Why Vibes Matter: Science, Energy, and the Healing Power of Consciousness with Dr. Garret Yount

Lorne Brown 

By listening to the Conscious Fertility Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guest or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to Conscious Fertility, the show that listens to all of your fertility questions so that you can move from fear and suffering to peace of mind and joy. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. I’m on a mission to explore all the paths to peak fertility and joyful living. It’s time to learn how to be and receive so that you can create life on purpose.

Today on the Conscious Fertility Podcast, we have Dr. Garret Yount. He’s a PhD molecular neurobiologist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences Ions, where his research focuses on laboratory based models of exceptional human abilities. He obtained his BS from the, that doesn’t sound right. Bs. We’re going to call it Bachelor of Science. You can’t use bs. There’s some people that talk about our topic, they may say, yeah, exactly. This is a BS degree. You’ll see we’re a little playful here today. He obtained his bachelor of science from the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the Pennsylvania State University and his PhD from the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at the state of New York at Sony Brook. And I’m sharing with you guys his background here because when we talk about conscious work, part of the goal of the podcast is to bring some credibility there, like showing you that there is some rigor, there’s some science behind this.

We’re not just somebody who had this thought or one person had this dream and they’re telling you this is how the world could work. There’s some science rigor and people like Garret today have done the education to get to this place where they can really observe and study these things that we’re going to talk about today. So a little more about Garret. He began his formal studies in consciousness research with a small grant from the Institute of Noetic Sciences way back in 1995 that allowed him to work with biofield practitioners. Garret will have to define what biofield is and spiritual healers in the laboratory. And since then, Dr. Yount has conducted carefully controlled laboratory experiments with spiritual healers and biofield practitioners from around the world. And this includes China, Brazil, Canada, the USA, Japan, India, Russia, Hungary, and Srilanka. And he’s also been fortunate to be amongst the first scientists to be awarded a research project grant from the National Institute of Health to study energy healing. And he’s also the author of Why Vibes Matter, Understanding Your Energy and Learn how to Use It wisely at the beginning. I was telling Garret at the beginning that we actually met way back in 2022 when he was part of the Society of Science Exploration Conference and I got to his talk. And so welcome back Garret and nice to have you on the Conscious Fertility Podcast.

Garret Yount

Thank you so much. It’s great to be here.

Lorne Brown 

So as I kind of shared in the intro, looking for credibility here, and to me you’re the credibility guide. You have studied, you got a PhD, you’re doing research, you’re doing rigor. It’s kind of like I’m the guy that wants to believe,

But I need some evidence to help me believe I’m not one of those guys that, okay, I’m just going to believe because you said it. I may be a little naive, but I say I have some healthy skepticism. That’s why I kind of wanted to talk to you today because I feel there’s a paradigm shift from the Newtonian world. Everything’s very materialistic. You can only, what you see measured with your senses are real to this quantum idea that there’s more to this world where there’s a paradigm shift happening. So I’m so glad you’re here. And I kind of wanted to start with just your book that you wrote, Why Vibes Matter, understanding your Energy and Learn how to use it wisely. I want to get into a little bit of your book. Can we first define biofield sciences or biofield healing or biofield practitioners since it’s your book and in your bio?

Garret Yount 

So it’s bio and biofield science. It’s somewhat of a catchall phrase to include spiritual healing like Qigong, jore, reiki. So as you alluded to the materialistic idea of the body of the world and then the body being this kind of machined is not the whole story clearly. So there are all these traditions, a lot of them healing traditions developed to manage the subtle energies of the body. So different cultures call it the different things like chi or prana. So biofield science, it’s kind of the modern lingo to make it more palatable to speak to a scientific community. So it’s essentially these purported energies associated with the body that are very related to health and can be influenced by our mind. That’s the catchall phrase for biofield.

Lorne Brown 

Then I need to even back it up more. How is it that somebody gets interested in this field? What was it for you that brought you to this? And I ask it because many people when they go into some type of vocation profession, there’s a personal experience. A lot of people that end up being psychologists, psychotherapists had trauma that they wanted to work with. They had to heal themselves and they went out and healed others. Not the typical thing. I want to grow up to be a lawyer and a doctor researcher. This back in the nineties definitely wasn’t on people’s radars like it is today. So what’s your story? How did you get interested in this?

Garret Yount 

Well, it’s interesting because when we were speaking earlier a little bit about the podcast, Conscious Fertility and you were mentioning the consciousness aspect of it, that’s where I began my interest. So when I was young, I had some experiences that led me to believe that consciousness and the human mind was a lot more than what everybody was talking about I was learning about. So I was super interested in consciousness, powers of the mind and then trying to do personal stuff, reading books, a lot of stuff out of Asia, trying to get out of my body, stuff like that. And then I wanted to study consciousness for my PhD, and this was even earlier than the nineties. So there was really no graduate school for this. So I went to the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at State University of New York thinking that okay, well that’s got neurobiology and behavior that mix.

They’re going to welcome me there. But I realized a couple weeks in that if I mentioned the word consciousness one more time, I was going to get booted. And that’s when I met my, now my wife who had said this, the caterpillar has to bend in order to move forward. So I was like, okay, I’m just going to bend. I’m going to get this PhD, do something as closely related to mind and genes as I could. This is my interest from my bachelor’s of science and molecular biology. So I began just kind of searching for this mind gene connection and that’s when my father was diagnosed with cancer and was given a pretty grim prognosis. And so that’s when I learned about going with him, I learned to do Qigong and it’s the whole personal arc story. Beautiful. But I realized that all this was kind of an in to get an H grant. I could study consciousness by studying the mind and body healing. And so that’s what kind of moved me in the direction. So I learned about Qigong personally as a health promoting practice with my father, doing it with him. It was an acute situation, but for me, I just continue to do it daily as a health promotion. And that’s my research, but I answered the question, I don’t know. I kind of went all over the place there.

Lorne Brown 

No, I like it. I have more questions for you. We’ll talk a little bit about Qigong then. But first you had mentioned, and if you want to share, great. If not I understand as well. But you said you had some experiences when you were younger and then you bought books on how to get out of your body. So how old were you? And if you’re willing, can you share your experience? Remembering our audience is fairly open to this and probably had similar experiences. So we’re always looking like, is it just me or have other people had these experiences?

Garret Yount

Sure. I was about 13 years old. The most dramatic, there were smaller instances of feeling like I was having these clairborne experiences, but the most dramatic one that really shifted my whole course of my life was when I was 13 and I was planning to sneak and have alcohol for the first time. So I had been collecting little bits of alcohol in a mason jar in my closet in my bedroom and hiding this from my parents planning for when they were going to be away.

Lorne Brown 

Wait, you’re making what I would call the kid swamp juices. All different types.

Garret Yount

Oh my gosh. Remember grasshoppers, the bottoms of the glasses from my parents’ parties. I would get up in the middle of the night and oh gosh, nasty. Anyway, when they discovered it, I was on another floor of the house. I was reading the Lord of the Rings in front of the fire and there were the metal earth scenes, and it was as if someone changed the channel in my mind and I could see my parents discovering my swamp juice and it was this huge emergency for a 13-year-old kid. And so I ran down the hallway, down the stairs into my room and they were in the exact position. It was just like I had seen through the house and I fell on the bed. I almost fainted. I was so overwhelmed by this. They of course thought that I was upset because I had been busted and they were calm . It’s okay, you can’t drink this, but we will get you something.

And I said, no, no, I just saw through the house. I just saw through the house. So that was a pretty traumatic event for me, and that kind of set me into this curiosity about how did that happen and what is going on and it’s fun to think about. I think that obviously it was an emergency from my psyche at that time, maybe that broke through these barriers that we built up to this ability to have these clairvoyant visions and also mind. I was in a magical world of middle earths. I often think that that’s part of what loosened me up to be able to access that just my imaginations.

Lorne Brown 

Fast forward to where we are today. Have you developed a process where you’re able to do that with more will or is it still random?

Garret Yount 

Not at all. It’s completely random.

Lorne Brown

Yeah. Okay. I was curious about that. It sounds like what you’re saying is that near Deathlike experience where people that have NDEs often can see other rooms outside of their body. They can. So we know you had that experience without having a near death experience, but you had a near death where you’re able to travel through walls, et cetera.

Garret Yount 

Yeah.

Lorne Brown 

And the Qigong part, have you done research on Qigong since you, because you’ve done so much research, I want to be curious about some of the research you’ve done and Qigong. Just because for me, being a practitioner in Chinese medicine was part of our training. It wasn’t until just actually a few years ago that I got interested and started playing with Qigong for my own personal wellbeing because it resonated with me. So I’m curious for you with Qigong, it resonated with me because I never enjoyed meditation so much, just sitting. I never enjoyed it. And this Qigong teacher said that what Qigong is, the way she described it, it’s a combination of intention, breath and movement. And to me, intention has benefits. The breath obviously and movement. I think about energy, I don’t understand it because I’m not an electrical engineer, but magnets and they need a move to create all this energy, I guess. So sitting versus meditation, but there’s movement to it. It just made sense based on how somebody was explaining electrical engineering that you need a little movement to make the energy move. To have energy. So what’s your understanding of Qigong? Have you done research on it?

Garret Yount

Yeah, I really like that and I’d never thought about that, that it makes sense from an electrical engineering movement. There’s movement, electricity anytime. Then there’s a magnetic field, all this relationship. That’s really cool. I always thought that I really liked Qigong. Similarly for meditation, I’m not that good at meditating. And for me, Qigong, it’s like it’s easier basically. It’s easier to meditate because you got the monkey mind. It’s just, should I kind of throw a bone? It’s got something to do. It just makes it easier for me to meditate. That’s my experience of it. I have done quite a bit of research on it. I was originally curious about it because when I went, when I learned Qigong with my father, we had gone to China and we were in Beijing and learning from practitioners there and had some interaction with scientists that had published papers.

So learning the personal practice, that was the main thing. But in addition, some labs that had published papers showing that external Qigong, so not the personal meditation but masters who had built up enough QI in practice to be able to emit it, to treat others. And there had been going into Chinese labs and shown that cell cultures were responding and cell cultures was kind of my thing. I came out of, part of my background that wasn’t covered in the bio as I worked at the Brain Tumor Research Center at University of California San Francisco. So I grew brain cells, brain cells. That’s part of everything I do every day. So I was really fascinated by this demonstration apparently in these labs, because I’m sure your audience is aware of the great power of secondary immunology and the ability of our mind to influence our health.

And so I was curious, this is a great, this very, very limited funds for research back then and still now in this, and that’s what I argued to get this NIH grant was if these cell culture experiments work, then it argues for more of a radiation type model versus basically a hypnotic induction of self-healing. So I believe that the power of self-healing is stupendous and as miraculous and wonderful as imagining these worlds of subtle energies. And particularly going through this with my father who by the way was a hypnotist and I was these Qigong masters, they’re super charismatic. And it seemed to me it’s possible that the whole ritual of this was basically allowing giving permission or mesmerizing people into unlocking their own healing abilities, kind of like my imagination that this Lord of the rings imaginations unlocked my mind’s ability to have the claimed experience. So I was really interested to just, Hey, I want to repeat these experiments and see if we can show in vitro. Then there’s two different branches you can go down on the research. So that’s how I got started in it.

Lorne Brown 

I got to unpack something there. When you said you’re working with the Petri dishes, the cells in the Petri dishes, what were you measuring to see change? To me, this is significant. I would think that cells in a Petri dish don’t get impacted by the placebo effect.

Garret Yount 

Yeah, that’s pretty much the basic idea of why doing it in the Petri dish. So the advantage of it is there’s no placebo effect, at least the way that we think about it. The disadvantage of course is it’s disconnected from the whole body’s electrical system. And you can argue that this is what relevance does it have, particularly if it doesn’t work, what relevance does it have to a whole body? If it does work, it has pretty clear relevance. Okay, well there’s something going through space that’s hitting it and having an effect apparently. So there were so many, I wanted a slight diversion, but this is one of my favorite stories from over there in Beijing. You asked what I was having them do. So here’s a Petri dish. I’ve got normal brain cells growing, and these are primary cells that came from a person’s brain, and this is, they’re very, very difficult to have them grow on a plastic dish.

So I asked the chi go masters to come into the lab and try to emit to help the cells grow to promote their cell growth. Basically looking at cell division mitosis of these normal human cells. And this was surprising, one of the most surprising things that happened over there. The first time we did it, I was sitting there observing the walk, but he did all the motions. Again, very mesmerizing. He walked out and he’s like, Nope, those cells needed to go. I sent a killing cheek, they had to go. And I said, what? This is all falling apart so much work to get this all set up in Beijing. And then I calmed and I realized that as I said, it’s really hard to get cells to grow on plastic. So three days before, I do a lot of that plastic to get it ready, put a bunch of stuff on it.

One of the things I put on it are lethally irradiated brain tumor cells. So tumor cells grow great on plastic because they’re cancerous and they’ve got all their signals messed up. And so as I said, the Brain Tumor research Center, for years, I just had these cells in the freezer. It’s basically a reagent, it’s a tube I take out where I had grown a bunch of cancer cells, hit ’em with X-rays of the point that there’s so much damage to their DNA that they initiate what’s called program cell death. It’s basically this like a two or three day process where they systematically disassemble all their RNA and protein. It’s something that’s natural in our bodies and all of our cells that’s still intact in these cancer cells. So what I do is I smear ’em on the bottom of the plastic and bunch along with a bunch of other stuff, and then they just slowly kind of melt into the plastic and create this organic matrix. Then on the day, the experiment, when I put in the normal cells, which are very finicky, they’re much happier because now they’re organic material. But I had been doing this for five years, and didn’t even think about the fact that those cancer cells that were undergoing programmed cell death, again, that means they know they’re on their way to dying.

Lorne Brown 

What’s apoptosis?

Garret Yount 

It is apoptosis. Exactly. But there’s 10 million of them and there’s 100 normal cells. So I realized, oh my gosh, if this guy can really see the energy of cells, just like he said, and he’s going to go in there and assess it, of course he’s going to see these predominant cells in there that literally have to go, which is exactly what he said. So I mean, again, I had a Vasso Vega response. I was like, this is proof that they can see cheese. I can’t believe it. So I was like, okay, well that’s a whole nother line of research. And I said, okay, let’s just do it over again this time. Ignore the dying cells. There are, and we kind of started that whole thing over. There’s a bunch of stories that come from that, but that’s a long way of saying one of the things I asked them to do was to help normal cells grow better in one of the sets of experiments.

Lorne Brown 

Were they able to

Garret Yount 

In that experiment, they were able to induce greater growth in the normal brain cells compared to untreated cells. I will say that I came back and tried to replicate that experiment and I was not able to have it replicated in my own lab. So I published the data together in one paper saying it worked this time. It didn’t work this time. So it’s inconclusive from this set of results.

Lorne Brown 

Do you have a sense, how would you do it differently or how you figured out there was the cell death, the cancer cells, so they were seeing that before you couldn’t. Is there something between the two labs, between not just physically, but is there something that you realized could be the issue, why it didn’t work in your lab?

Garret Yount 

Well, I wouldn’t call it a realization. It’s a hunch.

Lorne Brown 

Hunch

Garret Yount 

And it has to do with the minds of everybody involved. So my mind approaching it the first time was a very open wondering mind. I like, what can the universe show us? I was just kind of happy and curious. And then for sure when I was doing it again, I was like, okay, now I know exactly what I want this, I want to repeat. We’re going to nail this down. We’re going to lock it in. So there was an open feeling and versus an almost controlling intention

Lorne Brown

Attached to form an outcome versus curious and open.

Garret Yount 

Absolutely. Absolutely. 

Lorne Brown 

There’s no resistance. 

Garret Yount

Yeah, it feels like that. There’s no doubt that it was different whether or not that could have an impact. It is not the only one that this has happened to, and it’s happened to me over and over again. And when we have conferences on biofield science, a major topic that is the reproducibility paradox, we start talking about the trickster, the archetype of the trickster, and maybe the universe is kind of guiding this process in a way that is peeking it around the corner for us. We need to understand it a little bit better. I don’t know. It’s very interesting and fun and also problematic because reproducibility is kind of one of the most fundamental aspects of the scientific method. So it’s a real challenge. It remains a real challenge.

Lorne Brown 

I want to kind of unpack this, why can’t it be reproducible, right? As you said, it’s so important with a scientific model and again, hunches and what’s going on. You mentioned the trickster before that though, just to kind of bring it into our group here. I want to get more into this self-healing. The body has this capacity, self-heal. The Chinese medicine that I practice understands that I’m also like your dad, a clinical hypnotherapist. So using the mind to engage the body’s healing in the west, we often call it, we give it a negative connotation placebo, and we know placebo exists 30% more in things. And you talk about rituals. When a doctor puts on them, they wash their hands and somebody puts on their gloves and they go through the door and the mask and the light. I mean, that’s a ritual as well. And we see research where they do knee surgery arthroscopic, but they pretend. They go in and they show the video of a knee surgery happening. So everybody’s spending the same amount of time with the patient on the table. One is getting real surgery. The other one, they put the probe in, open a hole, but they do no surgery and it’s all done. And the person that’s having the fake surgery has as good or better results than the real surgery.

So I always viewed it as the Chinese medicine view as we are looking to do whatever we can to get the self-healing capacity involved. We want the body involved because it has this incredible way of healing. It’s constantly replacing cells and killing cancer, fighting cancer, and fighting bacteria all the time, even when you don’t have symptoms. So placebo is not something we don’t want. We want to engage you in healing when it comes to research. I get it. We want to know, does this substance make a difference? We want to know if this is adding to it. So can you talk a bit about what you’ve observed with the body self-healing ability from the biofield perspective? And also maybe talk a little bit more about placebo as a scientist, because so many people dismiss it and say it’s a bad thing where I’m saying we want to engage the self-healing capacity belief.

Garret Yount 

Yeah. Well, let me start with that in my perspective as a just add. So I agree and I think it’s fantastic that you’re getting that message out. And from a molecular biologist, I want to say one of the coolest experiments of placebo that I think is one that shows that placebo can actually regulate gene expression. So this is a while ago, it’s so long, I can’t remember the name, and maybe 20 years ago, but it was our body opioids, the famous drugs, the famous painkillers. We have endogenous opioids. Our brain produces these. That’s why the drugs that you take work, they hit the same receptors. So they did a placebo experiment where they’re injecting, I guess salt water and men’s jaws, which is just painful. It doesn’t cause anything damage, but it hurts. And they did it when they were giving them either exogenous opioids or not. The design I don’t remember fully, but the punchline is that people that were getting a painful injection of saltwater into their jaw could get pain, were then experiencing pain relief with a placebo. But they looked in the brain and they could measure that these endogenous opioids were being synthesized and released. So the placebo effect, wherever that is, that black box of the power of your mind, just that belief was able to turn a gene on and turn up its expression in your body.

Lorne Brown 

So I got to unpack that. So they were giving an injection to cause pain. They were giving anti-pain pills

Garret Yount 

To some and to some not.

Lorne Brown 

And the ones that were getting the fake placebo pills, their brain behaved as if they got the real pill.

That reminds me here locally in UBC, they did a Parkinson’s study where they were doing, maybe they’re giving them dopamine, I dunno if they do it through injection, to help with their tremors, talking about the behavior of training the body right to respond. So no surprise, they take the medicine, hopefully I’m remembering the study well, and their tremors improved and mood improved, but then they switched out the drug and started giving them saline and they had the same results, not surprisingly from the placebo effect, but then when they did the brain stuff, it was if they were getting dopamine, but they weren’t. So the same idea.

Garret Yount

Yeah. And I think that’s impactful because modern medicine at this stage, there’s a lot of credibility. It’s your DNA, it’s like, okay, this is the DNA gene level. It really takes it out of the realm of woowoo if you think because be, oh, it’s just in your head, just imagining and all that as if it doesn’t have any power or impact. But these examples show that it impacts our bodies at the most fundamental level that really has all the credibility in medicine right now.

Lorne Brown 

So it’s a little difficult to explain how come this works,

However that it works is not as debatable as in when the people that do visualization of Pac-Man eating cancer cells or they’re doing things, you can measure a physical response in the body even though there is nothing of physical matter that they are taking or getting injected in. So why this works may be very debatable, but the fact that you can see the body’s healing response and outcomes change, is something you’re fairly confident that we are measuring that and we can see that. We know it works, but we don’t always know how or why it works.

Garret Yount 

And I think it’s good to compare those kinds of situations. So the visualization of Pac-Man and seeing the impact on the overall physiology, that’s clearly demonstrated, but it leaves open a lot for interpretation about why. So there’s so many aspects of our behavior that could impact some health condition and especially subconsciously this visualization could trigger 25 different behavior changes and also attitude changes in that person over the period of time from really mundane things like small choices about diet to level of chronic anxiety, which affects the autonomic balance and the autonomic balance influences inflammation. So there’s a wide range of things that could explain that. It happens except, but if you do these really simple experiments and you show that this pain injection, it’s all happening right there in this little time zone and you see a gene turn on at this very fundamental level, you say, okay, well I can influence level, I can influence a gene activity.

That’s kind of a very basic mechanistic explanation for how you can add these health benefits. Now as you point out, there’s still upstream of that a little bit. How does that connect what molecule goes in to turn on that gene? There is still a black box there, as you say, but yeah, the science is that the power of self-healing is within our intention, something that we can influence intentionally. The limit of what it can do is unknown, but now that we know that it can influence gene expression, it’s kind of way beyond the limit that we would even need to think that we could influence pretty much any health condition.

Lorne Brown 

My hunch is it’s just the perspective that we have. And sometimes when you change the perspective that you look at something, you can see it differently. I think in modern medicine and modern science, Newtonian science, we think the physical is the real and the source. I get a hunch talking to people like yourself and the guest I’ve had on the Conscious Fertility podcast, that there’s another blueprint or dimension that is the more the source. And although we’re not measuring it, noticing it, when we make a change on that level, the cascade flows down into the physical. So we keep looking at the physical as if this is where it’s all starting. But to me it’s kind of where it’s ending and maybe it probably is bi-directional, but I think there’s things that we’re doing that look invisible to ourselves that are happening on another level. And I want to talk about your PTSD study that I got so moderate that when you presented at the SSE on, I think it was called decrease in post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms falling lucid dreaming healing workshop. I have to give a little bit of a preliminary why I want you to talk about it. There’s a thing called fertility trauma. So they have shared that the stress of going through infertility and infertility treatments is comparable to a terminal illness diagnosis.

And there’s one group that I’ve been talking with that has been measuring heart rate variability, something on the brains on the palm. So they’re measuring all these autonomic nervous systems and they have compared some of the stress that women go through when they go through fertility and IVF to the stress that they put navy seals through training in the body. So now that I’ve said that, for those that are listening that are on the journey, they’re like, oh my God, that’s what’s happening. And to the men, if you are listening, yes, the fact that your partner can get up and smile today just to show you the stress, they’re measuring this. So this isn’t like an opinion. I mean this has been unstudied and measured. So they have fertility, stress, fertility burnout, fertility trauma.

Now, I’d love for you to talk about PTSD, what that is, what is lucid dreaming, and then what did you learn in your research about this?

Garret Youn

Okay

So PTSD is a condition that can be triggered by any type of trauma. It leaves a residual disorder where years after this kind of really debilitating symptoms of nightmares and being triggered by things and anxiety, it’s a very difficult condition and it’s very difficult to treat. I learned lucid dreaming is a special type of dreaming where you wake up inside your dream so you know that your body is in bed asleep. This has been talked about in all kinds of cultures in the past, dreams of knowledge from the Yaki Indian tradition. I learned about this from the Carlos Castaneda books, like both books. That’s where I learned how to do lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming in modern science began to be studied about a hundred years ago. So I’ve always wanted to do research in dreaming. And I saw where, and I had been doing research on gene expression with folks with PTSD previously, and then I found this lucid dreaming teacher named Charlie Morley out of London, who was doing these workshops for veterans with PTSD and helping them transform their trauma and reduce their symptoms through this lucid dreaming workshop.

And you got a Winston Churchill fellowship, it’s very credible, really amazing anecdotal stories about relief from PTSD symptoms. So I contacted him and said, Hey, do you want to do some science on this? Move it out of the anecdotal mode into a more scientific approach and maybe this could benefit more people. So that’s where it started. We did a pilot study, 50 people with PTSD, and we brought them, this was an online workshop. It was very intensive. It was a week long. It was about 22 hours total of online training. But then homework and nighttime practices. I can talk as much about that as you like learning how to do induction techniques. Anybody can learn induction techniques. Some people just have lucid dreams spontaneously about one in five people just have ’em spontaneously at least once in their life. But you can do techniques to learn them the way I did from the Carlos cast book.

But basically at the end this week, we were measuring PTSD symptoms using a clinical tool, a self-report questionnaire called the PCL five. And everybody came into the study above the threshold of PTSD and everybody went out below and we checked three months later and they were still down. That’s what I reported at the Society Fair Scientific Exploration that you spoke about. From that work, we got a grant to repeat it with a large study, a larger study, and have a placebo group. And which meant we took a hundred people in. Again, these were both veterans and people that had PTSD from other types of trauma in their life. Domestic violence for example. So we repeated the study. Half of the people were randomized to a wait list control, so they knew they were in the study and they got the same questionnaires every day, but they had to wait until the other group went through their workshop and were assessed.

And then three months later, so this whole time, the wait list group, every morning they got the same questionnaires that the active group had. Did you have a lucid dream last night? And basically they went through all the probing and prodding so that we could tell whether the great result we got from the pilot study could have been from, like you say, the ritual. They’re part of a study. They’re in this group together. So that was why we did this replication. And it did reproduce where the people in the workshop had this great reduction in PTSD and this time we could compare it to another group that was being studied but didn’t have the workshop and it was statistically significant. So that randomized control trial is, I’m sure you’ve spoken about with this group before, kind of this gold standard. So we pushed it through that and it came out positive, so we just published that.

So it’s a wonderful thing. The level of impact is similar to other therapies when they work. Now, again, everybody coming into this, the other therapies had not worked, for example, group therapy, but I think for sure group therapy was part of this workshop because they’re all together. We had a psychotherapist present during all of it. They learned about meditation. They learned a lot. And I think probably the most important thing is they learned that our subconscious mind is there to protect us, and that basically they’re dreaming. They learned that nightmares are something that you don’t want to wake up from. You’re a subconscious giving the opportunity to work through trauma. So Charlie Morley encouraged them to embrace the monsters and amazing stories of transformation. It was very emotional for me going through this, witnessing it all. But it’s the level of type of relief you see with other therapies when they work. But for some people, it might be better for them because there’s some stigma sometimes around PTSD and people don’t want to go into a hospital or to the clinic or they don’t want to admit to anybody. So this is something you can do privately and it’s free.

Lorne Brown 

I want to ask more questions about your experience and what those do to help heal. Like you say, there’s a nightmare. You don’t want to wake up. And when you say lucid dreaming, you wake up in your dream to clarify, you’re not waking up in your dream’s over, you’re dreaming, but you’re aware. You’re dreaming.

Garret Yount 

Yeah, you’re still in the dream skate. 

Lorne Brown 

You can influence it, basically. Awaken it.

Garret Yount 

Yeah. So a normal dream, you’re being carried along with the story and the lucid dream. You wake up, you can influence it. There’s different levels of lucid dreaming, but the basic, you’re lucid as long as you know you’re dreaming and yet your body’s still asleep. It’s a sleep state. There’s a difference in the brain during normal rapid eye movement sleep, which is where most narrative based dreams occur normally, your prefrontal cortex is pretty much offline, and this is part of what the prefrontal cortex is famous for, is your sense of self. So they’ve shown now in El Lucid, when you become lucid, the prefrontal cortex comes back online, which makes sense because your self is now your body’s in bed. But your kind of reflective awareness, the one that we’re using right now to talk that’s inside the dreamscape, not all lucid dreams. You have total control. And Charlie Morley was very careful to talk about his training through the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. It doesn’t really like to talk about control because really this is your entire subconscious mind. It’s about influencing and interacting and engaging with it in a way where you do have your intention. Your intention is there.

Lorne Brown 

It’s episode nine, we had Robert Wagner on, it’s called Lucy Dreaming to Manifest Your Reality. You’re familiar with him then?

Garret Yount 

I love it, yeah.

Lorne Brown 

So he’s episode nine, by the way, everybody, if you want to learn more about lucid dreaming. So when they have a nightmare, I think about when I work with people awake, we go into their uncomfortable feelings and beliefs with my kind of hypnosis type sessions. Because the whole idea is to metabolize them, not what you resist, persist.

Garret Yount 

Yes

Lorne Brown 

You pick up a relationship with it. And I think lucid dreaming would be even more powerful if you have a nightmare or a scary animal or whatever. Can you share a little bit of, because do people share what some of the lucid dreams are, and can you share some of the ways people are healing inside their dream? You said it’s an opportunity to heal the subconscious trying to keep you safe. And so rather than ignore these dreams, they’re an opportunity to heal it.

Garret Yount 

Yeah. Well, I can tell you my own experience having come with the workshops. So I was in a very funny dream. One of the techniques for inducing lucid dreaming is reality testing during the day. And then hopefully that habit carries over in the night. And when you see something strange, you wonder, am I dreaming? So I did this reality test and it came back positive. Yeah, I am dreaming and the unevolved human that I am, I started flying around because it’s really fun to, in my defense, the test was like, can I fly to see if I was dreaming or not? And so then I could fly. So I was like, okay, I’m dreaming. But immediately this ghoul started chasing me, kind of like the death eater out of Harry Potter. And it was tracking me and I could speed up and it was just, but I remembered the teaching that you don’t run away.

This is an opportunity. So I stopped midair and I hovered and I turned to the goal and I said, what can you teach me? And it transformed into a little me, like a young me, but with a cane, an old man’s cane. So I thought, okay, time is an illusion. And as soon as I said that in my mind, and all the sound stopped, and the little me took the cane and swept it across his table that had all this glass, and as they shattered, but there’s no sound, and they all went into these little, the shards went up and became these points of energy in a matrix all around. And I thought I saw, knew that he was showing me this fabric of reality, the basis that reality was being built upon, and it was so overwhelming. And I started vibrating in the dream so violently, and I vibrated myself awake.

I felt like I was vibrating in bed. I think that that was a dream of knowledge, and I think that it was too much, and it still is too much from my mind to comprehend. And so this is not necessarily answering your question about dreaming, but kind of a transformative thing. And I feel like that’s something I can work on. I try to join meditation, go back and just kind of stretch a muscle, like a ballerina. The more you stretch, the more you’ll be able to encompass it. So that type of scene is very similar to what folks in the workshop were talking about, just any kinds of visions and asking us for healing. One really cool point about the lucid dreaming healing that Charlie Morley talked about is that your subconscious is there to protect you, and it won’t let you do anything you’re not ready for. So for example, some people would’ve very specific plans, you would’ve dream plans. And some of the plans were like, I want to confront my assailant, or something like that. And a dream character would come by as one example with a waiter with a tray and a little card says, you’re not ready yet. So it’s kind of guiding, and Charlie argues that it’s even safer than talk therapy because you’re your own guardian there. So that’s the flavor of it.

Lorne Brown

I want to share a bit about that and just observe, even when you’re talking, things get trapped in ourselves. And when you spoke, you got emotional, right? So it’s real time for you. And so to me, that shows you what kind of impact it has on the cells, and you’re still probably learning and healing from that. So thank you for sharing. When I moderated your talk, I think what you shared with us was in the dream, you’re checking to wake, if you want to know if you wake up or not. I think the test you did was see you, your finger, right?

Garret Yount 

Remember it might’ve been, yeah, stretch or poke it through your hand,

Lorne Brown 

So if you can stretch your finger. So there’s that. I remember, I think it was what Robert said, I only did it for about a week, and then I stopped doing it and talking to you. Now I want to get back into Lucid Dreaming. I’ll look for some of these courses, but I can’t quote it perfectly, but it’s in the, I said episode nine with Robert Wagner. It’s in there how he says to get into it. I think for him it was like, look for something that doesn’t really belong, right? Something weird.

Garret Yount 

I want to say really quickly, Robert Wagner, the Ion’s website has at least one course with Robert Wagner that you signed up for. So that example, that looking for something that doesn’t belong, it sounds like that was a nighttime intention, right? That’s kind of like a hypnotic suggestion you gave to yourself of going to sleep. And then it could also be used for these daytime reality testings, which is what I talked about with the stretching of the finger. So you could use that. Look for something that doesn’t belong during the daytime. Just do it 10 times during the day. Just look around. Is there anything in this room that doesn’t belong? And then because they’re creatures of habit, if you’re lucky that habit carries over into your dream and you do it out of habit rather than in response to this hypnotic suggestion. Either way could do that.

Lorne Brown 

Your book, the Vibes. So first of all, I want ions. You mentioned ions, we’re going to put that in the show notes. They got lots of material, they got everything great, everybody. They’re kind of one of their earlier pioneers on this kind of discussion that we’re having doing research. So check out their website Why vibes matter. Understanding your energy and learning how to use it wisely is by a good doctor here. Garret, can you tell me what these three kinds of vibes are and a little description about them? Are you talking?

Garret Yount 

Sure. Yeah. In the book to make it digestible, because vibes, people use the word vibes in so many ways. It’s very popular to talk about it. And so I just use a very simple model of mind, which has the conscious mind, the subconscious mind, and the super conscious mind to divide up the vibes into conscious vibes, subconscious vibes, and super conscious vibes. So the conscious mind and conscious vibes are the kind that are out there for your senses to pick up. And you intentionally set it up that way. The vibe of the wedding is rustic or something. And so you put things around or just the clothes you wear as though you smile at somebody to send out these vibes and you pick it up. So those are conscious vibes. Subconscious vibes are the ones that have so many different kinds, but basically your body’s picking them up, but you don’t notice it consciously.

So there are chemicals that, for example, have very profound impacts on the vibe we get about somebody not smells. There are chemicals that we cannot smell that impact, for example, libido. And again, at the level of molecular changes. So measuring testosterone can be changed by a chemical that’s emitted from women’s tears. Can’t smell it, but we have receptors that pick it up in our body. We don’t know it, but we get this vibe about them that changes. So that’s a subconscious vibe. And then the super conscious vibe is where we talk about the super conscious mind, which is where the division between the illusion of us being separate, again, not this material world, but these other realms where it’s kind of the God realm or the all is one where we’re all united. And that’s where I believe that these biofield therapies, when they work the radiation model, it’s by connecting our energies through the superconscious mind. And so that’s kind of the framework to talk about it all.

Lorne Brown 

I’m going to tie in psychedelics with this. Why I want to talk to you about it is I kind of resonate with the idea that it’s like, Hey, call the universe. The universe has answered, no, hang up. You got your message now. Do your work. You realize what you’re experiencing, what you think is not complete. And there’s more to this world. And now I’m learning Qigong. Learn how to tap into it. Naturally there is residue. I’ve had Jill Bolte Taylor on my podcast. She does say what it does to the brain, and some people are at risk of becoming schizophrenic after you’re close. And it’s what’s going to do it. I see people that have used it and it’s changed their lives. People that are raging alcoholics that have done it three or four times and they’ve given up alcohol. So you’re the researcher though, not me. I had my own personal experience where it scared the hell out of me, and I’ve had really awesome experiences, had those without any medication. So that was my preamble because maybe you’re the first person that loves psychedelics. Everybody that I’ve had on, I don’t know where they’re going to come from, but interesting enough, they all say it’s a one to three time experience.

Help you see some of your shadow, help you see what’s out there that you’re not aware of, and now go and do the work naturally. Tap into your higher self. Naturally. Don’t use the medication as a crutch or the residue can leave in the body, but there are people that are loving it. You may be one of those people. And I’m open to both sides,

Garret Yount

Gosh, there’s a lot in that. Well, I do talk about it in the book, and I basically agree with your sense of it. I want it tied into Qigong too. It reminds me of something. I do think it can be something that opens your mind, and as you mentioned, it could show your shadow. I think that another thing that it can do more generally and more universally is demonstrate at a knowing level, the interconnectedness of everything, that the illusion of separation is obliterated. I think by at least every type of psychedelic that I’ve tried, and almost everybody I’ve spoken to, that’s one of the universal experiences,

Lorne Brown 

And that’s one of the things I’ve heard by many as well, is we’re all connected, right?

Garret Yount 

Yeah. And that’s by the way, the driving premise of the Institute of Noetic Science is it drives all of the science. So back to your point, I do think it’s a very useful tool to kind of break that illusion and then realize, okay, the truth under that. And so that means it’s there to access naturally. So I couldn’t agree with you more. And the tie in I wanted to make with Qigong is that’s also the way I feel about Qigong Masters. If everyone’s like, what’s a good Qigong master? How can I know one’s good? And it’s so difficult. There’s no certification program and not just Qigong, and there’s so many different traditions. I think the most important thing is if someone’s coming to heal you, if they’re going to, I think that’s similar, is something to turbo boost you, to give you this sense of what your energy feels like and give you techniques to learn to do it yourself, then just part of your daily life. So I just think that’s very similar to psychedelics showing you you’re connected to everything. And I think Qigong intervention is to show you that you have access to the energy of your body and that you can influence it. And so in both cases, it’s a matter of, okay, now you’ve got a taste of that. You know what to then nurture and cultivate in your own way.

Lorne Brown 

And when I work with people, because some of them know my story, they think I’m going to judge them if they do psychedelics and don’t. What I share, kind of what you just reiterated as well, is if you’re going to use it as a crutch, as a cheat, I think it’s dangerous. I don’t know if it works that way. I think you do both, right? You’re cultivating your process and you’re using this as a catalyst to accelerate and support it. But you can’t just like, there’s no pill to fix things. You still have to do your work. They’re just catalysts. They’re there to support. And then the body heals. When you get a splinter, a cast, it doesn’t do the healing. It creates an environment so the bone can set and heal.

So I think that’s it. Anything can be abused, so I’m not against them. For me, I wouldn’t do it again. I can’t believe my nervous system survived that, how dysregulated I was for close to a year after and how much energy and work I had to do on myself and bring in colleagues. By the way, I called Bill up, when he was still alive. I broke my body. He goes, what? I go, whatever you do with your bengston and healing, if you can help me here, I am really damaged. I mean, I’m a helper. I knew that. I mean, I was struggling. I was not well, like the nervous system, but there’s a part of me that was like, holy shit. I dysregulated my nervous system. I am broken. And I had to do everything to regulate it again, acupuncture, my herbal and my practice. And as I say, would I do it again? No. Do I love where I’m at today? Absolutely, yes. In closing then, do you have a practice? Are you practicing lucid dreaming? What are you doing to tap into this subconscious and the super conscious? What do you do for your, what’s your playful way of tapping into this quantum entanglement or this field of just

Garret Yount 

The only thing consistent? I do a lot of playing, trying this and that, but the consistent thing I do is I still do the Qigong and the personal meditation. Qigong. My favorite meditation is called dumping buckets. I describe it in the book. It’s super simple. Part of the way I’m able to continue to do that every day is it could take as short as a minute and you can extend it, but just a minute of Qigong is what I do.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah, I do five minutes by Qigong, five minutes. So yeah, I like this long thing. It’s just five minutes of dumping buckets. What’s the intention behind it? When you say dumping buckets, is your meditation, is that a Qigong or is that your meditation?

Garret Yount 

That’s a Qigong, a Qigong style. And it’s just kind of the visualization. Again, just imagine the energy flowing and it’s got the movement in the body. And I would share with you what this is in the book, but I’ll give it as I can say really quickly. Now, you don’t need to get, the book is a self test to test that you’re moving the qi and your body. And this I learned with my dad in Beijing. So it’s a hot hand test. So there’s different ways to do it. But for you, just put your hands together so that the tips of your fingers are completely aligned. And then have a buddy mark your thumb pads right here. Or you can put a pen in your mouth to do it so that after you do it, you can put your hands back in the same way.

So this is just showing your hands are lined up. Then you just sit and you do your meditation, like dumping buckets or whatever meditation you like, that basically shows that you’re quieting your mind and you’re basically accessing your energy, your cheat. So then again, just a minute or five minutes. And so then you do the test, the hot hand test, you just imagine, and we won’t do it now, but you just imagine that one of your hands is heating up however you like. It’s burning up, it’s on fire. You’re dipping in and boiling water, a lava, it’s feeling it turn red and literally 30 seconds a minute, and then you stop your hands back up with the line and you look, see that that hand is expanded, it’s taller, which is on one level, totally mundane. You’re basically influencing the microcirculation of your hand. So more blood is going there and it makes it swell.

But the Chinese principle is Yi Dao, Qi Dao, where the mind goes, the Qi goes. And so, I mean, to me it gives me, and I think it gives other people the sense of, oh, my mind can really influence the energy in my body. If I can make blood flow into my hand, that means I can access the energy of my body. Now, from a medical point of view, microcirculation, lack of microcirculation, is one of the foundations of almost every disease. So if you can improve microcirculation, that means you can influence all those diseases. So it’s a fun, simple test to see just for yourself. Don’t compare yourself to anybody else, just to yourself. Okay, have I got my mind, my monkey mind under control today? Let me just test it. They’re like, okay, yes, I’m centered. I can do things now. So anyway, it’s a fun self test.

Lorne Brown 

Oh, and you talk about circulation fertility too, by the way. Blood flow. We want that.

My Qigong, Ping Lee, I think is her name. I’m having my brain melt here to remember it. Soup pong or sou ping. But I think her experiment that we did where we took alcohol and then we did Qigong around the alcohol, and you could taste the difference. One became almost like water. It was incredible. I was like, this is unbelievable. Wow. Everybody was able to do that. Alright, you have given me so much of your time, Garret, and thank you for the generosity. I want people to know how to connect with you. So the book is Why Vibes matter, understanding your energy and learning how to use it wisely. Also, IONS Institute of Noetic Sciences. Check out their website for courses. Where can we find you? Do you have a website? Instagram, Facebook. What can we share in the social media that you would like us to direct people to find your book or to find more about you?

Garret Yount 

I am only on the Ions website. I’m not on social media. The only thing is we’ve just launched a course that’s based on the book, so an online course you can go through. I go through the book, I give some stuff that’s not in the book, and it’s a fun course,

Lorne Brown 

Right? So we’re going to put the Noetic Science website in our show notes. You can find Garret there as well. Check out his book, and he has an online course that’s connected to the book as well, so you can find more of that. Garret, thanks so much for taking the time today, and thanks for sharing these stories and for doing all the research that you’re doing. As I shared at the beginning, there’s a part of me that wants to believe, and I’m also looking for a little scientific rigor, so it’s easier to believe.

Garret Yount 

Yeah. Well, it was a pleasure. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Speaker 3 

If you’re looking for support to grow your family, contact Acubalance Wellness Center at Acubalance. They help you reach your peak fertility potential through their integrative approach, using low level laser therapy, fertility, acupuncture, and naturopathic medicine. Download the Acubalance Fertility Diet and Dr. Brown’s video for mastering manifestation and clearing subconscious blocks. Go to acubalance.ca. That’s acubalance ca.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Conscious Fertility, the show that helps you receive life on purpose. Please take a moment to subscribe to the show and join the community of women and men on their path to peak fertility and choosing to live consciously on purpose. I would love to continue this conversation with you, so please direct message me on Instagram at Lorne_Brown_Official. That’s Instagram, Lorne_Brown_official, or you can visit my websites, Lornebrown.com and Acubalance.ca. Until the next episode, stay curious and for a few moments, bring your awareness to your heart center and breathe.