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BIRTHFIT Podcast Featuring Chris Tate

BIRTHFIT Podcast Featuring Chris Tate

BIRTHFIT Podcast: Episode 77 Chris Tate

[0:00:00]


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Welcome to The BIRTHFIT Podcast.


Chris: Thank you. It’s good to be here.


[0:05:02]


Lindsey: Yeah. So we’re sitting here in Denver, Colorado in an awesome Airbnb.


Chris: Oh, it is, isn’t it?


Lindsey: Yeah. I don’t know what year this was built but it’s old.


Chris: It’s got a semi spiral staircase over there. I’m going to ride down the railing there when we leave.


Lindsey: It has like a secret place in the back where they keep the dead bodies.


Chris: Great. Hopefully I’ll be making out of this podcast at the end.


Lindsey: Yeah, you don’t know what we do at the BIRTHFIT Coach seminar.


Chris: Glad I didn’t just accept any of that food in there.


Lindsey: That’s awesome. Well, give everybody that’s listening a little bit of intro, like your two-minute elevator speech of what you do in this world.


Chris: Sure. So I do several things. I enjoy life is what I do. But professionally, I’m a life coach. I teach a form of life coaching that’s based upon neuroscience and physics. My background is I’m not a scientist. I’m not a doctor by any stretch. I’m actually a software engineer. Several years ago, I had a very profound experience while in meditation. After that experience, I want to know from a scientific perspective what had just happened to me. By that time, I had gone through Chinese medical school and I’d studied both Eastern and Western science and religion, but I really wanted to know from a scientific perspective. I wanted to be able to hold something in my hand and to say, “This is what that was.” I had heard about out-of-body experiences from folks in Chinese medicine. I had certainly read about it but I had never experienced anything like that. You’re not thinking that they’re lying to you. You’re just saying I cannot relate to what you’re telling me. But once I actually had that experience, everything changed.


Lindsey: When was that?


Chris: This was seven years ago and it was the first time. I’d never been trained in meditation. It was the first time I closed my eyes in my entire life to consciously, for lack of a better word, go within. It was four in the morning and I know now why I was doing that at that point. It’s when melatonin peaks out in the body. Melatonin is a very powerful chemical in our system that when it synthesizes, it breaks down to DMT, dimethyltryptamine, and dimethyltryptamine is a very powerful hallucinogenic. It’s the active ingredient in ayahuasca. We naturally produce that and at four in the morning, we produce enormous amounts of it. So that’s why a lot of these spiritual groups and religious groups get up at 4 a.m. to pray is that they’re leveraging the fact that melatonin is peaking out in the pineal, the third eye, and as it rapidly breaks down into DMT, things happen.


Lindsey: That’s pretty awesome. I was just thinking like there’s a lot of babies born at the early morning hours.


Chris: Oh, that’s interesting.


Lindsey: Yeah, like, 4, 5, 6 a.m. That’s pretty awesome.


Chris: Yeah, it’s really interesting. Yeah, it’s a powerful time of day. There’s something very special that occurs at 4 a.m.


Lindsey: So prior to that, what have you been doing in your life?


Chris: I was a software engineer. At that time, I was working in DC. I was miserable. I was a miserable person. I was struggling with my job and I was struggling with life and I was struggling with traffic and relationships. I was infected with what is referred to as the monkey mind, which is basically just this constant dialogue of conversation that carries on, and I’m not ashamed to say that I have voices in my head.


Lindsey: Yeah, I think we all do.


Chris: We all do. We all do. It’s actually a way that the body maintains homeostasis. Homeostasis is our chemical balance, and it uses the mental mind chatter to produce the chemicals that our body has declared as normal. So if you’re someone who has a high stress life like I was living at the time, when you are not encountering stress in your life externally, you produce it in the form of thoughts, and that’s the monkey mind. So I had this chattery mind and I knew that I needed to make some changes. And someone handed me The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.


Lindsey: Aren’t you reading that now?


Female: I just finished it today.


Chris: It’s amazing, isn’t it?


Female: Yeah, just like the final sentence was.


Chris: That book, and it’s The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, is one of the most profound reads I have ever encountered in my entire life, and every time I go back, I guarantee I’ve read that book a hundred times. Every time I go back, I pull something different out of it because I’ve changed, and what it becomes is it’s almost like a litmus on yourself to see how you’ve evolved.


[0:10:07]


In the book, he talks about the monkey mind and the way that he said to begin to tame the monkey mind was to become the watcher, to become the observer of your thoughts, feelings, actions, and behaviors. Someone handed me this book. I was in a desperate place of misery, completely self-produced, and I had no better suggestion. So I literally started watching myself. I got the audio book version of it. I put it in the truck and I drove at a two-hour commute every day in and out of DC, and I would listen to that book and I would practice being a watcher. In neuroscience, we call it metacognition. Metacognition is our ability to literally step outside of ourselves and just observe ourselves. Right now, we’re sitting around this table and we can each pop out of ourselves and just see us kind of sitting here, right? That’s metacognition. The moment that you do that, all of a sudden you’re not producing the stress chemicals. You’re not engaging with life, producing the chemicals that you’re addicted to, that are creating that homeostatic state. You’ve taken this neutral position. As a result of that, you physiologically begin to change at a cellular level. That book, I got three months into it, and I started to notice that the monkey mind had quieted down. The average person changes their stream of thoughts six times a minute.


Lindsey: Six times a minute?


Chris: Six times a minute, changes their stream of thought. What I noticed was is that I was getting gaps, just momentary gaps of silence, and they were brief. They were five seconds long at first. And then I specifically remember one day, and this was probably now four months into it, five months into it, I was pulling on the on ramp to get on to 66 which goes, I think it’s 66 which goes to DC, and I realized that I had not had a thought in several minutes, several miles of driving. It was not long after that that I woke up at 4 a.m., closed my eyes, and changed.


Lindsey: So when did you move from DC to Colorado?


Chris: It was in 2012 and I needed to get out of DC and kind of get back to my mountains. I’ve lived here before and I needed to get back to cycling at altitude and catching trout or at least trying to catch trout. So yeah, I came back. This area is so beautiful. Every city has a pulse. Every town has a texture to it, and it only takes a couple of weeks for you to start to feel the frequency of that group, that organism that you’re a part of. For me, Colorado is a frequency. It’s a palpable feeling that I resonate with. In physics, it’s called coherence. I’m coherent with the signal here, and physiologically, it has an enormous impact on your body, not just the high altitude. I love my home.


Lindsey: It’s funny you say that because I like to arrive early, like a day at least, when we’re doing seminars to get the pulse of the city or the place. I was on a podcast like two days ago and somebody was asking me, “What’s your favorite place on Earth?” and I was like “What? I don’t have a favorite place.” Like there’s a few of them but it’s funny, like I mentioned Tanzania because Tanzania changed my life, which was in Africa but it does have a pulse. Like you get there and I felt at home immediately even though I didn’t know anybody or scared shitless. I’m like this is the motherland. This is where I got to be. And then I also said Austin, Texas, and I was like I just feel at home there. But it’s funny when I landed in Denver and I got in the car, and I got here and I walked around, I love walking around in new city. I was like this place is chill. I love this place.


Chris: I lived in Austin for a long time.


Lindsey: You did?


Chris: Yeah, I was down there for almost eight years.


Lindsey: What? Where did you live in Austin?


Chris: Just north of town. I had a beautiful, little neighborhood that we lived in, and I had the lake life and the music scene. And I tell people that Denver is Austin with mountains.


Lindsey: It is.


Chris: It’s the same pulse.


Lindsey: I was texting Logan. I was like, “It feels so much like Austin but it’s sort of not.”


Chris: Minus the 110 degrees. And their margaritas and salsa are better, I think. We have beer.


[0:15:00]


Lindsey: There’s a ton of like, oh, my God, there’s a ton of breweries here. Breweries, I can’t say that correctly.


Chris: Yeah, they’re all over the place.


Lindsey: So did that start a meditation practice immediately? How did you get into?


Chris: Once I had my experience, I immediately, like I said, wanted to understand from a scientific perspective, from Western science perspective what happened, and I was introduced to a gentleman by the name of Dr. Joe Dispenza. Joe is a chiropractor. He’s also a neuroscientist. He travels the world lecturing on basically how our thoughts and feelings impact how we experience life. He uses meditation as a tool for transforming the physiology of the body and, beyond that, experiencing whatever you experience in meditation. I’m not going to use the G word or even like that, but there is something there. There is really something there when you quiet your mind. So I get to spend quite a bit of time with Joe. I got to study under Joe and travel around with Joe and volunteer with his work.


Lindsey: How did you get to do that?


Chris: A few years ago, I literally was sitting in Sedona at dinner with Joe Dispenza and Gregg Braden. They’re two of my favorite authors, and I’m literally sitting there going “How in the hell did this happen?”


Lindsey: You’re looking down on your body.


Chris: You are. And another gentleman that I really admire his work is Bruce Lipton, Dr. Bruce Lipton. These gentlemen, they all have their angle when talking about this topic, but the commonality is that how we perceive, how we judge, how we interact, our actions with the environment around us is what creates the story of our lives. All too often — and understand, this is just one person’s perspective speaking here. My way is not the right way. It’s just the way that I’ve experienced life and what seems to work for me. What the science is saying is that how we judge the experiences in our lives determines what those experiences are, meaning we are oftentimes in a reactive place. We respond in thinking that life is happening to me. We’ve heard the mystics. We’ve heard the philosophers say that that’s not true, but now science is backing that up and saying, “Actually, that’s not how this is working.”


Your actions are actually creating your experience. That doesn’t mean that if I sit and meditate for ten hours a day and I only have positive thoughts that only good things are going to happen to me. That is not the reality of the human experience. There is something else in these mathematical and scientific equations that we don’t understand, and that’s consciousness. In my opinion, there’s no one on the planet that fully understands consciousness, and that variable is in that equation. So as much as we study, and I literally am obsessed with physics and neuroscience, I mean some people obsess over whatever. I am the guy that cannot wait to devour another book in physics or neuroscience. No matter how much information we have, we don’t have it all.


Lindsey: Yeah, not even a fraction.


Chris: We don’t, we don’t. And the moment we realize that you don’t know is the moment you actually know something. I absolutely believe that. Really, this process that I’ve been on has been you’re learning as you go, but really, it’s been a process of unlearning, unlearning and stepping outside of the analytical mind thinking that I can just piece this together, right? I’ll do my What Do I Want doc in my dream boards and I’ll align my actions to exactly what I want. That’s all I’m going to do. And I’m going to watch myself and I’m going to do exactly what Tolle said to do and who else said to do. And then things happen differently. That’s the human side of this. That’s the human experience. I think that that’s how it was put together to be. I think it can be very frustrating and maddening at times, but when you surrender into the fact that you just don’t know, all of a sudden it gets softer. Life gets easier.


Lindsey: It gets a little more manageable.


Chris: It becomes more enjoyable. When we’re not trying to predict the future by calling on our past experiences, when we stop that, all of a sudden we find ourselves in the one place that anything ever happens, and that’s the here and the now. That’s why Tolle calls it the power of now. When we stop looking forward, trying to anticipate the future by calling on our past experiences, we’re in the present moment and it feels like bliss.


[0:20:07]


Lindsey: Okay, this is good.


Female: I love how you talked about consciousness being that unknown and what I took away from The Power of Now was that that’s like by definition, right? It’s not something to be known by the analytical mind, by the thinker, that’s taking over everything as something to be felt and experienced. That book was like really powerful because I have had a lot of these experiences but never really had the words to describe what they were, and now it’s almost like holy shit.


Chris: You have a vocabulary. That’s your spot.


Female: I have the ability. It’s crazy. It’s making my meditation practice like even better and deeper than I thought it would.


Chris: In what way?


Female: There’s more visualization like not uncalled for but it kind of comes from somewhere.


Chris: Unsolicited.


Female: And it’s weird. It’s like the same thing.


Chris: You’re not doing it.


Female: It’s the same thing.


Chris: It’s happening to you.


Female: Yes, 100%, and it’s kind of like a variation of the same thing. Like there’s an entrance into infinity is like the only way I can actually put words to it, but there’s still like kind of in like the frame. There’s still like a churn, like a clutter like a white noise, like of something happening, and yet like a spaciousness. It’s hard to describe.


Chris: Absolutely, and when we go within, I’d been told the first time, I’ll take you back. When I had my out-of-body, it was the second time. The first time I tried to meditate, someone said “Go within and find your inner child.” That may be the exact words for some people to do exactly what that person is trying to get them to do, but those weren’t my words. I couldn’t relate to those. In working with Dr. Joe, Joe said “Sense and feel the space in and around your body,” and that’s called proprioception. And when we sense and feel the different space inside and around our bodies, we engage a part of our brain called the cerebellum. The cerebellum is the oldest part of the brain. It’s the processor if you think about it as a computer. It’s in the back of your head. When the cerebellum engages in sensing and feeling space, the analytical prefrontal cortex turns down. You actually can’t sense and feel space and have an analytical thought at the same time.


Female: So your thinking brain turns off.


Chris: Turns off. So instead of me telling folks when I’m instructing meditation to just relax on those thoughts, just let them go with like a passing cloud, that never works for me. What I tell them is that if you’re having a thought while in meditation, you’re not sensing and feeling. Go back to the feeling and the thought dissipates. Just go back to sensing and feeling.


And when you sense and feel, you get into a very specific brainwave state called phase-synchronous alpha. Back in 1969, a doctor, he was the head of Biofeedback for Princeton. His name is Dr. Les Fehmi. He’s an amazing gentleman. I got to study under Les last year and I’m part of his certification program for teaching phase synchronous.


What Les was able to do was he able to capture the moment that these monks were experiencing in these deep meditative states. What he saw was in the brain, the brain was producing a very specific brainwave signal called phase-synchronous alpha and basically it’s when in alpha frequency the waves start to peak in and trough in phase with one another. It’s not coherency. It’s not exact same frequency. It’s just in phase. So he was able to see what these meditators were doing. Oh, by the way, that was also the moment that the sympathetic nervous system turned off. The sympathetic nervous system is your stress system. Your autonomic nervous system is broken to two parts: the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. Sympathetic is stress. It’s to deal with fight or flight. And the parasympathetic is respiration, cellular regeneration, sexual function. It’s optimal health. It’s growth, right? That’s where we want to be. Phase-synchronous is the moment that that sympathetic nervous system shuts off and so he started teaching people how to produce this phase-synchronous state.


What we find is that when we maintain that state, when we’re holding that state of sensing or feeling the body for prolonged period of time, we drop down through alpha and we hit theta. Theta is in between alpha and delta, and delta is when you’re asleep and alpha is when you’re chilled out, sensing and feeling space. It’s also the athlete zone, FYI, alpha.


[0:25:02]


When you’re in theta, your sensory information has turned down. So your eyes are closed typically in meditation, not always but typically, and as we were saying that when you turn off that sensory information, what you find is that there’s something behind it. There’s an energy behind that, those five senses that’s just sitting there and that’s consciousness space. From a physics perspective, they’ve got the Higgs field. The Higgs field is this sea of energy that all matter is pulling from. It gives mass to matter. That field is everywhere. You can’t escape the Higgs field. It’s everything. Think of a fish in an aquarium. That fish is in water. That fish doesn’t know it’s in water but it’s in water. It’s been all its life. We’re in the Higgs field and that field of energy is what provides the electron, the energy that it needs to maintain its state around the nucleus of the atom. Everything is based upon on that energy source. We are all connected to it. That sounds an awful lot like that oneness consciousness stuff.


Lindsey: I heard — I forgot where I read this. I might have heard this — it might have been like a pregnancy retreat somewhere. Like you give birth at home, like the women that get to that alternate place where they give birth, no drugs, nothing, they’re on that theta wavelength.


Chris: That’s it. That’s where they’re at. That’s where my partner Angelina, she had heart surgery several years ago. Like I said, I’m not a Western doctor and I’m not going to pretend to know the terminology that they were using and the actual procedure, but they were basically slowing her heart down and racing it back up and slowing it down and racing it back up. And she has been meditating for 30 years and she’s a profound, I’ll say student because she appreciates that, student of meditation. But the doctor kept telling her, “Angelina, stop meditating. Stop meditating,” because her heart rate, she had pulled it down so low that they couldn’t continue with the procedure. That’s the autonomic nervous system. We’re not supposed to be able to tap into that stuff, and here she was at will controlling it.


Lindsey: The biggest nerve.


Chris: Yeah, right. So it’s amazing to see where neuroscience has taken us in our understanding of what’s going on during meditation.


Lindsey: It’s wild.


Chris: It is. We have Western words that are beautifully describing what these Eastern philosophies and spiritual leaders have been telling us for thousands of years. We just now have come up with words to say, “Oh, they were right. They were right.” Well, of course, they were right. It’s our arrogance that —


Lindsey: America has only been around for so long.


Chris: Right, good God. It’s our ego that thinks we know everything; and yet, all we’re doing is developing vocabulary. That’s it.


Lindsey: So I’m reading a book right now called The Art of Living and Dying. I don’t know if you’ve read this.


Chris: I haven’t read it.


Lindsey: By Osho, but it talks a lot about living in the present moment and how so much of the Western world, like America, fears death because we haven’t fully lived. The part about fully living is being in the here and the now. But like you just said, we literally have just put a vocabulary on things when Eastern cultures have for ages been practicing this and not been afraid of death. They’ve fully lived in the here and now. They’re not timing things. We’re the ones that are so scared about time and trying to get to a certain place at a certain time. It’s wild.


Chris: We absolutely are. And if you look at it at a very basic level, we are machines. Our bodies are machines and we are trying to survive. So the way that a machine like us operates is we try to anticipate the future, and by doing that, the only way we can do that is to call in our past experiences. So we look at watches and we look at our smart devices and we try to anticipate the economy and the weather and what our partners are going to say to us when we get home and how our jobs are going to go. All of that anticipation is one, firing that sympathetic nervous system constantly, constantly; but two, preventing us from being present.


Lindsey: Here.


[0:30:04]


Chris: I have to believe that consciousness is shifting on a global level right now. I think that we see right now in the world, we see some really awful stuff and we see some really great stuff. I mean it’s two peaks on either side. And I think that what we are challenged with from a Western culture is to recognize that we have a little extra work to do to pull us back into that present moment. We have to go to work. We have to pay our bills. We kind of bought into that whole system and how we approach that will be that next evolution of our consciousness.


Female: Right. Sorry, this is so amazing. Just thinking about the evolution of the nervous system, like the autonomic nervous system because have you looked into Stephen Porges and like his Polyvagal Theory? We have evolved at a collective sense of safety. We make judgments and we act on those judgments because that’s what’s led to our survival here and now, right? That’s our nature. That’s part of evolutionary history.


Chris: It’s in our belief.


Female: Yeah. And then we get to this point of having this idea of collective safety which gives us parasympathetic and gives us this optimal growth digestion metabolism like wisdom, all of these things. But yet, the selective pressure right now, like you’re saying, is this idea of chronic stress and like the chatter that never stops. I look at this as like this is really cool. This is like a natural selection in action.


Chris: It is.


Female: Right? It’s either what do you do with this chronic stress? Are we going to give into this? Are we going to transcend watch the thinker kind of evolve? I 100% agree with what you’re talking about. We’re in this evolution of consciousness right now.


Chris: We are.


Female: Totally. It makes so much sense. It’s so neat.


Chris: It does, and a lot of it has to simply do with we now have words. In Western culture, we have words to bridge the gap that had separated Western science from religion and spirituality. That was done back in, what, the 17th century? The 18th century, I believe. That’s when it was actually separation between the church and science. Now, with the words that we’re developing with neuroscience and physics and our understanding, it’s not that we’re learning really anything new. We are, to a certain extent, but what we’re doing is we are giving the general public words that they can relate to, that allow them to step through the same door that a Buddhist monk at 26,000 feet steps through every day.


Lindsey: I love this idea of words and you and I have talked about this in previous conversations about this idea of sharedness and like there needing to be two. Can you tell everyone about this? This is so cool.


Chris: Yeah, it’s kind of cool. What we find, we’ve heard, in spirituality is that it’s around relationship, right? What we’re also finding now is that in physics, it’s about relationship. It’s about how two signals interact with one another. And the point where, whether it’s an electromagnetic wave or it’s two cells, the point where they interact, that’s the point where the information resides. That’s the point at which we judge and experience. That’s the point that we take in the actual information and do something with it. It’s when it relates to something else. It’s not when it’s just on its own as an individual signal. It’s when it crosses another signal. I think that that’s a profound analogy to what’s going on right now on a global level where for me, I’m an introvert. I’m a big cyclist so I like to get on my bike and get off on my mountains and pedal, pedal, pedal and then when I’m done, I get in my river and I fly fish by myself, like that’s my gig.


But that’s not what is needed right now, I don’t think. I think what’s needed right now is relationship. People like me are not necessarily great at it. It’s not our go-to instinct. I certainly will speak for myself and say that I’m being pulled more into community than I ever have in my entire life and I don’t think that it’s coincidence. I don’t think it’s because I’m 42 years old. I don’t think it’s any of that. I think it’s because there is that frequency, kind of like we talked at the beginning here of a city having a frequency.


[0:35:02]


Well, the human organism has a frequency as well. We have our regimes all over the place and we have our states and we have our local and state governments, and we have so many different ways to segregate ourselves. But when you really look at the human organism, it will only survive together. It will. It will only survive once we start. That may sound new age, but I don’t think that’s new age at all. I think that’s very much based in, whether it’s analytics, whether it’s physics or biochemistry, it’s all pointing to the same thing that if we don’t begin to function like an organism, one organism, this organism isn’t going to be around forever.


Lindsey: Yeah, 100%. What kind of advice do you have for, let’s say, a collective organism because I was just talking to Erica today who is BIRTHFIT Wisconsin and I was telling her BIRTHFIT is an organism. BIRTHFIT is this movement. It’s a living organism. It’s going to be around, hopefully, much longer than I’m here, than Mel is here. And for us, our goal is to bring this consciousness, this awareness to the birth process, to the motherhood transition. So can you speak on like a living organism or some advice you would have for us?


Chris: Sure. I think I’ll answer the question this way. As a coach, one of the tools that I help people develop is this sense of feeling, feeling life, and it used to be called intuition but that’s kind of a scary, I don’t know, intangible place.


Lindsey: Hocus pocus.


Chris: Right. It’s like that. It’s a word that just doesn’t carry a lot of weight in a Western mind, and I’ll say in my Western mind. But feeling, on the other hand, does. Feeling does. At any given moment during the day, if I were to stop flipping through my iPhone or sending an email or me doing whatever I’m doing, reading a book, if I were to stop and just go, wait a minute, I’m going to pay attention to how I’m feeling, I would pick up on frequencies that I’m picking up in my environment. So what I encourage people to do is I give them something called the love compass. The love compass, it only points in one direction and it points towards love. It also sounds very new age but isn’t.


What it does is it simplifies, and I tell folks to follow what you love. Follow the feeling of enthusiasm. Follow the feeling of joy. Follow those tangible feelings and just see what shows up. Start making decisions that lead you down that path versus the path is fear-based, which would be something that are you making that decision because you’re feeling the connection, that love, that pull to one side? Or are you making that decision because you’re afraid not to? What I find is that when I choose the love feeling, the joy feeling, it leads me to community. It leads me to the organism. It leads me to the organism that vibrates at the frequency that I’m trying to call in. It’s not just me showing up at a group. It’s me showing up in a group that’s on the same frequency that I am.


Lindsey: You want to be there and everybody wants to be there.


Chris: Yes, but it’s a feeling. It’s not just that I’m getting information from this group or they’re showing me something that I’ve never seen before. That may be true too, but when you leave that group at the end, then when you step back into that real world space, all of a sudden you realize, “Wow, I was vibrating at a different frequency. I was feeling that all weekend. I was feeling that with that group of people.” And when you come out of it, that’s when you really get hit with the wow, this is different, this moment is different than that moment.


Lindsey: Makes sense.


Chris: Did that help answer that at all?


Lindsey: Yeah, for sure, for sure. Look at Mel’s face. So what would be your advice is you’re operating on this higher frequency with this love connection and all these awesome humans, but then you come back to DC life?


Chris: And I do love DC. I want to be very clear.


Lindsey: I like DC too.


Chris: I like DC a lot. I don’t like the traffic. The traffic drove me nuts.


[0:40:00]


Lindsey: But you come back to like maybe you’re in that in-between state, like you were at some point, where you’re like “Oh, my gosh, how do I get my whole life to vibrate at this higher frequency?” Because I know there’s probably more than majority of people listening that are like, “Yeah, I get this and BIRTHFIT seminars are awesome, and I elevate at a higher frequency, but then I come back and how do I implement this in my everyday life?”


Chris: Absolutely. That’s the million-dollar question. I mean we go to these workshops on the weekend and we hear great speakers and we get all jazzed up and we go home and it’s like “Oh, my God, I got to go back to return to this.” What I tell folks is first off to just stop. Stop. Stop chasing this workshop or this guru or this book or whatever.


Lindsey: Bouncing around.


Chris: Stop bouncing around and just stop and get very clear on what you want to experience in your life. I actually have my clients write down a document called the What Do I Want document. In this document, it is literally just free writing for them to say what do you want to experience in life? It’s not based upon moral. It’s not based upon right or wrong, or increasing your banking account or decreasing it or finding this perfect match or that. It’s not any of that. It’s a simple question of what do you want.


Once you can begin to identify even a couple, just one thing, what you can then do is begin to align your actions to that, and you begin to step, one step at a time, towards that new concept of what I want to experience in life. When they’re figuring, because the first thing is “I don’t know what I want,” and so I say, “Well, what do you enjoy doing in life?” Angelina, once again my partner, she works with toddlers. Instead of asking these children, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” she asks them, “What do you want to feel when you grow up?”


Lindsey: That’s powerful.


Chris: It’s powerful because now you’re teaching these children to be first off, aware of their feelings, their feelings, not what’s happening out here in the story, but how they’re feeling and beginning to take action based upon those feelings. So same concept applies as an adult. What do you want to feel? Okay, you want to feel joy? What do you already do in your life that produces that feeling? Go do it. For me, it’s riding my bike. What I realized was here I’m running around being a life coach and running around being a software engineer and blah, blah, blah, blah, and I was neglecting riding my bike because I thought “Well, I don’t have time and I should really be doing this.” You know what, it’s my job. It’s my responsibility, to me, first off, and then secondly to all the fellow organisms that interact with me, it’s my responsibility to ride my bike because that is what enables me to be the best at everything else and to offer the best version of me. But it starts with following that initial feeling, and then once you follow that, you pick the next thing. You pick the next thing that you want. You go follow that and you start following feelings and once you’ve been on that feeling path, you’ll go back to that What Do I Want document and you’ll see that all of it has changed.


Lindsey: I know exactly what I want.


Chris: You know that you don’t need this and you don’t want this, and what actually starts to happen is you start to whittle things off. The list gets shorter. It gets more narrow. And when it narrows, now you’ve allowed space for new things to show up and that’s when the transformation occurs. When you’re not chasing everything, you’re focused on maybe one or two feelings, and then things start to minimalize and new things show up because there’s space for them to show up.


Lindsey: Right, we ask our moms like how do they want to feel during birth.


Chris: Beautiful.


Lindsey: But like you just said, everybody has these different feelings of how they want to feel, and it narrows it down.


Chris: Yes. And what we typically would do is “Well, tell me the story. Tell me.” And just to everyone listening, I’ve never given birth so I don’t know. I’m certainly not an expert in this field at any means. But what we typically do is we formulate these stories.


Lindsey: Everybody’s got stories


Chris: What do you want to experience? And I don’t know. Like I said, I’ve never given birth so I don’t know what that story would be in my mind. But when you release from the story and just focus on the feeling, now the story can evolve and what typically shows up is better than you ever could have pieced together on your own, and happened because you followed a feeling and you released into the unknown.


[0:45:12]


Female: I’m feeling really affirmed right now because you’ve literally described an exercise that we do in our BIRTHFIT stuff because, like what you’re saying, you just gave us the living life forwards paradigm, right? If you want to create anything in your life, you have to put the future possibility of being or feeling something here now and create that in the now. That’s like you’re doing and you come to find the having just takes care of itself.


Chris: That’s right. It shows up.


Female: We often have that backwards. We say “Well, first.”


Chris: We wait.


Female: I need to have this first and then I can do those things, and then I can finally be the feeling that I was looking for.


Chris: That’s exactly right.


Female: Like holy shit, yeah.


Chris: And even the science supports that. We are co-creating this thing. We are co-creating. Life is not just happening to us. We call them synchronicities. Coincidences, a lot of people call them. We’ve all had those experiences that simply that was too random. There’s no way that could have happened. Well, there was a frequency. You had a thought. You broadcast the frequency out. It interacted with another frequency that matched it, and you experienced it. That’s physics. But it also says be the person you want to be before you are the person that you want to be.


Female: So I’m reflecting on my second birth right now as you’re saying this, like holy cow. So I put out there that I wanted to feel it all. That was my intent of a natural birth, right? And as I’m thinking back, I got exactly that, like I got the spectrum during birth.


Chris: You are a brave woman.


Female: But it was not the feeling that I was necessarily anticipating, like I got the excitement and we moved into the hospital for my second birth, and it was a beautiful natural hospital birth. But you get to a point of transition where the self-doubt and the fear and like everything just starts slowing and you’re like, “I don’t know if I can do this. What was I thinking trying to do this naturally?” And then you go into this like that meditative space. I remember the moment of transition where I was like I can’t do another contraction right now, and I told Anthony, I was like, “I’m done with the contractions,” and I laid back down and I got up to move with it. I was like, “Nope, I’m not having this contraction right now,” and I laid down and I fell asleep for four minutes or something and I woke up and then everything changed. I don’t know. I don’t remember. It was so bizarre. You have to just surrender into the now.


Chris: That’s the word. I was waiting to see if you’re going to say it.


Female: It was. It was this unbelievable like sense of surrender, dropping into like I just, I don’t even care what happens anymore, and then that sense of euphoria and just the intense joy and like holy shit, I just birthed this baby. It was stuff like that was it. I felt everything. It was just so weird. I didn’t mean to make that a story time.


Chris: No, that was beautiful, and I’m so glad that you used the word surrender because that is the hardest part of all of this, in my humble opinion, the human experience. It’s not getting up and going to work. It’s not trying to be the best parent or the best friend or the best lover or whatever I can possibly be. It is surrendering into the unknown. In meditation, when you are deep into alpha, and folks listening here, you’re meditators, you’ll know what I’m talking about here. You reach a point where you have one little thought that’s just dangling on, and it’s just dancing around and it just seems to be right there. When you surrender into that last thought, you can feel it. There’s a physiological response in your body when you hit that deep, coherent, alpha-synchronous state.


Like I said, I’m a software engineer and I wrote a program in iOS, and Apple program, mobile app program that produces biofeedback with the Muse headset to cue someone the moment they hit phase-synchronous alpha. I’ve spent three years developing this app. So I’ve spent hundreds of hours in alpha. It is a palpable feeling that the moment you hit that space, and the reason why I’m making such a big deal out of this is that it’s the same feeling of surrender in life as it is in meditation.


[0:50:20]


So what happens is you can take that sensory knowledge that you developed when you start to understand what it feels like to be in phase synchronous alpha, and you can be walking around in your day and start to be the watcher. Observe yourself that you’re a little bit amped up. You can instantly call on that memory of phase synchronous and how it feels and you can surrender into the moment. I swear to you, that is the moment that in my life I see all things change is when I consciously just take a deep breath, exhale, and I feel that sensation of just letting go. It’s not giving up. It’s not don’t do anything. They didn’t say, “Oh, just go home. You’ve got this baby halfway out.” No. You don’t just stop. You stop trying to control it. That’s the surrender. It’s not giving up and not doing. It’s not sitting on the sofa doing nothing. It is surrendering into the I don’t know and embracing that.


Female: So Eckhart Tolle in his book, because I just finished it today, and the whole last part was on surrender. There were two things that really stuck out for me. Number one was when you can surrender, that’s the place that you can actually choose compassion. For a lot of people, it’s a very difficult choice to make. We live in a fear-based collective consciousness. We’re very reactive and how do you choose compassion, genuine compassion, from a place like that except for in that state of surrender? And then the last sentence of his book was “How do I know that I’ve surrendered?” And he says “When you no longer need to ask the question.”


Chris: There it is.


Female: That was like —


Chris: It’s amazing.


Female: That was awesome.


Chris: And it kind of gets into that space that you said earlier about with consciousness you reach a point where the mind simply can’t understand it. It’s not meant to be grasped by the mind. Physics has the same concepts where you get to a point when you go deep enough into the quantum space where you can’t come up with an equation that actually works out to make any sense. It’s a complete unknown. It’s an improbability. So it’s the same concept that once you realize that you really don’t have control or you don’t need control, there’s this whole other layer that shows up but it takes that final little nugget of surrender of control, and when you can release from that. At first it’s just momentary. Here’s the other thing, we all go back and forth. I certainly do on a daily basis. Catch myself all the time, hourly, jumping back and forth. I’ve finished a book and in the book I wrote that I find it no coincidence that the word “aware” and the word “awake” are very similar. When you are aware of who you’re being, your thoughts, feelings, and actions and behaviors, that’s the moment that you wake up. That’s the moment. And from there, anything is possible. Anything is possible.


Another great book on surrender I think is written by Michael Singer, I think that’s right, The Surrender Experiment. It’s brilliant. He spent several years just going “yes” to life, literally. Someone would come up and ask him to go to dinner and he didn’t like the person, he would previously come up with an excuse to not go, and in this new phase that he was in, he was saying “yes” and he said himself, he spoke the word “yes” all the way into acquiring an enormous amount of land and then basically this center for meditation and it was all from saying “yes”. It’s a great read on surrender.


Lindsey: Wow, that’s pretty awesome. I’m going to have to read this book, the Eckhart Tolle one. Whenever you’re talking about that, it reminded me of my angel experience. I had a cat. I still have a cat. I think she’s present around me all the time. For those listening, they know about Angel. She was with me for 20 years. When we got home from Mexico, well, before we left for Mexico, I knew like she was trying to tell me something, and at least a month before she was trying to tell me something. And then when we got home, she was like half there.


[0:55:01]


I’ve been a doula for birth, so I’ve watched and been present for experiences like Mel’s, and so much of life and death are the same, like the entering and exiting. While you all were just talking about surrendering to the process and the compassion and everything, it was freaking crazy because let’s say that was on Sunday and I was talking to Angel and Angel has been part of every experience I’ve had since I was a freshman in high school, which is crazy. She’s moved across country with me. She’s gone through trauma, shitty boyfriends, like that sort of thing.


But when I came home — she’s never been sick. She was a six and a half pound white Himalayan cat with a smush face, all the personality. It was her time. She basically communicated to me about a month before that when it’s her time to go that she didn’t want any, like don’t give me medication. That’s not the way to go. So when we got home, and I’ve shared this at the BIRTHFIT summit and only with a few people, but I phoned my friend who’s basically a death midwife, like she’s gone over into Eastern cultures and figured out how to assist with dying and stuff. She basically talked me through the whole thing. It was wild because if you’re trying to control a situation, like at first I was so sad. I was crying. Like that Sunday night, I was like, “This can’t be happening. No, she’s supposed to live till infinity.” And then I talked to her and she was like, “You have to give her permission.” I was like, “Well, that’s not going to work. That’s impossible.”


Chris: I don’t give you permission. Don’t go towards the light.


Lindsey: Yeah, like no. But it’s like I laid there with her and I was like, okay, I’m going to go into that, try to meditate here, do this thing, and I hold her little paw and I just laid there with her. It was crazier than a birth I’ve been to. It was gnarly. I had to give her permission like four times because I probably didn’t mean it the first one or the second one. But when we got to like 3 or 4 a.m. and after the four or five permissions, I got to that alternate state of just being and it was crazy. I didn’t know what time of day that was. I didn’t know what was going on. We had piano music playing. We had candles and incense burning and stuff like that. I told people like I told you all at the BIRTHFIT summit like I never seen an organism be so courageous, just because you allowed that space for them. It gets me every time. But we were there and it was like you get your emotions. You get your ego, your stories out of the way. And for her, she was just so beautiful when she transitioned. It’s so true. You just got to give up control.


Chris: I loved it when you said you stepped out of the story. That’s it. When we can step out of the story, there is something there.


Lindsey: I told people, people were apologizing, like “I’m so sorry she left.” I’m like “She’s not gone. She’s just transitioned into –“


Chris: Just a different frequency.


Lindsey: Yeah, and I feel her all the time. Yes, I’m sad because I can’t pet her and I can’t squeeze her and I can’t hold her like a baby, but she’s still here with me. And to witness that experience was —


Chris: It’s profound.


Lindsey: Yeah, but I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I was trying to control the situation or if I wouldn’t have been meditating or allowed myself that space.


Chris: It’s happening to that field that all things reside from.


Lindsey: And I so want that for women that are birthing or women that are assisting women birthing and to allow that safe space to just be. Whatever happens happens. I love that. Thanks for sharing that.


Chris: That’s beautiful. That’s beautiful. I’m going to be crying over here a little too.


Lindsey: I don’t cry a lot, but if I cry, it usually has to do with Angel, my white cat.


Chris: That’s beautiful.


Lindsey: So if you were telling, explaining to somebody — and I’m thinking of my mom in particular because she probably does not listen to The BIRTHFIT Podcast, but she’s very religious. How would you explain consciousness?


[1:00:16]


Chris: It’s a challenging one. I grew up in a very traditional Christian family. My parents are members of the church and my mom feeds the homeless. They both do. They feed the homeless every week. The church is an integral part of their life, probably the most significant part of their lives. They’re in their 70s at this point. I think that religion is great for many reasons. One is it’s community. Community comes together and they’re all, in most cases, heart-centric, heart-forward with their intentions. I think where religion fails is when we put up walls that segregate one religion from the other. One is right, one is wrong.


So for me, I’m not affiliated with any religion. I’m affiliated with all religions which is would be, in my opinion, consciousness. I think it’s important for people in their own personal evolution to decide where consciousness of God or Allah or Christ or Buddha or whoever, whatever pillar, whatever road sign you’re following, whatever road sign you’re following, is to walk it, but walk it in an aware state. Don’t walk it because you’re afraid not to. Don’t walk it because someone else is insisting that it’s the right path. Walk it because you genuinely feel like it is. If that is the feeling, it’s probably the right place for you, whether it’s a religion or it’s outside of a religion.


It’s just when we start judging, pointing the finger across the fence, that’s when we’re now engaged in the external story. Life is now happening to us. We’re now projecting the future, right? We can go back into our neuroscience and physics there and it’s called religion or whatever we want to call it. It can be called anything. A wall is a wall is a wall. A barrier is a barrier is a barrier. We have many different words for it.


Lindsey: I think, like you said, oftentimes people get in religion or, I don’t want to say trapped, trapped might be the wrong word, but they get wrapped up in it because of the fear.


Chris: Right. I grew up Baptist and it was a very fundamentalist Baptist. I grew up in Southern Virginia or Central Virginia in the mountains. It was pretty hardcore. Wow, I sound like a terrible person. I definitely have to go home and pray or do something. It was very fear-based and that’s not me taking a shot at any form of religion. I’m just giving my own personal background of it.


I’ve come to a different place of understanding where I am in my life now, which is I follow love. Any time that something is not out of love, it’s out of alignment with who I want to be. That’s not to say that my decisions are all right. They’re not. They’re mine. They’re my decisions. And the way that I align my choices, hopefully, most of the time, is towards this feeling of love. So if someone is telling me that I need to go out there and try to change someone, convert someone, no, I don’t do that. That doesn’t feel like love to me. That feels more like fear. So I once again go back to that love compass tool. Are you making decisions based upon love or are you making decisions based upon fear? Be consciously aware and start choosing love and see what happens. And when you do choose fear, choose it in aware state. Realize it. You just chose fear. It’s fine. We all do. We all choose fear. But just be aware that you did it so that later, when nothing comes out of it, it’s not so shocking. Wait a minute, I did choose that path about three weeks ago. To me, it all boils down to being aware, being a watcher, using metacognition, watching yourself versus watching the story.


Lindsey: Right, being the observer. So tell us about this Muse thing. You’ve touched on it.


Chris: It’s awesome. It’s so much fun. About two and a half years ago, about three years ago now, I started researching companies all over the world, trying to find a consumer-grade EEG headband that was at a price point that wasn’t $20,000.


[1:05:05]


Lindsey: Outrageous.


Chris: The reason why I got into this is I was working with Joe, Dr. Joe Dispenza, and Joe, he’s an amazing, amazing researcher. In his advanced workshops, which I would encourage anybody to go to, they are absolutely fantastic, in his advanced workshops, he brings a team of neuroscientists with him and he has a team of upwards of 30 people at any given time. What he’s doing is in this room he’s got 800 people meditating and he’s monitoring all of the electromagnetic signals that are being produced in the room and he’s hooking individuals up to EEGs, heart rate monitors, taking blood, looking at everything. I think now he’s measuring telomeres off the DNA to see what physiologically is going on in these rooms where there are a lot of people that are highly trained in meditation and they’re all focused on a common intention: what is happening from a scientific perspective?


So in working with this team, we’ve been able to identify the brainwave states that people are in. They figured this out over a decade ago at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.


Lindsey: Wisconsin?


Chris: University of Wisconsin at Madison, right? So they brought in these monks and they put the monks in MRIs and hooked them up to EEGs and they had them meditate, and they saw physiologically what was going on. So we have that data. So now, with these at home EEG devices, software engineers like myself can capture this raw brainwave activity and write algorithms that provide a biofeedback chime to train you into those brainwave states. So what used to take me months to train a client to get into phase-synchronous alpha, that deep meditative state, I can put this device on someone and teach them how to do it in 20 minutes. I think after the podcast, someone here in this room is going to get that device put on them.


It’s amazing. The folks at Muse, it’s a Canadian company and there’s a ton of neuroscience going on in Canada, they’re doing an amazing stuff up there. What I built an app for, the iPhone, and I’m going to release it here probably in late September. I’m going to release it for free. I’m just pushing it out there and what it’s going to do is it’s literally going to provide you biofeedback chimes the moment that you hit phase-synchronous alpha. What you’ll discover is that phase-synchronous alpha is a very specific feeling in the body, and just like any form of muscle memory, we can train the human body to produce that feeling on will and we’ve seen people can produce phase synchronous alpha in just seconds once they’ve been trained on it.


When I’m doing lectures, I get asked a lot “I don’t know if I’m doing it right.” First off, that’s a terrible question. There’s no right or wrong to meditation but what they’re asking is “Am I doing what the monks are doing?” and I can finally answer it and say yes or no, you are with this device.


Female: Does the chime trigger the analytical part of the brain at all?


Chris: It does just very barely. I developed these chimes very specifically. I did all the music, all the sound effects for it. What it’s doing is it’s keeping you in alpha, out of theta delta. So it’s just enough sensory input, audio input, that keeps you aware, but then you just start to drift back down so I got you teetering, I hold you right in that phase, synchronous space. That’s a good question and it’s a valid, and I’m writing a new algorithm now to produce lucid dreaming which is a different brainwave state. It’s more deep theta, high delta where you’re tipping between that, and so that’s right. So that’s going to be the next version.


Lindsey: Like how do I prepare for birth?


Chris: I am working with a fertility clinic here in Denver. They’re using this with their clients to train them on how to turn down the sympathetic nervous system because that’s a big part of not being fertile. If you’re stressed out, your body is not trying to reproduce.


Lindsey: It’s not going to conceive.


Chris: Right, it’s not going to conceive so this device — and I’m not here trying to sell this thing. I love it and I love it as a fun tool, as a fun toy. But it has profound effects on the body physiologically.


Lindsey: I can see that.


Chris: Once again, I’ll refer back to my — I’m not going to use the word — she’d kill me if I said “guru”. I just said it, didn’t I?


[1:10:00]


I’ll refer back to Angelina. Angelina has been meditating for over 30 years. At one point, she was meditating 10 hours a day. I mean, this woman is highly trained in meditation and the first time I put the device on her, she said, “Go buy me one.”


Lindsey: How long did it take her?


Chris: Five minutes. She did it in five minutes. What was beautiful was the algorithm that I had written, it fired when she hit her known state of, she calls it the lean back, when she can lean out of her body and she basically loses the five senses and she hits that space, that consciousness space behind and she called it the lean back. The moment she hits that lean back, it chimes. So there are a lot of different words, right? There are a lot of different words for it but it’s a word. Some people it resonates with, some people it doesn’t. But it’s the same brainwave state. That’s the beauty of it.


Lindsey: So where do people get one of these?


Chris: You can get it from my website, coachtate.com, and I think I’m selling them for like $220.


Lindsey: Oh, that’s not bad. I thought you were going to sell it for $500.


Chris: No, no, no, no. I went through a lot of companies. I interviewed over 30 companies that are producing these to find out which ones were, first off, capturing high grade signals, but secondly, it has to be affordable. I mean if you’re trying to open a door for someone, it doesn’t need to be a thousand dollars in order to open that door.


Lindsey: To buy it, it’s got to be reasonable.


Chris: This was the right tool and it’s amazing. I can capture all of my clients. All of my clients use it and I capture their brainwave activity on a daily basis, and I can pull up my portal, and I can see their brainwave activity as they were meditating during the day. So it’s an amazing tool and I see this thing going into many different arenas. You look at the NFL, if the NFL could capture on a daily state the brainwave activities of their players. I played college football and I had a massive brain injury which ended my college career. That’s kind of how I got into this a long time ago into understanding the brain. That’s a little deeper than just seven years ago, but I know what this would have done for me as I was coming out of my recovery. So when the Broncos start knocking the door. They’re just down the street. You can actually see the stadium if you were to climb that tree. It’s pretty cool. It’s cool. It’s an amazing tool.


Lindsey: And then, they can find the app on just —


Chris: Yeah, it will be on the app store. Like I said, I’ll probably release it in September. You can go to my website and sign up for the newsletter and I’ll let you know when it goes out, but it will be called the Awareness App. That’s what it’s called because it’s training you to be aware, and I’m going to put a lot of coaching stuff in it. I’ll have guided meditations. You can use other people’s guided meditations with my app and the biofeedback is over top of that so you can — for example, Joe does a lot of meditations, guided meditations. He does a brilliant job of them and he releases them often, and so you can use one of Joe’s meditations and use the Muse with the app and Joe can guide you and here you’re getting the feedback. I’ll put a couple of my own guided meditations on it. It’s fun.


Lindsey: Awesome.


Female: You have a great meditative voice.


Chris: Thank you. Become aware of the space.


Lindsey: What does a normal day or week look like for you?


Chris: Well, it’s changed recently. Recently I’ve taken on a new technology project so I’m doing a lot of coding now and I’m still working with a couple of clients. But I need novelty. I just crave it. I always do my research but I spent the last four years researching 12, 16 hours a day and I needed a break. And then put coaching on top of that, it was just a lot. So I stepped back and working on a new technology project and getting ready to release this Muse app so that’s a big project in itself. Still coaching, so taking the occasional new client, but I’m really specific with who I work with just because.


Lindsey: Like who would you work with in case they’re listening?


Chris: In case you’re out there. I work with folks that are typically not brand new to this work. It doesn’t necessarily mean meditation that they’re brand new. I mean, meditation, you can start that at any point, but folks that they’ve been reading. They’ve been starting to connect the dots a little bit between what the new agers and the religions and the spirituality and the physics and the neuroscientists are saying. They’ve been to the websites, they’ve been to a workshop, but they just need to piece it together.


[1:15:15]


That’s what I help do. I help connect the dots and then help guide them and develop tools on how to actually live this stuff. That’s the difference because workshops are great, and I spent many years going to workshop and I go to one after the next after the next after the next. And what happened was I was becoming a seeker. I was becoming a seeker of knowledge versus integrating the knowledge that I already had and developing those tools. So what I encourage my clients to do, and I practice this myself, is I don’t go to the workshops anymore. I’m just working on the tools that I have because I think that I have a good set right now that are going to last me quite some time. Like I said, that doesn’t mean that I’m right with my approach. It’s just what works for me.


I’m a pretty happy guy. I’m a very blessed guy. So really, it’s just me saying this is what works for me. If you want to try it, this is how I do it and these are the steps. I work with folks. I only ask that people work with me three times. It’s three three-hour sessions and then after that, they’re done. And if they want to continue, they can, but they will have, after three sessions, they will have all of the neuroscience, the physics and the understanding of meditation to live it. You don’t have to spend a lifetime in a cave at 20,000 feet.


Lindsey: Yeah, with monks.


Chris: And you don’t have to throw thousands and thousands of dollars every year to go around the world and try to learn new stuff. What you have to do is actually learn to use the tools that you’ve already encountered. You’re not going to know whether it’s going to work or not until you actually do it. And that’s what the Tolle work in DC did for me was that I actually, for the first time, did the stuff they were telling me to do. Oh, my God, it worked.


Lindsey: You’re recommending the present moment.


Chris: That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s all we’re doing here is just saying be present. Observe yourself. Notice how your actions are aligning to or not aligning to what you want and become intimate with your thoughts, feelings, actions, and behaviors. All of that is done through observation of self, metacognition, being the watcher. It’s the key. It is the key. In my opinion, there is no other way to change unless you are aware of your own, current actions. We live 95% of our lives in our subconscious state of being. That means that 95% of the day, our waking state, we are completely unaware of the thoughts, feelings, actions, and behaviors we are exhibiting, 95% of the time.


So how do we get to work and how do we function? Well, we function off our past experiences. It’s called our beliefs. So our beliefs are these automotive programs that literally run our lives 95% of the time. And to go one more layer into that, 90% of the 95% subconscious beliefs that we live by, they were beliefs instilled in us before the age of seven by our caretakers. So 90% of the time, we are living our lives through the eyes of a seven-year-old based upon the beliefs of our parents. And the only way to pop out of that 95% is to be consciously aware which pulls you to into the 5% and once you’re in the 5% aware state, then you got something to work with. You’re aware. You’re awake.


Lindsey: How do you start your day?


Chris: Typically, I will start my day with a brief meditation. On days that I have a little more time or I’ve chosen to have a little more time, I’ll do a longer meditation. I’m an early bird so I like to be at least awake by five, and consciously making choices at that point. I begin work very early. It’s when my, for whatever reason, my analytical brain is firing on all cylinders, bright and early, and I try to capture that moment. I do several meditations during the day even for five minutes. Even five minutes in phase-synchronous alpha lasts for several hours afterwards. So once you quiet that sympathetic nervous system, and for folks listening out here, when you hear me say phase synchronous alpha, that’s me saying your sympathetic nervous system, your fight or flight system is turning off. That thing will stay turned off for several hours.


Lindsey: That’s pretty awesome.


Chris: It’s amazing. So just stopping for five minutes, and this is what I do when I’m working somewhere or with a client or something, I’ll stop for five minutes, close my eyes, bring all of my awareness to my body, and I’ll just sit there.


[1:20:08]


And then I hit that phase-synchronous state and I know I’ve got that state for several hours to come. Not necessarily phase synchronous, but sympathetic quieted down significantly. And now, parasympathetic is on. Now, we’re regenerating cells. Now, we’re healing our body. Our body is taking over in a much more healthy manner.


Lindsey: I like that.


Chris: And then I typically will always end the day with meditation. I like to end the day with just a good sit.


Lindsey: A good sit. I actually, in the last month, I’ve been trying to do that more because I was one of those that “oh, let me get my meditation in the morning” but then I realize who says I have to only do this in the morning? Like let’s put this somewhere else because I definitely needed this somewhere else.


Chris: And it’s a feeling. I tell people don’t sit until you’re called to sit. Don’t make sitting into just another regimen that you’re going to guilt yourself into doing or not doing. That defeats the whole purpose. You could actually miss a day of meditating. What happened if that? What would happen? Well, just be aware that you made that choice and decide whether you want to choose that again. But don’t guilt yourself to death about it. Meditation is not a diet. It’s not a diet. It’s a choice. It’s a lifestyle. That’s what we’re talking about here. It’s a way of living a life and it happens to be a very effective tool for helping me align to the best version of what I think myself as being.


Lindsey: That’s cool. I know, we’ve already kept him for like an hour and 20 minutes.


Chris: I love it. This is my life. I love this stuff. My life has changed from this work and I’ve seen thousands of people’s lives change from this work. It’s not a magic bullet. There is no magic formula despite what a lot of people believe. I don’t believe it. It isn’t a magic equation. I believe that you become aware of who you’re being, become aware of the choices that you’re making. If you don’t like the choices that you’re making, choose something else. Don’t beat yourself up about it and then just do your best and release into it. See what shows up. Stop trying to control everything. We all do it. We’re conditioned to do it. Take a break from that a little bit. Just have some fun. Sit in the unknown. See how that feels.


Lindsey: Sit in the unknown. Have some fun. What would be maybe your top three or five book recommendations?


Chris: Oh, wow. Now that’s the hardest question that you’ve asked so far.


Lindsey: I was going to say one but I give you three or five.


Chris: So I’ll say this, and once again, I’m not trying to plug the website but I’ll plug my website. At coachtate.com at the top, you’ll see a reference material section. If you click on it, it has an incomplete, I’m not going to say complete, it’s definitely an incomplete list of my favorite authors, videos, research papers. It’s all out there. I have it categorized so you can pick like whether you want learn physics or quantum or consciousness or God or whatever it is you want to look at.


Five favorite books. Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, Dr. Joe Dispenza. Amazing. You’re going to learn neuroscience, you’re going to learn the physics, and you’re going to learn the meditation approach that Joe uses. Joe is an outstanding person. I love Joe. Bruce Lipton, Biology of Belief. You’re going to see at a cellular level what’s going on. And when I say cellular, I mean genetic level. We used to be told that our genes were turned on and that we were victims of our body. We know now that that’s not the case.


Lindsey: Can you elaborate on that a little bit?


Chris: Sure. So the work of Bruce Lipton, Bruce was an amazing researcher and he is an amazing researcher and speaker now. What his research shows us is that in fact, genes are not turned on. They’re not just randomly firing off proteins into the body. Those genes are being signaled by the chemical signals called neurotransmitters that are coming to the outer part of the cell. I’m not going to go too deep into it because we have been talking for an hour and a half and I don’t want to make the podcast too long, but the cellular membrane in the cell is surrounded these receptors and they’re basically doors, and it’s a lock and key mechanism.


[1:25:00]


So the signal that comes to the cellular membrane is the key and if there is a lock, there’s a door on that that matches that key, it will open to allow that signal to come in. And then from that point is when the genes produce proteins and genes triggered. But the key here is, I say key, the signal that’s coming to the cell, that is a signal that we produce based upon how we’ve judged an experience we are having in life. So in other words, it’s how we judge our stories, it’s how we judge our interactions in our life that are signaling our genes.


Lindsey: It’s freaking brilliant.


Chris: And then we go back to the fact that 95% of the time we’re living by our old belief systems and those beliefs are triggering those chemicals, and that’s why he calls it Biology of Belief. So Biology of Belief, Bruce Lipton. Another book, I love this particular speaker because he is a Franciscan priest that talks about Christ. He talks about religion minus the dogma. So you hear this 70 year old and his name is Richard Rohr and the lecture, my favorite one is “True Self, False Self” and he’s talking about the concept the ego, this concept of me, who I think I am versus who I actually am. He approaches it through the words of religion, but he’s a no-nonsense, no-bullshit kind of guy, and he just gets straight to it. It’s a beautiful listen to Richard. So that’s three.


Four would be The Field by Lynne McTaggart. The Field will give you a very broad history. So Lynne is not a scientist. She is a journalist. She basically documented the history of quantum physics. So how we got to this point of knowing that all things are coming out of this primordial suit called the Higgs field and how a lot of scientists are saying that light is the primary form of communication in the body, not chemical interaction. All that stuff has been an evolution of science.


Lindsey: Light, not sound?


Chris: It’s the speed of light. Think about it. If you’re a gymnast and you’re running down the — I don’t know. I’m not a gymnast. Is it the runway?


Lindsey: The runway.


Chris: It’s a runway. It is a runway. Good God, they fly.


Lindsey: Good God.


Chris: So when they hit that vault and they start to twirl and twist toward the air, the way that biology describes communication in the body can only communicate from the brain to the muscles at about 300 miles an hour. It’s actually less than 300 miles an hour. The information that needs to be computed by the acts that they’re doing has to communicate through the body at nearly the speed of light.


Lindsey: Makes sense.


Chris: So what travels at the speed of light? Light. Wherever that comes from, the definition of light, which is electromagnetism, is a charged particle in motion. Our body is filled with, what is it, 50 trillion cells? Is that right? I think it’s 50 trillion cells. Every one of those cells is a charged particle and it’s jiggling, it’s vibrating. So 50 trillion cells conducting 100,000 chemical reactions a second, those are all charged particles in motion. We are all and only light.


Lindsey: So this takes me back to — have you ever heard Dr. Demartini?


Chris: I’ve heard the name but I’m not familiar.


Lindsey: He talks about quantum physics. He’s also a chiropractor, but I think he was the first where I heard subluxation actually means, like the definition of subluxation with chiropractic. So a chiropractor will scan your spine looking for a subluxation, and I just went off on a tangent, but subluxation means you’re looking for a restricted area, this piece of the spine that speaks to you basically. Subluxation means without light.


Chris: Right. Absolutely, absolutely. Look at Chinese medicine and look at the Meridian system. When you start to look at that system, and I went to Chinese medical school for a year and a half, and when you start to look at that system, you start to see it through the eyes of physics, it starts to make a lot of sense. Light is our primary form of communication. It is our primary form. It is not just visual. It’s audio. It’s everything. It’s feeling. You can run your hand across somebody’s body, be an inch from their body and we’ve all seen healers do this all the time, and you can literally feel the areas where there is incoherence. That’s just an incoherent light signal and your hand, your cells in your hand, your sensory cells, are picking that information up as just something off. And these advanced healers have the skill to discern exactly what it is.


[1:30:15]


But I do this experience. I’ve got a huge cut on my knee right here and whenever I’m lecturing and somebody says “How does this work?” I’ll bring someone up and I’ll tell them to just move their hand around my knee and I’ll give them about a two foot portion of my leg that they can kind of just move their hand, and I tell them “You tell me where there is a problem here” and I have yet to have someone not point to the place where I had 72 stitches put in my knee. They couldn’t tell you what they were feeling, they couldn’t tell you what it was necessarily from a diagnostic perspective, but they could tell something was different. That’s just an incoherent light signal.


Lindsey: One of the trainings I did for chiropractic was through MLS and part of the training we did was very similar. There’s no talking, eyes closed. You’re just scanning the spine and you’re looking for that incoherent signal.


Chris: And anybody can do it. These are just skills. These are just skills and I can’t stress that enough. Meditation is a skill. Healing is a skill. Becoming aware of your thoughts, being a watcher, metacognition, it’s a skill. Just spend some time developing it.


Lindsey: It’s a power play, yes.


Chris: It’s a power play, absolutely. It totally is. Oh, my gosh.


Lindsey: I love it. Wait, so what’s the fifth book?


Chris: So The Field, Breaking the Habit, what’s that?


Female: You haven’t said Frequency.


Chris: Oh, Frequency by Penney Peirce is outstanding.


Lindsey: How did you know?


Chris: I’ve given her the recommendation. So Penney Peirce is amazing. What Penney does is she takes the science, she takes the neuroscience, she takes a little bit of meditation and she presents it in a how-to way which is awesome. But what I would have said on the fifth one is The Power of Now, The Power of Now. And understand, with those groups, there are five or six books there, what you’re doing is you’re developing a language. You’re developing new words to describe stuff that you probably already know at a deep level.


Lindsey: Right, it’s in there somewhere.


Chris: I swear to you, you start reading this stuff and it just resonates. You don’t necessarily understand the quantum physics. I don’t necessarily understand all the quantum physics, but I know it’s right. I feel it. I resonate with this stuff.


Lindsey: How many text messages did you get from me when I was reading The Power of Now?


Chris: She’s excited. That’s a lot of bold, lots of exclamation points. Some hand emojis. It was awesome. It is. I tell people that when you pick up a book, once again, pull out the love compass and trust the feeling. If you start reading that book and you’re just not feeling it, put it down. There are so many different doors to the same place. I don’t care if it’s religion. I don’t care if it’s new age. I don’t care if it’s physics or biology or whatever. It’s all going to the same place. Trust your own enthusiasm and excitement around this stuff and just walk it. Walk it. And then when you get to the point where you want something else, put it down and pick up another one. We just have this framework that we’ve got. We got to do this and we got to do that. How about we just trust some feeling for a while? Let’s see what a different way of interacting with life does. That’s an experiment.


Lindsey: Does anyone have questions?


Female: No, this is just amazing. Thank you.


Chris: It’s been awesome. I just love you guys. That was so much fun. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.


Lindsey: So where can people find you at? You mentioned your website.


Chris: So coachtate.com


Lindsey: T-A-T-E.


Chris: And all my contact information is out there. I see the Muse on my site. I sell it at the base price so it’s pretty cheap out there. Yeah, just shoot me an email.


Lindsey: Any social media stuff?


Chris: People give me so much crap about it. I’m not a big social media person. I never wanted to brand myself with this stuff. I think that there are enough people out there that are embracing a guru concept or a leader concept, and it’s like that’s not me. All I’m doing here is just sharing with people what I do. It works for me. It might not work for you, but it really works well for me. The social media, me pushing blogs all the time and creating this air of I know, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I really don’t know. The more I know, the less I know.


[1:35:04]


Lindsey: Isn’t it true the more you find out, the more you don’t know?


Chris: Honestly, like I don’t know shit. For me, it’s just not a comfortable space to do that. So the folks that I work with, we were going to run into each other no matter what. Whether I release the blog or anything else, our paths were going to cross. So those are the people that find me. Like I said, I’m taking clients and take them here and there, and I’m always willing to talk to someone. You can grab me a cup of coffee or beer, and I’ll sit down and talk with you any day.


Lindsey: In Denver.


Chris: In Denver, and I do lectures and workshops. I’ll be doing a lot more of that. That’s more of my gig. I like getting with groups of 20 to 50 people and let’s play with this stuff.


Lindsey: How about the BIRTHFIT Summit next year?


Chris: Absolutely. We’re there. Like I said, I’ve never given birth just so you know. We’re so there. We’re totally there.


Lindsey: Just put the Muse on.


Chris: It’s great and I love the workshops and I love the face-to-face because you feel people and they feel you, and that’s that energy it’s just so yummy.


Lindsey: All right, any last thoughts or words you want to share with the BIRTHFIT community?


Chris: Thank you. We wouldn’t be here without you. You guys are doing a great service to the people, and what’s so palpable and clear is the energy that you guys bring. That’s what we need. In my opinion, we don’t need gurus. We don’t need people that are just hoisting the flag. We need people doing. We need people going you know what, I’m just like you. This is what I’ve learned on my path and maybe it will help you. And just carrying that heart forward energy and delivering that every single time, that’s my goal.


Lindsey: I love it.


Chris: These folks would have loved to have been in this room because it’s got a lot of energy flowing. It’s good.


Lindsey: Thank you so much.


Chris: Thank you, guys.


Lindsey: This was great. This is the last time we see you.


Chris: I hope not. We’ll do it again. We’ll do it again.


Lindsey: Thank you so much for giving your — is it Friday — Friday evening with us.


Chris: This is my love.


Lindsey: Sweet.


[1:37:53] End of Audio

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