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Host: Welcome to the Lifelong Wellness podcast where we talk to wellness professionals from so many walks of life from around the world and get their insight into living healthier. I’m your host, Wes Malik. Today's very special guest is Dr. John McGrail, Ph.D., who is a renowned hypnotherapist, a life empowerment expert, and spiritual teacher who lives by and teaches a very simple precept, “Life is supposed to be fun”. Through his clinical practice and a variety of innovative workshops and seminars, he works with an international clientele, helping them learn to create personal change, growth, and transformation in their lives, as well as improve their performance at work, school, or play. He is a leading media expert on personal growth and performance enhancement and his writing and expertise have been featured in numerous national and international print and online publications. And he is a frequent guest on radio podcasts and television. He has written a book called The Synthesis Effect: Your Direct Path to Personal Power and Transformation and he is here with us today to talk about synthesis and what it is. Dr. McGrail, welcome to the Lifelong Wellness podcast.
Dr. John: Thank you, Wes. It’s a delight to be with you today.
Host: The first question, do some of us take life too seriously? Is that what's going on with a lot of us here?
Dr. John: Well, truthfully, I believe we do. Oscar Wilde said, “Life is much too precious to take so seriously”.
Host: Yes.
Dr. John: I think we take ourselves too seriously once in a while. We were, as a society, I think we’re very, very energetically imbalanced. And when I say as a society, I mean modern technology-driven Western culture. We have become so absorbed first of all in materialism and acquiring and doing and achieving and producing and also negativity. You know, we have become singularly talented, focusing on the dark side of the whack equation. We evaluate our life in terms of contrast, positive and negative, that's the essence of how humans evaluate the quality of life. And we, in modern Western culture, have become really, really good in focusing on the dark side of that contrast equation, gloomed and doomed and fear and negativity. And of course, with what we’re going through today, that's explainable and it's understandable but it was like that even before this occurred. This is just exacerbating it.
Host: We are recording this while we are under both under quarantine just for our listeners in the future. If you're listening now, you may be facing the same situation. Dr. McGrail, out in California and myself here in Ontario, Canada, in Toronto, and these times you compound the problems people have. Have you seen an uptick? Have you noticed an increase?
Dr. John: Oh! No question about it and, you know, when we have an emergency like this, it's natural to feel extra stress. It's interesting. I'm doing a video series that comes out on Tuesdays and Fridays and the one I released yesterday was all about that. I'm getting so many clients that are coming in. First of all, extra hyper, extra stress, feeling anxious because nobody knows, you know, what's going on or how long we’re going to live this way and our world has been turned upside down. And then I have people that are getting down on themselves for feeling that when I say no no-no-no. Permit yourself to feel it because if you try to ignore it or just suck it up, it's only going to make it worse. Once you give in yourself permission to feel it now, what can I do to get myself out of this energy? What can I do that's productive? What can I do that’s going to help me feel more positive? And that's the way you bring yourself back into balance. So yes, it's much worse now than it was and maybe, just maybe, I'm not sure this is total speculation, Wes, but I wonder when if it's possible that once we're through this and we will get through this, it's the end, maybe that will help rebalance our culture in general. Who knows, maybe people will start thinking a little bit more about balance in physical, emotional, and spiritual energy and not so much about just the material in the physical and the products that mess us up, to begin with.
Host: Well, I do certainly see talk about it, you know, people make a little post or a meme or, you know, share a WhatsApp message, you know, saying… I was just watching a video of a very famous actor, you know, sitting in a tank top in his, you know, undershirt saying, well where are all the fancy cars now? Where's all that, you know, Gucci and Prada and where’s all those clothes that you are wearing, you know it's all gone? And, you know, you're sitting at home and he was giving a perspective on life and maybe the perspective on life will start to change after this.
Dr. John: I think it would be wonderful if it did.
Host: Yes?
Dr. John: I don't believe in coincidence and I do think that when you have a major event and this is really major. I mean, it's not just a one-day thing that after a few months people started to get back to normal. This is going to affect us for quite a few months and it could really be a turning point. I did an interview just yesterday with an online site and they asked about that very same thing. You know, what's going to happen after this is over? And it could be that this is the lesson that modern Western culture needed to sort of take another view of things and look at life differently and get back to a more balanced existence. It’s really interesting, but when I was doing my doctoral studies years ago, I studied a lot of native philosophies, indigenous cultures. And it's really interesting that the tribal cultures of the world, live in a very different way than we do. They live with a much more balanced existence both within themselves and with the earth and nature. And they don't suffer from a lot of the weird stress-related diseases that we suffer from like lupus and Crohn's and IBS and obsessive-compulsive disorder and all this. It just doesn't exist in their culture until they’re westernized and as soon as they’re westernized and they start living as we do, then they get it too. So, maybe this is going to help us take another look at how we’re doing the business of our lives. I certainly hope so. And if we can get that movement which has started this can get a lot more momentum and I think we’re going to be happy campers because if we don't do something quickly, the Earth is going to be fine, but we might not be.
Host: I think it’s a good time to ask you a question if one of our listeners is experiencing anxiety or fear about the pandemic, COVID-19 right now. What advice would you give them?
Dr. John: Well, the advice I would give is the same advice I’m trying to follow myself and that is one, remember this and I heard this from a very well-known ER doctor the other day. She was doing a podcast and, you know, this woman has been working 20-hour shifts a day in, day out in an exhausted and she said, “You know the one thing that keeps me going and the one thing that I want everybody out there to remember is that this is a horrible situation. There's no question about it. So let's hold space for those people who are really sick and those people who are losing loved ones. But also we have to remember the other side of that equation and that is most of us, the vast, vast majority of us are going to be just fine”. And you have to keep that part in mind, we will get through this. So that's number one. Number two is, obey the restrictions. Don't, you know, do what you have to do to keep you and your family safe and healthy. And then now that most of us have a lot more time on our hands, one of the things it's really helping me is and my family is, we’re spending as much time as we can just in quiet time, getting outside, taking a walk, just appreciating a flower or tree and remembering that we in this Earth are much more than this situation. Now, it takes consistent effort and it takes diligence. In the beginning, it seems like it’s not going to help me but it will. It will help you feel more balanced, it will give you a sense of control. And then when you go to the store and you have to go to three stores to find a roll of toilet paper, you can do it with more and equanimity in your energy and that because excess stress and anxiety compromise the immune system and that's the last thing any of us need today. So if you do that, if you take some time to just think in a more balanced way, get yourself away from it. Definitely, limit your media exposure because that can hypnotize you right into this panic mentality if you just sit in front of your TV all day, listening to all the gloom and doom and terrible statistics.
Host: Yes.
Dr. John: Get what you need to know because we have to be informed, pay attention to what they tell you to do, and then get away from it. The more you do that the easier it’s going to be to maintain your composure when you need to so that you're responding rather than reacting in a way that hurts and could actually compromise your health.
Host: That's a great series of advice, in a nutshell, that is fantastic. I'm so glad I asked you that question.
Dr. John: Well, thank you.
Host: Now, I think we’ll look back on this time and when we spend time with our families or friends and we’ll look back on this several year from now and say, “Hey, remember that spring of 2020 when we did this and we were, you know when we did that?” My children asked me this question several weeks ago. What are we going to do this summer? And for a second I was stunned because we had to because due to the national parks being closed in Canada, we had to, you know, we’re not going camping this summer season and we were really looking forward to it. We love the outdoors, we love nature, we love hiking, we love going out, we love the water and…But we had a ton of things that we wrote down after my kids asked that question. I said, “Well, let's make a plan” and we came out with a lot of things that we could do together. We started doing them two weeks ago and we get a great routine running. So, going forward in the future we’ll all look back and say, “Hey, remember the spring of 2020? Remember the summer of 2020?” and hopefully we’ll look upon it fondly. Now, I want to talk about your book and the real reason we’re doing this podcast is that you're the expert on the synthesis process and I truly would love to understand. If you could dumb it down for me and tell me, you know, from the beginning what it is. How'd you get into it and you tell us a little bit about that?
Dr. John: Well, where do I start? I got into it because I had a lot of work to do on myself. I was a very unhappy camper at one point in my life. And while on the outside it looks like I was very successful professionally and financially and whatnot, on the inside I was a mess. And so, going through the process of cleaning my own psyche out and I call it my rediscovery project, rediscovering who I really am, rediscovering how to love myself unconditionally, rediscovering how to live my life in a more balanced fashion, much more spiritually, and that doesn't mean religiously. I mean spiritually there’s a distinction there. So, that combined with being laid off from a very lucrative but very I'm unfulfilling and extremely stressful job, put me at a crossroads in life. What am I going to do with myself? And I look back at all the things that I have never done that and I've been blessed to have a variety of very interesting careers of military and commercial aviation, and film and TV. And I look back at all the jobs that I ever have including the last one because it started great and then as you get promoted and become more senior it becomes more, more not fun. But the central theme was that I had always been tapped to be instructor and coach and mentor in the military, in the airlines, in film, and TV. It didn't matter. I always end up teaching. I realize that at heart I'm a teacher and that's what I love to do. And so I took the experience I had in cleaning my life up and found, you know, part of that was under the auspices of a brilliant hypnotherapist and that led me to go to Hypnotherapy College and get my initial certification. So that's where how I get into the helping professions.
Host: Alright.
Dr. John: And then when I did my doctoral studies, I had to figure out what to write a dissertation on because we get a Ph.D., you’re supposed to come up with some original research that furthers the field of human behavior or whatever your field is and I was absolutely stuck. What am I going to do? I’m just this little piscine hypnotherapist in California. What do I have to contribute to human behavior?
Host: Right
Dr. John: And I really agonized over it for quite a long time. And then I realized one day I was looking in my file cabinet working on the client files and I realized that I had a thousand case studies right there in my file cabinet, a thousand of them. And I said, “What if I start going through my cases and see if I can pluck out or tweeze out any common denominators that differentiate the clients that did really well really quickly, the clients that have done okay but maybe took longer and the ones that, fortunately, there weren’t too many of those, the ones that didn't do well and didn't really get results. And sure enough, as I started doing that the threads began to unravel. And I began to see the common denominators and that led to the process that I now call synthesis. The models and techniques and essentially what synthesis is, is learning how to get your conscious, logical, cognitive mind, which is the part of the mind we’re all used to using, in alignment with the much more powerful subconscious spiritual part of the mind which really runs the show most of the time. When you get those two parts of the mind working together, so that your subconscious mind which is very much like a computer at least metaphorically, is working in alignment with your conscious desires, your life starts working really, really well. So that's the process of synthesis, creating, or synthesizing “A Better You”, which is the name of my company, through the use of these very natural, very powerful tools and techniques. So it's changing your life profoundly and quickly using a very, very easy and simple method.
Host: I was going to ask is a complex method, but you just mentioned it’s simple and easy. How it sounds difficult. How is it possible to do that?
Dr. John: Well, let's say this, it is a very simple process. What happens is very complex, but the cool part about it is you don’t need to know or understand much of the complexity at all. And I think that's what, if anything, if I got and I do think sometimes I was divinely led to writing this book because when I look at it now I don't know how I could have it done, I’m not that smart.
Host: Yes.
Dr. John: But what the synthesis affects my book does is it breaks the complex down into very understandable concepts.
Host: Okay.
Dr. John: It dumbs it down because I like to keep things simple and when I'm working with somebody in the clinic, they don’t want to hear all the science, they don’t want to hear the quantum physics and the neurophysiology that's behind what we’re doing. They want to feel better and they want to feel better quickly. So, it is a very simple process. Now, easy or hard is up to the client. And I always say every client I work with and when I do workshops my students is that “If you make this easy, it will be easy. Your mind will do what you want it to do, but we are trained in our culture to suffer”. No pain, no gain. And so that's the mentality we have to get by, but if you choose easy these very simple techniques make it a breeze. You know, I’ve seen people, Wes, and I’m not kidding when I say this in a matter of a few weeks, completely turned their lives around. Because they chose easy, they did the work, there is a process involved, it’s not magic. But these tools, hypnotherapy and some of the other tools and techniques, are very, very powerful tools to get our minds working the way we want them to rather than the way we thought we were stuck with.
Host: Now, who does this work for? What issues or problems do these people have come to you and you go through the process of synthesis with them?
Dr. John: Well, literally I work with clients from about the age of 7 all the way up to my oldest client is 85. And what’s beautiful about this is that there is very little in the human behavioral spectrum that this doesn't work for. You know, some of the common ones getting rid of unwanted unhealthy habits, building self-esteem, and self-confidence, treating stress and anxiety, which is the number one issue. I work with these days is chronic stress and anxiety, fears, and phobias. It really doesn't matter. Getting over habits. It's whatever is holding you back from living the life you want to live.
Host: So, you said it takes a couple of weeks and it's a process of hypnotherapy and hypnosis. How does that play into the process of synthesis?
Dr. John: Okay, well, it doesn't always take a couple of weeks. I said it can take a couple of weeks. I don’t want to mislead anybody but on average 3 or 5 sessions. First of all, hypnosis is a natural state of consciousness.
Host: I see.
Dr. John: We all do it every day. Any time we watch a good movie and feel an emotional experience or read a good book or even just daydream or get sucked into a video game, we are in fact entering a state of hypnosis. We all do it.
Host: Really?
Dr. John: Now, the beautiful thing about hypnosis…Yes. It's a natural state of consciousness. Anytime you’re driving on a freeway and somewhere you say, “Oh, my God! How did I get here? I don't remember getting here”. You’ve been in the state of hypnosis. The beautiful thing about hypnosis is that it can be used, this state of consciousness, can be induced on purpose and then used to help the subconscious mind change its patterns. It is a tool, it’s like pliers or screwdriver or hammer, the subconscious part of our mind is like a three-year-old child and metaphorically speaking, it works a lot like a computer. We are programmed with our habits, our patterns, our values, our attitudes, our beliefs good and bad, very early in life. Once those patterns and habits and attitudes and beliefs are ingrained in the subconscious mind, they just play over and over and over again. Something happens, we react. Boom! We don’t do it on purpose. We don’t feel depressed or anxious or sad or fearful on purpose, it just happens.
Host: I see.
Dr. John: Hypnosis allows us to take the patterns off the computer if you will, and reprogram that subconscious computer which is also like a three-year-old child that has no sophistication. It's like unlearning unwanted patterns and then reteaching the subconscious computer or reprogramming new ones and hypnosis simply is a state of consciousness that opens the mind to these new possibilities. So it is a very powerful part of synthesis because it’s such a powerful tool. And there are other techniques associated with it. Again, that helps the mind change itself. Our brains have the ability to rewire their circuits. It’s called neural plasticity. And essentially, the brain can unwire circuits that aren’t working and rewire new ones. And in essence, that's what we’re leveraging.
Host: Is there a limit to what synthesis can be used for or apply to?
Dr. John: Well, of course. And I have to say, as powerful as this process is and it is and it's growing, it's developing. I learned more and more and more and develop new little techniques here and there. But, you know, there are certain limitations and there is no silver bullet. There's nothing that works for everybody but I'm fortunate or I should say that I'm gratified that this works for a lot. If there is organic damage, brain damage, or if a person is, you know, past a certain level of mental dysfunction or mental illness, then there are certain conditions that, you know, nothing’s going to work on and…However, for the worried well of the world which is 85 to 90% of the people that have stuff, and we all have stuff, it is a very powerful process. We have so much more potential to control how our mind works. And remember, our reality is created through our minds. We process our whole experience through the mind. So, whatever programs are in that subconscious mind, whatever filters that we’ve learned are going to create our perception of reality. And the beautiful thing is, when we change those internal programs and filters, we can change our perception. We can create a whole new reality and that's what this process is all about.
Host: Creating our own reality, what does that exactly mean? Are we imagining what's going on around us?
Dr. John: No, we’re not imagining it but think of this. Okay, we all grow up and as we grow up we are taught and we learn and we are programmed to be the people we are, our personality, our attitudes, our values, our beliefs, our big programs like our ethnicity, our culture, our religious and spiritual beliefs or lack thereof. All of those things are like filters in the mind and everybody's got a different set of filters because everybody experiences growing up and being programmed differently. If we’re having an experience, we are taking in the energy of the experience. We’re seeing, we’re hearing, we’re tasting, we’re smelling. So, we’re experiencing life but as that energy comes into our brain it goes through all these filters. So, your filters are different than my filters. So, we are going to perceive the same experience differently. Your reality and my reality are not going to be the same because we have different computers. And so when I say we create our own reality, we have the science behind this, too. This is not woo-woo new age, you know, stuff.
Host: Okay.
Dr. John: There’s science behind this. I’ll give one very small example that maybe will help people understand a little better. But an atom, which is one of the basic building blocks of all matter is just a fuzzy cloud of energy until it is observed. Once you observe the atom it takes structure. And so, it takes the act of observing or the act of experiencing to give that atom its structure or reality. And that's basically what's happening to us. We are taking in the energies of our experiences. Those experiences have to go through our internal filters and that creates a perception of what's happening, which then results in behavior and, you know, physical feeling but it's different for everybody. That's why some people just see the world so much differently than you do or I do. The cool part is, if we don't like the reality we’re creating or feeling, we can change it because it's our mind.
Host: When you work with clients and you work with hypnosis, are you working on those filters or are you working on something else?
Dr. John: Oh no, we’re working on the filters. You know, if I let's just say, let me think of an example. I had a young lady that came into me and she just could not commit to a relationship. She desperately really wanted to be a mom and a wife and have a family, but there was something in her mind when a relationship got to a certain level, regardless of how cool the guy was, she finds a way to sabotage it. She just had this internal fear of commitment. And she was beside herself. So, that's a filter for her. She was creating that reality because it was in her mind. And what we did through hypnotherapy and some the other tools of synthesis was literally help her understand why she felt that way and once she understood where it came from the experience that she had had as a little child that created that fear, that mental block, she was able to get rid of it and realize that she has the ability to commit, that it wasn't going to happen to her again. And I think she was probably with me for about four or five weeks, maybe six sessions and I think within about six or eight months she had met a really good guy, they were engaged and now she's happily married with three kids and one of her kids is now a client.
Host: Wow. That’s great.
Dr. John: Yes. So yes. We are working on changing our internal filters so that they work the way we want them to, rather than the way they’re programmed to.
Host: At the beginning of the podcast, I asked you a question and it was about, you know, taking life too seriously. And a lot of us do, a lot of us don’t. How do we start taking it lightly? How do we start having fun? I know through your website, through your books you call this practical enlightenment. Is that correct?
Dr. John: I do. That is learning how to live your life virtually free of suffering. And the easiest way to answer that question, Wes, is to refer to one of my favorite books and it was called Don't Sweat the Small Stuff and the subtitle was and It's All Small Stuff. It was written by a psychologist named Stephen Carlson. In fact, he may have been a Canadian, I’m not sure. I know he lived in the Pacific Northwest somewhere and unfortunately, he died young. But his point was most of the stuff that we let just rip us apart isn’t worth the energy. It just isn't. We get mad at certain things. We say, “Oh, she/he/this/that makes me so…” Nothing makes us anything. We choose to do that. And because we choose to do that, mostly unconsciously we don’t do it on purpose, but nothing can make us feel or say or do anything. So when we start realizing that we’re wasting so much energy, say on stuff that’s happened that can't be undone, we perseverate on it. We chew on it. And it just gives us (angry sound) You don’t have to do that. Let it go. It doesn’t matter. It’s over. Or we spend so much time worrying about what hasn't happened yet. Oh, my God! What if…What if…What if…And then when it happens it's no big deal. Well, we can take all that energy that we’re wasting on what has happened and what hasn’t happened and invest it in making what is going on right now as good as it possibly can be. And so when you start doing that and you start easing up on yourself and you start realizing that most of the stuff that's weighing you out isn’t worth the energy, you start suffering less and less and less and you start living more and more mindfully in the moment which is all we get. And with some practice, it does take practice and it takes a little diligence. Pretty soon you realize that your life is running so beautifully and you feel great most of the time. I call that practical enlightenment because the Buddha who I sort of admire said, “Enlightenment is the end of suffering”. We can end almost all our suffering and it's not that hard to do.
Host: How do we know if we’re suffering?
Dr. John: (laughing) Great question. We know we’re suffering when we don't feel good. It's as simple as that. One of my favorite spiritual teachers of all time, Abraham Hicks, says over and over again, “You know, just find the thoughts, find the words, find the actions that feel good. And when you're feeling good you're not suffering”. And it's an inside job, that’s the other thing. We’re all waiting for outside influences to help us be happy. Give me my stuff, give me my love, give me my fortune, give me my fame, and then I can be happy. Meanwhile, I'm not happy and I’m suffering. What if you chose to be happy just because you're here and you have this wonderful opportunity to get your stuff, to find your fame, your fortune, your love. It’s out there and you can be happy while you're doing it. Well, now you’re not suffering and now you’re still going to get your stuff. It’s an inside job. And once we start working on from the inside out instead of waiting for the outside in, that's when things get really, really powerful.
Host: That’s a great way of putting it. People always note happiness with a material object. When I get that car or when I get that Mercedes or when I build that house or when I get the cottage or when I take that vacation. There's always a “When” or “If” attached to your personal happiness and if or when and something. I guess that detachment is difficult to do, though. And how do you help people? Okay, you help people, you know, you have a clinic, you have a practice and there are hundreds of thousands of professionals all over the world who can help you, who can help you. Is your method different from everyone else or is it the same?
Dr. John: Very tough question to answer. I would say that a lot of what I do is probably practiced by other people as well. I mean, hypnotherapy, there are hundreds of thousands of hypnotherapists. I guess it's becoming a very popular profession and psychotherapist and whatnot. And, you know, many people there’s cognitive behavioral therapy, but the synthesis process takes a little bit of a lot of different disciplines and puts them together. What I think is unique about what I’m…And thank you for asking this question. What I think is unique about my process is not necessarily what I do. It's how it's done and the perspective from which it's presented. Because for whatever reason, and I as I said earlier I got to say this again, I can't take full credit for it because I don't think I'm that smart, but I found a way to make very complex concepts understandable to the average person to the Western thinker. And I found a way to present these topics, these models in a way that not only creates understanding but creates hope and expectation. And hope and expectation are huge catalysts in the process of changing your life. Again, because it's an inside job. So, is what I do better? Is it different? No. But does it work really well? Absolutely. And I think that's the easiest way to answer that question.
Host: You have great insight into civilization, the Western civilization, Eastern civilization and I believe I get a sense that you’ve studied them very carefully and I sensed a sense of admiration for the Eastern culture.
Dr. John: Yes, very much so but I would not call it necessarily Eastern. It's hard…You know, when I say Western, I mean modern technology-driven society which is in most of the world.
Host: Right.
Dr. John: When we say Eastern, for me, that means more indigenous, aboriginal native because…And here's why I admire them so much and I have put a lot of study into it. For some reason, I’ve always naturally been attracted to it and it was through native philosophies that I made a lot of my breakthroughs. But if you look at all the tribal cultures of the world and remember that before modern society these cultures existed, they had no idea of the others. They were separated by vast geographies. And if you scrape away, what I call it the cultural semantics, the specific rituals, and ceremonies which are very unique to different cultures if you look at their core philosophy, how they live their lives and first of all very spiritually based, it's all about balance and they’re almost identical. And when I realize that all these different cultures from different parts of the world, Australian aboriginals, Native American, South American, Central American tribes, African tribes, their central philosophy is so similar. And they didn’t know one another existed. They couldn’t communicate. That's when I started saying, “You know, there’s got to be something there”. And the essence of it is that, while these “primitives”, and I say that with quotes, air quotes as I'm saying it, seemed to be very simplistic. They live in a much more harmonious and balanced way. And as I said they don't suffer from a lot of the physical diseases that we do. They’re more balanced in their outlook, they’re very spiritually based. And when science really started studying the nature of matter and energy and manifestation, and now I refer to the modern sciences of neurophysiology and quantum physics, and quantum wave theory. What they’re finding, using our scientific method, “I believe it when I see it”, right? Show me. If you can't prove it, it’s not science, which works really well to a certain extent. But what we’re finding is that the way these native people think and have thought for millennia is the way the world actually seems to work. So, they instinctively knew or know, there aren’t too many that still live the old ways, how to manifest. When the Australian aborigine is going to walk about, which is, they just leave, they’re going to where the harshest environments on the planet with nothing, they don't take water that, they don’t take food, they just go knowing that the universe, Mother Earth, will supply them whatever they need, whenever they need it. And they’d been doing it for thousands of years. They know how to manifest and we’re finding out now that the way they think, which is exactly the opposite of the way we think, they believe to see, and then they see what they believe they’re going to see. That's how it really works. So, I love the irony that we’re not proving scientifically that the way these people think and live in a much more balanced, harmonious, and healthy way is really, really effective. So, that's why I admired it so much because it's simple and if you make it easy, it's amazing. Even we, in modern society, can live that way to a much greater degree than we do and it's all about energetic balance. I know that is a very long-winded answer and I apologize but it's a big question. (laughing)
Host: I was and I didn’t need to ask you a follow question about the commonality or the philosophy of the different tribes or the people that you studied. Very well answered. Thank you. I appreciate that. Is there a way, now in creating balance in your life, is there a way that we can learn or practice or be like, you know, those aboriginal tribes and figure out, you know, understand what their philosophy is and live it?
Dr. John: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And you mentioned something a little while ago and, you know, it’s with different people. There are a lot of ways to do this but the number one thing that has to happen is that we have to create balance in our physical, emotional, and our spiritual energies. So, the physical part is very simple. Take good care of your body, eat healthily, move it. You know, whether we like it or not we have bones and muscles because we’re supposed to move. If you treat your body well, get enough sleep, it will take very good care of you for a very long time. The emotional part is the part where we seem to have the biggest problems because again we are hypnotized by mass consciousness to think about negativity and its efficiency and lack. We spent a lot of time worrying about what we don't have what's not working and not enough time remembering what is working. One of the things I always say when I do, I do a lot of or did a lot of corporate motivational and keynote speeches on this subject and I love doing those. Of course, they’re on hold for now, but one of the things I always say is that you know if you focus on the negativity you’re going to manifest more negativity. What you focus your energy on is what you attract. And so if you focus on gloom and doom then that's what's going to happen. If you turn on the news, what do you hear? How often do we hear that most of the people, and most of the planet, even now are fine? We have thousands of people that are sick but we have billions of people on the planet. So, we don’t focus on that. We can start adjusting our emotional balance by focusing on the positive as much as we possibly can. And then the key to the castle, and this is what separates modern Western culture from the Eastern or native cultures, is that we have to get back in touch with our spiritual energy. We, for some reason in modern society, have learned, it goes back about 500 or 600 years, but we learned to sort of throw spirituality on the dung heap when we discovered modern science which is empirically based. What we forgot or didn't realize is that whether we like it or not we are spiritual beings. We have the science now. We have proven that this energy, called spirit, our essence, the essence of life itself exists. So, when we acknowledge our spirituality and we nurture it, it is very simple to do, just take some time every day, get quiet, and reconnect with your nature and with Mother Nature then it's very easy to start creating that energetic balance between the physical, the emotional and the spiritual energies. That’s the difference between the way we live and the way these native peoples live. They live in balance. Does it mean they don't have challenges? No. Does it mean they don't do stupid things that humans do because they have egos? Yes. They fight, but nowhere near what we do. And the practice of spirituality is best achieved through a consistent practice of meditation, which is a dirty word in modern Western culture. But it is one of the most powerful tools known to man to create that balance. It’s been in use for 7000 years. And if something's been in use for 7000 years, there's a reason for it. And the reason is, it works and it works so well and it's not hard.
Host: Wow! What a great, what a great message you provided to our listeners. I feel refreshed and, you know, energized and hopeful just by listening to you. Thank you very much for that.
Dr. John: Well, thank you so very much. It's very kind of you to say, Wes.
Host: Well, you can be found on www.drjohnmcgrail.com and your website hypnotherapylosangeles.com and that's where you are based and that's where you take clients. And do you get in touch with people through social media? Do people contact you to respond?
Dr. John: I absolutely and thank you for mentioning that. I do have two Facebook pages and I use them both. I have my personal page, John McGrail and Dr. John McGrail, Hypnotherapy and I post, as I said I got a video series on my YouTube channel, Dr. John McGrail, pretty simple to remember.
Host: Yes.
Dr. John: There's a series called A Better You in a Minute or Two.
Host: Okay.
Dr. John: And it's got about 46 regular episodes produced now. They’re just short little video clips to help people learn to live more powerfully on a day-to-day basis, little tips, and tricks that anybody can do any time. And now I'm producing, again I don't know exactly when we’re going to air this, but we are in this coronavirus pandemic. I'm producing special episodes of that Tuesdays and Fridays for the moment. And so if anybody wants to go to my YouTube channel, Dr. John McGrail, they can hit the subscribe button and they’ll get a video every Tuesday and Friday to help all of us get through this because I'm learning every day, not just working with my clients but for myself. I'm stressed. I have those moments when I get a pit in my stomach and I'm learning how to handle that and so I’m sharing what I'm learning and what I'm doing with my clients. And yes, if people reach out either through my website via email or if they message me on Facebook or call me, my phone numbers are on my websites. They get a personal response from me. I don't have my staff do that. I answer everybody personally.
Host: Wow.
Dr. John: And if anybody has questions or wants a consultation or is interested, perhaps in doing some work in changing their lives, those are provided absolutely complimentary. There's never any obligation and yes, I appreciate you giving me a chance to do that and I do invite people's questions. I promise to get back to you personally, if not by email, by phone, or whatever works best for you.
Host: Dr. John McGrail, thank you so much for being on the Lifelong Wellness podcast today.
Dr. John: Wes, I thank you so much for having me. You are doing your listeners a great service by doing these shows and having people, you know, get exposed to ways to empower their lives. It is doable, I promise you. Everybody has within them what they need to make their life work exactly the way they want to. It’s just a question of getting the right help because most of us need it and using the right tools. And if I could be a part of that, great, but do it because your life, you deserve it. And I appreciate so much that you had me on today, thank you.
