Transcript: EP 169
Dr. Pedram Shojai: You know, we all grew up with different religious, spiritual orientations. It's usually an easy go-to if you can remember to go back to it, but dig and get to that place first thing in the morning and start your day with that type of practice. You set the tone. And then I'm a big fan of constant reminders. I like to set a timer every half an hour to just push back from my chair, go stretch, touch my toes, take 10 breaths, do some jumping jacks, go do some qigong, whatever it is, and then just come back to myself. And then, look, the computer's gonna be waiting for you, the phone calls are there. I mean, the world's not gonna stop. You have to.
Dr. Anna Cabeca: Hey there, it's Dr. Anna Cabeca, and I'm thrilled to introduce you to Balance, my wild yam progesterone and pregnenolone cream. This is the dream cream you've been waiting for. Formulated with the combination of bioidentical progesterone and pregnenolone from wild yams, this cream is specifically designed to support hormone balance, mood, memory, and a good night's sleep. Plus, it's a fantastic skin cream promoting firmness and reducing age spots. With all natural ingredients and high quality hormones, you'll feel perfectly balanced. Try Balance today and experience the magic. Visit dranna.com forward slash balance to get yours now. Embrace wellness and vitality with Balance, my wild gam progesterone cream. Your body will thank you. Within a woman's life, there are many seasons of dramatic change in our hormones. From the start with puberty and then our monthly menstrual cycles can seem very severe for some and very simple for others. and then childbirth and the postpartum period. What happens to our body during childbearing years as well as during pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum is a huge metamorphosis, an incredible time that I've been blessed to experience four times myself. And then there's menopause. Menopause is natural and mandatory. Suffering is optional. And we would no more want to suppress a person's puberty and that hormonal transition than should we want to suppress menopause and the natural transition and transformation that occurs. We want to support it, age optimally and successfully with more passion, brilliance, and so that our lifespan equals our health span. During these times of hormonal transition, there are factors that can affect us adversely and positively. The most significant adverse factor in our lives is from the consequence of stress, real stress, physical stress, emotional stress, relational stress, perceived stress of the 10 o'clock news. So all of these things can affect us. And today I want to talk about how to create a Zen life even in the utmost stress, turmoil, and tragedy in our lives. And I speak to you from personal experience when I say that it is possible to be in a state of gratitude despite the adverse circumstances and to recover our health from the consequences of stress and the effects that stress has on our body. On today's podcast, I'm going to bring to you a incredible individual, now doctor, former monk, and just an incredible person, and I'm honored to be able to call him friend. Dr. Pedram Shojai is a man with many titles. He is the founder and director of the Urban Monk Academy. He's a New York Times bestselling author of the books Rise and Shine, The Urban Monk, The Art of Stopping Time, Inner Alchemy, Exhausted, Trauma, Focus, and Conscious Parenting. He's the producer of the movies Vitality, Origins, Prosperity, and The Great Heist, as well as the docuseries Interconnected, Gateway to Health, Exhausted, Trauma, Conscious Parenting, Hormones, Health and Harmony, and Gut Check. He's an incredible producer. and researcher and scientist and human being. He's the host of the Urban Monk podcast and a key influencer in the health and personal development space. He's a prominent physician in the functional medicine space and is known for his ability to bring people together around ideas that matter. Doing all this, he's a chill guy who now lives up in the mountains and values his time and his days that he gets with his family. As a former monk, he strives to bring enlightenment and peace to the world around him. So without further ado, let me introduce you to Dr. Pedram Shojai. Welcome, Pedram, to The Girlfriend Doctor Show.
Dr. Pedram Shojai: Great to be with you.
Dr. Anna Cabeca: As always, it's great to be with you too. So you've dug deep into so many areas with your books and your specialties and your docuseries. And like, I know that when it comes to the number one reason that over apparently over 90% of our doctors visits are due to stress related complaints. So when we hit on stress, we want to talk about how it affects us, how it affects us physiologically, and then how to get out of the stress. So what do you know about stress anyway?
Dr. Pedram Shojai: Never had any, ever.
Dr. Anna Cabeca: No such thing.
Dr. Pedram Shojai: Yeah. You know, what's funny is early in my career and my monk days, that was my study, right? And then I got into all the functional medicine stuff and looking at the gut and looking at this and looking at that. I got to say, I've come full circle and stress has really become the central character in this drama again, because all roads lead to stress. And, you know, my thinking on stress has evolved and adapted over the years. I'm layered, right? But essentially, I'm at this stage now in my career, if you will, where it's either you feel safe or you don't feel safe. And if you don't feel safe, everything breaks, right? This animal is in a very different physiology. This animal's mitochondria are signaling to say, hey, shut down. Things aren't well. And the show just stops, right? And so I've spent the last few years of my career just helping teach people how to feel safe. Right. And that could come from the cheese burrito that you had, or it could come from the way you interact with your spouse. A lot of ways to go in that conversation.
Dr. Anna Cabeca: Yeah. And I like the concept of feeling safe, creating a safety, you know, like having a safety net, so to speak, but creating a concept of that we are safe. You know, and like my work, I say we're either moving towards oxytocin or we're moving towards cortisol. And so we're moving towards trust and safety. or we're moving towards fear. And so these concepts, it's a dial, you can't exist in both places at the same time, at least not that I've found.
Dr. Pedram Shojai: Yeah. And I love that you've brought oxytocin to the party, right? Like I remember a decade ago, we were all talking about, you know, sympathetic versus parasympathetic and, you know, what that means and rest and digest. And now you've really isolated this kind of master hormone of love and connection and really compared and contrasted it with the cortisol economy, if you will, right, like peacetime versus wartime economy. And it really is. I mean, I hate to oversimplify things, but it really does feel that binary. And the issue is, look, At the end of the day, I don't care how much L-theanine you think you need to take. I don't, you know, tapping and pulling and all this stuff. Whatever it takes, you got to do what you got to do to get yourself to feel safe. And that nexus of control is with you and only you.
Dr. Anna Cabeca: So saying that, what we can do to create that safety, and I want to talk about that first. How do we know that we are stressed or we're letting stress get the best of us?
Dr. Pedram Shojai: There's the telltale signs. Your respiratory rate starts to go up.
Dr. Anna Cabeca: Hair loss. I was going to say that one.
Dr. Pedram Shojai: Hair loss, you know, I've never had that. You know, it's your sleep quality. Your arousal remains high in the evening. Not the good kind of arousal. And you are edgy, right? You are compressed in time. and you are not able to just sit and be, you're fussing about doing. And that to me is a sign of an animal that doesn't feel safe, right? It's just you're looking around, you become myopic. Whereas if you're kind of sitting on the savanna, surveying a broad vista, and just kind of, you know, enjoying and taking in the scenery, you have a very different physiology, you have a very different cadence. And the problem is, I don't know how to say this. It's become so common that we can't see it anymore because everybody is drowning in the same pool. So we don't recognize that the guy next to us is also stressed out beyond compare. Look, everyone around you is so stressed out that you can't recognize that you're one of them, right? And you go to a foreign land, you go to a place outside of your environment, and then all of a sudden you're like, oh my goodness, I'm the one that's wound up, right? We're just, we're all drowning in the same pool. And that's the problem with stress is we've learned to accept and normalize the level of stress that we have been harboring. And it's just like death by a thousand cuts. It's just, it's so bad for us, but we don't recognize that we have a choice in decompressing.
Dr. Anna Cabeca: And, you know, for me, as much as I've studied, it was a great student. I didn't understand stress until it really affected me. Post-traumatic stress, chronic everyday stress, work stress, responsibility stress, relationship stress, all of those things. And I was sleeping three hours a night for years, sleeping three hours a night. I was completely weight loss resistant. I was losing hair. I was reacting instead of responding. And so like that, as you said, like being on edge, you know, not having a container in which I felt safe because I was always waiting for the next shoe to drop, the next trauma to happen, the next accident. I was always in that state of high alert, hyper vigilance. And my body was never resting. And with that high cortisol, it affects, it robs us from all our beautiful, juicy hormones. It creates leaky gut, it invades, it breaks down our healthy boundaries, our health from our healthy cellular boundaries on a cellular level to our physical, emotional, relational boundaries. And that again, there's no, if you don't have a good boundaries, you don't have safety. And so bringing this around the concept of safety, how do we create more safety?
Dr. Pedram Shojai: I like fuse lengthening exercises. Fuse lengthening, right? So there are things that have been around for 6,000 years that have worked for hundreds of millions of people. And you know, they're called yoga, they're called prayer, they're called meditation. I mean, these things work. The problem with them is they're not that sexy because you don't flop on a table and have it done to you. I mean, I guess you could get a massage three times a week, but that's expensive. But if you picked up a meditation practice, you would be able to do that mental floss. You would have that spiritual hygiene that is essential. And I think In the day and age that we live in, I mean, look, in the 80s, we had AIDS. Right now, I think there should be a new diagnosis code called SIDS, which is stress induced immunodeficiency syndrome, right? Like we are literally falling apart immunologically because the amount of stress that is just compounding. And, you know, we could talk about the deleterious effects of cortisol, but I mean, I'm sure you've done that on your show, right? What we want is solutions. Right. And the solutions to me start with how you start your day. If you wake up and not have any form of mental, emotional, spiritual hygiene. And you just go right into the white water. The rest of your day, you're gonna be tumbling around hitting rocks. So you have to find that stillness and really find a place that you can anchor your psyche in a place of peace, place of forgiveness, a place of thankfulness, whatever your orientation is. You know, we all grew up with different religious, spiritual orientations. It's usually an easy go-to if you can remember to go back to it. But dig and get to that place first thing in the morning and start your day with that type of practice. You set the tone. And then I'm a big fan of constant reminders. I like to set a timer every half an hour to just push back from my chair, go stretch, touch my toes, take 10 breaths, do some jumping jacks, go do some Qigong, whatever it is, and then just come back to myself. And then look, the computer's going to be waiting for you. The phone calls are there. I mean, the world's not going to stop. You have to. And so that's where I think a lot of the really interesting stuff where neuroscience and biohacking and all this ancient stuff that I studied in the temples comes together is developing the nexus of control to build up your PFC, to build up the part of your brain that allows you to negate impulses and say no to the things that you know are bad for you and choose what you decided was good for you yesterday, again today. The problem is every time we say yes to something new, we say no to everything we thought was important to us yesterday. And this attention economy is just so strong at pulling our attention away, our lives, our goals, our priorities, our health. into whatever the ad wanted you to do or however that political party wanted you to respond. And so in my assessment, you don't stand a chance if you don't have personal spiritual hygiene and you're on social media. There's just too much stacked against you. You have to stop and drink from the fountain.
Dr. Anna Cabeca: I love that. And you know, as you're talking about this, I think of my spiritual practice, and I mean, I would be nowhere without my faith. And it has rescued me time and time again. And so I created a practice that before I even opened my eyes in the morning, I think, where did I see love yesterday? And today I woke up and when I did this practice, I thought about a husband and wife that came into my practice yesterday. They've been married 27 years, and she had such a runaround with her health care from mold and Lyme disease. And she's seen over 20 physicians around the country for these problems. And he's there standing by her side, came to her appointment. And it was just like to have that, like she has that safety net and that ability to, OK, I'm going to try one more thing. I'm going to get better. I see that. I feel that. I want that. And he's there with her. So I saw that love yesterday. So that made me smile. And then I think, what am I grateful for? And that list gets longer, the more I practice, I stay in this practice. The things that I'm grateful for, from the pillow under my head, the blanket over me, to my daughter driving herself to school, just made me happy. And then where could I, the third question I ask is, where could I laugh at myself more? And where could I laugh at myself or others more? Where do I find humor in that from my day, my assessment of the day yesterday? And that list is usually very long too. So I wake up with a smile versus my prior habit of feet hitting the door, already running behind with a to-do list, you know, rolling, scrolling through my mind or distracted. And the distractions is key. I've heard it called shiny object syndrome. I'm like constantly looking for the next thing and you're never really realizing what you want and truly need. And when it comes down to that, there's not very many things. And you also said the, you know, when we say yes to something, we've said no to so many things. And I just done an interview with Dr. Anil Gupta, the love doctor, and he says it's a no till it's a yes. And I really like that mantra.
Dr. Pedram Shojai: If you think about the prefrontal cortex, I mean, its superpower is the word no, right? No is one of the most powerful words in our lexicon, yet we're people pleasers. We've been trained to keep saying yes because a good consumer, you know, spends all their money. And so we've really fallen out of that nexus of control to stop and say, well, do I need this thing? Do I, you know, the guys want to go out for a drink. I was supposed to go to the gym. You have to have this moment of introspection to kind of just intercede and be like, if I say yes to that, then I'm saying no to my health and my family. And no is, you know, we have such a negative connotation to that word, but I think it's one of the most powerful words we can adopt for our own personal sanity. I call it life gardening, right? You have to water the plants that are important to you in your life. And if it's not what's explicitly in your life garden, it's a weed. Stop watering the weeds, right? And it's a simple metaphor, but you start to apply it in every aspect of your life, you start to see the things that matter grow. And you grow it with your attention, right? What follows your attention is your energy. What follows your energy is action. It's how things happen in the world, right? And so I come from a school of thought where everything, you know, in your cultivation happens around your mind because your energy follows your mind. And the material reality we live in will eventually coalesce around the energetic signatures that you pattern. And so your mind is ultimately the culprit and it's also the healer and it's also the savior, but it's your mind, not what someone's doing for you. It has to be you.
Dr. Anna Cabeca: And getting in touch with that. And I like the, you know, the direction and really the introspection. When you're making a choice, you're saying yes to something. What are you saying no to? And even that pause, I thought about that as I went to the gym yesterday, ooh, I had a lot of reasons not to go. I was busy, I haven't done my medical charting yet, I wanna get home and see my daughter, all of those things, right? But then I'm saying no to a goal I've set to myself and that's being a naughty 90. That's what I want to do. As we shift this discussion from stress, I want to delve into a topic that I don't think anyone knows as much about it as you, but it's the enlightenment. Getting into a state of enlightenment, living in enlightenment. Well, first of all, what is enlightenment? What does that mean? It seems so esoteric.
Dr. Pedram Shojai: First of all, you're too kind. I'm just a student of it. But to me, enlightenment is turning the light of awareness around to become aware of your true self. Now, what is your true self?
Dr. Anna Cabeca: That's a good question.
Dr. Pedram Shojai: I don't think there's an answer, but there's better and better questions. The real question is who just asked that question, and who observed the asking of that question. So there are a number of really powerful practices that I learned over the years that I think are incredibly relevant to this pursuit of that question, right? And the more you turn it around, the more you become self-aware, the more you realize that who you think you are is, you know, this cluster of defense mechanisms and narratives and stories that you've layered on to protect yourself, to create an identity, a storefront in a world where everyone's posing. And the more you let all that crap go, the more you have bliss become emergent. The more you understand that you and all your flaws are just fine and you don't see all the flaws in other people and you drop the judgment and you start, it's visceral. You can see people who are enlightened and go, Ooh, I like her. I like that guy. Why? because there's less there. You see the smile of God, you see the light of creation, you see through the facades and you see the beauty of nature and life expressing itself through this focal point of a body that somehow has life in it. And the mystery behind that mystery, anyone tells you what that is, you know, cut out the middleman, just keep digging, right? To me, enlightenment is all we're here for. And to me, enlightenment is the cure to a lot of the ailments that we are having in our society because we are, as the Buddha said, hungry ghosts looking outside of ourselves for resolution, for happiness, for peace, for answers. And those answers have never been outside of ourselves, but the marketers and the people that intermediate would love you to believe that, is they want your money, they want your votes, they want your power.
Dr. Anna Cabeca: Many good things said here, Pedram. And as I think about this and I think about the stage of enlightenment, I think about the hormonal transition of menopause and andropause and the loss of the reproductive hormones. I do believe that we get into like this stage of post-menopause of, you know, as we enter the second spring of our lives, that it is a stage for higher enlightenment. And God bless you, you get there sooner and well before this, and there are, those individuals. But I wonder, like, because of the hormonal transition transformation that occurs, there's more people seeking that spiritual connection, more people that are looking to have that higher connection with God, with oneness, with a community with each other with finding the spirit delightful within each person that you meet and really seeking that. Do you see that as well in this hormonal transition has a divine purpose?
Dr. Pedram Shojai: I think so. And I think there's been a bit of a misread of kind of ancient scripture where, you know, I was an ascetic monk for years, and then I shifted to become a householder. I have children, I have a wife, I have a life, you know.
Dr. Anna Cabeca: What does ascetic monk mean?
Dr. Pedram Shojai: Ascetic means you renounce the world. Yeah, I mean, I had this haircut before it was mandatory, right? I had this elective haircut. I shaved my head and I was a monk. And when I became a householder, the deal changed, which is you take care of your family. Thank God your daughter's driving themselves to school now, right? And you get to the golden age of your life where the biological drive to procreate and create offspring is now sunsetting and your attention goes from providing and hustling and doing all the things that we do as householders to kind of reflect inward and be like, oh man, you know, what's this show all about? And that is the golden age in the Hindu tradition and also in the Taoist tradition that I come from. Introspection and self-reflection of someone who's lived in the world was your workshop. And so I think that some of the volume, the hormonal volume comes down, we're allowed to kind of turn inward and introspect more. And we have the tools, we have the mechanisms, we have the cognitive capacity, we have the experience to then measure what we're witnessing against years of experience and let things go and forgive. And I think it's just a wonderful time in life to turn inwards and become a better person, right? As you go through the trials and tribulations of life and business and all the, you know, the things that give us lessons in scar tissue. We then have time to become better people so that then we can become better tribe members or the grandchildren and become the wise elders of the tribe. And so this used to all work. Now we just ship folks off and have them play golf, right? Like this. I think that the enlightenment principle and the golden age of life are the missing ingredient and what happened to America where we just start, you know, it's like, okay, you know, you take your Medicare and go play golf, right? It's just such a disempowering narrative versus what this golden opportunity truly is at this age.
Dr. Anna Cabeca: So when we talk about practices of enlightenment, so what are some of the practices that you adhere to on a daily basis?
Dr. Pedram Shojai: So I'm currently on day 59 of my gong. I do these hundred day sprints and I pick five or so items for every hundred day period based on what I need. So I will get up in the morning. My routine is the alarm clock goes off, the dogs are already on me, right? So I go feed the dogs, put on a pot of coffee for when my wife wakes up and then let the dogs out while I start my qigong. And I will do, it's the coordination of eyes, mind, body, and breath. I will do Qi Gong every morning from around 5.30 or 6 till 6.30 or so, depending on the set that I'm doing and meditate. I have a second Qi Gong set I do at one point throughout the day whenever I can get it in because once the day starts going, the white water is whatever it is. And then I also personally in this particular Gong, I'm doing my Hermetic Christianity Esoteric Studies. that I loved over the years. I've studied Kabbalah, I've studied Hermetic Christianity, and it's just, I just love this curriculum and I'm back in it and I really appreciate it. For me, I constantly need to read. So I have a minimum of 15 minutes of reading I do every single day. And that's just, it's mandatory, right? And so I have two Qigongs, a meditation, my tarot and my reading. Those are the five. And I get to the gym or work out at home daily. And if I'm not doing either of those, I'm skiing because I live on a ski mountain, but I got to move my body. I got to eat right. I got to do all of it. Right. And so I assemble the skeleton of my day around dedicated acts of self-love. So that then I can be the urban monk my students deserve. I can be the father my children deserve, the spouse my wife deserves. Like if I don't do these things, then I'm wobbling, right? I'm flickering. I'm not able to be the person my family, my community need of me. And I'm also robbing Peter to pay Paul and I'm, you know, going for a third cup of coffee or, you know, doing the things that are trying to just get by versus overflowing and being abundant and happy and, you know, giving. Right. I can't give if I haven't given to myself.
Dr. Anna Cabeca: So true. I love that. I can't give until I've given to myself. And that's like, I say giving from a, you want to be at a place where we're giving from an overflowing cup, not from emptiness. And circling back to stress, like we talk about fight, flight, or freeze and thaw. And for many women, we freeze or try to escape, but predominantly freeze or fawn mean taking care of others, like the martyr syndrome, or just reflecting outwards instead of reflecting inwards in these states of stress. And that's further pulling you, creating a distance between the spirit and the body and life in general. I know for myself as a mom and being a single mom for many years now, it's until I realized that I needed to prioritize my self-care, it was until I realized that and started practicing it, I saw my children get better too. My relationships with my daughters are the best ever. For that, I'm hugely grateful. I'm hugely grateful for learning the things that are most important don't get packed in a bag. They're within me and around me in this relational way. And to keep that healthy is to keep me healthy, so I'm not snapping and irritable and exhausted and taking good care of ourselves. Pedram, tell our audience about your 100 Days of Gong and how they can participate in that as well as connect with you as the Urban Monk.
Dr. Pedram Shojai: TheUrbanMonk.com, that has been my longest standing course, maybe 15 years now called The Life Garden. I've been doing this for 30 some odd years where I started doing gongs for myself. People are like, man, what are you doing? So I started showing them and it became kind of an open source way of saying, Hey, you do your gongs and bring it back and let's learn from each other. And now I have thousands of people in the community doing work on themselves and elevating their ability to, you know, for me, it's a very simple process where you need energy. So you have to bring up your vitality and then just energy will empower anything, including chaos. So then you have to channel that energy to the aperture of focus. And in doing that, then you start to see things work in your life. Right? Like that focus of you saying, yeah, I got a lot of crap going on, but I have to go to the gym. That's part of your ability to override the impulses and the narratives of, you know, all the chaos and say, no. Right? Monkey, no. The part of the brain that is just reactive gets overridden by the part of the brain that gives you mastery. Right? And so you don't just have focus, you cultivate focus. And so that's been a big part of my lessons in the last decade is, holy crap, focus is something that is a dwindling resource thanks to social media and the way the world is. So if you don't cultivate your focus, you're not going to have it. And if you don't have it, your life is going to look chaotic, right? And so you reverse that, you get the life that you choose. And then all of a sudden everyone's like, how'd you do it? I focus.
Dr. Anna Cabeca: Discipline practice. So coach someone if it comes to you and they're just there, maybe they're 60 years old, they're exhausted, they feel like they've wasted the last 10 years of their life, they can hardly get organized or keep it together. What is one thing you will tell them to start doing?
Dr. Pedram Shojai: You know, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, right? But the next best time is right now. So the question is, you know, how much water do you have, right? Time, energy, money. And where do you need that water to go to net the best results? Like, what are your actual priorities? And how do we water the plants that need it the most right now so that they can kind of come back to life and thrive. And you start to create an ecosystem around that pond, right? Like there might just be an oasis. And around that, then you start expanding and expanding once you've brought life to the vital areas of your being, right? And some people have marital problems. Some people have health problems. I mean, it just depends on what area of your life is compromised, but looking away, sure as hell doesn't work. Right. And so turning your awareness inward and saying, OK, what do I have to do to fix this? What is my next logical step in the resolution of this? And then staying focused on that until you see the resolution. Right. It's like the parable of digging for water and having pockmarks all over the ground. Right. Versus digging deep and getting to the water. Right.
Dr. Anna Cabeca: I love that. One final question as we wrap up. How do you see yourself when you're 100 years old?
Dr. Pedram Shojai: Probably doing the same things I'm doing now with grandchildren, more time for Qigong, more time for meditation, more time in nature, but serving and skiing and, you know, probably have another generation of dogs, frankly, that's in a while, but, you know, just dogs and kids and grandkids and growing life in a way that is supportive of the community and supportive of the next generations.
Dr. Anna Cabeca: I love that. So fertilizing your garden today with the things that matter most, that are the things that are most important, avoiding those shiny objects. keeping it a no until it's a yes. And when we make yes choices, really introspecting on what we're saying no to by making this yes. So being connected to ourselves, being able to respond instead of react or overreact, to understand our innate wisdom in this golden years of our life to create the stage of enlightenment, despite the trauma that we may have experienced or being experienced right now. despite the stress that's in our life or that we have experienced in our life, despite the labels that are put on us, you're too old, you don't have enough hair, whatever it may be, and to find humor in the situations as we build a life that we love with the people we love around it. Thank you, Pedram, for being on the show today. You guys check out theurbanmonk.com. Check out his program. Certainly his books and docuseries is just a wealth of information. Very well thought, well brought together and curated and transformative. Thank you for all the work you do, Pedram, and thank you to all who are listening. Till next time.