get to get you out of the high beta brainwave state, which is the scribble brain and get you into these very cohesive, very pattern like lower brainwave states where you can then do some great work. So the kaleidoscope was really cool. He says that they’ve just found that that is a very quick way to do that staring at the kaleidoscope creates so much order in the brain. And then there’s this very interesting music going on in the background. Well, it’s not even really background, it’s kind of loud, actually during the meditation, which is helpful because then you’re not hearing other people rustling around or moving. So I actually like the that it’s loud. Anyway, the kaleidoscopes super cool it, it was very trancy, but in a good way. And then the music helps with that. And you can just feel like you’re, you can feel your heart kind of going in syncing up with the rhythm of the sounds. And you can just feel it feels like just a very unfamiliar, but yet, welcome body reset. Like, you can just feel all of the systems of your body just like oh, yeah, everything’s in order. Everything’s working together, everything is coherent, it feels like things really slow down and recalibrate. It feels really great. So the kaleidoscope meditations or bomb, I loved those. We also did three coherence Healing Meditations. And I had learned that this was going to take place prior to the live event, when I went down my deep, deep, deep YouTube rabbit hole and was watching other people’s experiences from the advanced retreats. And they were talking about these coherence healings, I had no idea what that was. And now I do because not only did I learn about them prior to the event, so it didn’t completely take me by surprise, but also I have had the experience now. So they’ll coherence healing our group healing activities, you just have to see it and you have to experience it to really get the depth of what I’m gonna say I’m gonna give a very, very brief overview here, but it’s super cool. I highly, highly, highly recommend that you tune into this, especially if you have healing that you need in your body or you know someone that does. So during these events. When you register you can indicate if you have something that you are trying to heal in your body, and if so you can apply to be what’s called the Healey. So there are healers, which is everyone else in the room. And then there are a couple 100 Healy’s so again, there were 1800 people, I think at this event, and I believe that 200 of them were selected to be Heelys, and that meant that they were participating as the person that was being healed in these three coherence Healing Meditations. So it was very different than any of the other meditations if you were a healer, you left the room if you are hilly, they rearranged the chairs into groups of six or eight chairs around one person that was on the floor. And that person was the hilly so they we all left as the healers, the Healy’s got situated on the floor, Dr. Joe got them into a pretty deep meditative state ready to receive healing and to feel worthy to be healed and they did specific work while the rest of us were doing a walking meditation, getting ready to heal them, or like getting into an energetic state for just what is possible with and how to heal other people. It was really, I’m doing a terrible job of explaining this, but it was very profound, especially with that many people all walking and moving together and doing the same thing you can this energy is just very palpable. You can feel it, literally you can feel it. And that’s really cool, too. So then we came back after we were prepared, we came into the room. And then very quickly, the team is amazing. Again, this is something they do a lot so they have a system for getting everybody quickly moved into the room while the energy is still very high and getting everyone around a person you have no idea who this person is. You also have blindfolds most people there have like, think of bougie sleep masks. Like that’s what I mean by blindfold. But you have these on to pull over your eyes when the meditation starts so that it’s fully black. Like there’s no distractions. You can’t see any light Any anything. So most of us have these blindfolds, you get around the person, you pull your blindfold down, then Dr. Joe is bringing everybody through the coherence, healing meditation. And basically you’re syncing up your energy with the people around you and directing it towards the person that needs to be healed. You have no idea what they’re, you have no idea what their issue is. You don’t know who the person is. But it is just, I mean, these, these were the best meditations, they were so so intense, there was a lot of crying, it was highly emotional. And the conversations afterwards were Oh, my gosh, like what just happened? Oh, my goodness, especially from the Healy’s who would then sit up afterwards, and say how they felt during it and the changes that happened, but also just the energy of healing in the room, a lot of people had significant healing themselves just from being there as a healer. It’s wild, absolutely wild. So I want to say, that was really, really profound. I had no expectations for that, again, I had heard about it on YouTube, but I didn’t really know what that was, I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know what the format of that would be, I guess, but it was really profound. So amazing. In fact, there, once you have gone to one of these advanced events, you are then introduced to the next level of Dr. Joe’s world where you can become certified in coherence healings, you can have a key has a lot of volunteers, he has a lot of breakout teams that do this work at a deeper level. So what they actually do, and I was not aware of this until the event, they have virtual coherence healing. So if you need to be healed from something or something that you’re struggling with, you can ask to be on one of those. And then they have these coherence healing teams that do the same type of format of what we did in person, but they do it virtually. And they’re seeing incredible healing and results from that as well. So that was really just a very profound experience to be part of, I can’t you just have to do it for yourself to understand. That was next level for sure. I just was so impressed at the entire event with the amount of organization with how it was just a well oiled machine. But at the same time was very fluid. And it wasn’t formulaic in it wasn’t scripted. It was formulaic, I’m sure behind the scenes, but it wasn’t scripted. It was It went so well. But it was also very fluid. And I loved that was a great experience. The coherence healings are absolutely amazing. The now I mean, I guess now I get to go to Advanced follow up retreats. So this was the advanced week long. But now that I’ve done that there’s next level events. I’m looking forward to attending one of those when the dates align in the future. And I don’t know, this is just kind of my, I guess, my experience. No, a lot of my people were interested. So here’s my quite on unfiltered thoughts on going to this week long, advanced Dr. Joe Dispenza retreat, it was absolutely fantastic. I met wonderful people I learned so much about myself, I learned so much about what’s possible, I learned what I would like to work on for next time, there’s some things I didn’t like that I was very impatient with myself about specifically, there were four walking meditations that were early in the morning on the beach. And you you had you do the meditation in your ear. So you have to have on like air pods, or you have to have actually corded works better because there’s so many people there that people are having issues with their pods and the Bluetooth. So you listen to the recorded meditation while you’re walking on the beach, I found those to not be my best. I was very frustrated about the walking meditations, which many people say are their very favorite part of the event, I couldn’t get into it. So I for next time would definitely be working on my expectations and my patience with myself in the walking meditations,
Andrea Nordling 53:52
maybe practicing those a little bit. Before I go. Yeah, and I will go again, absolutely will go again, I loved the experience. I have other people in my life who want to go. So hopefully, at some point, I will be able to rally a crew and go but I would love like I would welcome any questions you have on this. If you’re on my email list, you have my email, feel free to send me one. And we can talk more in depth. I just I wanted to give my unedited thoughts on the event why I went, how I feel different about myself and about meditation in general since the event and I guess my concise answer to this in case I didn’t fully get into it in the last 55 minutes. Is that I don’t know if meditation is exactly the word I would use to describe the experience. I feel like that has a connotation of downloading the calm app and sitting quietly for 10 minutes. That’s not what this is. So this is completely different. Very different experience very different process than you know headspace app or Whatever. It’s not like that at all, it’s much deeper. And I think it is very sciency. I also would say at the event there, they brought on the team of researchers that is looking into. And like, from my point of view, this was really interesting, they’re very specifically trying to figure out why people’s microbiomes change. So significantly, just over the course of the seven days of the live event. And then of course, afterwards, there, there’s a lot of measurable change, but just in the seven day sample, they see such a huge change in the microbiome. And so obviously, as a holistic nutritionist, that’s something that really spoke to me and I was very curious about. So that was just one of the things they were talking about. But they have like the researchers and the the teams that are putting all of this data together, come on, and do I think, maybe a two hour presentation and kind of q&a on what their findings are and where they’re headed next, and what they’re publishing as far as the research goes, which really is fascinating to me. So if you are sciency in that way, and you really liked the statistics, and you really like to know the research behind it, I would say this is the place for you, you will get exactly what you came for. It is very sciency. If you are more woowoo, you will get exactly what you came for you it’s very woowoo in the way Huawei has, I want to I don’t know how to articulate this. And I don’t want to poison the well for anyone’s personal experiences, because they’re all going to be different. But they’re just personally there’s a lot of growth that happens behind that blindfold, in 35 hours of meditation at the live event. So take that for what it’s worth, it is woowoo, it is sciency, it’s both of them put together in a very, very interesting package. So highly recommend, if you’re interested in this work at all get started with just poking around on his website, YouTube, and downloading any of the meditations that you find. I mean, I don’t think that there’s really a wrong way to start this work. But the progressive course that is whatever it is, like 299, whatever that is on his website, I think it’s it has a longer title, but something about the word progressive in it. That is also a great starting point. And then you’re gonna get all of this together, you’re gonna get the research, you’re going to get the the why, and then also introduces the meditations too. So that is what I’ve got for you today. All things Dr. Joe meditation retreat. So have a wonderful week, my friend, again, I would love to hear from you. If you end up downloading or starting any of this work, hit me an email, you are on my email list, right? We’ve we’ve made that clear that has to happen, go to build a profitable practice.com and sign up for anywhere where you can enter your email address on the website, if you haven’t already, so that you get all of my emails, and then you’ll be able to hit reply. And tell me about this journey that you go on, I would be very interested to hear. If you are already a doctor, I know a lot of my audience is already very familiar with Dr. Joe’s work and is already on some sort of a trajectory there yourself. I would love to hear about it. I just I’m just curious. And then if not already, but you are in the future. I want to hear about that, too. In the meantime, we have some big things happening. First of all, Happy Valentine’s Day. Again, I don’t think that I said that not happy Valentine’s day, Tuesday, in February, maybe this is a big day. Maybe this is just another Tuesday for you. For me, it’s probably just Tuesday, but Happy Valentine’s Day. So coming up, we have some very, very cool events, not to least of all the clients week training that will be kicking off on February 27, just less than a couple of weeks from when you get this episode. So you have to sign up for the clients week training. I guess that’s what I’m gonna leave you with today as your homework. If you have not already, you need to register for clients week at Build a Profitable practice.com/clients plural with an S and you’re going to get five days of information very, very actionable training from me that is actually paid content from inside the profitable nutritionist program. I’m giving it to you for free for five days for you to get better quality and more quantity of the exact clients that you want. So if you’re struggling with the number of clients that you have, and it’s not as many as you’d like to have or if you’re struggling with the clients that you have currently burning you out and not being the dream clients that you wish were banging down your door, either problem is going to be solved in our five days together. You have to register for clients week. So again, that’s build a profitable practice.com/clients plural. Go there. Register. I will see you next week with another episode here and I will see you on February 27 with the day one video for clients week. Have a wonderful wonderful week my friend
