Welcome to OuiTalkRaw with rBeatz Radio. I’m Jennifer Busco, I’m your host today and I just want to share how much I love, love, love how this show happened today and how sort of divine the universe is that I happen to see our lovely guest here speak at an event a couple months ago.
And I remember watching you on stage and thinking, oh my gosh, yes, these conversations need to be had. Like, Charlotte is ready. Ready for these conversations. We are ready, our consciousness is ready for the conversations about how the mind, the body, energy, your emotions are all connected to your physical health. And I was just like clapping metaphorically as I was watching you on stage and thinking to myself, I don’t even know this man, how would I ever get him to be a guest? And then cut to a week later, I’m talking to one of my best friends and she’s like, “Oh my gosh. gosh, I know him, let me shoot him a text.” And here we are today.
And so I just think that’s a really beautiful story because you just never know how the world works out and how divine things happen and how I believe there’s something sort of bigger working for all of us, which I really think this is meant to happen today. But I also think as humans, it’s our responsibility to be emotionally, physically, mentally and sexually healthy as possible so we can be in that flow, right? Like you and I were in a flow, the way that all worked. And so I really think that’s what we’re here to talk about today. So welcome!
Thank you.
Everybody, please welcome, please. Dr. Jonathan Fisher, how are you?
I’m doing great. It’s so good to be here. And the fact that we met that way, I was just thinking I was gonna give a talk to the town and lo and behold, you came on up afterwards and just here we are today.
Yes, and I had a stomach bug, like a really bad one and I was recovering that day and I was like, I don’t wanna go, but something told me. My intuition was like, you need to go to this Jennifer. So look at us.
I’m sorry. Yeah, we’re doing it.
So tell us about you.
Oh my goodness. Well, some people think it’s interesting that my family is one of the largest families with physicians in the country essentially. So, my dad’s a doctor. There are seven children all seven children are doctors. Part of that-
Where do you fall in there?
I’m at the bottom, I’m the baby.
The baby’s the coolest. I’m the baby.
I happen to agree. Yeah, I’m with you. Yeah, so we lived in this small suburban town and my dad moved there in the 1950s and raised this family and he took my oldest brothers and sisters on house calls. So with the old leather bag, with the doctor’s bag, and the stethoscope, in the station wagon, and my oldest brother, Eddie, would get in the back of the car and my sister Laura would get in. I don’t think he knew that every one of us would become a doctor one day.
So they never tried to force it, it just sort of–
No, I think they encouraged it. Mom and dad always said, “Whatever you do, do it well.” And they also encouraged it. us to help people. And they were very sciency too, so it made sense. Dad was a chemical engineer and a doctor, and mom was a nuclear physicist and a teacher.
Wow.
So I had no choice but to do the nerdy stuff.
The nerdy stuff.
Yeah, so that’s how it got started. And then I did the nerdy stuff for a long time, for like 25 years and got all the achievements and all the accolades and thought that getting into Harvard would be the end of my life and it would be all I ever needed to do, but that wasn’t the answer.
How did you know it wasn’t the answer?
I was really lonely. I was I really I felt like there was something wrong with me. Why are all these other people having fun living life feeling feelings and I was just kind of studying and thinking that getting straight A’s was all it was about. Getting this great accomplishment after my name was the end of the story and it started with that. It started with questioning what is wrong with me, and that was a real feeling that I had it was very painful. I was ashamed of it and I kind of hid that for about 10 or 15 years.
Wow.
Through medical school, I just kept on that train track that says, “If you want to be a doctor, you go to college and you go to medical school. Then if you want to be a specialist you go for another three or four years”, which I did. All the while I felt like I was getting further and further away from this really happy, curious kid that would run around and explore and that just wasn’t who I was. So, that’s that’s how I knew.
And so now you are all about mindfulness? You sort of shifted gears from two different sides of the brain. What was that catalyst that sort of made you go from that technical scientific side of the brain to a different way of living?
The first catalyst was when I was in college when I didn’t know it was depression. I had no idea. I hadn’t really heard the term. It wasn’t something that we all talked about 25 or 30 years ago now. So, that was the first one. I just knew that there was something that I needed to work on and it took me 10 years before I got help for that. The second catalyst was my sister. So my sister, Andrea, who was a radiology specialist in taking pictures and interpreting pictures of the inside of the body, she was also kind of my spiritual guide. In this family of really smart, nerdy people, she was the one who was always like, look at the butterfly. Look-
They say there’s one shaman in the family, like there’s that one person that plays that like shamanistic sort of role that that was her that was to help everybody else grow and evolve.
That was Andrea.
Beautiful.
Yeah, that was Andrea. I’m getting chills just as you said that. Andrea saw that the root of some of my struggles was that I had this really harsh, mean inner critic where I would sort of beat myself up to try to do better and achieve more. And we had this text, it was the early days of text messaging. She said, and I saved it, she said, “Can you just be kind to yourself?” Which was a totally radical concept 25 years ago.
Coming from a family of doctors.
Yeah, exactly.
Achievement, achievement, achievement.
And so she made me pause and think, “What does that mean to be kind to yourself?” And I realized I wasn’t at all. And yet, here I am wanting to be a doctor to help other people? And again, we can talk about what it means to be a doctor. We have this idea, well, it means to read the books, to know what the medicines and the tests are, then to give them to the people and it’ll make them better. That ain’t what it’s about. So, I realized that I was missing something and I wanted to explore what it meant to actually heal. So I had to heal myself. I had to figure out what was going on. Which has involved this journey from feeling broken to realizing that I wasn’t broken. I was already whole, but I had to shift the way I was thinking about things. So that was one of the catalysts, was when Andrea realized and pointed out that I wasn’t kind to myself.
And the second catalyst was a few years later when she called me from New York and she said that she wasn’t seeing straight. She was in her 40s. She was having blurry vision. And the short version of the story is that she was diagnosed with a brain tumor that no one could take out. So my sister’s in her 40s. She has a small child and my spiritual guide. I knew I was going to lose her within just a few years. And so, that was another part of my experience was this person who brought so much joy and beauty into the world and into my life. She was my ground in a way and now the ground was falling out.
Well, and you said earlier, you weren’t really comfortable feeling your feelings and a loss like that’s that large you have to right when you have to feel that grief.
Yeah, and feeling the grief and you hit on it. It’s feeling the feelings and I didn’t really know how to do that. I mean, I was totally confused when it came to feelings. I thought they were bad. I thought you had to push them away I thought they were like not as valuable as thoughts and the intellect, right? Makes sense that I would think that thinking would be more important than feeling. And I didn’t realize what you just said, which is that grief is something that unless you face it, it can tear your world apart. It does often. And it leaves us with a lot of questions about, will there be life again after this? And how do I find something to stand on, something to hold on to? When I felt like I was just at the bottom and the floor was was dropping out. And so, it was a journey through grief. I bought all the books. And it was actually during the grieving period that a really close friend, who had just lost her brother, recommended a book to me. And it was not a medical textbook, which I was used to. It was a book by a Buddhist nun in Pema Chodron. Yeah, called When Things Fall Apart.
Oh my God. gosh, yes.
Yeah. And so I read that book and it was in the middle of the book, there was a quote that just stopped me in my tracks. And she said, it was like she was talking to me, she said, “Your suffering will begin to end when you realize that there’s nowhere to hide.” And I had been hiding from my suffering and it just kept finding me, the loneliness, the sadness, the anxiety. And actually I was kind of mean at times to people.
How was your physical health at that time?
It was lousy. It was lousy. I don’t think I was exercising. I certainly wasn’t eating- it was a lot of comfort eating. I didn’t have energy that I do now, or when I was in my triathlon days years later. And it was all connected. It was all connected.
One of my favorite quotes about grief, and I’m not sure who said it, is “Grief is love with nowhere to go.” It’s like there’s just so much love, grief is love, with nowhere to go. Where do you put this love? And so if you’re not feeling that, it’s like all this like, where do I put this? Confusion with your energy.
Yeah, also with grief, and I’m aware of this, part of the grieving process, it felt selfish in a way. You know, she passed away, right? Her family lost her and yet in my moment of deepest grief it was all about me and my loss. I realized that whether it was around grief or other periods in my life when I was struggling, I had to examine this whole idea that I had built up about who I am and how important I am in the world as opposed to what does it even mean to be this person. I learned to kind of loosen my grip on all the things that I wanted to keep in my life. I knew I couldn’t keep people, even the people that I love the most. I didn’t really have control over that. And whether it’s belongings or achievements, and also in the field that I work in, which is cardiology, I see people who are healthy one day and I get the phone call the next from a family member, and they say, “Your patient, my husband died.” And so, I’m very intimate with the fragility and the vulnerability of life.
Does that get easier when you have to let go like that so often?
Does it get easier? It does get easier, but it doesn’t get easy. And if it gets easy to live with the loss of life and of love, then something’s wrong.
Right.
Something’s wrong.
But I think having… that strong sort of innate wisdom of understanding everything is temporary. So like in yoga, the Sanskrit word is Aparagraha. It’s one of my favorite words. It’s all about like recognizing everything is temporary. You have to let go. Our bodies, the buildings, everything’s going to go at some point. And I think having that really deep awareness of understanding that we’re all temporary and everything’s temporary, there’s more comfort but I don’t think it makes it any easier if that makes sense.
Yeah it totally does. It totally does. There’s so much wisdom in that and not grasping onto reality as it is. And it brought me a lot of peace in my mind and anytime now I feel frustrated, and it happens a lot, or if I feel kind of down, I ask myself the question, “Well, what part of reality am I holding on to? What part of reality do I want to be a different way?” And that’s often the cause of my own internal struggle.
But also the grief that you’re feeling, this to shall pass, right? So speaking of emotions, that’s what’s understanding is that emotions are emote, right? They’re meant to move through you. And so when you feel those really, really uncomfortable or bad quote unquote, air quote bad (laughs) emotions that they will move through you. I think that’s really, it’s hard to really feel that though when you’re in it. It’s so hard.
It is. I like that you brought that up. They will move through you. And for people like me who didn’t know that or didn’t know how to do it, and for a lot of people, I would say, in more so men than women, maybe in this generation as well, where it’s more about technology and less about feeling the feelings. It’s more about escaping the feelings and looking at something else, stuffing them down. I don’t want people to think that it’s just an easy passive thing that, “Oh, the feelings will come and go.” We really have to, one, give permission for the feelings to be there. If it’s a feeling of grief, it’s a feeling of insecurity, whatever it is. And it doesn’t mean you’re bad, it doesn’t mean that you’re wrong, it just means that you’re a human being.
And you can feel more than one feeling at a time, I think, too, like relief and sadness at the same time, right? Like a loss of a spouse that’s suffering. There’s some relief in there, but there’s some sadness. I think there’s, there’s so much gray with that. And I think it’s up to our individual experience and what we’re feeling and what we need when we’re feeling that. Do I need to call a friend and be outward with what I’m feeling? Or do I need to be quiet and reflective by myself? I think all of this work really is about like self study and knowing what’s happening and how to honor that.
Well, there’s two things that you just said there. The first is like varsity level. I would call that varsity level, to be able to have two feelings at once. Yeah, we have them, but to be aware of them and then to be able to name them, process them and all that. So we’re going varsity. You’re going like varsity right away. I love that.
I’m not saying I’m there necessarily.
So, and then I think the second piece that you said is really very wise, which is that anytime we think we’re feeling a pure emotion, like “I’m so proud right now”, there’s often a darker emotion that’s much deeper than that and maybe fear.
And that’s why you’re proud? You have to have the dark for the light kind of thing? Interesting.
That’s part of it. And any time there’s sadness, there is always a glimmer of something else, whether it’s joy or relief that someone’s suffering is over. Getting back to grief It’s something that I had to read books on because again, I didn’t know what to do with my own feelings and an intuitive person who’s comfortable with that, you just know. You grieve in your own time. There’s no timeline for it and there’s no right way to do it and there’s no right way to experience it and there’s there’s feelings of guilt that come up as well. There’s a lot to deal with and so I kind of realized that I needed to become a scholar, not just in the physical beating heart. I needed to know what was going on with all these emotions. Because it’s not just affecting me, but I was seeing two to three thousand patients a year in my clinic and in the hospital, and I’d say a good 60 or 70 % of them, they were really dealing with emotional issues.
So can I interrupt you there? So when I saw you speak at the Beckler, I have told the story a million times that opening story. Can you share that here, with the woman? Yeah, it was just so powerful.
Yeah. It was one night when I was on call, you know, doctors, some of us, when you get called to two in the morning, you’re fast asleep in bed. You’ve got to get up and say goodbye to your loved one and get on the highway. And so that’s what I did. They explained that there was a young woman who was in her 40s, really no other medical problem. She didn’t smoke, she didn’t have diabetes, she was exercising, she was healthy. All this stuff was right. But they said she came in with all the signs of a heart attack. And I kind of knew that something didn’t fit here because a typical heart attack is a blockage in an artery from cholesterol and inflammation and all that. And so when I talked to her, it certainly looked like one and we were going to need to do an emergency procedure. I just asked her about, you know, is there any stress going on? Is there anything unusual happening? And she explained to me that her daughter had just been admitted to rehab for a drug abuse issue. And she started to cry at that moment as she’s explaining to me everything that’s going on. And it occurred to me that this was probably a different kind of a heart attack that has been recognized now over the last 50 years. It’s what’s called broken heart syndrome. And it’s more common than we know. And I see it. We used to see it in medical school, but we didn’t know what it was. We were just scratching our heads. Why is this young person having a heart attack, but we can’t find blockages in their arteries? Fortunately, science has caught up to us and we now know there’s this powerful cascade. When we have certain emotions, very, very strong or for really long periods of time, they can create physical changes in the shape of our heart and they can weaken and damage the heart muscle even leading to heart failure and to death. So, that’s what she had and knowing that it really helped us help her.
So, did you get her the mental and emotional help that then helped her physical?
Absolutely. She ended up being fine. We found out there were no blockages in her arteries. We got her on the right medications because her heart was damaged.
From the emotion.
From the emotions.
From not feeling it or from just such a powerful emotion?
Powerful emotion. In her case It was a powerful emotion perhaps and I don’t know whether she experienced it fully, or whether it was too strong a blast for her, or whether she was suppressing and denying part of it. That part I don’t know, but it was this cascade of emotions that she felt over the last day or so that created this heart damage. Two weeks later, she had a full recovery of her heart function and now every time I see her, we talk about about medications and all that ’cause I wanna get her off of them. We spend a good deal of time talking about how are you doing with your emotional life, your social life, your spiritual life? Because that has an impact on the shape of our hearts.
And you talk about that in your book, the four dimensions of the heart, right? Emotional, physical, spiritual and relational?
Yeah, there is, (social). So, there are four dimensions to the heart, just like there’s four chambers of the heart. We don’t think that there’s four dimensions. People come to me and they say, help me with the ticker, doc. And they say they want to know about sleep and exercise and nutrition and all don’t smoke and all the obvious stuff. What I think we’re not getting in our healthcare system right now are the other three dimensions, that as we just discussed, have a direct impact on the physical shape and health of our heart and how long we live.
And that’s what you’re doing right like you’re really sort of trying to to pull everybody’s hands like “hey y ‘all look at this I’m proving I’m telling you that this is this is what’s happening.”
That’s the message. I start the book I say I have something to prove because a lot of times I get up in front of doctors and health care systems And they look at me and they say this is a bunch of woo -woo stuff, you know, “Go do your yoga and your meditation. We’re gonna stick to the standard way to do things.” And so, hopefully, we can get the message out that we have a physical heart, and it’s deeply affected by how we deal with our emotions, whether we experience them, allow them to pass through us. Our social life, loneliness is such an epidemic right now, it directly affects, of course, our emotions, but also our hearts. People who are lonely, it’s like smoking cigarettes, the same risk of heart disease. And then lastly, there’s the spiritual dimension, the fourth dimension of the heart, which so many people kind of shy away from. I don’t wanna talk about it, don’t wanna go there.
Well, how about this? We’re gonna take a quick break and after a message from our sponsors, we’re gonna go into the spiritual dimension of the heart. Stay tuned.
And we are back. So being a healer myself, one of my favorite topics right now is going to be talk about the spiritual dimension of the heart. So continue, please.
The spiritual dimension of the heart. Even just hearing that word, I can already hear some of the scientists or the doctors like shutting off their radios and sort of “Don’t don’t turn it off!” And that’s sort of how I was as well. I really poo pooed it for a while there because you can open up any textbook of medicine- There’s nearly. 100,000 medical doctors that are reading and they don’t read anything about the spiritual dimension of the heart. Very uneasy talking about it.
I love what you said at the Beckler and I think you say in your book. It’s just spirituality is just believing in something bigger. And I think this is so so inclusive that doesn’t matter what what you believe in you can believe in that tree out there, you can believe in an organized religion, but just believing in something bigger. You’re spiritual, you’re part of something I think we all need to feel.
That’s exactly definition that- I didn’t come up with that, there’s a national organization of palliative care. So taking care of people with death and dying, and they need to talk about spirituality. And it’s very clear. We don’t mean religion. We’re not talking about a certain religion or going to a certain place or a certain leader. That’s not what spirituality is. In fact, some religions don’t even share or bring about spirituality. It can be more sort of technical. It can get you away from that. What I’m talking about, just like you said, it’s going beyond ourselves, that narrow sense of identity and ego that we all carry around, whether we know it or not.
We’re human. That’s part of us.
Yeah. And connecting with something that has much more significance than ourselves. Whether that’s nature or a God or a being or just life or
Feeling the energy. The universe.
Yeah. The energy of the universe. Exactly. So that’s, it’s a sense of awe. You know, you see the night sky and you see the constellation Orion in the sky and you have this sense of like, wow, been there for millions of years. That could be spirituality.
I agree. And sometimes that’s where I have a little bit of a problem with like the whole manifesting sort of, you know, stuff that you see on Instagram and TikTok. Like just think of this, visualize this, it’s gonna happen. And I think to myself, who do we think we are? There’s also, it’s a partnership. There’s something in my opinion, something bigger out there that’s ultimately probably going to decide if you get that red Corvette that you’re trying to manifest if it’s for your greater good.
Absolutely. The universe has been around for 13 billion years.
I’m 47. I don’t know that much.
And sometimes the universe doesn’t seem to care about what we’re manifesting or not.
Or the timeline of it all. You know, I’m this age, and I’m not married. The universe is like, honey, we don’t care about how old you are.
Well, it’s interesting that you brought that up, you know, manifesting, because, and I discussed this in chapter five, this whole practice of visualizing and manifesting and bringing things into being. I don’t discount that. In fact, I’ve experienced it myself.
100%.
And so I think it’s important to distinguish the difference between seeing ourselves in some future state as we want to be with a little bit of hope and a lot of optimism.
Doesn’t hurt, right?
And it shifts our internal state, our energy and puts us in a more likely position that other people can receive us and those opportunities then come up.
But the commanding and the demanding part of that, that to me is where it’s there’s a little bit of a “who do you think-
It’s a little selfish and egotistical to think that I can change the universe by my thoughts. Thoughts are so powerful. They can change my emotional state for sure, and it can make it a little bit selfish.
And do you believe that thoughts can create a sort of man -made emotion? They can sort of create a mood, like you talk about, or an emotion in your body that’s not even really something that’s necessarily supposed to be there, but you think–
It happens all the time. There’s a lot of research it’s not just an emotion. That show that one of the most common causes of symptoms that we have where we don’t feel right and we have to rush to the doctor, is that we feel something in the body. It’s just a feeling, it’s not specific for anything. The feelings are noticed in the mind, and then the mind does what minds do. It makes up a story.
And it keeps it going.
It keeps it going, but the problem is that oftentimes we’re making up the wrong story.
So true.
I’m having a heart attack. I’m gonna die of a stroke. Well, that’s a mild anxiety.
That’s when I get in my head and when you think you’re having anxiety. That’s what I do in sessions, I teach my clients to really just pull their energy like out of their head and into their body anywhere in their body like just drop into your heart, your low belly, your hips like out of your head. Okay. Now. How are you feeling about this? Versus letting it just through.
I’m doing that right now, by the way as you said it I’m dropping it. I can feel the soles in my feet my thighs on the chair.
Well, people have confusion, like I’m not sure if I want to stay in this marriage. Something like that, like really big choices. But, you know, he pays the bills, my mom loves them, or all these things, right? Okay, quiet that. And I often say, I imagine there’s like a fireman’s pole or like a water slide, and you just like take yourself and drop just out of your head into your body. Now what are you feeling? That is the truth, because your body doesn’t lie.
It’s such a skill, it’s such a skill. I love the book, “The Body Keeps the Score.”
Yes. I was trained by him in trauma -sensitive yoga! Wow.
That makes sense.
A long time ago. Yeah. And he was one of those first, you know, leading, proving like the breath work and meditation. Oh my gosh. Yes. He’s great.
And I think that message is important for people who are listening because a lot of medical care can sometimes dismiss what we’re feeling. You know, you can come and say, “I don’t feel well here.” Oh, it’s… just anxiety, it’s just this. We don’t want to dismiss our sensations, and I don’t want people to get that impression.
I love that you’re saying that.
I want everyone to know that we do have a wisdom in our bodies. Our bodies know. Now, we may not always interpret it right, but the signal is there, and we should never ignore whatever signals are coming from our body. They’re essentially asking for some kind of help.
100%, and what I always preach is, “The mind can lie, but the body doesn’t.” You can create these thoughts like you’re having a heart attack or you’re not having a heart attack But the body, those little feelings they are that’s your internal guidance system for something, right? There’s some sort of communication from your body or an awareness that something’s happening and that you should hopefully respond to it or honor it.
That’s our intuition, but and I don’t like to use the word “but”, any children of this generation are taught to ignore their intuition. People say, “Well, I’m feeling this way,” or “I’m sad,” or “I’m this,” and a lot of times we give the message to the kids, “No, you should get over that, suck it up, and just put on a happy face. “Go on with what you’re doing. Focus on the task.” And so I think there’s a risk there that we’re shutting off that intuition that you’re talking about at a young age. And at least for me, I had to relearn it. And for me, I didn’t even learn it through meditation and mindfulness, which I’ve done for 10 ,000 hours. It was more through yoga. Physical practice of yoga. That I needed that practice in order to get in touch with all the aspects of my body that I had forgotten a long time ago. And my goal was to just be a happy person and to live well again. and I didn’t even realize that in order to do that I had to feel things and tune in and to feel things in my body Because we’re all stuck at least me stuck up here and a lot of the people I deal with and help out, patients, a lot of them. It’s like you said It’s stuck up here and the mind is telling us stories. We have to go back into the bodies, feel the pain, feel the suffering, work through it and learn to tap in into the joy that’s experienced when we’re in love, when we see that beautiful constellation in the sky.
I think that’s why I’m so happy that you’re here, because anyone that I know that’s in the medical field, they’re all very brainy, brainy, brainy. And so you’re just such a breath of fresh air that you’re coming from both sides of the spectrum here. But my question to you would be, how would you describe intuition and how do you feel like it has felt in the body? ‘Cause I have my own opinions on that.
I would say that intuition is a wisdom that we all have that is not the traditional wisdom of the brain or of the mind. You know, when you ask people what is intuition, it’s just a feeling that I have a kind of a gut feeling is what most people say. So for me, and I speak about this in the chapter on wisdom, is there is a connection between our mind and our gut. And there’s a strong connection between the mind and the heart. That’s what this book is all about and in fact, the gut and the heart are connected as well, so anytime someone tries to simplify it and say oh intuition is just a gut feeling, it’s not it’s a combination of feelings that are stored in our gut. (It’s) kind of memories that come up feelings and memories that are stored in our heart because our heart has been through things before and it’s also a lot of thoughts and analysis in the mind. And for me, that’s what intuition is. I want to invite people to consider that wisdom is not just something that you can read in a book or something based on your own experience, it’s based on the gut which is good at detecting fear. And also the heart, which is good at bringing compassion into our lives.
Brilliant I love it and I think this just goes back to that whole self -study like self -awareness, like knowing your body, knowing yourself, like I know when I get the chills that it’s truth. You know, having conversation with you. When I get the chills, that is like my higher self’s way of telling me that is true, that is right. And so I know that about myself. And when I’m in sessions with clients, there’s certain messages that I get in my body and feelings that I know are messages. And so I think it’s just really important for us to preach in a way, you know, to help people or show people how to get to know themselves. or show people how to get to know themselves. to preach in a way, you know, to help people or show people how to get to know themselves. they can not ignore these feelings, these little hunches, these awarenesses.
Absolutely, and as you’re saying that, I realize that every time I help somebody with a practice of mindfulness or meditation, which may be new for them, and I teach this to all my patients, if they’re open to it, and most of them are once I’ve talked to them about it. I say, “Well, why are you coming to me again? “Oh, a lot of stress going on causing this.” And so at the end of the visit, we sit for a minute and one of the first things we do in our practice, and I’m sure you do the same thing, is we we practice getting out of our heads. We let we notice the thoughts that are there and we
practice arriving in the body-
Feeling into the part fingers, feeling the toes.
Yes, drop in feeling parts and knowing that it’s okay. Well, I feel numb I don’t feel anything there. Yeah, because you haven’t had practice feeling into the body. You’ve ignored it for so long, which is why we get into habits of eating certain ways and not exercising.
Like you’re just not in your body, yeah.
Just not in the body.
And I love the idea that there are so many things out there, there are angels, there might be aliens, or beings, and animals, but we chose to be human because humans can do three things that a lot of other beings can’t do, eat, feel, and the other F, right? And so if you’re not feeling your emotions, you’re negating 33 .33 % of what it means to be human. Feeling is a part of being human. The ups and the downs, and you say in your book, and I agree, that they’re fairly neutral. Some feelings can be really uncomfortable, but they’re not bad. They’re teaching you, they’re showing you, it’s a part of life. And they also help you feel the higher, better feelings when you’ve already felt the low feelings, right? So it’s just sort of that whole black and white spectrum that we have to go through as a human.
I love that you. brought that up. And this is something that I clarify over and over again, that there are no such things as bad feelings. Feelings are information. Feelings are information that we are telling us that we’re not getting what we need maybe, or we need to make a change. Often though, we have a certain feeling, whether it’s for me, it’s sometimes I get really restless and I can’t sit still. And I kind of get frustrated at that. I’m like why am I so restless? Why can’t I relax? I just make it worse. Instead of recognizing oh, there’s just a feeling here. Maybe the restlessness says that I need rest, maybe that’s all I should be doing and if I just let it be, often that will just pass in a couple of minutes as opposed to playing it over and over in my head and keeping these feelings stuck for hours and sometimes into moods which can last days and weeks. Some people have chronic issues with rage and anxiety and hostility and cynicism. We’ve seen it, I saw it driving here today. And I see the impact of that. I see when that person who carries those emotions around for so long in my clinic or in the emergency, physically affecting, I can see the blood pressure going up. I can, I can note that the blood vessels are constricting, reducing blood. blood flow.
And energetically, they create energetic blocks, which also can be related to physical elements. Well, we can talk about emotions forever, but are you familiar with Dr. Bruce Lipton’s work?
He’s one of my favorites, yeah. He has this amazing book that inspired me, The Biology of Belief. And so, where he talks about the cell membrane as being the most important part of the body, and I read that, I said, “What? The membrane, it’s not the inside of the outside of the outside of the outside of the outside of the outside of the outside And for me, the takeaway from his work and from that was that we have to recognize that our experience depends on the interaction between you and me. And it’s sort of what happens between there. And also that our beliefs, whatever’s going on up here, affects our biology. I’m trying to honor him and dozens of mind -body scientists who’ve come before me in writing this book and kind of doing the latest research on how the mind, the body, and our beliefs are connected.
Totally. And, you know, a lot of times with belief systems, if you have a certain belief system, you tend to create a pattern with that belief. Like love is, you know, someone that’s going to shut down on me, right? Because you have that belief from childhood or whatever it is. And that’s a lot of the work that I do is trying to grow up those beliefs for people to sort of shift the perspective so they’re not recreating that same pattern. That can be a prison sentence.
It’s so true, and I’m sure you experienced this. When you’re working with someone for the first time, it’s a little bit of a delicate process because I can tell you for myself, I don’t want you to mess with my beliefs. Like, what I believe about my childhood and why I am the way I–
Well, that’s letting go. That’s Aparagraha. Even letting go of the things that we know we need to let go of, right? They’re hard to let go.
And I love the process, you know. The process is just start gently first recognize that we have beliefs because many times we carry them with us unconsciously for 20, 30 or even 90 years. So, I love the any healer who’s doing that work It really is helping not just the emotional life and the spiritual life, but it’s it keeps them out of my clinic.
And that can be ancestral. It can be carried down from generations. Like my grandmother wasn’t the Great Depression so I have a belief around scarcity and that’s still happening. You know, it could be happening in my 10 year old kid because we haven’t really recognized or began to to heal it.
Yeah, for sure. Intergenerational trauma is real. And I just read this from one of my friends who’s a psychologist. She said that just like that’s real, intergenerational healing is also real. I’ve got three children and there was some time when, just after getting married and before we had kids, I realized that unless I worked on some of these anxieties and the depression and my habits of shutting myself off when I feel down- Unless I worked on that, that was gonna set an example for my children and I was gonna replay this pattern over and over and then they would take it with them.
That’s what I say I’m like it stops here that’s what I always say like I’m like I might have it stop here it’s not going to my children. So how did you do the work?
The work started by reading that book by Pema Chaudhren, which was just to get an idea that I was not my thoughts and that I was practicing escaping my thoughts and my suffering. Making it okay for me to feel whatever feelings, taking Andrea’s message of adding some kindness on top of that, not judging whatever I was feeling. And then I did what any sort of good, high achiever does. I went on retreats. So, I signed up for multiple retreats. So my first one was at the Kripalu center in Massachusetts.
That’s where my training was, um, Bessel.
So it’s such a beautiful place. So I was, my first retreat there was with Steven Cope, who was their medical director, who’s written books about the connection of yoga and the body. That really opened my eyes, um, as I started. to get in touch with my physical body. I’ll never forget this. It was almost 12 years ago, I was on retreat with him and he was guiding us and we were in Shavasana, the final resting pose. Here I am, this cardiologist who’s like got all this undelt with stuff and I’m lying there and I start to, I start to notice a tightness in my throat and this is going to sound crazy. And then I felt some tears building up and I started to cry out of nowhere. And I started to feel this releasing feeling in my throat which happens to be one of the chakras in the body. And he was teaching us all about that. And I realized that for me, part of the constriction that I had there and the sadness was that I really wasn’t listened to when I was a kid and I was never encouraged to have a voice. I was always, it’s like… I still am if you ask my wife, kind of the shy one in the corner. It may not seem that way, that I’m comfortable speaking with you. That’s taken a lot of work to recognize where I had closed myself off. For me, it was just self expression,
authenticity. That was the beginning of the work. And then I went to Oxford in England to learn how to teach other people this practice of mindfulness, which I had practiced on my own for 10 years. Then I realized that in my healthcare system, we could start to make some changes. So I pitched an idea seven or eight years ago to our healthcare system that maybe some of our nurses and doctors could benefit from this. Maybe some of our patients could. And now I–
Are you hiring? (laughing)
Well, we’ll talk later. And then now, five, six years later, I got off our monthly call yesterday where I have a whole year -long course where every month I have hundreds of our team members from across the state, 38,000 employees on the call. Our head psychologist and I guide them through practices of mindfulness. Yesterday, we did a visualization practice on the practice of savoring and awe and bringing these feelings into the body.
Wow, that’s fantastic. So are you received well with the doctors that are really up in there? (Points to head)
We’re getting there.
Your doctor buddies when you’re having a beer, are you talking about like meditation?
No, I used to care.
They’re like, “Go Bills, go Bears !”
You know what? I have had people say you should study sports a little bit more. (laughing) But I was like, “Who’s Caitlin Clark?” No, no. And so, you know, I was in a place before where I was really nervous about that. And I was nervous, well, what are people gonna think about me? ‘Cause this is a bit out there.
It’s courageous. I mean, you have to have courage to do this. You’re pushing the envelope, going outside the box. You’re doing all things.
I needed to develop courage. I didn’t have courage. I didn’t, I was afraid to put myself out there. Well, what are they gonna think of me? What are they gonna think? Especially, what are my own colleagues gonna think about me?
As a heart doctor who went to Harvard, now is talking about all this mind -body stuff.
Like you’re a big softy, right?
Exactly, yeah, you’re not a real doctor. You’re kind of a hack. This is made up. Again, coming back to the beginning of the book I have something to prove to our health care system to our world, that if we don’t recognize the connection between our physical and emotional health, we’re not going to get better.
And that’s why I’m so happy that you’re here because I feel like you’re just you’re part of that bridge You’re on the bridge You know of like helping bridge that gap between the two worlds, which I just think is this brilliant. So do you want to talk about your upcoming book? Oh, tell us about it, which I’ve already read.
Oh, yeah. I just released it today, actually. And this is the first conversation. Just released today on Amazon, and it’s basically free for the first couple of weeks to get the message out there, because it’s not about making money or making profits. It’s really about shifting the way we think about ourselves and our health. The book is called Just One Heart, A Cardiologist’s Guide to Healing, Health and Happiness. And why all three? That seems like a lot. And actually, one of my 25 beta readers, these are the people who read the book over the last two years to help me get it in good shape. She said to me, she said, Jonathan, it’s really good. The only problem is it’s not a book, it’s three books. She said, you’re covering so much information here. And I just realized I wasn’t going to have the energy to write another book for a while. So I put it all in there. It’s kind of a roadmap for people to understand how their own minds and hearts are connected. Talking about using this idea of the heart’s dimensions. Thinking about our emotional heart. Thinking about, well, how healthy is my social heart? Going home at the end of the day today and saying, did I have one good conversation? Like, we’re having here. Did I yell at someone? What’s the quality of my social heart? Am I lonely? Without judgment, noticing if I’m lonely or if I feel connected, if that’s important to you, and hopefully it is important to people. We now know that the number one predictor of how long we live is how connected we are socially. And for introverts like me, don’t worry, it doesn’t mean you have to have a million friends. You can have just one good friend. And that one good friend should start by being yourself. And so I go into the book about this practice of self -compassion. That’s what the book is about. It’s about the four dimensions of the heart and really how do we develop those four dimensions? The whole second part of the book are called the seven timeless traits of the heart. And I go back through 3 ,000 years of history and I study ancient China and ancient Egypt and all these cultures and look at how each of them believed in the power of the human heart. They all believe that the heart is a center of our humanity, it’s not the brain. The brain can lie to us, the heart doesn’t lie. So, these seven timeless traits of the heart- each chapter is a different trait and I help people develop them and I had to develop each seven of these in order for me to be here talking to you today. Not the old kind of really anxious depressed avoid an isolated person who was physically unwell as well.
So what advice would you give to a viewer watching that sort of is feeling kind of humdrum and depressed? Like what would be their first step?
Yeah, the old me would say, well, you know, meditate or read out a book, go on a retreat. Retreat is maybe the next level. I would say, well, actually I would say the answer is a retreat, but not the kind where you have to go away for a weekend. All it takes is three seconds. seconds to take a retreat.
Amen.
You don’t even have to go outside. If you’re feeling down, if you’re feeling blue, it helps to change your state in some way. Change the body in some way, change your environment in some way. It’s a feeling of stuckness that keeps us feeling down. So if we feel down and we’re scrolling on our phone,
we have to, even though it’s hard, we have to let go of that phone. And if we can’t, have people around us to hold us accountable. And say “I notice that you’re seem more interested in your phone than you are in me, honey.” That kind of a thing, and so my my advice to people starts by would be like by taking that retreat or time for yourself giving yourself a gift. Allowing yourself to just take a few deep breaths and maybe finding some gratitude that you can still breathe. Now, I have to be careful because I see people dying and my wife is a cancer doctor she sees people dying and so I don’t have to think about the fact that we can’t take today for granted. I lost my sister and my best friend. I don’t have to think about that. I know that every day is a gift. Sometimes when we’re feeling down, we forget that. And so that’s how I would begin.
I love it. And I think when you are in a place of like really low and depressed, you think, I’m not gonna put on a meditation on YouTube for 30 minutes. I love what you’re saying that really this work is just sort of about being present. And I know I keep saying the same thing, but just getting to know yourself, like what am I feeling right now? You don’t have to go on a mountain top and sit with your legs crossed with a meditation pillow from Target, right? You can just, just take a deep breath, notice how you’re feeling and just start there. Just not ignoring what’s happening. I think it would be like the first step of someone that’s feeling like they want to make a change.
Yeah, I think that’s really interesting, especially since I just got back from vacation. I used to be the person who would really say I can’t wait till Friday I can’t wait till Friday to finish work and then it would be I can’t wait till my vacation to get away. And now what I realize is, what you’re saying is, as long as our happiness is dependent on external circumstances- “I’ll be happy when, I’ll be happy then I’ll be happy later,” Anytime I hear that thought in myself, I check myself. Why? Why do I have to wait? And if I can’t find a way to find some stillness right here where I am, even staring at a blank wall, I’m not gonna find it at the top of a mountain. I’m not gonna find it in Palm Springs, California.
It’s like simpler than I think people think it is in that way. And I think when you feel like you’re in purpose, right, you talk about that in your book, doing this work I love is definitely part of my purpose and healing.
It shows.
Thank you. I do feel like the more that you find yourself, the more your purpose finds you. They’re the same. Does that makes sense?
It absolutely does. And it reminds me that I once thought that purpose was something that you had to find out there. And that it had to be GOOD. Actually, the purpose that I was looking for, like to quote help others or to achieve, that wasn’t my purpose. Part of it is now. That was the purpose that my parents stood up for me and that my teacher stood up for me. And so I really believe in what you said which is that purpose is not some elusive thing that you have to find your thing otherwise you’re gonna miss it. To be honest, I think we kind of have to make up our purpose in a way. Like feel into it, feel that intuition. What am I being called to do? What lights me up? What lights me up? And then what lights me up while helping other people at the same time? Bonus, that’s amazing. And then, what lights me up helps other people and I can make enough money to have enough in my life. You’ve got it.
And what lights you up may change. In five years from now, you might have to a whole different road that you want to travel. I do believe to that we know we’re all connected and it’s collective, so when you’re doing something that you love and you feel like you have purpose, those around you are affected without saying or doing anything. In that way, I think when you’re in your purpose and you’re in that place of maybe a great joy, a great emotion, it’s felt by when you walk in Harris Teeter, people can feel that and they might not know what it is, but it’s definitely something that radiates out.
Absolutely. I love that you brought that up. And so, in the chapter on warmth, which is the final chapter of the seven traits, which is really the only trait that matters for me. Like if people are courageous, that’s great. That’s your business. If you are open -hearted, fine. I think all these are necessary in order to get to this final trait, which is really the purpose of the book, to bring more warm -heartedness into our lives. And being a doctor who’s been stressed out, burned out, and been to the point where I’ve rushed past people, even in my clinic, I realized that it’s not as easy as saying, “Well, just feel connected. Just give off good energy to people.” There are these other traits we have to develop in order to get to that deep, warm -hearted place. We have to be open -hearted. We have to live with our whole heart, seek parts of our past, integrate them into our present, be fully present in the moment, learn how to tap into flow. And so, when you talk about the warm -hearted feeling and that energy, it also reminds me what you said has a great scientific basis, which you’re describing as emotional contagion. When I walked into this room today, whatever I was feeling, whatever energy I was bringing with me, I didn’t say anything, I didn’t have to, but you could feel that. And even if you didn’t know, you could feel it, you know, when someone comes to meet you, you can kind of get that vibe. And that’s what it is. Well, science has shown that whether it’s in a room or in a whole organization, the emotions and the mindset which affects those emotions of a small number of people can have either a very toxic negative effect, which can lead to the failure of that organization, or you get a couple leaders in there who are warmhearted, compassionate, empathetic, and also smart and know that business side. Everyone else is gonna feel that without words. And so that idea of emotional contagion, and it’s really fascinating, I kinda nerded out in the book on how that happens. There are these mirror neurons in the brain,
our vagus nerves come into some synchrony as well. That’s a whole ‘nother story.
A whole ‘nother story. (laughs) I mean, we’re all connected, you know? And you know, this is sort of a smaller story, but I used to bartend at the Westin Uptown. in Charlotte and it was before the Ritz -Carlton was open, so it was just where all the big conventions and companies would come and they’d come for like a week. And I would have a feeling about the company as a whole. I could tell whoever the leader, the boss was, trickled down into the people, meaning like a whole entire company would just be happy, joyful. You could tell they really loved what they did. I’d be like, I would work for them. And then the next week, another company would come in and you could tell that who the leader was. was at the top, that energy was just moving down, moving down, moving down. It was like a whole collective feeling. It was wild.
That’s amazing. You’re gonna save our organization a lot of money because we take these metrics every so many months, but we should all just go to the bar and have you watch us.
Yeah, exactly.
You’re like, there’s something going right here.
Like they gotta go on.
Yeah, but one of the people that I interviewed for the book. book, one of my role models is a guy named Steven Porges. And Steven Porges has developed this thing called polyvagal theory, which you know about this stuff. But for people who are listening, one of the most powerful nerves in our whole body, the one that actually connects our mind and our heart and our gut, it’s kind of the intuition nerve. It’s also the empathy nerve. It’s the vagus nerve. And this is how our organs talk to each other. My vagus. vagus also is connected with my face. So how I’m feeling in the inside, whether I know it or not, is showing up in micro expressions in my eyes, in the corner of my mouth, et cetera. Even if I’m trying to fake it, you have the radar ’cause you’ve got that same nerve and you’re wired to detect how I’m really feeling.
So there’s so many ways that we’re connected, that our bodies are speaking to each other without words.
And a lot of that is that related to, like, the… primitive sense of trying to survive, like caveman days, like, oh, I can tell he’s about to stab me with a stick.
That’s exactly right, that’s all it’s about. Or more realistically, and this is where it gets into teenage anxiety and the crisis we have today. It’s not only the feeling that someone is gonna hurt us, it’s just the feeling that we’re gonna be left out of our group.
Pushed off the tribe.
Pushed off the tribe. And that’s our greatest fear, because even though many of us today believe we can do it ourselves, and it’s all about self -help, which it’s NOT, we need each other we cannot survive I dare anyone to try to be born without another person.
And you say in the book, we’re relational beings how do you say it in the book? Something about how like that’s WHY we are here like we are here, to relate.
We are here to relate we’re social animals.
I think it’s up to us you know as as people that are in relationships to you know speak your needs if they’re not met speak them and if they can’t be met then maybe it’s time for you to move on to a new pack, right? People get stuck in these in these groups in these relationships where their needs aren’t being met and then that’s how they have those sort of not so fun emotions and feelings.
That gets that reminds me that courage is so important, because many of us were taught keep your your needs to yourself. Okay, the needs of whether it’s the family, the team, the organization, those are more important. And what we’re really trying to find here, and this is a delicate balance, is the balance between my needs as an individual, being allowed to express them. This is the whole hot topic of psychological safety. When we’re taught that our feelings are not valid, our needs are not important, we don’t know how to live authentically. We don’t even know what we want, what movies we like, what foods we want, because we’re taught that the group is more important. And I think for me, part of the work that I’m doing is when I’m working with individuals or with organizations is to realize that both are necessary.
We are certainly, we are born as infants, we need our mother. We need somebody there for us and at the same time at some point we have to individuate. We have to become ourselves. We can’t just be mama’s boy or mama’s girl or daddy’s boy our whole lives otherwise we’re living someone else’s life. So there’s this amazing balance that never ends between our needs as an individual and our needs as a collective and I’m talking in the broadest sense as a global community.
I think that’s great and like what I always say and with clients is like your emotional body is you know your low belly so you feel your emotion then you pull it up into the third chakra, which is like your personal power. So you have the confidence to pull it up into your heart, to speak it with love. So, if you’re speaking what you feel with confidence through your heart and with love, a lot of times it’s received much better.
I love that and what I also like about that is the you’re bringing, I initially, when I was learning to communicate, I thought it was all about being nice and being kind and not offending people kind of a thing, but there was a lot of fear. And what you’re saying is bringing both the kindness and the courage together.
Yes, and then through the heart.
Yes, I love that.
Well, that was great, sold. (laughing) How can people find you and tell us what you’re up to? I know you’re up to some things.
Well, it’s easy to find me. I’m Happy Heart MD. So you can just Google Happy Heart MD. You’ll find my website. You can find me on LinkedIn and Instagram and all that good stuff. And the book is called Just One Heart. So if you look up justoneheartbook.com, you’ll find it or go to Amazon. It’s really easy to find me. What I’m up to now, aside from getting the message out that we all share just one heart, both internally within ourselves, our mind and body are connected, and between each other, our hearts need each other. So that’s really where I’m at right now, and I’m doing that on a book tour, and I’m also doing that within my organization, which is a large health care system, trying to help support the people who are caring for others. Because we’re in trouble as a country, and and as patients, if our doctors and our nurses continue to burn out at a rate of 50%. I’m deeply passionate about that, so I also have another organization ending clinician burnout. It’s a global community. And three years ago, I hosted a summit. I interviewed Ariana Huffington and 83 other leaders over three days. We had 1,000 people from 43 countries within healthcare trying to fix a system, ’cause it needs fixing right now. And so I’m hoping to bring the message of compassion to our health care system as well.
Wow, that’s amazing. And don’t you find or do you find when you are coming from a place of you know the heart space in your work, do you find that you’re more energized or depleted?
It’s interesting because anger can energize. So I think they’re both energizing But one of them is sustainable and uplifting and one of them is not. And so for me I want to live, and this is the second to last chapter, we all know people who are light -hearted. You’re somebody who’s light -hearted. We all know people who are not, who are heavy -hearted, heavy. And we’re all can be surrounded by the same stuff in the world. And I wanted to be someone who lived with a lighter heart. And so there’s a whole chapter on light -heartedness. And I find that those emotions that you’re describing, the warmth and the kindness, they lighten the heart. They expand the heart, they open the heart. Whereas the other emotions, what I call in the book, The Heartbreakers, they contract the heart, literally can contract the heart. Physically, and the blood flow as well, absolutely. So that’s what I’m up to now is really helping people tap into the connection in their own bodies and develop these relationships that I think are the way that are, it’s the only way to heal the world is through relationships, communication. One person, one group at a time.
I love it. Well, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for coming on for all the viewers. Go ahead and check out the book. It’s out right now on Amazon, Just One Heart, check it out. And thank you so much, Dr. Jonathan Fisher.
Thank you so much.
Thanks, everybody.