Placebo: How to make your own soul medicine - Lian Brook-Tyler
Episode 542, released 2nd April 2026.
Wild Sovereign Soul co-founder, Lian Brook-Tyler, explains what the placebo effect actually is, why the science is more radical than most people realise, and how to consciously build your own healing response using it.
This episode is Lian’s All The Everything show… her solo space where she dives deeply into a theme that is alive for her, which, if you know her, could be literally anything - explored through the lenses of science, spirituality and story - hence the name of the show!
It is created for those who feel called toward a soulful life shaped by meaning, depth, truth, and love… for those who feel unsatisfied with quick answers or surface level takes. This is a rich rabbit hole that Lian journeys through alongside you. She speaks from her own lived experience and unfolding process… while inviting you into your own as you listen.
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The LIVE making of All The Everything is recorded live on YouTube… to join Lian for the next one: Make sure you’re subscribed to our YouTube channel, subscribed to our Moonly News email list and/or are a member of our Facebook group and we’ll let you know when the next one is happening.
In this episode, Lian moves through the science, the evolutionary context, and the shamanic architecture that underlies the placebo effect, sharing the studies that show belief produces measurable changes in brain chemistry, exploring the nocebo effect and the cultural signals most of us have absorbed without realising, and explaining why open-label placebo research changes everything about what conscious intention can actually do.
She also shares the open-label placebo she built for herself and walks through exactly how to build your own, through the lens of Wild, Sovereign, and Soul.
Listen if you've ever sensed that what you believe about your body is shaping it, but had no idea how to use that deliberately.
We’d love to know what YOU think about this week’s show. Let’s carry on the conversation… please leave a comment below.
What you’ll receive from this episode:
Why the body recovers just as well from fake surgery as from the real procedure, and what that reveals about the architecture of care
How a specific gene variant may mean you are constitutionally built to respond to meaning-based healing at double the rate of others
What open-label placebo trials found when patients were told outright that their pills contained nothing active
Resources and stuff Lian spoke about:
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Register your interest for the upcoming Wild Sovereign Soul journey here.
Share what showed up for you listening to this show, including any questions, either in the Be Mythical facebook group or in UNIO.
Join UNIO, The Community for Wild Sovereign Souls:This is for the old souls in this new world… Discover your kin & unite with your soul’s calling to truly live your myth.
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Thank you!
Lian & Jonathan
Episode Transcript:
Please note: We are a small team and not able to check through the transcript our software provides. So you may find some words are out of place and a few sentences don’t make complete sense. If you do see something utterly ridiculous we’d love you to let us know so we can correct it. Please email any howlers with the time stamp to team@bemythical.com.
Lian (00:00)
What if what we think we know about the placebo effect is actually getting in the way of us remembering an ancient healing power, a power that lies behind what we know in modern days as the placebo effect, but is something so much greater, deeper, more complex and indeed more soulful. Hello, my beautiful soul seekers.
This episode is my All The Everything show. And if you haven't joined me for one before, it's my solo space where I show up and talk alone rather than with a guest. And we will dive deep into a theme that's been particularly alive for me. And if you know me, that could be literally any topic. And we're going to journey into that topic through the lenses of science, spirituality, and story.
This month's theme is again all about the placebo effect. What's really at play? What does the science tell us? What does the, I guess, more ancient shamanic context tell us? What do myths and more kind of like ancient ways of living tell us? And why understanding what all of those things together are showing us? What do they show us? And then why that is important?
What does that allow us to know, do we see and ultimately how that might help us to heal? And so this show is for those of you that are feeling called to a soulful life of meaning, depth, love and truth. You don't want quick answers or surface takes. This will be a glorious rabbit hole that we journey down together. And...
As we deepen into the theme, I'll be talking often from my own experience and process with, again, this theme in particular is the placebo effect, but this is what I do each time with the All the Everything show. We really go into this in a different way to how it's normally spoken about. And as we journey, I'm going to be inviting you into your own process, your own inquiry, your own experience. And so with that in mind, if you don't already, I would invite you to go get a pen and paper because I will be asking you questions and I've noticed there's something else that is activated by writing with a pen and paper, old school, rather than on something electronic or indeed, you know, relying on your own memory. So if you can get hold of pen and paper to write on, I think you will be served by doing so.
And if you have just arrived here welcome, if you've come back welcome home. And if you keep finding yourself here at Wild Sovereign Soul without subscribing your soul clearly knows what it's doing so honor the call go ahead and subscribe. It's challenging to live in this crazy modern world the Wild Sovereign Soul Path is what we know will help and so if you're struggling with the challenges of walking your soul path and your heart longs for guidance, kinship and support, come join us in Unio, the community for soul seekers. We are journeying together every month and reclaiming our wildness, actualizing our sovereignty and awakening our souls. And exclusively for Unio members next week, they still to be decided.
I will be answering your questions about this episode in an integration circle. So taking everything we've explored and looking at how specifically you can take whatever you want from this episode and make it something that's real in your own body and life. And you can discover more about UNIO and walk with us by hopping over to BeMythical.com/unio or click the link in the description.
And now back to this week's episode. Let's dive in. So I came across a quote that I want to start this episode with, because I think it speaks to so much that we are going to explore more deeply. And so it's by Mark Twain, and it's the power with which, sorry, the power which a man's imagination over his body to heal it or make it sick is a force which none of us is born without. I'm gonna read that again.
The power which a man's imagination has over his body to heal or make it sick is a force which none of us is born without. And we are going to be exploring all of the aspects of that quote. There's so much in that that is just brilliant. Even if you notice, heal it or make it sick. We are going to explore all of those things. First, I'm going to share with you A little bit about why I am particularly fascinated with the placebo effect. I'm not going to go too much into my story because that would be a whole episode in itself and some of you have already heard aspects of it, but from the context of the placebo effect, I just wanted to share with you why this is something I have lived and breathed in all kinds of ways for many years.
So as you might know, I had a long history with chronic facial pain. And when it first arose, I tried many, many, many things to cure it. It was, you know, obviously we start with the normal kinds of things, go for me because it was in my face, assumed it was something to do with my teeth. In fact, it felt like it was in my teeth. So went to my dentist. I had a root canal. I was seeing specialists. I was then referred to other kinds of doctors. I was prescribed different medicine, you name it. I had tests and prescriptions and all the things. Then I tried more I guess you could say alternative remedies and methods and nothing worked. And I kind of just decided this doesn't seem like it's going to ever go or I'm going to find the cure for it. So I'm going to learn to live with it. So that's what I did for 15 years. And then...
I had, I guess one could say, a spontaneous healing. And I'm going to tell a little bit about what happened there, but that, what really happened is in some ways what I'm still living into, understanding. But I do know some of what happened. So my father died under very sudden and shocking circumstances.
And it really blew me open to soul, to spirit, to the beauty of life. As well as, of course, simultaneously journeying with all of the grief, the very difficult kind of practical implications of his death, the rupture of my family. So I was journeying for a year after his death with all those things. And then after a year, Seemingly by magic, my facial pain vanished. And so there's, there's details along the way that I may touch on as we go, but in a nutshell, that's what happened. And I had a sense, although it was kind of a mystery, like how could something, I tried all of these different things and all of those years to cure, how could it just go like that?
What had happened, what was the reason. And I had a sense that not only that happening, but also the way that I journeyed that year after my father's death, being open to such beauty and wonder in the world, I knew there was something in it that I was meant to share with others. And so my quest, which is quite different to Jonathan Wilkinson's, the co-founder of Wild Sovereign Soul, My quest was less at this point to find answers for my own healing, but it was if I can understand what's happened here, I can help others to do the same, to heal, to see the beauty in life. And so that was what started me on this quest, like what creates this kind of pain, but not just pain, of course, it could be all kinds of other ways that we as humans suffer and what creates healing.
So that was my own context for this. wasn't so much searching for my own healing. I'd given up on that. It was actually once I had healed trying to understand what took place. And so I have in the years since, journeyed with so many different... methodologies, spiritual traditions, all kinds of things, including shamanism, which holds so much of what we're going to journey with through today's episode. And again, this is not a done deal. It's not like I have all the answers, but I want to share with you today some of what I have discovered, that is held specifically in what is known as the placebo effect and how it's something so much more than just this idea of, it's a kind of sort of strange thing that happens when we're testing how new medicines work. There is so much more to it. And as we, as we deepen into this, you're going to see why I say that. And my hope is be able to take away things that are really going to make a difference to you, a healing difference to you.
Okay. So, If you've been paying attention, you probably have a sense that by now, science has proven that belief changes biology. Not just this kind of like, it might just have some subjective effect, but actually measurably, we can measure that belief changes biology. And we're going to look at some of the studies that show that.
We know that the stories that we live inside literally shape our body and our body's chemistry. And our culture already knows this and it's being used one way or another in so much of what we're swimming in culturally. This reminds me last month's episode. If you didn't catch that, this would be a really nice compliment to it.
We were talking about the power of priming and this we're going to be talking about themes that very much kind of linked as well. So those of you joined me for that one, you're going to recognise that, this builds upon it. And so specifically look at it through this idea of belief changes biology. We're being told all the time what our bodies can and can't do, how healing works, how healings can't work, the limits of healing. And so these are things that we know, and are also subject to all of the time. And so again, this episode is to understand exactly how this is happening, how this mechanism of belief changing biology works so that you can use it in your own healing. But first, let's look at the word itself. You'll know if you've followed any of what I've created.
I love looking at the word roots of things. Often there's real clues in those words and why it's kind of come from the root it has. So placebo is from the Latin I shall please and apparently borrowed into medicine from the Catholic office of the dead and this was where hired mourners performed grief. So they weren't really grieving but they're performing grief and so this word is
I shall please almost like I will perform in a way that you want me to. And so medicine inherited that that sense of it, there is something being performed, something's fake. So it became became associated placebo with an idea of like a fake treatment, a trick, a quirk, it only also works, it's got a deceptive aspect, only works because the patient doesn't know it's a placebo. And the inheritance of the word and its connotations is definitely part of that misunderstanding that we are going to dismantle today.
And so again, let's just really define it. So the placebo effect is the body's measurable. And again, this is really important. This word measurable, it's not just an idea. It's a measurable physiological response to the meaning of an intervention. And when I say meaning of intervention, the very point is it's not its chemical content. And Again, this isn't about someone imagining that something has created a change. It's not about, I feel as though this has done something for me. As again, the studies will show, we can actually measure real opioid release, real dopamine cascade, real hormonal shifts, real immune modulation. So we can measure that it's not just someone subjectively saying, I believe this has happened. And then being kind of like subject to magical thinking, we can measure these things absolutely do have a physical effect. And so again, the brain releases actual painkillers, signals are feeling more full in one of the studies we're going to talk about chemistry that actually allows us to be different measurably and this is based on what it has been told to expect.
And I think what's helpful to recognise is, again, just even this word, just plus like this way of saying it, it's just the placebo effect, even if it's just a placebo. It kind of creates this closure around it, it stops any curiosity about it. It's like, okay, it's just the placebo effect. I've even heard….
In conversations I've had, say for example, the podcast, we guess that perhaps we're talking about magic or something like that. They might say, even if it's just the placebo effect, blah, blah, blah. And I understand why they might say that. And again, it creates this sense of firstly, we already know what the placebo effect is, but also it has this real dismissal of it. It's like nothing to see here. It's just a placebo effect. And so. If we were to translate that, what we're actually saying is it's just the body healing itself in response to meaning, relationship, ritual. But that's what we're dismissing here. And so, and there's also this recognition. This is the body operating exactly as it's evolved to operate. This isn't a mistake. This isn't a quirk of a research study. This is how we are designed.
And so it's, It's funny how we always have this like embarrassing relationship, like, gosh, it was just placebo, placebo worked here. But really if there was anything to be embarrassed about is that we've built a whole medical so-called healing framework on something that is dismissing the placebo effect as if it's, you know, like a null result. It's inconvenient. And so I just want to, I might seem as though I'm kind of like banging, banging on about this, but I think there is something really important to just even open to some curiosity about, do we actually know what this is or have we just decided it's called this and then to never, never look at it again. So now let's really dive in.
So put very simply, this is really oversimplifying it, we have two systems that are running simultaneously. We have a conscious system, which can read, hear, reflects, sets intentions, forecasts into the future, decides to do the inner work. And then we've also got this much more ancient somatic wisdom.
And this is what's running things like the immune function, our hormones, inflammation, wound healing. And it's not to say they have no crossover, they do. And yet it's not like the somatic system is taking those instructions from the conscious system directly and accurately and wholly.
So yes, it will be an input, but the somatic system is operating on pattern and your repetition, felt expectation built on conditioning, things that we've experienced before, things that we've heard about. And so this means we can't consciously think our way into this deep embodied healing. We can think, okay, I would love to heal or it may not even be about healing. It might be to kind of move into a different way of being, but knowing what we're going to explore more deeply today, we can find a way of working, bridging the gap between the conscious and the somatic subconscious systems in a way that does bring about the healing that we choose. Okay, so, Again, if you know me, you know I love the science. I might be kind of really just in love with the mythical and the magical, the spiritual, but I also do love the science. And this particular format of the show, all the everything is my chance to really geek out on the science. So if you're not into science, you're going to have to just be with me whilst I geek out on it. But for those of you that do need, and my mind does need this, I need the kind of I need the logic, I need the evidence as well as the rest of it. You are gonna love what we're about to jump into. So again, when we think of it, when we think of the placebo effect, most of us know it because of science. It's not like we've just discovered that term through some other means, it's come about through medical science.
And so it's quite helpful to actually go where that, where our understanding began, but also look at this more deeply because when you actually look at the science and go beneath that first level of just seeing, you know, often we'll see the placebo effect alongside where we're studying, say for example, a new drug and there'll be a control where the people who are So one group, this is obviously very oversimplified, one group is getting the actual medicine, the other group is getting a placebo, for example, a sugar pill. And then it's looked at that we will potentially see some kind of improvement in the placebo group. But we will also see, hopefully, from the scientist perspective, that the actual substance has performed better. So really overly simply put, that's what's going on.
But beneath the hood, there are so many studies that are showing us other aspects of the placebo effect that go way beyond that. So that's what we're going to look at. We're not going to just look at the same old stuff that you probably already heard of. OK, so what I love about this actually, the first study I'm going to tell you about, we spoke about way back, and maybe 12 years ago, in our very first course that Jonathan and I did together called Happy School. And in it we were talking about the, I mean was so funny because in some ways it similar themes to this but in a just a very different way to how we talk about these things now. We were talking about the effect of our thinking on our bodies and I spoke then about this exact study that I'm about to share with you and I'm like how incredible it is all these years later and now I'm talking about it in this way. So it's the milkshake study and in this study it wasn't studying whether one's milkshake brings all the boys to the yard it was about two different kinds of well actually technically it wasn't two different kinds it was the same milkshake but one was labelled indulgent and said it had 620 calories. The other one had this much more kind of, I don't know if it was called like slimming or sensible, but it was labeled as having 140 calories. So vastly different, although it was again, exactly the same milkshake. And again, I don't know if either brought the boys to yard. What they found out was that the hunger hormone, Grailin, dropped three times more steeply when people drank the milkshake labelled with the indulgent label. So just to put that again more clearly, if someone drank the milkshake they thought was more calorific, their hunger hormone dropped three times more steeply, as in their body thought, okay, I'm going to be really full now for quite some time because I've just had this really filling milkshake. So the body was metabolizing based on what it believed it was receiving. Isn't that just incredible? And just literally by how many calories they thought was in the milkshake. The next one I think is so cool. So this was... a sham surgery, knee knee surgery back in 2002. And there were 180 participants split into three groups. One group had whatever, I don't know exactly the kind of surgery, but it was basically to deal with some kind of knee pain. So the first group had the usual surgery that you would do for knees when they have this kind of problem. Second group had it opened and I think it's called something like joint lavage where basically it's washed. nothing, there's no actual surgery in terms of like fixing whatever would normally be fixed with a joint, but it was kind of washed and then sewn back up. The third group, the incision was opened. I guess they may have just like waited around for a while and then it was closed, but nothing was actually done.
I'm just gonna ask you this question before I tell you the answer.
Do you think that there was a difference between how those three groups healed? And what do you think? What do you think that could have been? Like, do you think the first group was, say for example, this percentage, just estimate roughly, what do you think happened to those three groups after a period of time had passed?
Well, I just think this is amazing. All three groups recovered identically over two years. Identically. So the ritual have been operated on produced the exact same outcome as actually having the operation.
What does that tell us? What does that tell us about thinking we are being cared for, we're being operated on? And then the result of that, isn't that incredible? Okay, I'm gonna go a bit faster now, because I'm, again, I get so excited by these things. I was meant to just like quickly whiz through them, but I find the whole thing just so amazing. I've definitely spent longer than I intended to. So I'm going to touch on a couple of others, as we go, but I'm going to do the others a bit faster if I can. So the next one I want to tell you about is this wasn't a control versus placebo. All of them were actually in a placebo study, but didn't know they were. So the participants were put in a brain scanner, given a cream that they were told was a painful painkiller, and then they were subjected to painful heat. Ouch. I don't even like the thought of that.
And then their brains actually released real painkillers in response that was measurable on the brain scanner they were put in. So they weren't just saying, I feel better now I've got the painkiller. It was measurable changes, biological changes. And this, I believe, is actually the first study to show that belief doesn't just alter pain, in that it doesn't just alter our subjective experience of pain, it actually alters brain chemistry. So it's really important study.
Okay, I'm going to share one more thing that I think is a really interesting part of this. This isn't directly related to placebo effect but I think it's a really interesting kind of side track. A pair of researchers, neuroscientists called Carl Friston and Andy Clark, they are incredibly influential and their work is like a huge body of work. It's not just kind of one study, it's a whole framework.
that explains lots and lots of different experimental findings, including the placebo research that we just covered. And they've created this theoretical model of how the brain works called predictive processing. And very simply put, their premise is the brain doesn't just sit there passively waiting, for something to come in, information, stimulus. It doesn't just wait for that to happen. It's constantly running ahead, predicting, oh, this might be about to happen, that might be about to happen. And then, and this is important, preparing our body's response to those predictions. And so much of what we experience as reality is actually our brain's best guess, like.
I think this is what's going to happen. Therefore, this is what we're experiencing. I know this is, I mean, that is a whole mind blowing conversation itself. Again, we're not going to go too far down this rabbit hole, but it is important to recognise that this theory has huge implications. And so we're experiencing our brain's best guess about what's going to happen. And it's only really updated when something very unexpected, very much outside of that guess breaks free. And there was an example of this that I discovered through some other completely different rabbit holes going down once and it was only as I was pulling together everything I knew about placebo effects for this episode I was like huh I know something that I found out through some other means that is really relevant to this so have you ever if you're a coffee drinker particularly if you're a morning coffee drinker have you ever had a time where you have for whatever reason gone without your coffee and then had a headache. And so it's a very common thing, know, when people, for example, give up coffee, they might say, I'm going to give up coffee for a period of time. And they'll be like, my God, the headaches in the morning. And people typically think that is a direct result of not having the caffeine. And yet, as you probably are guessing by now, there's something else going on.
And so what's actually happening is we are obviously generally have, if we're generally drinking coffee, we drink coffee every morning and the brain starts to predict that we're going to do that the next morning, the next morning, the next morning. And so over time it knows that, ⁓ I'm going to have coffee, which gives me this burst of sort of stimulants.
So if I've got my own stimulant chemistry running, it's going to be too much, or perhaps it's the use of the body's resources that are needed. So I'm going to suppress my own stimulant chemistry before the coffee arrives in anticipation of drinking the coffee. And so when we skip the coffee, we're feeling withdrawal from something that the brain predicted, but never came.
And the brain had already sort of down-regulated preparing for it. And then we get the headache. And again, this is not a quirk. This is not something going wrong. This is our body's like extreme intelligence working exactly brilliantly, efficiently, sustainably as it's designed. And so again, this means what your brain and body expect is what is being experienced, what our chemistry is being created around before anything has actually happened. Which means our expectations are not passive, they are biological instructions.
And I don't know if we know exactly why these things work like this, but I think we can make some best guesses. And so I'm going to sort of talk about these things as if like, this is definitely what it is, but recognise, I think there's probably some room for doubt with some of these things. So why does the body brain, and again, the more we go into this whole path, the more it's like the mind bodies and exactly two separate things, but kind of just so we can speak clearly, we're going to talk about as if they sort of are.
why do we have this way of working, this way where the brain's guessing, the body's kind of doing what the brain's guessing? It's not a glitch. It is an ingenious way to create a way of living that is conserving energy where it needs to be conserved. It works kind of across contexts.
It is something that we will have kind of like seen works and then of course that's been kind of like an evolutionary capacity that's built on selected for the more that we can guess and experience accordingly the better we will survive and therefore the more of that we're going to become down future generations. If you think about it If we were to kind of like just whatever happens, okay, throw our full immune response at this, throw all of our tissue repair, all of our inflammation suppression at this. That's metabolically expensive. We need to know, A, is this needed? Again, in the coffee example, it's like the body gets to know, the brain gets to know and tells the body, we don't need to use our own resources here, just wait, the coffee's coming. So we need to know, you know, Is it even needed? But also are the other things in place that is going to mean what I kind of like throw out as the body is, is it going to work? And for so much of human history, the most reliable signal that healing could take place wasn't really a biomarker. It wasn't a kind of, you know, will or won't the body do this particular thing.
It was held in a context. So you would have had, for example, a trusted healer. You would have had some kind of remedy, whether that's, you know, a literal medicine that one consumes or some other kind of remedy. And that would have been given to us with this real intention. We would have been in some kind of ritual container and held by community. We would have had an invocation which connects us to something greater than this kind of separate human life. And so our bodies learn to read those signals as a kind of permission. these things are in place. Now commit my resources. Now turn on this response. Healing is meant to happen here. And so seeing it through this lens, What we call placebo is really that ancient signaling system happening. There's, there is a kind of much weaker version of all those different things I spoke about, you know, ritual community, the trusted healer, you know, the, is a kind of modern version of some of those things. And some of those things is absolutely bereft. I mean, true community being one of the main things we, just really lack true community.
We lack that invocation of something greater, but what we've got, know, the last vestiges of that are what allows us to activate in quote marks the Perceiver Effect, which I hope by now you're starting to think like, seems like a really poor word for something that is just incredible. Okay, how are we doing for time.
There is just so much I want to share with you. This might be little bit longer episode than usual. Okay.
So again, what we're recognising here that this thing called placebo is actually something much more ancient, this ancient signalling, healing intelligence. And it's there all the time, latent, just waiting to be spoken to in the language that it was designed for. There's also something quite interesting that we're going to come back to later on that is fascinating. Some of us are built constitutionally to be most responsive to this and that this is something really important. I'd say it's particularly for those of you listening or watching this, I suspect you will be the people who are designed to be more responsive to everything we're talking about here than others. So we'll come back to that. Okay, so I just want to quickly say what just almost like gathered all of what we've just been talking about together and also just a few kind of like disclaimers like what this isn't necessarily shown to work for. Not to say therefore it definitely doesn't work like this but just what's been studied. So the placebo effect is absolutely real, precise, measurable but it's not necessarily shown thus far at least that it can do absolutely everything. For example, It's not been shown to replace insulin for diabetics. It doesn't regenerate severed tissue, for example, if we've lost a finger. It's not been shown that the placebo effect will magically allow us to grow a new finger like a lizard grows a tail. It certainly has a strong domain when it comes to effect, when it comes to pain, inflammation, mood, hormones. did I mention immune, digestive function, those kind of areas it has a very strong effect and interestingly that is probably where the most chronic and kind of in quote marks mystery human suffering is and it's also where we can most consciously do our soul work.
If you caught the last episode that I did with Jonathan, we both shared some of our own story, journeying with chronic pain and other chronic health conditions, which very much fall into exactly what we're talking about here. And so I don't think that's a coincidence. It's really interesting that these things that we seem to have really lost the capacity in modern medicine to understand and to treat, are the very things that for most of human history we had the perfect medicine for. of course I don't mean just medicine as in something we take, but all of what we're talking about. We had it and we've forgotten it. Which is again why this conversation is so important.
I'm going to ask you, here's a reflection. When have you noticed your body responding to the meaning of something rather than its literal content? And so that could be indeed be a medicine, it could be a food, it could be a certain place that you go, it could be a certain person when you're with them, it could be a practice that you do. And so it doesn't necessarily have like a literal chemical component.
And yet you notice your body responds to it in a positive way, a healing way.
So now we've talked about this a bit more. You might have a sense of like, ah, I recognise that. It might be so much, not so much that you think, well, it's an inert substance. It might be you're like, I don't think technically, I'm just going to give the example of every Wednesday, I go to a local Thai restaurant and I have lunch and the whole experience is fabulous. They are so wonderful. When I walk through the door now, They've seen me pulling up in my car and I walk in and they'll have my drink on the the counter and they'll say your orders already in with a kitchen and they just said go and sit down and then they'll bring everything to me. And I'm very much a creature of autistic habit, let's be honest. So hence they know what I'm going to have. And you know, yes, it's beautiful food made with lovely ingredients. I'm sure which do you have chemical compounds that are beneficial and yet The experience I have and how it always feels like I've taken a holiday when I go there. I'm there often only about half an hour because by the time I've left work and got there and then need to pick up my children, it's not very long. And yet that experience of the food I'm eating, the way they receive me and all of that, it absolutely creates something that is beyond its literal components. And so I would, I would love to know.
What is that for you?
Okay, what else do we need? Let me just have a quick scroll through how much of my notes we haven't yet journeyed through. So getting some huge things I want to get into with you. Okay, I'm gonna skip through some things that I was planning to talk about or maybe just touch on them much more quickly than I was planning to. So.
The one thing we cannot skip through is what's known as the nocebo effect. So you may have heard of this. So people talk about placebo and nocebo. So the word nocebo is kind of made up as you can probably guess is the idea of instead of placebo being like, this is going to do have this kind of positive healing effect that you've been told it's going to have. nocebo effect is ensure this is going to kind of have the negative impact that you think you're going to have. You, sorry, you think it's going to have.
And again, there are studies that show this. And so this is a really important example of this is when, for example, you get a prescription medicine and then there's a bit on that that will say side effects. And the side effects are often a really good example of the nocebo effect. Again, the body does what it believes it's supposed to do, whether that's positive or negative.
It's exactly the same mechanism, same pathways, same response. It's just going in a different direction. And this is the challenge. is a course, it's important to inform people of what the side effects of something could be. They need to consent to take it knowing that. And yet it measurably increases the rate at which patients will experience the side effects.
The warning literally can cause the symptoms. So that legal requirement to inform may actually still be causing measurable harm. And I'm not saying therefore we should do this or this. I don't know what the answer is, but I think it's really helpful to know that's what's happening. And there's some interesting examples of this. One, and we will get a little bit more into what is also at play in this example, because this could be a very oversimplified example of the Nocebo. But there was American anthropologist called Walter Cannon. Walter Cannon, love that, I don't know why I love that name. And this is way back in 1942. And he did this kind of sort of cross cultural gathering all of these different case reports from all across the world, different cultures, Aboriginal Australia, New Zealand, Africa, South America, cultures that had no contact with each other to get imported, but all documenting this same phenomena of the voodoo death. So in short, a person would be cursed by figure authority within their belief system. So medicine man, shaman, witch doctor, so on.
And then the person dies within days with no identifiable physical injury or infection or toxin. So nothing like that should chemically cause that death. And the common thread across all of these cases was an absolute belief that this particular external force could cause death and that it was like an absolute curse. The victim had no power to alter this.
And those things together, that expectation, that belief created, meant death resulted. And again, I really want to emphasise this wasn't a controlled study. This was sort of anecdotes that were pulled all together, but it was 60 years of, sorry, 60 years of subsequent research is largely confirmed rather than overturned his hypothesis. And again, There is so much more going on there. I do not want to say this was just the Nosebo effect in action. When we're talking about ancient cultures, let alone shamanic practices, uses of magic in cultures like this, there is so much more going on. So please do not take what I'm saying as saying, this is just, you know, the Nocebo effect. I'm really not saying that. I would say, it's an indication that the nocebo effect kind of works alongside things of this nature and is kind of put into effect in this way. It's probably the best way I can say it. And again, I'm like kind of banging on about this because we do not just ⁓ ourselves a disservice, but we're doing real harm to real people who have died to protect their ancient wisdom, traditions, practices, and to just dismiss them as like, this is just a placebo effect, just is not okay. So please do recognise the reason I'm going on and on on about this disclaimer. It's for that reason, it's an important reason. And there is something I think interesting in that study. I'm going to just touch on a few actual studies about the placebo again, very quickly because again, you could hear, I just love this stuff. So there was a mega study that found half of the two, I'm terrible at saying numbers, 250,000. So I think that's quarter of a million patients who took placebo pills in clinical trials is looking across. all other studies that included placebo, they reported negative side effects. can you understand what I'm saying? The patients that got a placebo in a controlled study also reported the negative side effects of what wasn't the placebo. So including pain, nausea, and more serious symptoms. So they were getting both the placebo and the placebo effect. Another example, telling patients
10 % of people who take this drug have a negative side effect produces more, sorry, produces more reported side effects than saying 90 % of people don't have any negative side effects. So same information, obviously, unless you're even worse at maths than I am, saying 10 % get the negative side effects versus 90 % don't get it, exactly the same information just. put differently produces a different biological response.
One last one. Patients who are informed on the consent forms that are potential gastrointestinal side effects experience a six fold increase in symptoms of that kind compared to those who weren't told. And so again, this wasn't a placebo. This was, it wasn't actual medicine. but it was the fact that they were told about these gastro... Why am I trying to say this word? You know where I mean, the intestines. They experienced that side effect six times compared to the ones who weren't told. Okay, so the important thing to recognise about this, taking out of the realm of medicine for a moment, is to see that culturally we are being bombarded with nocebo signals all of the time. I'm just going to give a couple of examples but like now I've said this to you look out for this. We're told what our bodies can and can't do. We are told that with certain diagnoses this is what's expected. We're told what's going to happen to us at certain ages that it's this age this decline at this age our near vision goes for example.
We're told what it is to experience menopause. We're told what it looks like to be, I don't know, 70, 80, 90, and what we will be like at that point. And as you've probably heard from everything I've shared, none of this is neutral. None of this is factually, this is what is gonna happen if we, this is of course now getting circular because the problem is, We don't have a control to our culture. We don't have people who have lived outside our culture that we can say, okay, well, how would you journey through this kind of age or this kind of condition or this rite of passage if you hadn't been receiving all of these miscevos? So this in itself raises an interesting question, but given everything we've just learned, you can see that none of what we're being told is neutral. It's an instruction. It's telling our mind what to expect, which tells our body what to do.
And the challenge is the more that we are sensitive to meaning, and again, I'm going to touch upon a particular group of us that are even more sensitive to meaning than others, we are in an environment that is absolutely constantly telling us how we are, what our bodies are, how we can feel.
And so it is a kind of like, yeah, soup of nocebo that we're floating in and some of us are particularly sensitive to that particular soup. So I would say again, we are going to journey further into all of this, but something I would really suggest you do if you take nothing else from this episode at all is to… choose into a practice, which is something that I chose into, kind of somewhat, somewhat subconsciously. It was sort of consciously, but I didn't know anything as much as now know on this topic. But to recognise that that is happening. You are being told what is possible for you, how you're going to age, what ageing looks like, what menopause looks like, what you know all of these things look like, recognise that that is true and recognise you can be sovereign in what you allow in. It's not to say that you can completely shut yourself off from it, you absolutely can be a choice, you can be sovereign, you can limit that, you can limit the impact of it. I mean I have been known literally when I have something come in I know is going to be a harmful nocebo.
I will do things like kind of like delete, gone, it's not true, this doesn't relate to me. I will tell myself that, kind of make sure my mind knows this isn't something to take in. This is just nonsense. It applies, might apply to someone somewhere else. It doesn't apply to me. And so again, even if you take no notice of anything else that we journey with, and I hope you do, I really hope you take that particular.
invitation. Okay.
And again, I'm going to ask you, what do you notice that you've received that kind of cultural nocebo about what your body can and can't do and therefore have been running that instruction? What do you notice has already been, you've been acting upon, your brain has been kind of like, oh, okay, based on this, I'm going to guess this is going to happen. Your body started to do
Okay.
This is the part where it all gets so exciting. So after everything we journey through, the obvious conclusion one might make is if we know it's a placebo, it would stop working. Like it only works because, for example, in the clinical trials, they are being given it told either that it is an active substance or being told it could be an active substance.
If we knew it was a placebo, it would stop working. really understandable assumption to make and yet that actually isn't how it works it is how science used to think it worked and then we discovered what's now become known as open label placebo and this is the finding that changed everything so when patients are told explicitly
These are sugar pills, but research shows they still work. They showed measurable improvements. Knowing it is a placebo doesn't change the fact we will respond to it. And again, this is because going back to, if you remember, we have that conscious part of us that's like, I want this, I want that. And then we have that somatic intelligence that's running our immune system, healing capacity, all the rest of it.
The part of us that knows this is a placebo, it actually does has nothing in it, is not the part that is going, ah, okay, it is a medicine. It's been prescribed to me by someone who actually cares. I'm having the ritual of having the thing. That part of you is saying, ah, it's time to turn on the healing. And I'm just going to share a few studies on this because again, this is where it's just...
So fascinating. And then I will do my best to go through the rest of it much faster. I probably could have done a part one and part two of this, quite frankly. I didn't realise how much I had here.
Okay, so first study we're going talk about was in Harvard in 2010. In fact, I think this might be the study that showed us this. And so 80 people with irritable bowel syndrome. Half were given placebo pills and told outright, these are placebo pills. They are made of inert substance.
They contain nothing active. The other half received no treatment at all. So quite an interesting, it's like a placebo and then I kind of, here's the other thing that isn't a placebo. And the result is 59 % of the placebo group reported adequate symptom relief. And this is so interesting. Again, I don't even know what to call this group. They've called it the no treatment group, but it feels like this should be another word to even describe this.
Only 35 % of the no treatment group did. And again, doesn't that tell you something? Even the group that didn't receive any treatment, was 35 % symptom relief, but compared to 59 % of the ones that take in the placebo. And the effect size was comparable to the very best IBS medications that were available at the time from a sugar pill that the patients knew was a sugar pill.
Isn't that wonderful? Another one, I'm going to rattle through these now. The second was in 2018. 74 people with a cancer related fatigue were given a pill, were told it was inert, but were also told the placebo effects can be powerful. Three weeks later, the placebo effect had, sorry, the placebo group had a 29 % reduction in fatigue. The control group had no change at all.
Another one, it was around chronic lower back pain in 2016. 97 people, they were told it was placebo, they were given an explanation how that can still work. And there was a 30 % reduction in pain, 29 % reduction in disability. The control showed no significant change.
And then there was a meta analysis is done. This is when they take all the studies and kind of mash them together. And it's a study of those studies and they pulled together 60 trials and that was over 4,500 people. They looked at overall difference between patients who were taken a placebo knowingly, knowing they were taking a sugar pill or an equivalent and the patients who didn't, the difference in pain relief between the two groups was point
Seven. sorry, no, I just make that clear. So the point I didn't make was people who knew they were taking placebo and the people who took a placebo but didn't know they were taking a placebo. Sorry, I should have made that clear. I think I worded it in a way that wasn't clear. everyone was taking the placebos Some knew I open label, some were taking it, but not knowing it was a placebo. And the difference in pain liberally between the groups was point seven millimeters on a pain scale, which is basically very little difference. And so what that's in short saying, whether you, whether you are taking a placebo or not, and as we've already seen from the previous studies that we've journeyed through, the placebo effect in itself creates this incredible measurable difference. Knowing it's a placebo or not doesn't change much. You can take a placebo knowing it's a placebo and it still works.
So the ritual, the object, the act of taking something with an intention engages genuine changes in our brain and body, regardless whether we know it's meant to do that or not. I mean, the researchers who did this meta study, and this is interesting because it chimes so well with everything we're journeying with.
They hypothesize the body responds to the context and ritual as a conditioned stimulus independently of belief. And so again, the active ingredient is not inert, it is conscious. Us knowing, this kind of knowing of the knowing, us now, right now in this conversation, becoming conscious of that is taking that even further. And so what I'm trying to say to you is knowing this in itself, is something that has an effect. Telling yourself that the placebo effect works is part of the effect, is part of the dose. So it's not that people were told it and then it was like, by doing so, we're kind of breaking it. It actually is part of the design. It tells their brain, you can expect this to work because we've shown it works. And
Again, going back to our heritage, every tradition that we've studied pretty much, and again, I'm going to be talking very, like overly simplified terms, but we can look the world over throughout history and we see this same ceremony, repetition, ritual, community, sacred objects being held in a space. All of this has been working with the same architecture that again, we have this kind of power limitation of in today's world.
But the science is saying, yes, this is what's happening. This is what's worked. It definitely has not caught up with the full depth of what's possible. But you can see that the science is starting to show that is what is at play. my goodness.
Right, we are going to start to move towards a close. And again, thank you for bearing with me. I know this has been much longer than intended. I definitely should have realized that I was going to get excited and go into all of these areas far more deeply than I had time for, but I'm really hoping it'll be worth it. So.
Again, we've seen this, study every kind of healing tradition on earth and you know, whether we call that shamanism or, you know, all of the different names that we have this across different cultures, they had the same kind of architectures of healing. And it isn't coincidence, it is because each culture over and over again discovered how healing works and did more of it.
What I feel is really important to say again, and I touched upon this with the example of the voodoo death, and I know this myself, I have trained in shamanism. And so please recognise I have trained in shamanism myself. I have received shamanic healings, I've given shamanic healings, I have worked with indigenous shamans. And what I'm saying, What I'm talking about here in terms of what we can see in the modern placebo effect and how it tracks back to what we can see in ancient shamanic cultures is not me at all saying, therefore, that's what shamanic healing is. It is built on the same architecture and what's so important to recognise.
When we're looking at true shamanic healing, we're talking about a relationship to spirits, to lineage, to plants, to land, to our ancestors, to the patient's own soul. All of that is real and true. And it's so important to recognise this. And so, yes, you could say certain structures were creating that placebo effect we spoke about. It told the person's mind what to expect. it told the body to therefore respond to move into a healing pattern, but there was more going on. again, I really want to emphasise therefore it doesn't mean there isn't something important in what we're talking about here about placebo effect, but I really don't want to sound as though I'm dismissing the very real depth, beauty, truth of those traditions as if it's just placebo. And so...
What's interesting is what we're starting to see is even if we like, so what we've tried to do is go, okay, we've now studied certain chemical compounds and then we can kind of give that to someone and we can get rid of the relationship, the ritual, the meaning, the community, the spirits, because that's all just superstition. And then it's like, huh.
So why is it that these active compounds that we're studying in studies on new medicine, why is it that they're only performing a bit better and in some cases not any better than that discarded so-called superstition? Because that's what we're talking about here. And I think that's really what this is all about. It's recognizing that we have… either done away with or again really kind of diluted the structures that made healing possible and bless our brains and bodies. It's like even the like, the sight of say for example, a doctor in a white coat, healer, that will have an impact. But there's so much more we could be doing to bring about our healing now we understand how this works.
Okay, so I'm going to just because it's super cool and I think particularly interesting to anyone listening or watching this my senses there's a genetic mutation I want to tell you about that just makes this again all of this is kind of like sort of like multiplied by some knowing this. And then we will, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about myth and archetypes that talk about this, but we don't have time. Maybe another time, maybe I'll have to do a part two or if we're in UNIO, perhaps we'll dip into that in UNIO next week. And then we're going to talk about what to do with all of this. So there is a gene.
called in fact I'm not even going to try and pronounce it but the initials are c-o-m-t I like just to say the things I'm just going to say comped but I don't think you normally do I think you normally do say c-o-m-t and what it does this comped gene is it controls how quickly your brain clears dopamine and this is the chemical that that is kind of saying something meaningful is happening
It creates this sense of like, this is important. This is a good thing to focus on. This is something to take notice of. And there's two versions of this gene. One clears dopamine quickly and one clears it slowly. If you have the slow version, that signal of meaning stays in your system longer and significantly longer after any given experience.
This one means in practice and in particular, what was studied is this in relationship to the placebo response. And this is, this is such a great example of how my geeky mind works. Separately, I knew of this particular gene mutation. I didn't know about this research. I'm about to tell you when it came to the placebo until I was doing extra research and I had this kind of, huh, I wonder.
Could that mutation impact the placebo effect? It turns out it does. So we're now getting into like really kind of like weird, wonderful territory, like a rabbit hole off a rabbit hole, which again is an indication of how my mind works. Welcome to that world. You will find this fascinating because I think many of you who are listening or watching this will have the slow version of this gene. So what this means is, People have the slow version have roughly, wait for it, double, double the placebo effect from identical inputs. So same situation, same studies, same kind of medicine, same message. And the response in them is measurably larger and more sustained than someone with a fast version. Can you believe it? Can you believe it? See now why I had to tell you this. Half.
oh sorry double, double the effect. And so we don't actually have accurate details in terms of across the whole world how many people have the slow or fast version. It does vary quite a lot according to ancestry. But they think the perhaps around 40 to 50 percent, there's a couple of copies of the slow variant. I don't know if you know much about genes. I'm to make this really basic.
I don't mean that in a kind of like dumbing it down way, but unless you're interested in this, I won't give you honest information. So the slow version has two copies and around 40-50 % have one copy and 20 to 30 people have two. So it's kind of like, like an even greater dose of the slow variant. And again, it varies across the world. So some places they're going to have more of that, some they're going to have less.
The interesting thing is people with the slow comp variance, it correlates with that capacity to hold complexity, to tolerate ambiguity, paradox, to make nonlinear connections, to be really moved by things, to read meaning into experiences. And our mainstream material culture
tells us that people like this are oversensitive, prone to magical thinking. And what I would say is actually more true is people like us, and as you probably guessed, I am one of the people who has two of those copies, it's we are, we're intentionally designed to have this porosity to meaning.
We are more sensitive, we're wired to see something that could have like this healing effect, for example, or to be the healer in these situations and to work with it for it to have a deeper effect. And what I suspect is, and again, this is why I'm saying for you in particular, who is receiving this, the likelihood is you are probably this, that kind of person with that kind of mutation. If you've ever had your DNA thingy done, you can go and check this. But what I would say is the people that come to us who join us tend to be very much the people who are more sensitive to meaning, who feel more, who look more deeply into things, who have that kind of sort of permeability to spirit, to the liminal.
And so isn't it, isn't it incredible that there is actually, and again, I imagine there's many ways, but just this one way of looking at it, we can see this at a genetic level. How incredible is that? Okay. So let me skip on, because again, I, I can't share with you everything I'd intended to. Okay.
I decided as part of preparing for this episode to do my own a open label placebo and I'm going to keep some of its secret at the moment which is for a number of reasons including I recognizing the importance of I guess protecting ourselves from the nocebo effect which includes other people's kind of disbelief or kind of rational like, no, it probably wasn't that that did that. It was probably this. I'm not going to share with you what I created the placebo for. I may do in the future. But right now I don't feel that I'm wanting to share everything I've done and what the intention was, but I will share some really interesting parts of it. So, Again, I take things to a level that most people won't. So don't, I'm going to give you the invitation to do the same yourself, but please don't be scared off by the fact that mine is taking it to a ridiculous level that most people wouldn't and you don't need to. I just like to really go there if I'm going to go there. So I chose a substance. It was actually capsules of glycine, which I chose partly because glycine is a bit like, it's an amino acid and it's a bit like sugar. Literally it looks like sugar and it's sweet. And I already take glycine and so was like, huh, given if I start taking it as a placebo, there's no change because I was taking it. There's no like active change if that makes sense. It's a bit like if someone's already taking sugar in a capsule and they'll makes it into a placebo. So I chose to create my placebo around these glycine capsules that had already been taken as if as just glycine. I then created a whole name, brand, everything around this medicine. Created a label with a beautiful image on it. Importantly, and you'll love this, I didn't just write on the label what the medicine was designed to do. In the side effects, where normally it'd be a negative message, a nocebo, I worded it so that it was like the side effects were all so positive as in like they weren't they weren't directly related to the thing that I was taking them for but they were like warning it could also do this but the thing that it would create was something that was also absolutely fine by me if it also happened so I was kind of like working with both placebo and nocebo at once so had the beautiful glass bottle, beautiful label on it, had these capsules in it, and then tracking it. Not really to convince myself, because I believe this is how it works, but I really wanted to, I guess almost like deepen that feedback loop between my mind and body, and also to be able to, you know,
in the work that I do, I'm often sharing what it is that I'm doing so that at some point in the future, if I choose to, I can say, yes, I tracked it and this was the result. So I'm kind of doing my own science study on myself. And so far, will say, I am, I think I've been perhaps taking it now for, I think it's three weeks, maybe not quite as long as that. It took me a while to...
design everything I've just said, I went to a whole other level. I haven't even told you some of the things I've done. I'll tell you one thing. So I buy supplements off a website called iHerb and I created a whole sort of pretend, it was like a graphic, not an actual website, but a whole iHerb listing for my placebo, with reviews and everything, as part of creating the sense of like, this is something real, this has this effect.
So again, it took me a time to do all this. So I've only actually been taking it maybe two to three weeks, but I've already started to see positive results. And yeah, it's been really interesting doing this. And this is why I'm going to invite you to do the same. You don't have to, even if all you do is take everything that we've journeyed through in this episode and apply it to your life, apply it to your choices, apply it to… how you put boundaries around what you allow yourself to receive in. If that's all you do, wonderful. I have a sense that in itself will be so powerfully healing. And if you choose, if you're like me and you like to really go deep on something, by creating your own placebo, not only will you benefit from whatever you create the placebo for, as in you will directly receive benefit from that. What that will also do in terms of teaching you how this works, teaching you how you work. That will be invaluable. And so I'm going to run through briefly how you can do this. And again, for those of you in Unio and if you're not a member, you can join and be join us next week for when we do this. I'll give some general, this is based on literal, open label studies like what works best, what's been shown to work best.
but I can go much more deeply into all of this in that UNIO call, sorry my dog sneezed in the background, and I can also answer questions specifically for you and your circumstances. So I'm going to do this through the lens of the three primordial strands that we work with in Wild Sovereign Soul, just because I think it helps to structure it into something that's quite memorable and easy to understand. So the first thing is… through the wild lens, choose something physically real. So as you saw through some of the studies that we spoke about, they weren't always something that someone took. And yet, if you do it based on something real physical, something that you can touch, feel, taste, it's gonna have a more powerful effect.
It needs to have some kind of like presence. needs to feel like, yes, this is a medicine. isn't just, say, for example, it's going be harder, for example, to convince yourself perhaps that water is going to have that presence that something is like a tablet would. So again, your body is responding to what your mind already knows about taking medicine and it being powerful. So recognise that.
If you're taking, for example, a capsule and a capsule is better than a tablet, two is better than one. So two capsules is better than one capsule. One capsule is better than one tablet. And I would say that if you have a relationship with a substance like a particular plant, that also could be a really beautiful invitation to that wild animal of your body. So as you probably know, I have a very strong relationship to the rose. And so for me, I've included that. In fact, I'll tell you how I included it. It's quite interesting. I've not put rose in the thing. Cause again, the whole point is it's meant to be inert, but I put the smell of rose into the cap of the bottle. So I'd smell it as I opened it.
So if you have a relationship with something that is, you know, like a live material being in this world, you could include that, for example, on the labels. I also have included that, although it doesn't really, it's not really in it. I've also included Rose on the label as I'm describing it, if that makes sense. So it's not really in there, but I've said it is in there. Okay. And then...
going into, so that's all about that kind of like the wild material aspect, going into sovereign aspect, really recognise you have choice, you are creating your own medicine, you're creating your own prescription. And so really look at what's going to work for you. So some things that have been studied to work is if you again, build that ritual same time every day, twice daily if possible, I take mine in the morning and the evening. Same place if possible, same sequence. So be really intentional, really sovereign about I am going to have agency over my healing in this area. And so you're creating again this repetition of ritual which in itself has power. Every time you move through it you're building on that, you're building and making it stronger. And so that's a really important part of it. And then Also linked to that when you're connecting to the intention for this, really recognise there is a kind of sovereign power here. So not just I want to feel better, but you know, like this medicine activates my body's capacity to whatever the thing is that you want it to do. And then lastly, looking through the soul strand, connect to what's real for you, something larger than your individual self. So it could be the, your ancestry, the spiritual tradition you draw from, spirits you have a connection with. And we've seen that this can really amplify an effect. And again, shamanic traditions knew this. So call in what is going to allow this to be held, to be supported, to be guided.
Your soul is not a passenger in this. It really is like the practitioner, the healer. And then tell yourself out loud, written down in an iHerb mock listing, whatever land, whatever way of doing it, lands most powerfully for you. Write it, say it, how it's going to work. Tell yourself you're activating your body's self-healing intelligence through this repeated intentional embodied practice. Tell your body it already knows how to do this. Just say, I'm now giving you the signal you need to make this happen. And again, going back to the open label studies, they were told this, they were saying that this works and this is how it works and that was part of it working. So this is part of the dose. And then if you want, track it, track it, see how this is working for you.
And what we're doing here is not borrowed from a clinical trial. It really is a return to our heritage, is a return to those primordial strands. And we call them primordial strands because they are the first principles. They're these strands that kind of woven through us like DNA, wild, sovereign and soul. We're reclaiming this body, our body's healing intelligence. So sit with that.
what you've been called to create when it comes to your own placebo.
Hmm. So I'm gonna leave you with a few inquiries and then we will close very late on this episode. But again, I hope this has been really rich for your worth of time. So where are you still trying to create healing or changes through a system that really doesn't have the power to make that change?
And maybe it's because you're trying to kind of will your change or just be kind of at the mercy of the medical system, rather than through using the language that we've just been talking about that the body actually speaks.
What would it mean for you to stop waiting for that external permission? This could be like a validated protocol or a kind of guru thought leader or a clinical trial diagnosis before you choose to work with your own body's intelligence and all the intelligence that they've been working alongside it since, well, for most of human history.
What if your body is, and my senses is, is always running its own prediction engine based on what the brain thinks is going to happen and then building itself around that. What story is it running? What best guess is, is your mind currently telling it is going to happen? And is that the story you want to be building your body around? And again, remember you are not discovering something new here. Like yes I've given you perhaps the words, the science to it, but this is really a remembrance of your birthright. This is the correct relationship to something that is ancient, always within you. None of it's gone anywhere. It's time for you to just remember, wake up to it and allow it to do what it's been there for all of this time, just waiting to be asked.
And as I said earlier, if you are struggling with the challenges of walk your soul path and your heart longs for guidance, kinship and support, come join us in UNIO, the community for soul seekers. UNIO is the living home for the wild sovereign soul path where together we reclaim our wildness, actualise our sovereignty and awaken our souls. And as I said, at some point next week, Exclusively for Unio members I will be answering your questions in an integration circle about how to take everything which is explored into your own mind body and life. And so I can answer more questions about kind of how to create the best placebo but also as we did last time when we did the integration circle around the priming episode I can answer specific questions about your own situation, your own longings, your own kind of healing that you need and how you could create something that works most potently for you.
So it's either depending on when you listen to this at wildsovereignsoul.com slash unio or bemythical.com slash unio or click the link in the description.
And if you'd like to hop on over to the show notes for the links either at wildsovereignsoul.com slash podcasts slash 542.
or bemythical.com slash podcast slash542.
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