The Connection Between Love, Belief And Our Health With Dr. Tom Moorcroft D.O.

In this episode, Adiel Gorel chats with Dr. Tom Moorcroft D.O., exploring the power of meditation, choice awareness, belief, gratitude and its connection to our physical health. Dr. Moorcroft works with other physicians to help them begin to take a more holistic approach to health and wellness. They also explore the Gut-Brain-Heart Axis, how our minds are wired for negativity addiction reinforced by dopamine, and the role of our thinking in our health and healing.

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The Connection Between Love, Belief And Our Health With Dr. Tom Moorcroft D.O.

Reprogramming Our Negativity-Focused Nervous System For Better Health

It’s very exciting to have Dr. Tom Moorcroft here with us. Tom, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Adiel. It’s great to be here. It’s an honor, and I’m looking forward to this conversation.

Unlocking The Knowledge Base: Dr. Moorcroft’s Journey

So am I. We’ve talked before, but you are such a multifaceted, knowledge-based person. It’s always so fascinating to talk to you. In preparation for what we’re going to discuss, maybe you can give us a little background on how you arrived at the knowledge that we will be sharing, and then we’ll take it from there.

In our last conversation, we talked about Lyme disease and other infections. A large part of what we’re going to talk about in this episode, I learned in my own healing journey. I was chronically sick. At the time that I started to make the biggest shifts and learn the things we’re going to be talking about, I hadn’t met the doctors I needed to overcome the physical aspects of illness.

The long and the short of it was that I was about six years in chronic unexplained symptoms, joint pain, cognitive dysfunction or brain fogs, lots of muscle pain, and horrible fatigue. I started feeling like I was missing out on life. The challenge was that I went to doctor after doctor, and they’re like, “It’s all in your head. You’ve got depression. You’re an old man.” I’m like, “No, I don’t have depression.”

I was fine until my body hurt, and then I couldn’t get an answer to why it hurt. My mood got a little crappy, but it was more like I was angry at the system, and I was angry at my body because I want to live life and do the things I love doing. I felt like I was losing that. I was recently married. We wanted to start a family. My wife and I love playing outside together, mountain biking, hiking, skiing, camping, all that stuff. I love to be outside, and the more symptoms I had, the less I could do those things I loved.

I remember one day very clearly, I was staring at the wall in our apartment. I was like, “I keep going down this path every morning, and I know exactly what I’m going to get. I’m going to get more of this junk that I hate.” I see a picture over there of all the things I described, the things that light me up that I wanted to do. I was like, “I have no idea how I’m going to get there, but if I wake up every morning and keep doing the same thing, I know I’m going to fall off the face of the planet over this way.”

I decided that, no matter what, I was going to get that, and within 48 hours, someone handed me a yoga DVD. I had to explore where the guy learned it because he had changed it, and it wasn’t all that right. I went way back to the original gurus in India and started studying with them. One of the biggest challenges I had was that, physically, I could do some things, but they hurt a lot. Mentally, I was all over the place. I was so frustrated that I couldn’t sit down and beef.

Through the course of my learning, I learned to use breath to open up and heal my physical body. Through that process, I let my body teach me more about diet and proper nutrition before I took a class in it. Also, it allowed me to slowly, over time, be able to become more comfortable and be in my body. The more I got into my body and being present in the moment, which I accidentally learned through the healing process, our bodies are so amazing, they teach us this. When I sat down, I finally was like, “I’m in touch with my heart.” When I got in touch with my heart, everything opened up.

In retrospect, two years later, I was 70% better. I still needed doctors for the other 30% but that big huge improvement came from focusing on what I was passionate about and saying, “I’m going to get there.” The one other piece to the foundation of our conversation is that I didn’t say, “I have to have that today.” I said, “That’s where I’m going, and I’m going to live as the person who knows how to get there. However, today, if my body doesn’t feel good, I’m going to respect it where it’s at, yet still hold the image and the vibration of that deep in my heart.” That’s what opened up, at minimum, 70% of my healing. That’s why we’re sitting down here. In the work I do, I see a lot of chronically ill people, and giving them the physical treatments is only a very small portion of their true healing.

The Power Of Self-Perception: Shaping Your Reality

That resonates very much because the mental image or the perception or the feeling we have about ourselves counts for a gigantic portion of how we are, or how we manifest ourselves in real life. I’m finishing a book with Chad about my travels. Not some of the heavy adventures, but one little vignette from London. I started my travels in London with no money. My parents were mad at me because I was wasting time and traveling, so I traveled without money.

In London, where I was staying for a few months, I had to make some money. I did what I could, which was cleaning houses. They were very happy to have a male cleaning for them because they could say, “Move the heavy stuff,” and all of that. One lady struck me so much that I put her in my book. Her name was Ruth. I was 21, she must have been in her 50s. I didn’t see her husband, but I know that there was one. He must have been at work. She called herself the disabled one.

While I was working at her house, she was getting phone calls. She would say, “Hi, this is Ruth, the disabled one.” Every second sentence out of her mouth was about her disability. By the way, I couldn’t see her disability. Not to say that she didn’t have it, it wasn’t externally visible. Her identification with her disability was so complete. She was deriving a certain amount of satisfaction or joy from claiming it all the time. That brings me to the negative manifestation. You talk about the positive one.

It’s interesting because that resonates so much. I work with people who say, “I’m a limey,” or “I’m a moldy.” I’m like, “This is not who you are. It’s something that has come into your world, but it’s not defining you. It’s a small portion of your world.” I do think it’s interesting. We throw around the word meditation quite a bit. In different groups, meditation may have a very positive connotation. Other people may not like that word as much. I teach a lot of meditative practices of healing that some people define as meditation. I always go back to where it came from. It’s like yoga. I’m like, “Let’s go back to the OGs,” so to speak, the original folks.

When you look at meditation, one of the definitions of meditation is to become familiar with. I take that, I look, and I go, “If you want to heal and you want to change your life, or maybe you want to even go even further and say, ‘I want to bring abundance into my life,’ whether that’s health, wealth, prosperity, relationship, whatever, are you becoming familiar with the state in which you would like to live?” That would be what I would like to term as a positive meditation. A lot of the people like Ruth and the patients that I was acknowledging, they’re so ingrained in it that they are doing more of what I would call a negative meditation. They’re becoming more familiar with the state they claim they don’t want to be in.

Our bodies are amazing. One of the other things I realized from my journey is that my body is never not showing up 100% for me. I am never betrayed by my body. My mind may not like what’s happening to my body. That’s a different story. When I start to argue that fact, then I create suffering and all this other jazz. My body is always there, even in the last moments of life. I know this from my esoteric meditative practices in philosophical and spiritual pursuits, as well as my medical pursuits. It’s scientifically there.

We have to look at it a little differently and say, “What do I want life to look like?” That’s my story. If I focus on what I didn’t want, I was already doing that and getting it. That was a protective mechanism. It keeps me safe. We have to say some people have a secondary gain, as you alluded to a little. How can we help people slowly but surely move towards that place of what they want?

One of the challenges I realized is that when I was a kid, I was provided what I needed. If I wanted anything, I was always told that I wanted too much, or I shouldn’t want it because other people don’t have as much as we do, and we have it good. We’re a lower middle class. We never didn’t have a house, but there were times when I thought we might not. I never went to bed hungry, thankfully, but there were times when I was wondering if that might happen.

We were taught when we were younger, before we could choose on our own, that wanting something was wrong. As I grew up, I said, “If I’m passionate about something and I truly want it, why is that wrong?” That sets me up for this negative meditation. That’s societal. I started saying, “Can I be objective about what I want?” If I’m like, “I want $1 million,” sure, but why do I want it? If my litmus test is if I want something and it lights up my heart, then I start to feel it. Is it expansive and full of energy, gratitude, and love? I would say that is a positive response.

If I’m like, “I want this,” because I want to be like my neighbor, even when I say that, I can feel the energy closing in. If objectively I want it, that’s my heart speaking to me. I’m not going to disrespect my heart because when I do, I get what I don’t want. When I listen to my heart truly, and I sit with it, then I start to be at a manifest healing and all these other wonderful things that we can enjoy in life.

Structuring Behavior For Positive Meditation

It’s a little tricky. This is where you could guide me, and you could guide our audience in how to maybe structure the behavior that would lead to those positive meditations, as you say, rather than negative. You mentioned gratitude, and I want to visit it with you. Gratitude is almost the opposite of some of the Western education and thinking.

You see very strict parents whose kid comes from school and they got 94 out of 100 on the test. I would say for the majority of people, the natural thing to say was, “You did so well. That’s an A-plus. That’s amazing.” There would be a certain percentage of people who would say, “What happened to the other six?”

Maybe that’s an extreme example because the majority of people will be very proud of their kid if they brought such a grade home. Let’s say you walk around, you are in good shape, you’re generally healthy, but yesterday, you ran and you tweaked your knee, and today, you can’t do stuff. You even know it’s temporary, but it bugs you.

Somehow, without meaning to you, you are focusing on your knee and maybe even covering it with a structure that says, “Why did I not watch where I was going? Why did I run so fast through the trees? Why?” Here you are, 94% of you, I’m saying it as a number for the sake of this example, is perfect, it is wonderful, it is amazing. The 6% is not so good. Where are you in your mind? That’s the opposite of gratitude if you spend your time in the 6%.

I find it’s a huge challenge. I’ve had people come in, and in two months, they have a 70% improvement. They’re like, “That’s not good enough.” I trained physicians to do the work with tick-borne illnesses that I do. Somebody who has been sick for four and a half years came in. We started him on treatment a few weeks ago, and he is 25% better. She’s like, “That’s not enough.” I’m like, “That’s a miracle.”

Part of it is that society has taught us this from time immemorial. Part of it is control mechanisms. Part of it is human nature. Part of it is that our parents taught us because they were taught it before their conscious mind was fully developed, around 7 or 8 years old, to say, “I can accept or reject ideas.” It was programmed into them. It was programmed into “Don’t beat yourself up.”

When you have awareness of your ability to make new choices now, you have a responsibility to yourself, and you are worthy to receive healing. You are worthy to receive everything that’s in your heart. I believe that if your heart is speaking to you and it’s creating thoughts in your head, those are divinely inspired. Whatever the divinity of life that lives and breathes you, what word resonates with you, that’s not my business, but we’re all alive. Whatever that life force is, it’s planting this in you. If it is truly what you want, you deserve it. It’s our job to accept that we’re worthy enough and then take action.

A couple of things. One is that the nervous system defaults to the negative. When I grew up, if they watched the news and it was 30 minutes or an hour, everything was crap except for the last 30 seconds, where there was a nice little closing. You look online, there’s almost nothing positive because positive doesn’t give you a dopamine hit, unless it’s massive. Negative, we grab onto because if we don’t, we could die. There’s a reptilian nervous system, the basic part of our reflex protective mechanism within our body, that when we see something negative, we give it extra attention in the event that it could end our ability to pass our genes on or end our lives.

Innately, we assume negative and then we choose positive. I made up a crazy example years ago. We’re back in the Aboriginal tribe days, and there are even some places like this in the world now, but we’re around a campfire, and a neighboring tribe comes in. We don’t know them, so we’re not sure. If we assume they’re friends and they all come in and cut all our heads off, we’re gone. If we assume they’re not our friends, and they’re not, now we’re on guard, and we’ve been able to protect ourselves. If we assume they are not our friends and then we realize they are, then we can change our minds and sit down and share a beer.

This is a protective mechanism, but in modern days, we probably don’t need it as active as evolutionarily it is. That’s part of it. It’s our natural reflex. How do we overcome that? I always tell people, “You don’t need to focus on a hurt knee to know you have a hurt knee.” You’re not going to forget to do something about your hurt knee or your Lyme disease if you have it, because it’s right in front of your face.

The example of the knee is a good one. I twisted it yesterday. I woke up today. I’m like, “I did that. Why did I do that?” You know the whole thing about you shouldn’t or should on yourself, like, don’t crap on yourself. No matter what I do during the day, no matter how positive I am, if my knee hurts, I’m not going to be able to forget about it. If I am able to forget about it, then my knee doesn’t hurt, and it’s not injured anymore.

What I tell people is, you’re never going to forget about the bad part. Assess the negative, make sure there’s no life threat, and then go back to focus. A couple of things you can do that are practical. You and I could talk about this for three days and have it all be non-actionable and just be theory. A couple of things that I recommend people do. I love an exercise where at the end of the day, you give yourself 3 to 4 minutes and you break out a journal. It is best to write it down, whether you use a digital writing device with a pen-type stylus or real paper. I’d recommend not typing it. Get your hand using something that’s more like paper because that’s a direct connection to reprogramming your nervous system.

You write down three wins that you had for the day. It doesn’t matter how big or small. In fact, in my life, the smaller the better. It’s almost like sipping a beautiful glass of red wine. You take one sip, you swish it around, and over the next 2 to 3 minutes, you savor that moment. That’s what we’re looking for. If this is the worst day you’ve ever had, you lost your job, somebody hit your car, your dog died, it’s the worst thing I could ever think of, all added up. Write down three lessons you learn.

The trick is to spend no more than 2 or 3 minutes writing those 3 wins down, and then write down 3 wins you’re going to have for tomorrow. A lot of people are like, “Why am I doing that?” The thing is, you’ll eventually fall asleep for some period of time. Even the worst insomniac will eventually sleep for a bit of time. When you go to sleep, the conscious mind that says, “Yes, no, this can work, that can’t work, this is why it won’t work,” and it’s always trying to protect you, dissociates from the subconscious mind. That subconscious mind does what you tell it to do.

When you were six and your parents told you that you shouldn’t want anything because you’re greedy, you’re going to run that program over and over again until you choose to reprogram it. Reprogramming happens in 1 of 2 ways. One is a huge event that happens, but when a huge event happens, it’s usually very negative, like 9/11 or COVID. Could it be the birth of a child or meeting the love of your life? Yes, but that’s less common because of the way our nervous system works.

The other part is repetition. Repetition is easier when I can bypass the conscious mind. I do it at bedtime, then I go to sleep. The subconscious plugs into the life energy, and now it’s what we would call the superconscious. You’re getting all these new ideas, and you wake up the next morning. You read over the 3 wins from yesterday, the 3 wins you’re going to have today, and you do this every day. Within 4 to 7 days, everyone who has ever taken me up on this is like, “My life is so different.”

The Three Wins: A Daily Gratitude Practice

I have a technical question for you. In my mind’s eye, I see myself writing it down at the end of the day, the three wins, but when I write the three wins for tomorrow, while I write it, I can hear my conscious mind saying, “How the heck do you know? What is this? Are you predicting the future here? What the heck?”

That is so spot on. That is exactly the reason we do it at nighttime. You’ve proven my point that the conscious mind is going to create all of the ways that it won’t happen.

“How do you know?” They say, “What do you know about tomorrow? It has not unfolded yet.”

That’s why at bedtime, we write it down and we let it go because then when that conscious mind gets to chill out and take a nap, the subconscious is open to new possibilities. As an example, I don’t remember my schedule for tomorrow completely, but I know I have some meetings after I see patients. I’m going to do something tonight where I’m like, “Tomorrow, I know I have a couple of patients that are a little more challenging than my standard crew, those visits are going to go well, and I’m going to enjoy them more than I usually do. I’m going to be able to offer them something good that’s going to help break through for them, something that we haven’t been able to achieve in the past.” I’m going to say, “I have a business meeting and the meeting is going to go well.”

That is now a wonderful guide. Let’s say I’m doing it last night. I don’t know anything about today, but I do know from my calendar that I have an interview with you. That’s an anchor. I can take that and say, “I’m going to enjoy it. I’m going to learn a lot of new things. It’s going to be fascinating,” stuff like that.

It’s simple because in the beginning, you don’t have to rewrite the whole future. It’s as simple as saying, “I’m so grateful that Adiel and Chad asked me to be on the show tomorrow, and I’m going to show up and be myself and share something amazing that’s going to help change at least one person’s life.” If you notice some of the words, “I’m so grateful,” and I even said at the beginning, “I’m honored to be here.” I could choose other words. Is that accurate? Yes, I’m very honored. A lot of times, we don’t say what we mean. It gives us permission to focus on the good, as well as the bad, because I’m not going to forget the bad.

The idea is that after you do this for a few days, in 4 to 7 days, you’ll be like, “My day went well. I didn’t realize how many positive things happened.” A lot of times, we have a lot of stress in the world. It’s not to say that it doesn’t exist. It’s just that it’s easy to focus on that. It’s an inherent reflex protective mechanism. It’s on us if we want to live an abundant, long, good life to focus there.

The other thing I’ll often do and because we’ve talked about gratitude, and I like coupling these, are two things. I like to give people options because one will resonate more with you than it would with Chad, and vice versa. I like to give people a couple of simple things, and they choose one. I also like a couple of simple things. I choose one, and then add them together later on.

Another practice that’s important for people is breath awareness. I got into this back in the day, several years ago. I saw a paper. I was getting into it. I was always very into how I could reignite self-healing within me. That was part of my learning journey. Even before I was sick, I came across a paper that said if you focus on your breathing in and out of your nose for ten minutes a day, there was a study that showed you can turn off breast cancer genes. I was like, “That’s interesting.”

As I went down the rabbit hole with all this breathing thing, we find that there’s a thing called heart rate variability. We know the heart goes a little faster, a little slower, depending upon our activity, but also, at rest, while we’re talking here, there’s a little variability. Our beat-to-beat variability, the higher the variability is, the healthier we are. The healthier our immune system is, the greater stress resilience we have, and the greater resistance to viral and bacterial infections. We can live longer and healthier.

If you’re chronically stressed or you’re old and you haven’t put work into this, those are signs of decay of the system and aging. What’s interesting is if you sit down and you focus on your breathing in and out of your nose, the air moving through your nose, the air in the back of your throat, even just your chest rise and fall, and that’s all you do for 5 minutes, then move to 10 minutes. You close your eyes, sit on your bed, lie down, and you start breathing, and you become aware of it.

Most people will realize that thoughts start coming. There’s no way to get rid of them. Don’t try it. Until you’ve super meditated or had a crazy, instantaneous spiritual experience, thoughts are normal. What we do is when it comes across my mind, I go, “Thank you so much. I’m going to go back for the next five minutes.” Whenever I get distracted, I go back to my breathing. That’s step one. It’s all you do.

It will get you into a parasympathetic rest and digest setting, and it’ll start to increase your heart rate variability. We know through the research of the HeartMath Institute, as well as others, that if I take heart-centered breathing, meaning I take that breath awareness and I start going on breathing, my chest is rising and falling, then I go and I think about something I’m grateful for.

Something I love, someone I love, something I used to do that I love that I want to do when I get better. Something that I do now that I can’t wait to do more of. Something that I plan on doing in the future when I feel better. Whatever lights you up, dog, cat, bugs, snake, kid, lover, whatever you can hold in your heart that lights you up, do that while you’re focusing on breathing. That’s gratitude breathing or what HeartMath calls quick coherence.

The importance of that is when I do quick coherence and I measure it in real time, I can see your heart rate variability dramatically increase. Let’s say I did heart-centered gratitude breathing for five minutes, and then I opened my eyes, and I wrote down 3 wins for today, 3 wins for tomorrow, or if it feels better, do it in the opposite order. It doesn’t matter. Now, you’re getting parasympathetic. You’re getting ready. You’ve celebrated gratitude now. You’re practicing gratitude in the future. You’re pre-programming gratitude.

The trick is now that we’ve coupled this with the breathing and the quick coherence, we’re helping our nervous system get out of fight, flight, or freeze, which are our sympathetic overdrive or our collapse states. We’re going back to parasympathetic, which is healing and rejuvenation. What’s beautiful is that parasympathetic helps you rest and digest. You’re about to go to bed. That’s when you consolidate memories. That’s when your brain detoxifies optimally. If you’re having a hard time going to bed, you’ve got to practice these things during the day, and it’ll make going to bed easier, digest your food better, and you’ll heal better.

Aligning Goals And Desires: Making Sense Of Your Path

This is a way to access longevity, but also a way to access healing mentally, physically, and emotionally. It’s so simple because you start with 3 minutes or 8 minutes, and you’re worth it. You do those practices, and it’s amazing how quickly the snowball gets to the top of the hill and then starts running down the other side and gaining momentum for your wishes, your goals, and your desires.

Makes a lot of sense. What you’re describing is almost the equivalent of a mantra meditation, except the mantra is being aware of the breathing.

A lot of this is what your chronic meditation is, going from negative to positive. Also, when you look at your passion and you live with passion, your passion comes from your meaning and your purpose. We know that when you live a life of meaning and purpose, it changes how genes are expressed. Genes that reduce inflammation and immune resilience. Now, I have changes in genetic expression, and I have direct changes in my nervous system that impact my immune system.

Not only is it going to help you change how you feel, but it’s actually going to make people biologically younger. While not everybody may want to live to be 170, like a lot of the biohackers are trying to pretend we’re going to get to these days, but most people I know want to live their full life at their fullest capacity, go to bed and not wake up, rather than suffer for 30 years.

We know that markers, like telomeres, or markers of aging in chronically stressed people, get shorter and shorter, showing that we’re having early advanced aging. The other thing is when we do this, this is a riff on mindfulness. We’re aware of how we’re thinking, and we’re aware of how we would prefer to think more. We’re essentially rebooting our phone. When my phone doesn’t work right, I look for an update, and/or I turn it off and turn it back on. It’s a reboot. That’s what we’re doing.

We know older folks, and this also applies to a lot of people through the pandemic, who do mindfulness-based stress reduction, and this is a version of that. We also see lots of studies showing reduced inflammatory markers, but also people subjectively reported less loneliness. I have an aging mother, she’s 85, she’s in assisted living, and she’s doing okay, but she was in Florida for a while. We moved to Utah to be closer to family. She was engaged with some people, but she didn’t have a lot of family connections anymore. That’s a big part of how we grew up.

We had a reunion where all of her sons and their families came together, and it made all the difference in her health. There was that connection. If you just do 5 to 15 minutes of some form of mindfulness a day, and add some gratitude to it, that supercharges it, and it’s free. If you look at your breathing and you’re already doing that, that’s also free. You might as well take advantage of it. There’s no admission fee here. That is going to improve immune function. It’s going to decrease inflammation. That knee that we were talking about is going to heal better. You’re going to feel more connected to the world.

Humans, whether they’re very extroverted or very introverted, need connection. We’re social animals. We need a connection to those around us and the planet on a level that’s individually right for you. None is generally not good. The feeling of loneliness versus the feeling of connectedness is a major risk in aging. It’s a major risk in chronic disease.

We see that so many people with chronic diseases, including chronic stress, or just life stressors. It doesn’t have to be an infection. It could be your life circumstances. When you feel disconnected and lonely, everything is worse. I can even measure blood levels of inflammation going up and coming down before and after applying these principles.

A Philosophical Pinch: Eastern Wisdom in Healing

I guess if we take it and we add a pinch of philosophy/Eastern stuff, it goes like this. They always say, and rightfully so, the cliché is almost “Be here now.” The past is gone, the future is unknown. All you have is now. All of those clichés, everybody knows them. If we try to pair it with what you said, here you are right now, and you have what you have. Your knee may be twisted, the rest of your body is generally okay, and you’re frustrated.

Let’s pretend that the next minute is your entire life. How are you going to choose to spend this minute? Lamenting about your knee or taking all the good stuff and living in the minute and looking outside and seeing the birds and whatever it is? Now, take that minute and make it a week, a month, a year, 10 years, 15 years. It’s the same thing. You don’t let that roof take over you.

There are all kinds of different traditions talking about major shifts going on right now. We talked a little bit about this right before we started. When you want to talk about cliches that are applicable and helpful, I’ve also heard we’re human beings, and a lot of humans do. My mom, when I first became a doctor and I married a doctor, it’s Doctors Tom and Jill Moorcroft, DOs on the mail. I’m like, “Mom, that’s what I do for work. That’s not my identity.” It’s part of it, and I’m very proud of it because I had to get a lot of 94-pluses to get to school.

I want to be known for how I live my passion. I’m there for my family and my friends. I love cooking and sharing that passion and that love. I love my music, and I share that with people. I’m a good doctor and all, but the thing that makes me a good doctor is that I let who I am come into my work, not just because I studied a lot. The “study a lot” is the doing. We’ve all met doctors.

It’s interesting, when I teach the physicians, and we talked about this before. If you look across the board of doctors who get reported by patients for doing bad things and for maybe malpractice, which most people don’t understand what it is, but they say, “That’s malpractice.” Those doctors who get reported typically have done nothing wrong. If anything, they have the highest skill level of most doctors in their community.

However, the other person that didn’t get reported usually is the person who might not have the greatest skillset, but they have the greatest bedside manner, and they connect with the person. As a physician, I try to be both of those doctors together, and I think most of us do. What we learned from that is the connection. Sitting down with a real person who cares about you is the opposite of that loneliness.

That’s a direct connection. That allows us to feel like we’re one-on-one with a person, not being spoken down to. From a healing perspective, whether that’s me working with another person or me coaching a person to have a better relationship with their own healing mechanism is we want to have the connection with passion and purpose because that’s what humans yearn for deep in their hearts. It improves all the factors we’ve been talking about.

We know that when we reconnect with calmness, gratitude, and meaning, that alone, outside of the quick coherence technique, will improve heart rate variability. It’s directly related not only to how healthy you are and how long you live, but maybe most importantly, how well you feel now. You’re right that we have this moment right now, and we hope to have a lot more moments, but I don’t know how many moments I have.

If you’ve ever read Don Miguel Ruiz, the Toltec Shaman who wrote The Four Agreements and The Fifth Agreement, he has all these beautiful things he says. One of the things he was telling us was not to ever have an argument with your family. He is like, “Never leave your family and loved ones in a state of upheaval,” like when you have an argument, and you leave.

He’s like, “Even if all you do is stop and you say, ‘I didn’t want this to happen. I know we need to decompress this. I’m sorry. I love you. I don’t expect everything to be hunky dory in the moment,’ but don’t leave without saying I love you.” Even if there’s tension, close the tension with, “And I love you,” or whatever words work. “I love you” is a good one. What if something happens? We all know somebody who left and never showed up at home again.

One of the things I love doing is recommending that once you do some of these other practices and you’re feeling good, and it’s okay to sit in your body and focus on your breathing, take it a step further. Stand in the mirror and look at yourself, and then say, “Tom, I love you.” Most people find that to be harder than telling anybody else they love them. For a lot of people, they can do it, and a lot of other people feel uncomfortable. No matter how much you practice it, there’s usually a little area that does a little twinge. That’s an awareness. You don’t have to do anything. When I say “I love you, Tom” in the mirror, I feel a twinge here. I feel a twinge down there. Be aware of it and be open to that.

That’s part of my gratitude practice. I can even say, “I’m grateful that when I stood in front of the mirror, I felt this area that was different than the rest.” I acknowledge it. That’s it. That’s a win because now I’ve brought awareness to it, I brought light to it, and my body is going to heal itself. It doesn’t need my brain to get in the way and do more. One of the things about being a human being is that it’s about awareness. We have to take action, but we don’t have to go crazy.

I’ve studied with a bunch of amazing people, and I studied with Mary Morrissey. She’s so fantastic. She said, “Everything that we see in this world is created twice. First, in the mental and emotional connection plane. We think it, we dream it into existence, and our passion brings it to life. It’s then manifested in the physical plane.” I go back to the writings of Wallace Wattles from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. He was an early American philosopher, and he talked about what we now call the Law of Attraction.

He said, “It’s by thought that we bring that which we desire to us, and it’s through action we receive it.” It’s in that order. It’s like in Mary’s two-step hierarchy. We have to be clear on our passion, our gratitude, and our love of life to start bringing it to us, so then we’ll know objectively what action to take, and not waste our time on stupid action or frivolous action.

With the guitars behind you and the guitars in my other room, we all know that we need to practice, but what do we need to practice, and how do we need to come to practice? I want to sit down and be like, “I want to be in the zone.” Other people can coach us and help us, but we need to be in, “Why am I even doing this?”

Simon Sinek tells us to start with our why. If we start with our why, then we know what we need to do, and then we take action. You can learn to play the guitar, you can learn how to invest in real estate, or become a doctor, or you can learn how to heal or live a beautiful life by starting with what you truly want. Don’t play small. Don’t let your parents or your friends tell you you’re wrong. Write it down in your journal and think about it in private. Eventually, you’ll want to tell people, but you don’t have to. Just think, “What lights me up?” That is how I healed.

I want to bring it back to like why it’s so important in my world. My life was going down the tubes in my mid-twenties. I was like, “This is not what I signed up for.” I don’t deserve it, and I don’t think anybody deserves it, but there are lessons to be learned, and you have an opportunity to dive deeper into life and savor it. I love the topic because it’s a spiritual topic. It’s a mental and emotional healing topic. It’s a physical healing topic, but at its core, it’s a human topic. I’m so glad we’re able to talk about this because it changes lives.

The Mirror Exercise: Cultivating Self-Love

A variation that I learned about, standing in front of the mirror and saying, “Tom, I love you,” or “Adiel, I love you,” is looking at your child. Your child may have been told, “Don’t be greedy,” as you said. You look at the child and you say, “Little Tom, I love you.” Some people find that easier to do. Little Tom starts getting your love, and then maybe you even do some things with Little Tom. You take Little Tom out for some fun time. You don’t shy spending a little money on Little Tom. That’s another level of indirection.

These are all different tools. There are so many different religions, spiritual traditions, and yogic practices. I’ve even recommended Qigong and Tai Chi to some people. The reason all these things are so powerful is that you don’t have to choose what works for me. I’m just giving you some simple things that are easy to start with. Find something you love doing. If you love knitting, go knit. I said prayer is great, too.

The thing I would say, though, is that your example and the examples I’ve used bring it back to being present in your own body and people who have experienced trauma. This is one of my favorite definitions that comes up so often. If somebody gets hit by a car or raped, we would almost say they experienced significant trauma. When I studied with some Peruvian shamans, they talked about it as being stuck energy. To make the American tourists happy, they call it stuck negative energy. Their idea of negative and positive was of opposite poles, not a value judgment of good or bad. It’s just like a magnet, positive pull and a negative pull. Their point was that the energy is not flowing. Our goal is to get the energy flowing.

If you look through the world literature, some of the best practices for trauma resolution are what they call somatic exercises. Meaning we help people who have moved out of their body, bring their energy back, and their focus back in, so they can live more comfortably in their body. They exited because it felt dangerous in the moment. Now, you are currently safe. This is one of the biggest things. In order to heal, your nervous system has to know it’s safe.

The challenge in the world is that we’ve created social media and instant news. It changes every two seconds, and most of the time, it is completely inaccurate. We have a world where we can feed on, and we’re scared. Our cortisol and stress hormones are super high. We need to get back to getting to this place where we have moments of safety. Getting into safety is critical, and a lot of these practices we’ve talked about do that.

One of the things I like to do is not just do a practice where it’s like, “Come back to your body.” For a lot of people, that’s hard to do. As you said, even looking in the mirror is more of an advanced technique for some people because it’s intense. Breathing is great. You’re already doing it. Now that you’re aware of it, guess what? You came back into your body a little bit more today than yesterday. That’s all I want. It’s like starting a siphon when we were kids. Dad ran out of gas in one car, and he asked you to put gas in the other. You start going and going. As soon as the trickle starts, all of a sudden, that’s all you need.

We don’t need this to be a big deal. We need it to be a “consistent most days of the week” deal. The consistency is key. Not how long you do it. That’s why I say 3 to 5 minutes is great. I’d rather you do 3 to 5 minutes, 5 days a week, than an hour once a month. When we look at all this, the goal is to move into reprogramming ourselves slowly but surely.

One of the things I love doing, since we keep talking about music, is a lot of breathwork with people. I teach them to go pass challenges through the breath work practice. I love you doing breathwork primarily with curated music. We can produce music or create music that resonates with the heart, and it helps bring you more into the heart’s frequency.

Love is what I’m looking for. That highest frequency where we dial it all in. We can use beats and music. Also, if you’re breathing but then you start doing one of these things, now I forgot that my back hurts or my knee hurts, and now I’m getting into this. I’m not focused on that. I’m back in my body. I’m naturally residing where I belong.

For me, that stemmed to even doing DJ-ing and ecstatic dance. I’ve done some free online stuff. I’m doing a lot at medical conferences for doctors because I want them to lead by example and shine their light so they can show their patients, not by authority or demand, but through personal practice. How many doctors, lawyers, and investors aren’t under high stress? It’s like we need to go out, so we need to lead by example, I think.

We do this, and then people are able to move their bodies in whatever way feels right for them or not at all. They can be in the flow together at a frequency. Throughout human history, we’ve used dance, movement, and music to bring community together. I did a live stream on YouTube. I invited 50,000 people to a YouTube dance party.

We did breathwork. We started with shaking, we did breathwork, and we did dancing. The feedback I got from people was that they felt connected to each other, but we did it on Zoom and YouTube. You don’t even have to be in the same room. For people who are not quite ready to get out and connect directly with others, you can get this.

Joe Dispenza has done all this meditation research. They have publications done at major medical institutions. Hemal Patel has published a lot. He’s down in San Diego. He’s done a ton of research for Joe Dispenza on white blood cells and other cell lines and how we can change them. They’ve even put stuff in different rooms and different parts of the planet.

A group of people meditating in a room can affect things in different places. A group of people meditating together over Zoom can change gene expression across the globe. All these coherence and oneness initiatives and all these things are scientifically grounded. As much as what you and I have been talking about might sound like woo-woo to some people, it’s spiritually sound for millennia, and it’s being scientifically proven more and more every single day.

Thinking Like a Physicist: An Engineering Perspective

Thinking like a physicist, I was trained in engineering, so there was a lot of physics and math. Thinking from that standpoint, the most logical and scientific, it makes perfect sense. Everybody who has meditated knows that when you meditate with another person, somehow, it’s better, maybe deeper. Some people would say, “Yeah, because you stray less with your thoughts because you know the other person is there, so you do it better.” That’s one explanation.

The other one is that everything is waves. Electromagnetic waves, including our thoughts. When you have a certain wave pattern, because you’re meditating and you have another person in the room with a similar wave pattern, there’s what is constructive interference. If you have 1,000 people, I was lucky enough to meditate once with 4,000 people in a building.

I did 1,800, but 4,000 is insane. I love it.

I can tell you it’s a very different experience. Very deep and very special. Why wouldn’t it? If you are emanating waves, at least in theory, those waves can reach very far. They have an effect. What you’re saying, as a physicist, makes perfect sense.

One of the other people I spent a lot of time with before his passing was Bob Proctor. For anyone who has watched The Secret, Bob is the white-haired guy who’s like Grandfather Time, almost. He’s like the guru of the gurus type of thing. One of the things he was talking about was that a lot of people are like, “I’m following the Law of Attraction. I want this. I focus on it every morning I wake up. This is my purpose, and I look at it, but I’m not getting it. Why isn’t it happening?” He’s like, “Your frequency is down here. What you’re thinking about and what you want is here.” Going back to what Wallace Wattles said, not only do I need to think up here, but I need to act up here.

It might be that I have to go and meet it. That constructive resonance ultimately becomes coherence. Another thing is, who are you hanging out with? Jim Rohn is one of the guys who, in the early days, inspired Tony Robbins. I think it was him who said, “If you tell me and show me the five people you hang out with the most, I can tell you what your bank account looks like.” The bank account is an analogy. Yes, it’s a physical wealth bank account, but I would also say that based on who you hang out with, I can tell you what your emotional bank account looks like, too. The point is you resonate with those around you.

I continually try to uplevel. I’m going to do some DJ-ing and ecstatic dance at Burning Man. It’s the first time my wife and I have gone, and we’re going for the art and the music and the community piece because I’ve heard other stuff, but that’s not our gig. I want to give things that bring me love and that the community likes.

I wanted to, as part of it, create spoken word things over the top. Not like I’m on a microphone and hoping the tech works in the middle of a desert, but I wanted to be a theoric, like it’s an angel speaking to people. I can have it layered over songs in certain areas to, at core times, give somebody a little extra boost to that love right as the music brings them to an openness, and then it drops out, and you’re hanging out in stillness. It’s the perfect time to program your mind. It’s almost like using neurolinguistic programming, hypnosis in the middle of a deep, still dance experience.

By no coincidence whatsoever, because I don’t believe in those things, but by divine intervention at a bioenergetics conference, I happened to run into a Grammy Award-winning music producer who creates primarily meditation and heart-aligning music. On a whim, I was like, “I’m going to reach out and say I want to gift this to other people. I’m stuck in one spot. You’re an expert here. Can you help me?” I texted him and he’s like, “My schedule is super crazy this entire week, but I want to help you out. Can I call you right now?” I was like, “Okay.” He was like, “I usually charge people for this, but you’re a friend of mine.” We talked for two minutes at a conference, but he was like, “I believe in what you’re doing. I can help you quickly.”

Because I wanted to give love and lead by example and share this with other people who are in a community, where it’s more about coming together and living in love, community, and support, rather than what can we get, this person who could arguably charge me thousands of dollars for a consult did it and helped me. I had a couple of patients after I’d talked to him, and it took me 15 minutes to do what I had to complete 50% of the project that I hadn’t been able to figure out in three months.

I reached out because it’s in my heart to give, and we had made a connection on a heart level, and he was willing to give because he knows I’m going to give it out. That’s what I’m saying. We can live in a world like that where it’s about love and gratitude. It’s like when I help patients. They’re trying to retrain the way they relate to their current circumstances and their identity, and the traumas they built up over life. Most importantly, maybe their inner narratives have been part of that.

When we retrain that in this way, we shift those immune markers, which is cool as a doctor. I can say, “I got to teach you spirituality, and it changes your physical being, and that makes me feel cool.” The reality is they don’t give two craps. They want to know how it’s going to change their lives. We’re seeing long COVID, chronic Lyme disease, mold exposure, and physical and emotional traumas. They’re being healed by doing simple things like just doing what you love and stopping playing small.

There’s a Marianne Williamson quote that I talk about all the time. I almost feel like pulling it up, so I don’t bastardize it. The gist of what she says coming out of the Course in Miracles is that it’s our light, not our darkness, that scares us the most. A lot of people are like, “If I play big, then I’m going to make people around me feel small.” That’s a bunch of baloney. Shine your light. When you shine your light, not only do you give them a little reprieve in their day, but you inspire them to do the same. The world is a cool place, but it’s pretty dark right now, too. We need some more love going around. If we open up our hearts and shine our true passion, we’re going to inspire others to do the same.

It’s the way we raise our daughter. I would love for her to do some of the things I think are cool, but that’s me. I want to create a basket where she’s safe and she learns to be herself. When she does what’s in her heart, she’s going to have a great life, have the greatest level of health and healing, and longevity. She’s also going to inspire others to do that through that ripple effect, which is an interesting analogy based on what you said. When we ripple out like this, and other people’s ripples go like this, now we create that interference as well, which creates a higher frequency. That’s what we’re all doing. When we each do this and we motivate others to do it, our interference is what’s leveling humanity. That’s freaking cool.

Constructive Interference: Building Towards Wellness

I know the word interference could be misleading, but it’s called constructive interference. In other words, they’re in phase with each other. There’s destructive where they cancel constructive. There are two points. One, I want to take us back to the very beginning of our conversation. We brought the example of the knee being tweaked, and you being frustrated with it. It consumes you or it doesn’t.

Let’s say a friend of yours is coming to visit you, and you guys are going to go hiking. Now, you can’t. You cannot go hiking right now. The thing is, I want to marry this concept with the concept of standing in the mirror and saying, “I love you, Tom,” because do you now feel, “I wish my friend came at another time when I would be better.” The question is, do you love yourself even with a tweaked knee?

You are lovable, and you don’t have to be perfect to be lovable. It all gets into each other. The concept of the 94%, all of that, is that you are lovable despite the fact that you have an injury. You are lovable despite the fact that you may have a virus. I think a lot of people grapple with, “No, I’m not worthy. I’m not good.”

I’ve seen and heard about a situation where a man would say, “I lost all my money and my wife left me.” If you look at the value of that sentence, you say, “How could she?” However, if you go deep, more likely than not, he would say, “I lost all my money, now I’m worthless. Now, I hate myself.” He behaves in such an insufferable way over time that she has no choice but to leave him.

It’s interesting. The first thing that came to mind is all those things you said, “I shouldn’t have gone and done this and messed up my knee.” I knew somebody’s like, “Whatever, I’m not worthy. I’m not a good person. I wish I had done this.” All those things run through my head right away. I’m not perfect at this by any stretch, but I’ve practiced becoming aware of what’s going through my head.

Examine your thoughts. Write down every thought you have about yourself for a day. For most people, it takes between 15 minutes and an hour, or even 15 seconds, and they’ve already replayed all 95% of what they’re going to say about themselves. For most people, it’s bad. One of the things that I come out of that is I say, “When I’m standing in front of that mirror and I say all those things to my friends coming, then I’m aware of it because I feel it,” and that’s all I need to do.

I was playing this in my head in real time, as if I were in that situation, as you said. The next thing that I would think is, “My friend and I are now going to have to figure out something else to do together.” I bet you it’s going to be something I never thought of before. We are going to have an adventure that’s not pre-planned. It may or it may not, but it may be better.

My mother is mostly in a wheelchair with bad Parkinson’s and osteoporosis, and a broken back in several places, all in the last six months, the back breaking. Her Parkinson’s has been a while. She had us all come for that reunion. We’re like, “How can we go do something with my mom that’ll be fun for everybody?”

We’ve got a couple of teenagers. We’ve got a bunch of people in their 40s and early 50s, and she’s in her 80s. She can’t move and can’t do much. On some days, we don’t even know if she can get out of bed. My wife came up with this crazy idea to go glassblowing. The kids are like, “Whatever.” The rest of us who are middle-aged are like, “It’ll be fun, but do I want to go do that? We want to do it with mom, so we’re going to show up.” My mom was like, “I’m not going to be able to do that.”

It was so beautiful. I have a video that we made of it. Everybody went. We made a little vase. It’s basic, but the glassblower walked each person through it. My mom walked and watched everybody do it, and then she went up to do it. He helped her in a way that it was almost she was all doing it. She did that, and then she got to put it in the fire and spin it, and then she got to blow it. All of us thought she was going to sit there on her turn and watch one of us do it, but she was able to do it.

We all have these beautiful things. We all made these beautiful things that expressed our time together. The kids and the teenagers had a blast. My mom had a blast. We’re showing everybody this video, even the people at the assisted living, even the director of the whole place is crying when I showed it to them, because you could see how it brought everybody together.

We then went out to dinner, which got even crazier, at a newer restaurant in the area. We’ve been there a couple of times and liked it. We wanted to go somewhere else, but it wasn’t going to work out because we weren’t sure if my mom was going to even be able to go. It turns out my next-door neighbor runs the place, and he is the head chef. It was this crazy thing. Everybody got the food they wanted, and a lot of people have different ideas about food. We got to connect with their neighbor more. It’s like Jill had planned four other things, but it didn’t work out.

While no one broke their knee, my mom was limited, so we had to adjust, but it turned out to be phenomenal because we did something we would’ve never done because of it. I don’t know what the lesson to learn is from your Lyme disease or your knee. I honestly am not saying you deserve it, but when it shows up in your life, take advantage of it. Learn the lessons. That’s the spice of life. Try something new.

Setbacks As Teachers: Learning From Challenges

I am trying. I’m not saying I’m perfect, but think about setbacks as teachers that come. It’s a class. I’m going to class, but there’s a setback. What is it trying to teach me? What can I learn from the situation? I want to ask you also this. You talk about optimizing brain detoxification, improving sleep, and optimizing the autonomic. Can you talk a little bit about that?

This might sound like it’s a little bit of a curveball to maybe some of your readers, but all these people come to me and say, “What’s the best supplement? What’s the best machine? What’s the best IV for brain detoxification?” Invariably, my answer is sleep. In our arms, our legs, our chest, and our belly, we have lymphatic channels that are big channels of detoxification. In our arms and legs, we need to move our muscles. Muscle contraction is the primary driver of detoxification.

In our chest, our belly, and our pelvis, it’s pressure gradient changes. When you look at the pressure gradient change, you’re like, “That’s why they tell me in breathwork or in yoga to breathe all the way down until you feel the pelvic floor pushing into the chair.” In some of the yoga traditions, they’ll have you lift your pelvic floor to create even more pressure. They’re not saying descend, but they’re doing a similar thing. That was one of the traditions I learned in.

You go, “That’s great. What about the brain?” I go, “Okay, hold on a second.” The beauty of having to move is that when you move, you burn energy. When you move, you breathe more deeply. I made myself breathe more deeply. I’ve optimized detoxification. I made myself more tired, and I’m going to get exercise-induced endorphin release. I’m going to improve my sleep. It’ll be easier to go to bed at night. Now, 80% to maybe even 90% of all brain detoxification has been shown to happen in deep, slow-wave sleep. We need to protect the sleep, especially this first six-hour block.

The only other time people have measured high levels of brain detoxification is when they’re in super deep meditation, or they’ve done breathwork or prayer that gets them pretty much in a deep, slow-wave sleep, or a wake but trance-like state. That’s it. Our body detoxification is optimal when we do stuff during the day. The things we do to optimize that also allow us to optimize being tired and being in a rest and digest state, so we can sleep better.

Brain detoxification relies on sleep. A lot of it has to do with hydration. That’s also something that’s not too expensive. Drink high-quality water, maybe put a little pinch of sea salt and some electrolytes in it. It’s sleep and water, and movement during the day. Another little trick for that whole thing is to get up in the morning and go out in natural sunlight. It’s going to stimulate your mitochondria, but it’s also going to stimulate production of melatonin, which is our main sleep hormone. Production is stimulated by early-day natural light exposure.

Release of melatonin happens at night when it’s cool and dark, and we’re in parasympathetic rest and digest. We’ve done breathing, and now we’re chill. The nighttime starts in the morning, and then our morning, as we’ve talked, starts at night. In order to get up with energy, and to get up raring to go mentally and physically for the day, we prep ourselves at bedtime. We prep ourselves to go to sleep in the morning, and it’s this beautiful cycle of natural healing.

Can I give you supplements that help? Sure, but if you’re not sleeping, there’s nothing I can do that’s going to fix your brain that much. I’ll give you a temporary relief like an IV of glutathione or a whole handful of it and a bunch of other supplements, but you would want your brain to work well, and I would recommend you do because that’s what cleans out amyloid plaque. If amyloid plaque builds up, that’s what starts Alzheimer’s and other early cognitive declines. You’ve got to sleep seven and a half to nine and a half hours a night. If you have a wearable that tells you how much you sleep, you’ll notice that some people are awake for fifteen minutes, some are awake for an hour or two. We need to sleep seven and a half to nine and a half hours for most adults. Less than that is not good.

Addressing Sleep Disruptions: Waking Up At Night

A couple of points that I want to raise. Number one, some people will wake up several times a night to go to the bathroom, whether it’s because of menopause or post-menopause, prostate for men, some of them end up sleeping very well. Maybe the body knows what to do to compensate for those interruptions. Maybe the interruptions in an ideal world come at the end of a chapter. If you look at sleep like a chapter, like you have certain dreams, here’s the end of a dream, now your body says, “Let’s get up to pee.” Maybe that works.

The other layer, maybe we can put on getting up and being in the natural sunlight in the morning is what do we do at night? You and I are speaking right now, looking at screens. I know the screens emanate lights driven by a blue pump. At night, I would say to complete the cycle, minimize all of those screens. If you do look at them exactly as you did, block the blue light.

If we go in reverse order, blue blockers are good. There are different levels. You can use them in the early evening and the darker ones later. There are several pieces of software, including F.lux and Iris. Iris is one that I’ve more recently been using that can take the blue light out of the screen, so that it’s less fatiguing. I’m on the computer a lot. I do a lot of interviews, I do a lot of virtual consultations. I do a lot of writing, and that’s all primarily digital, other than my journaling. I like to change the screen so it’s not driving me nuts. Especially, as you mentioned, it’s crucial at night.

We love not to be on screens for 2 or 3 hours before bed. We’d love to have orange lights and not the full-spectrum lights at night. However, there’s a reality. We can change our screen tone. We can certainly put blue blockers on. The other part about waking up, I love not only sharing my own experience, but also quotes that are important. I find that this one is one of the funniest ones that I share on a regular basis.

If anyone is familiar with P90X and Tony Horton and all of that, Tony Horton is well known for saying, “Do your best and forget the rest.” I’m telling you what to do in an optimal world. The more you practice the things that Adiel and I have been talking about here, the more likely you are to sleep more. We do know that “naturally,” as you age, you tend to have more sleep disruption and not be able to sleep as long in a continuous manner.

What I’ve noticed is, as I’ve gotten a little older, my body is waking me up way earlier than I want to on the days when I can sleep in. When I was young, on a weekend, I could make up sleep. No problem. Now, I have this clock that wakes me up. One of my coaches gets up at 4:00 AM every morning. I think that’s a little insane, but he likes it. He goes to bed at 8:00 also. What he says is to set an alarm to go to bed, not to wake up.

If you’re finding you’re getting up early, it’s on you to go to bed earlier. Also, these practices will help you stay calmer over time and sleep more deeply.

Again, going back to do your best and forget the rest, if you’re not able to sleep through because you have BPH, you have the prostate thing, you’re perimenopausal, that’s a stage of life you’re in. You’re like, “I should be sleeping through the night.” You’re not, so don’t fight with reality. It’s like your knee. You twisted your knee, it hurts, and you can’t hike. You can fight reality all day long, but it isn’t going to change the fact that you can’t go hiking today.

Part of it is the awareness of what we’re thinking, the awareness of what we’re feeling, but also the acceptance to do the best with what we’ve got. Mary Morrisey always told me, “You do the best you can with what you’ve got from where you are.” The Tony Horton version of it is a little bit simpler. You do the very best.

It’s interesting when people define that. Going back to Don Miguel Ruiz in The Four Agreements, one of the four agreements is always do your best. His point is that, year to year, month to month, week to week, day to day, and even moment to moment, your best is different. It doesn’t mean to achieve the greatest in every moment. It means show up the best you can for yourself in that moment with all the circumstances.

Before my dad died, I got to visit with him. It was such a great moment to be able to see him. We hadn’t seen my parents in a little while because we didn’t live near each other. I had a blast, and we celebrated, and it was the best. However, the next time I went to see him was an emergency when it turned out he was 48 hours from dying, and I was the first family member who could get there.

My best in those two situations was pretty dramatically different, and visiting for Christmas or visiting knowing that he’s going to hospice, and I have to get the rest of the family here soon before he dies. After my dad died the next day, we all did the best we could, but the point was we weren’t ready to go. This is interesting. I haven’t thought about this in a long time. I was training to do a 10-day bike ride in France, where they average 125 miles a day and 20,000 feet of climbing. It’s super insane. I was into road biking at the time, and I was training.

After I got back from my dad’s passing, it was good. He was suffering for twenty years. It was a blessing. However, he is my dad, and he was just a month shy of 75. I showed up at home, and I was like, “I can’t ride my bike. I don’t want to do anything.” I needed to step back from 30 to 50 miles a day of training and be present. It was what my body needed to mourn, be in the energy of that, and be with my family.

I started to exercise a little. It was interesting that you brought up the knee injury. About six weeks after he died, I decided I was going to go out and go with the slower group and ease back in, because I hadn’t trained for six weeks. I saw my friends that I rode with all the time, and they were all like, “What happened?” I figured I’d turn, I’d go with them for a little bit, and tell them, and then go jump in with the other group.

I was stupid. I got in with my friends. I need to do better than my best. Lo and behold, I woke up the next day, and my right knee was super swollen. I couldn’t ride my bike for another 2 or 3 months. I ended up passing on that entire trip that I had trained for over eighteen months for, and I had another 6 months to go. I was like, “I can’t do it.” “We’ll let you come back the following year.” You know what, even though I lost $1,000 on my ticket for their program, because they don’t do refunds, I was like, “I can’t do it. It’s no longer in my heart.”

My point is, I did the best I could at each moment there. The lesson I learned was that my best can be different. Maybe I was planning on this, but then life said I need to go down this path instead. Let’s not fight that. I was okay to let go of needing to achieve that because I know mentally and physically, I’ve got the grit to finish that. I thought it’d be cool to torture myself and do that. In the end, I needed to be there for me, not what my brain previously thought. You have to be willing to change and go with the flow.

You reminded me, I went to a couple of workshops in Oregon led by an amazing person, and he had been blinded several years prior. We got to be very friendly, very close. We talked very openly. He shared about his blindness, and I was marveling at how great he was doing. He then told me one sentence. In a way, you can say it was very Tony Horton-esque, if you will, but he said it in such a dry, matter-of-fact tone about his blindness. He said, “You work with what you’ve got.” It was very powerful because it was said so matter-of-factly. That’s the thing. We work with what we’ve got.

It’s so amazing when you meet people who understand that. If I look back at my knee injury, brain fog, fatigue, and muscle and joint pain, granted, I’m over it now, which is good, but in retrospect, it’s always easier than winning the moment. For someone who lost their sight, to be able to share that, I don’t think those things I went through are anywhere close to losing my sight. I remember watching a video of a gentleman, I think he’s from Australia, who was born without arms and legs. He dives off a diving board. He swims. He does all kinds of stuff that you would never imagine he could do because he uses what he’s got.

Tom, we could easily be here for six hours, but people made sure to fill up my calendar. We should probably meet again. It’ll be a joy. I want to thank you so much for your time, your kindness, your love, and your wisdom. We can learn so much from you. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much. It’s an honor. I’m wishing you lots of love and a life full of gratitude and passion for everybody.

Important Links

•  Dr. Tom Moorcroft
• Dr. Tom Moorcroft on YouTube
• The Four Agreements
• The Fifth Agreement

About Dr. Tom Moorcroft, DO

Dr. Tom Moorcroft’s medical journey is distinguished by academic excellence and specialized training. With a Bachelor’s in Ecology & Wildlife Management from the University of Vermont and a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine from the University of New England College, he furthered his expertise with fellowships in Medical Gross Anatomy & Osteopathic Manipulation and Medical Neuroanatomy. Board-certified in Family Practice and Osteopathic Manipulative Treatment, he founded Origins Of Health, serving as Founder and Chief Medical Officer.

His influence extends nationally as a Telehealth Provider for Florida. Beyond clinical practice, Dr. Tom plays key roles in professional organizations, notably ILADS, where he served as Acting President and contributed to the Evidence-Based Fundamentals Program. A published author and engaging speaker, he shares expertise on topics like tick-borne co-infections and brain detoxification, reflecting his commitment to holistic well-being.