Exploring the Power of Awe with Dr. Michael Amster

0:00:00 - Speaker 1
I bristled with skepticism when I first read the subtitle of this particular book. It claimed overcome burnout and anxiety, ease chronic pain, find clarity and purpose in less than one minute per day. I kept my mind open, though, and when I read on, what they talked about was that mindfulness can often be a practice that is inaccessible. And that got me hooked, because that is something that I relate to and I know so many of my listeners and my clients relate to, so I went ahead and read this book for a chance to interview the authors of the book. I am so glad I kept an open mind because I absolutely loved this book, loved the approach they took and it was unlike anything I had ever read before. So today, on this podcast, I have the absolute honor of interviewing one of the authors, dr Michael Amster. Dr Amster is a physician and faculty member at the Turo School of Medicine with 20 years of experience as a pain management specialist. He is currently the founding director of the pain management department at Santa Cruz Community Health. He's been a student of meditation for over 30 years, as well as a certified yoga teacher and meditation teacher. He splits his time between clinical work, research on awe, teaching mindfulness and leading awe inspiring retreats around the world. 

Welcome, welcome, welcome to episode 77 of the Unweaving Chronic Pain Podcast. I'm your host, dr Andrea Moore, founder of the whole self-integration method, and I am on a mission to help those with chronic pain move out of a life that keeps shrinking and step back into a life that is full of expansion and living full out and living into your purpose and your passion. And if you are listening to this episode on the day or maybe the day after it's released, on August 17th, then I want to let you know it is not too late to get in on the beta experience that I'm doing Y'all. It is absolutely fire. It has been so powerful seeing people's takeaways and moments of aha and connection and finally being able to feel the sense of relief from knowing that it's not your fault that you are in this position that you are in and, more importantly, there is something that can be done about it. 

Oh it just gives me the chills. So if that is something you want in, the replays are going to be taken down on August 25th. All the replays have been completed. However, I am doing a bonus training on Monday, but all of them will be removed on August 25th, so sorry if you are listening after that. If you are, make sure you get on my mailing list so you don't miss out on future opportunities like this. All the links will be in the show notes. Make sure you go there right now and either get signed up for the newsletter so you don't miss out, or get signed up for the replays. It is not too late. Welcome. Welcome, dr Michael. It is such a pleasure to have you on here. 

0:03:24 - Speaker 2
Thank you so much, andrea. It's a pleasure to meet you as well, and also all your listeners. I'm just really thrilled to be here and get to spend the next hour together and talk about two things that are really dear to my heart, which is chronic pain as a pain management specialist, as well as talking about awe and wonder and healing, so we're going to have quite an incredible time in this conversation. Thank you so much. 

0:03:46 - Speaker 1
Yes, absolutely. And why don't you start by telling people I always got to hear your formal bio, but can you tell people from like, a more personal perspective of like, how did these two seemingly very far apart worlds come married together for you? 

0:03:59 - Speaker 2
Yeah. So I wanted to be a physician since I was a little boy and as I went through my education and going through high school, I started developing tests, taking anxiety because I really wanted to be a doctor. So bad and I knew the stakes got higher and higher. After my undergrad was wrapping up, I took the MCAT and I had a full panic attack the first time I took the test and experience that feeling where your mind is literally hijacked and your physiology to your body. Your heart starts beating fast and it's like I was being attacked by a tiger and I realized at that point I had to make a choice about either getting on medication to manage my anxiety or finding more natural ways of working with my mind. 

And a friend said hey, you should go on a meditation retreat and began this really long journey of over 30 years studying mindfulness and then eventually becoming a mindfulness teacher myself and then, as a physician, choosing to specialize as a pain specialist because I really love the interaction that started the intersection between the mind, the body and the spirit. I think there's something so special about the world of pain and treating it and helping people that are suffering with chronic pain, and I think it brings all my gifts to the table really loving science, but also being someone who's very emotionally available and spiritually oriented to really be able to hold the container of all that for people. And mindfulness, as we know, can be very helpful for people with chronic pain as well. So what happened was I had taught mindfulness to hundreds of patients and I also let a Buddhist meditation group in my community and I was experiencing that a lot of people had a lot of challenges and resistance to developing a sustained mindfulness practice. I don't know if any of your listeners out there who have tried maybe you've done a mindfulness course like MBSR, mindfulness based stress reduction or you know tried to pick up a practice. But for a lot of people it takes a lot of effort and they feel that they can't do it well enough and they struggle and then often give up and beat themselves up and it's kind of a really vicious cycle that can happen in trying to develop a mindfulness practice. 

And I had a conversation with my friend and colleague, jake Eagle, who was a psychotherapist and he also has led hundreds of people through mindfulness retreats, and we were like, yeah, it'd be great to find a way to give people profound healing benefits of mindfulness, but in micro doses and ways in which it could be easy, accessible and successful at it. And Jake lives in Hawaii, so I flew out there about three and a half years ago and we set out on this journey to explore what would be that ideal brief, 15 second mindfulness practice that would give people that sense of what the Buddha calls nirvana. It's that state of pure presence, of deep inner peace, of experiencing connections to life, to God's spirit, whatever words you want to use. And we actually stumbled upon this being the experience of awe. For those that have been to Hawaii or you've been to a tropical island, you know places in the tropics are beautiful, with a lot of amazing. You know scenery and food and fruits and colors and rainbows. 

But it was actually this very ordinary moment of making pancakes for breakfast one morning for Jake's wife Hannah and him that I had what I call an orgasm. You know this full on earth, shaking experience of like awe and wonder watching pouring batter and seeing these pancakes go from a liquid to a puffy, delicious pancake. And it sounds silly, but I think most of us when we pour pancake batter we like pour it and then we're off running doing something else in the kitchen, making orange juice, sausage, whatever, making our kids lunches for school, and I just was there present, fully experiencing this moment of wonder, of like wow, look at this happening. And that just had these tingles and chills in my whole body. 

And then from that experience we realize we're on to something here, that it's about finding really profound moments of awe and the ordinary that if we open our eyes to just look and see all around us, there's awe and wonder. We don't have to go to the edge of the Grand Canyon to have a moment of awe. We don't have to go to this incredible rock concert and get all jazzed up to have a moment of awe, but we can have moments of awe all throughout our day If we just open our eyes, our ears, our senses, our vision to see awe everywhere around us. And so from that we develop what we call the awe method and that's what our book is based upon, the science that we did. We did two robust studies on testing out the awe methodology with hundreds of patients and also we recruited doctors and nurses at the height of the pandemic that we're dealing with severe burnout and saw significant, really transformative changes in people's lives, practicing awe every day in microdoses. 

0:08:27 - Speaker 1
Hmm, that is so amazing and beautiful and I just like love how you came to this and even being in Hawaii, right, it's like this moment of making pancakes that really brought this into fruition. I love that emphasis because I think it's so often we feel like we need to like leave our lives or go do something to find ourselves or find our wonder beauty, and it's like it really is all around us. 

0:08:50 - Speaker 2
Yeah, it is, and it's something that I think we've lost. I think as children, we all lived in that state of wonder. If you have any children in your lives, you'll see infants and as they continue, as they go through their process, they just are sucking in all this information and they're so in awe and they're so in wonder, and it's our birthright and it's something that is wired to experience awe. We've evolved in our physiology to experience awe and wonder. When we have moments of awe, for example, awe is thought of as the what's called a pro-social emotion, which means that from these experiences of awe all these other positive emotions cascade out. So generosity, compassion, love, connection these are all seated and rooted within the experiences of awe, which is so powerful. 

0:09:36 - Speaker 1
Yes, and I found something that you talked about to be really profound and it was so interesting in reading it because I often in my course I teach people the wonder driven mind and it's really about looking at things from this place of just like wonderment, of just like wow, this is like so fascinating and I'm normally teaching it from this place of being able to be this like third party observer to our own reactions. 

Because I found that when you're in this place of mental downward thought, spiral right, everything is horrible, you know everything is going wrong that for me, I found the biggest shift out of that was to be like wow, this is fascinating that my brain is taking this one episode of a twinge of pain or this my car getting a flat tire to mean XYZ, Like that is fascinating that it can make those leaps, and I found that was so much more helpful in helping me disidentify from the story versus what I think a lot of traditional methods are like oh, we'll see the positive, and like think positive and I feel like you spoke to that really beautifully of how awe is available in any state, versus I feel like positivity is not. 

0:10:49 - Speaker 2
Yeah, you say that really well, sorry to interrupt you. 

0:10:52 - Speaker 1
Yeah, no, you're good. 

0:10:54 - Speaker 2
Yeah, we have a whole chapter of our book dedicated to talking about finding awe and times of strife. And there's something really powerful about the emotion of awe and you just touched on it is that if you're going through a really tough time and you're struggling with depression, you can't force yourself to be happy. It doesn't work to say, you know in your mind over and over again, I'm going to be happy, I'm going to be happy today. It just doesn't work. I mean, I've gone through some bad, challenging breakups and challenges in my life and I know firsthand, having gone through some depression, like you can't happy yourself out of being depressed. 

But what is really profound about the experience of awe is that you can't access awe while going through really dark, challenging times in our lives and it gives you a really profound healing reset, even if it's just for those 15 seconds. And I know you talk about, you know the wiring of the brain and the work you do and you teach about. But awe does change the circuitry. We're interrupting those circuits even just for 15 seconds and giving ourselves a taste of feeling safe, of security, resting our nervous system, cultivating even just a glimpse of a healing state and shifting our consciousness in a way that we can begin to see things in a new way, a new perspective which is so healing. You know, changing our story, as you were just saying. 

0:12:04 - Speaker 1
Yes, yes, I speak a lot about finding nervous system safety and you know many of my listeners will have heard this before, but you know I speak it from the place of. So often we make safety mean something of like, oh, like XYZ has to be present for safety to occur. So when we try to tell ourselves, oh, I'm safe, I'm safe, it doesn't feel true and again it just feels gaslighting to ourselves versus I talk about it from a place of we can find safety. Even while we're in pain, even amidst, you know, being depressed or in anxiety, like within that state, we can find a safety and know that we can move through it. 

And I think you also spoke in the book. That was something that was really interesting, as you speak specifically about the safety, cytokines and how that, in order to turn these on, your body has to be able to see that this chronically out of control threat is over. And I think for so many people in chronic pain or depression or anxiety often the threat in our own story about it. And yeah, I love that you brought that science these days because I didn't really know about cytokines, so feel free to speak to those more if you feel inspired to. 

0:13:10 - Speaker 2
So cytokines are something to be really being off. When we teach about awe, we talk about sort of three different categories, a way of looking at awe. So one is experiencing awe of the senses, right, so we can open our eyes or our ears to beautiful music. Just touching our fingers together can be a sense of awe. The sense of touch and feeling the ridges on our fingertips can be a moment of like wow, my nerves are communicating this and I'm feeling these micro ridges on my fingertips Like how awesome is that. So another category of awe is these awe of concepts and understanding how the world works around us. It can be so awe inspiring and I think the cytokine story is really one of those. 

So when life evolved on the earth over a billion years ago, the first single cellular organisms that were started to come into aliveness, they communicated with each other through cytokines, so the cytokine system, which are they're small protein molecules of maybe 30, 40, up to 100 protein chains folded up. They were communicating to the different organisms that I'm either safe or unsafe. And this same, if you want to call it, like prehistoric technology, the backbone of our own immune system. I mean we have within us immune cells that their descendants of these early ancestors that first lived on this planet a billion years ago. It's phenomenal. 

If you think about that, you know we're here, you and I are talking and we are conscious and we're healthy and we're growing intellectually and spiritually and living a full human life experience, and this is all because of these cellular ancestors that lived on this planet a billion plus years ago. It's like wow. And our immune system today and our physiology is based on the same safe versus unsafe design. If you think about our autonomic nervous system, for example, which is that part of our nervous system that we don't consciously control, it controls our heart rate, our respiration rate. So we don't have to think about all these activities that are going on in our body day to day if they just happen automatically. And that too is divided between what we call the sympathetic, which is that fight, flight, response if we're under threat, under stress, versus the parasympathetic, which is the control by the vagus nerve, and that's the sense of safety and healing and repair and restoration that can occur. I mean, I find that just so. 

0:15:28 - Speaker 1
On-spite it is, I'm with you. I know a lot of my listeners are very highly analytical and just love the information, so I loved how much you had in your book about the science behind it. Yeah. 

0:15:39 - Speaker 2
Yeah, thanks. I really love writing our book because it's both a book that is a science sort of big think book, but it also has a lot of spiritual content. And then it's beautiful for me to see the marriage between the hardcore science, as well as the spiritual and emotional and the poetic side of healing and growth and awe and wonder. 

0:16:01 - Speaker 1
Yeah, you did a beautiful job of combining the two and speaking from both, and I am sure obviously now I know what people my listeners don't know yet that awe is an acronym for your process, so I was wondering if you want to share what the awe process is. 

0:16:15 - Speaker 2
So we took the word awe, which is spelled A-W-E, and we broke it into three steps, into an acronym, and this is the method that we've taught our patients and our research studies to learn how to do. We asked them to practice just three times a day, and the experience takes 15 to 20 seconds to do. So yeah, I'd love to share for your listeners about the awe method, and I'm also mindful that when people listen to podcasts, most of us are driving in the car, so I don't want to give anyone like a really profound aghazmic experience that might impact their ability to drive safely. So I will talk through it, but I would just encourage people to visit our website, thepowerofawcom. We have free resources there. We have some guided meditations that are available, and also we have in our book, extended Practices of Awe, that, even though we're teaching you how to have a brief moment of awe, I think that there's something profound about extended awe moments as well that are even maybe more healing and transformative. So the practice involves really three steps, and so the A stands for attention, and what we're asking you to do is just to bring your full, undivided attention to something that you appreciate, value and find amazing. So right now as you're listening, you know maybe you're at home or you might even be driving. And if you're driving, let's say you're at a red light and you can just look out the sky in front of you and maybe you see a bird fly by or just you can be an awe of the stoplights, of power lines. So the fact that how a car works can be an awe moment as well. 

So I'm talking to Andrea and she has this really cool piece of art behind her. I don't know, can't make out what it is Well like. It's a little blurred, but it's like really beautiful and got dimensionality to it and folds. It's incredible. So I'm just focusing my full attention on that right now as I'm talking to you all, as a moment of awe, being curious about where it came from or who made it or what were they thinking when they made it, or just noticing the textures or the shadows and colors within it. And then the W stands for weight. So we are giving ourselves a nice break of just being present, a pause, a fully being with that moment in which we're having a moment of awe with. And I think in our busy world where we're constantly distracted by our devices and all the technology around us. It's a bigger gift than ever to give ourselves that gift of a moment of pause and just fully, you know, taking a nice size, just fully being with that for 10 to 15 seconds. So it's like a cycle or two of a breath. 

And then the E stands for a longer exhale than your inhale. And when you take a long exhale out and we can do that together right now, even making the sound of awe together, so we do that and you can immediately feel like a calmness and a reset. And that's because when we take on a nice long exhale out, we are stimulating our Vegas nerve and I had alluded a little bit about what the Vegas nerve is, but it's the master computer of our autonomic nervous system, particularly the part of it around the rest and repair state, the healing state, the state in which our heart rate slows down or blood pressure, you know, gets lower. We become more present, and so we're really using our breath to help cultivate that sense of calm and peace. And then the E stands for expansion. And when you have a moment of awe if you think about, maybe, the time you've had, that extraordinary moment of awe you feel like a sense of expansion, maybe out there in the world, but internally you also feel bigger, like your ego. Your sense of self diminishes and you feel connected to something bigger. And I think about using this idea of expansion as you're letting the experience really fill you up. If you're a visual person, you can even imagine in your mind's eye. Maybe it's like a warmth or a light that just fills you up and expands inside of you from that moment of awe or just letting that experience get bigger than just the smaller experience. And sometimes people, when they have that expansion, they'll feel that energy expand in their body and that's where you maybe get those chills, the tingles, what they call pile or erection, the little hair cells kind of standing up on your arm. Yeah, just summarizing it three steps. It's just attention, finding something that you value, appreciate, finding amazing, fully being present with that, letting go of any other thoughts. Then having a nice pause, a way to soaking in that experience and then a nice long exhale with an expansion and that's the moment of awe that we're teaching people how to cultivate and what's really lovely. 

Few things I want to share about the practice. 

So we talk about in our book and what we did in our research studies is we created a 21 day program, so we asked people to practice this three times a day for 21 days and the idea is that we want to help you build a muscle so that you can find these moments of awe ultimately without having to do the practice at all. 

And what's beautiful and what we know from the research is that with time and just a few days or weeks for most people they'll start to have spontaneous moments of awe, like you won't have to intentionally go through this three step process, but that all will happen all around you all the time. All will bubble up. You just can be present and all will appear. And another neat thing about the practice is that the more you do it, the more you have these micro doses, the more benefit there is, and we saw that in our research that the benefits would decreases in depression and anxiety and all the other health benefits that I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about in the podcast were all improved by the more doses you have of awe throughout the day. 

0:21:16 - Speaker 1
Yes, it's amazing how powerful a practice like this can be, and I feel like sometimes one of the biggest barriers is how simple it sounds. I think often, when you have been in chronic pain and you've tried so many things and been to like so many specialists, you hear something like this and you're like, really Like you're telling me something 15 seconds a day is going to be the thing, and that's why I really loved, like, the way the book is written and that bringing the science, and that's where I think it's so valuable to have an entire book around it. 

Right, it's like if you just presented in like isolation, I feel like it's so easy to be like, meh, not going to even try that, it feels too small. So I just want to urge any listeners who go there because I know what that's like to go there, because that's what I used to do as well, and you know I would kind of poo poo practices and not want to try them when I was in a different mindset state, because it didn't feel like it could help me. And so I just want to call that out and anybody is feeling like, oh, this just feels too easy, just try it. Then, you know, if it's so simple and easy that, why not just play with it and give it a try and see what happens? And I think that is where, like especially my listeners who tend to be much more like cognitive and analytical than in their heads it's helpful to be like, okay, well, tell me more about the benefits of it. Like how could this really really help? So yeah, I just wanted to speak to that because I know that that is where my mind always used to go before I realized the benefits for myself of these like micro doses, of moments of like realizing that it wasn't just one tiny experience that was going to cure all my problems, that it's not about that, that it's this overtime, healing and openness that happens. 

And you spoke to something really profound in the book that said as your ego gets smaller, your identity has room to expand. And I loved that. I was like, oh yes, like it's so true. I feel like so often we're so stuck on something or just in something that it really takes that willingness to just open to a new perspective and for our ego to maybe not be right in a situation. I've kind of asked the question of people before. It's like well, do you want to be right or do you want to feel better? Right, because our egos love to be right so well. 

0:23:21 - Speaker 2
And I think this is what you were talking about just a few moments ago is that our ego is often a barrier to getting well. 

0:23:28 - Speaker 1
Oh yeah. 

0:23:29 - Speaker 2
Sadly. We're attached to our stories, we're attached to our identity, we're attached to the way we see and do and believe about things. And one of the neat things about others so many amazing things about all. But this is not my research but my colleagues' research at UC Berkeley is that we know that moments of awe make us more open-minded. We're willing to look at other people's points of view. We're less attached to our points of view. We see the world with more openness and curiosity. Our sense of self, our ego, diminishes Because of that diminishment. We're more generous, we're willing to give to strangers. We experience a sense of more compassion and a willingness to be in service to humanity. And we really have a big call to action about that at the end of our book, about how this emotion isn't just the personal but it really is a collective thing. 

Awe is probably part of what kept early civilizations connected and working together, because when we're in awe we feel connected to the vastness of life, to everything. When you're living in these connected moments, it's truly spiritual and I love that. A lot of spiritual traditions talk about awe, for example Rabbi Joshua Abraham Heschel. He was colleagues of Martin Luther King. He's in all those pictures on the walks standing right next to Reverend King. Part of his whole message was about funding awe and the everyday and the ordinary. And his spiritual practice is about how can you not wake up every day and just be always in awe of everything around us? So it's really rooted in all of the major religion spiritual traditions to connect to the divine, to each other, through awe. 

And you're really right in what you said, that we are happier and healthier when we have a fluid sense of identity and ego. I see it all the time with my patients. People come in and they are so attached to their story and they'll repeat their story over and over and over again, months and months, years and years. And I do my best to work with people to help loosen up their stories. But I think stories are really the biggest hindrance, one of them for healing to happen for people. 

0:25:31 - Speaker 1
Oh, 100% my own story was not being willing to let go of my stories, right, and so much of the work I do is we're kind of told to well, just let go. And it's like, well, how do you do that, right? So a lot of the work I do is like this deeper, somatic work of like why are these parts of you scared to let go of that story? And I think it's so important, though, in addition to any of that type of like healing work or kind of clearing work or when you are making room, is that you're filling it with something else, and I feel like that filling it with awe, like this type of practice just goes so beautifully with any type of healing work. 

And I'm Jewish and, while I wasn't raised super religious or anything like that, the more I learn about it, the more I realize how much Judaism brings in, like you said, awe. Like they have a prayer for everything, like you have a prayer for going to the bathroom. If that's just like honoring the body's ability to go to the bathroom and cleanse itself. There's, you know, a prayer for when you just see the rain or see a big tree, like it's really cool, like I think that you touched into how many spiritual practice or religions really did have this at the core, but we, unfortunately, have lost it all or lost so much of it. You know it's been so easy to forget those things or not have them talk to us in the first place. They definitely weren't taught to me, I know that. 

0:26:42 - Speaker 2
So yeah, yeah, and I think that the most important practice is that you can find awe everywhere, anytime. You can be in line at the airport and going through the TSA checkpoint and you can really be in awe of just looking at other people, the quirkiness of human behavior and different way people dress or their personalities. That can be a moment of awe. Everywhere around us there's moments of awe and wonder, and when you start to really build this practice up, your whole life is going to change for the better. It is potent, and I've been. Now really it's about all practitioner or the last three plus years doing this practice. What I've heard from my close colleagues who are also practicing a lot of awe, but for my patients as well, is that it's a practice that has so much depth to it as well. It is simple and easy, but when you are continuously dosing, rewiring your brain, instead of it being a temporary state of your nervous system, it becomes your trait, becomes who you are as a person and I have always been an overachiever which creates a fair amount of suffering. Judging my self worth that's been my story about how much I accomplish or achieve. I've also been proud about being an incredibly talented multitasker, and this practice has really helped calm my nervous system down, and I think for the better. People will say I'm more present than I've ever been. I have a lot of humor and humility and I'm more playful and I take everything less seriously. Physically, I feel less fatigue from a day of work and more robust, and this is actually one of the things that we focused on. One of our studies was on doctor and nurse burnout. I know you're also in healthcare and it's a huge problem for those of us that are caring for other people or even if you're just in a service industry, if you're a teacher, if your job involves putting a lot of effort out there into the world and caring for others in some capacity. We're all working with burnout and one of the things that's really powerful about this practice is it is an antidote to burnout. We study that and know that it helps people decrease burnout and it's a great practice to bring into your clinical situation. 

For those of us that take care of people or you're a teacher, bring all back into the classroom and wonder, inspire children and to learn, because we actually know from research that in awe-inspired curriculum, students learn better, they retain information better, they do better on tests. Same with. I bring this into the patient care room. I start my patient visits often with a moment of awe with my patient. We look out the window of the clinic and can appreciate the trees or the view of the mountains off in the distance, or I ask people to share about a moment of awe they've had recently. There's something really contagious about awe. That a good type of contagious. Yeah, exactly that. When you share awe with others, you inspire awe on them, and then you hearing other people's awe moments inspires awe on you. It's a circular, give and take, reciprocal relationship about sharing awe with each other. 

0:29:33 - Speaker 1
Totally, and I feel very lucky to have my own personal little awe generator, because I have a six-year-old that is an expert on finding awe in every situation or just being so curious of like, how does this work? What is this button for? Look at this hinge and I'm like he has discovered functions of my car that I've had for 10 years that I didn't even know happened or it had. I was like I didn't even realize that button was there, right, because he's just so curious about everything and I was like, how does this work? And he was like asking me the other day of, like, how do the lights know to come on? And I just one of those things where I was just like, how do they know? Like that is. And my first instinct used to be like I don't know. I guess there's like a Bluetooth and I was like it's not Bluetooth. 

0:30:16 - Speaker 2
Lights have been around for way before you know what I mean. 

0:30:18 - Speaker 1
But I was like that is fast, you know, and it totally just, and I had been reading this book so it just made me be like man. That is like amazing that they could do that. I still don't know the answer to this. Right, it really is. I feel like he has helped me in so many ways. Just like see that, because he just questions these incredibly mundane things that we take for granted every day and it just makes you see them in this whole new way of like man. How did someone come up with that you talked about in the book? I think pretty sure it's in your book about the doorknob. 

0:30:46 - Speaker 2
Right, exactly the story of that, the story of amazing. 

0:30:49 - Speaker 1
Oh my God, feel free to tell it, Because I probably wasn't planning yeah go ahead. 

0:30:52 - Speaker 2
Yeah, I know the doorknob was invented by a young black man in the 1800s, you know, around the time of the Civil War. And if you think about just how doorknobs have transformed our whole like sense of life, like being able to walk through you know rooms and have privacy and all that, it's just we take all this for granted. But someone invented the doorknob and it was a person who had came from a slave background and had like everything against him and yet invented. That is incredible story. But it's all around us, like everything you know. 

Here we are talking on zoom and right you're across the United States and there's like no delay. I mean to be in awe of this technology, of these devices that really transformed our lives in many good ways, is just so inspiring. 

0:31:35 - Speaker 1
Really is. 

0:31:36 - Speaker 2
Yeah. 

0:31:37 - Speaker 1
And I think you touched on this earlier too just like one thing I felt like was also really profound that I wanted to touch on, and I feel like you have a passage you want to read that I think will relate to this. 

I think so often, when we're in chronic pain or like in our own struggles, right, we're so inwards and how awe can connect us to the vastness and to the greater world and I think if all you're exposing yourself to is like the news, or then you are somebody who is a people pleaser and really hard on yourself and really feel like your worth is based on your ability to perform, right, it's almost like our association with the greater world becomes negative, becomes hard, is exactly what leads us to burnout. But I feel like this practice and seeing that actually connecting to the world in this different way, in this just seeing the vastness of it, and that there is something greater than ourselves, it can be something that is so healing and actually helps soften us and take things so much less seriously At least I know that's helped me tremendously of taking things way less seriously when it's like I am just a tiny speck in this ridiculously large universe we have, like it's really not that important in a good way. 

0:32:46 - Speaker 2
Yeah, I shared about just humility, that really developing a muscle of awe and cultivating that really does bring us a lot of humility and although I don't live in chronic pain, I've had episodes of time where I've had injuries. 

I am a pain doctor so I know the field very well and intimately. It's a big part of my life just caring for people in pain all the time and the practice is deeply transformative. I think particular people in pain and we haven't talked about our research yet specifically and I'll just touch on it briefly give some examples. But we saw in our studies, for example, a 35% reduction of depression in the almost 300 primary care patients and the 200 doctors and nurses in our study and this is at the height of the pandemic, when people were super depressed and stressed out over half the country would have been, you know, measurably depressed on intake questionnaires and a simple practice of awe three times a day for 15 seconds decrease people's experiences of depression by 35%. It's really equal and efficacy to have taken a drug or being in psychotherapy and doesn't have any side effects and it's free. 

0:33:46 - Speaker 1
That's a lot of side effects. They're all really positive, yeah. 

0:33:49 - Speaker 2
And we knew also from research, there's a dose response. So the more you dose moments of awe, the more it helps to decrease in depression. So about 25% reduction in anxiety, decreases in chronic pain, decreases in headaches and all different types of pain, improvement of overall sense of health and well-being from really the simple practice. But as you were alluding to, it is so profound that when we have these moments of awe it changes our physiology. We it's been proven through research that inflammatory cytokines to sort of the bad immune factors that result in cancer and heart disease and diabetes and all these other chronic health conditions they're lowered with awe. It's awe is actually the only positive emotion that was shown in the research to lower inflammatory cytokines. So that has huge impacts on health, just as an emotion about cultivating this positive emotion has the ability to change our physiology, like what's circulating in our blood. It is that profound as well as just changing our nervous system as well by improving the ratio of our sympathetic versus our parasympathetic nervous system and quieting the thoughts down in our mind. But I was loved to share just a passage from the book because we've talked to Fairmount today about the personal benefits of practicing awe, but in our epilogue we talk about how the implications of awe go well beyond personal transformation. Awe touches everything, and perhaps most telling is the effect it has on others. We're wired to attune to others' behaviors and moods. Our nervous system senses the emotions of those around us. Just as being the recipient of a warm smile can lighten our mood, when we're in awe, those around us feel it too. Awe is contagious, and so practicing the awe method is one not so small way we can contribute to the world. 

In this book we've covered how the awe method is grounded in science and that a whole body of science supports that awe changes lives. So we have a big, simple crash ending to the power behind the simple practice of the awe method. If practice frequently enough by enough people a critical mass, as it were everyone would experience a significant, heightened shift in consciousness. Awe changes us. When we share our awe, we change the world. How can we be in awe of someone and physically or emotionally harm them? How can we be in awe of the natural world and destroy it? How can we be in awe of life itself and not live as if every day were a miracle? 

In awe, the tone of every conversation, from the personal to the political shifts from having an agenda to being open and curious. Our conversations impact how we raise our kids, how we help our aging parents, how we treat our spouse, how we participate in community, how we mentor or supervise people, how we govern a city and how we lead a nation. We can think of no downside to practicing the awe method, because awe is the light, the appreciation of nature and different cultures, the curious and open mind, the generous and giving soul. These days, we need awe more than ever. So awe waits you and surrounds you in the ordinary moments of your life, like the view of the stars the fill the night sky. Awe is free and always available. All you need to do is pay attention to what you value, appreciate and find amazing, wait and then exhale and expand into the unlimited timelessness of awe. 

0:36:57 - Speaker 1
I have chills and my heart feels so open. I love that. Thank you, that was absolutely beautiful. Thank you so much for this conversation and for your work in this and for this beautiful book, whose cover I feel like whenever I pick it up. I just love looking at these colors. Yeah, the cover is real inspiring cover. 

The book is beautiful it really is, so I'll put it in the show notes as well. But where can people find you and your work? And obviously they can purchase the book at Amazon or anywhere that I'm sure books are available. 

0:37:32 - Speaker 2
Yeah, the book is available online pretty much from every retailer, but definitely put a shout out to buy the book from your local bookshop. I'll tell you when I walk into a bookstore I feel awe how can you not be in awe when? You walk in a bookstore. I don't really feel a lot on Amazon, although I get overwhelmed. 

0:37:50 - Speaker 1
I usually would be on Amazon. 

0:37:52 - Speaker 2
I encourage people to support your local bookstore and buy the book. They can order it, but a lot of them do have it in stock. And we have a great website, thepowerofawcom. We have videos on there. We have a free ebook you can download and guide your practices. We also have really cool on our website. 

We call it the moment of awe page and it's where you can post a moment of awe. You can read other people's moments of awe so kind of building a community of awe and also feel free to send us an email. I know Jake, my co-author, and I we love hearing from people and we have a newsletter we call the moment of awe newsletter. We send it out twice a month and it just basically gives you a little taste of awe short little taste of awe every other week, so you can kind of be reminded to find awe and we've done a few online courses. But, yeah, definitely would love to hear from people. You can write me if you want to reach out, michael at thepowerofawcom. And thank you so much, andrea, for hosting me today. It's just been such a great time connecting with you and your listeners and I would love to come back and talk more about any aspect of chronic pain. That's an area I could spend hours sharing wisdom and loving to learn more from you about it as well. 

0:38:54 - Speaker 1
Oh my goodness. Yes, you're welcome back anytime, and we just need more physicians. You know bringing this into the mainstream because it is so important. So thank you truly for all the work you do and thank you for being here today. 

0:39:06 - Speaker 2
Thank you. I'm so honored to be here and enjoy being in your presence. Thank you again. Thank you. 

0:39:11 - Speaker 1
Was that not fascinating? I hope you're able to try this practice out for yourself. It's so simple, but do not let that take away from its absolute power. Allow yourself to just do an experiment, see what happens. Have fun with it. 

Worst case scenario you accidentally experience a moment of awe in your day that you weren't expecting. Doesn't sound so bad, right, and I'm not going to lie. One of my favorite things about the book was getting to see that there is actually research behind one of the concepts that I teach, which is the wonder driven mind. I realized how much what I call wonderment is actually very similar to what their description of awe is, and that there's research to back up why it is such a powerful state to operate from. And if you want to learn more about that day, one of my training in this beta experience talks all about the wonder driven mind and goes into a lot of depth about it. 

So definitely, if you're not past the point where the replays have been taken down, which is August 25, 2023, make sure you get signed up. Go ahead and check that out, and it will give you so much more depth and ways to apply this into your own life. As always, thank you so so much for listening. If you found this episode to be helpful, please go ahead and leave us a review on Apple iTunes, whatever it's called. It helps other listeners find us and helps this word get out and make this world a better place. Thank you so much. See you next time. 

Transcribed by https://podium.page