#6 This week my special guest is best-selling author and journalist Lynne Mctaggart. Get ready to strap yourself in because what Lynne has to share was mind blowing!
Lynne McTaggart is one of the central voices in the new consciousness movement. She is the award-winning author of seven books, including worldwide bestsellers “The Field,” “The Intention Experiment,” “The Bond” and her latest book “The Power of Eight.”
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About Lynne: Lynne is consistently listed in the Watkins’ annual list of the 100 most spiritually influential people in the world. As Editorial Director of What Doctors Don’t Tell You (www.wddty.com), she publishes one of the world’s most highly praised health publications and runs highly popular health and spirituality teleconferences and workshops. For the third time, What Doctors Don’t Tell You has been awarded “Best” and “Most Popular” website of the year for health and wellbeing. Lynne is also the architect of the Intention Experiments, a web-based “global laboratory,” which was prominently featured in the plotline of Dan Brown’s blockbuster “The Lost Symbol.”
Lynne is a member of both the Transformational Leadership Council, launched by Jack Canfield, and the Evolutionary Leaders, launched by Deepak Chopra. She has appeared in many documentaries on the science of spirituality, including “What the Bleep?!: Down the Rabbit Hole,” “The Living Matrix,” “I Am” and “The Abundance Factor.” She is a highly sought after public speaker, speaking at conferences and workshops around the world. Lynne and her husband, WDDTY co-founder Bryan Hubbard, live and work in London, UK. They have two adult daughters.
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Guy: Hi, I’m Guy Lawrence and you are listening to the Guy Lawrence Podcast. If you’re enjoying this content and you want to find out more and join me and come further down the rabbit hole, make sure you head back to the guylawrence.com.au. Awesome guys. Enjoy the show!
Guy: A good day, Lynne, welcome to the show.
Lynne: It’s my pleasure to be with you today.
Guy: Absolutely fantastic. Now Lynne I gonna kick off with the question that I’m really keen to hear what your answer is. I’ll ask everyone on the show and that was if a stranger sat next to you on an airplane and asked you what you did for a living, what would you say?
Lynne: I guess I would say I give people hope is my job. Um, that’s what I do in my books, which merged science and spirituality. Um, it’s all about looking at our lives in a much better and more hopeful way, rather than thinking that we’re lonely people on a lonely planet in a lonely universe, you know, we’re, we’re so interconnected and we have capacities far greater than we’ve been told. And then on with my magazine, what doctors don’t tell you, I provide alternative ways to get well, other than the usual surgery and drugs model that’s given to us by the conventional medicine.
Guy: Yeah. Right. And I would imagine that would spark off a lot of conversations. Just that alone. Well, what intrigued me? Like I’ve been submersing myself in your work the last couple of weeks. And, I was listening to a book on audible that, you narrated, called living with intention and I was fascinated with it. And what did the put, the first thing you said was is that you were a skeptic, like you are, you needed hard evidence and I’m intrigued. Cause the first bit of work I came across the view was the field, the book a number of years ago, which no doubt. You’re probably recognized for like, I’m curious, how did your life lead you to research and that body of work, especially from kind of a skeptics background?
Lynne: Um, well I’m an investigative reporter by training. Uh, when I was in my twenties, I was busting baby selling rings and things like that with hidden microphones and tape recorders. I segwayed into writing about health. Um, uh, Oh, about 10 years after that. Mainly because I got ill and I wanted to find out how to get me better. And I finally, when going from conventional doctors to alternative doctors, I found a very forward thinking doctors. This was back in the eighties, um, who was really a pioneer in nutritional non-drug medicine. And I had what people would call a faulty microbiome now, but back then nobody knew what it was. Um, but he had really doing a lot of work in this area and he got me better and it was so impressive that, um, I started to tell everybody about it. I was so impressed by the way, he dealt with patients as a partnership, not as addicted or patient child, you know, our parent child relationship.
Lynne: Um, so I want to tell the world about it. So, um, and my husband said, you know, stop telling me, you know, let’s do this, let’s actually do a publication. And so we created a publication. It was a newsletter at that time called what doctors don’t tell you. And it’s now an international magazine, it’s in 17 countries and different languages. And we write about what works and what doesn’t work in conventional and alternative medicine. And you know, we’re always looking at medical research. So back in the early nineties, when, you know, we had just got this newsletter off the ground, I kept coming across very good studies of things like spiritual healing. And I kept thinking to myself, wait a minute, if you can send a thought to someone else and make them better, that in itself undermines everything. We think about how the world works and how we work.
Lynne: So I set out to try to find out why. And I thought initially, well, I’ll speak to some frontier scientists who are doing work in this in consciousness and things. And they’ll tell me there’s something like human energy fields and I’ll write it up and that’ll be fat, you know, and I’ll, I’ll hand it in and job done. Well, it wasn’t like that at all. What I discovered and was shocked to discover was that each of these people, each of these scientists had discovered a tiny piece of what compounded into a completely new view of the world. Nevertheless, as scientists, they don’t like to stray beyond their own experimental evidence. They don’t want to speculate on what this all means. What’s the big picture. And they also don’t have the decoded into real English. You know, they speak in code, they speak in math. So it was my job really to try to decode what they were talking about and then to synthesize it and put it all together.
Lynne: So I did, and that book really did change the messenger. That book really sent me on this journey because I realized we are very different from what we’re told the newest science is telling a very different scientific story. And that science in fact is just a story. You know, we, we act as though it’s this finite truth. Um, and that a lot of our story has already been written, but new chapters come along all the time that rewrite the chapters that came before. So this new chapter loaded of chapters are now being written. It’s just extraordinary, what’s being discovered. Um, and so that really changed my view of the world, but there was one part of it that was quite, excuse me, a little bit of unfinished business for me, which was the whole idea that thoughts are a thing that affect other things. There was plenty of scientific evidence about this, but I kept thinking to myself, you know, and this was the time where we were hearing a lot about the law of attraction, early part of the millennial.
Lynne: Okay. Um, you know, that and the secret and things like that. But I, as a reporter by training had a lot of inconvenient questions. Like how far can we take this? You know, we talking about, yeah, shifting a quantum particle by a fraction, or we told him about curing cancer with our thoughts, you know, and also what happens when lots of people are thinking the same thought at the same time. So I decided to put it to the ultimate test and I set up a thing called the intention experiment. Um, cause I thought, well, I’ve got lots of readers. The field was in 30 languages. And I thought, well, and I also know a lot of these scientists now for writing the field and doing consciousness research. If I just put them together, I’ll have the biggest global laboratory in the world. So that’s what we did, but I was suspicious.
Lynne: I didn’t really think it was going to work. Um, I’ve known a lot of qualifiers in my book, the intention experiment, which was, you know, not only a book about intention, but an invitation pardon this thing. Um, but we’ve run 30 to date where we’ve got the experimental results and of those 30, 26 have shown measurable, positive, mostly significant effects. Okay. How would you define intention? Okay. That’s a great question. Um, a lot of people think of intention as that focus, thought we have when we are in a meditative state and send it. And that’s the one thing the universe hears, but you know, the science shows that we are at our Lewis level, not a batch of electrical signaling and chemistry, but have a network of quantum relationships of quantum frequency. And then our thoughts are another kind of frequency that gets sent out and heard.
Lynne: Uh, I mean, there’s certainly a lot of evidence from the work of say, uh, uh, the late Fritz Albert Popp, a German physicist showing that we send out a tiny current of light. He called them biophoton emissions and other living things send that light back synchronicity. So you and I are not just having a conversation, we’re having a conversation of light as well, sending back and forth. So the bottom line is we are all leaky buckets. We are all sending and receiving all the time. Um, there is other evidence demonstrating that thoughts aren’t locked inside our head, but our being transmitted and also we are receiving backs. So we’re like a television set and a television station all at all rolled into one we’re senders and receivers. Our brains are essentially a receiving and transmitting mechanism for this constant conversation.
Guy: That’s incredible. It’s incredible. What kind of experiments did you do? 26 out of the 30? Can you give us a couple of examples.
Lynne: For sure, we had to start out small. I mean the scientists I wanted to cure cancer, cause the scientists kept saying, let’s start with leaves. And so we had to start with very basic experiments seeing if we could change something in a biological process because this had never been done before. So we started with just trying to change those light emissions in a leaf. Then we moved on to trying to make seeds grow faster. And then we moved on to trying to purify water and eventually to doing experiments, trying to lower violence in war torn areas. And finally, to try to heal an individual who was a Gulf war veteran with post traumatic stress disorder. Mmm. Just to give you an idea of the kinds of stuff we were discovering, let’s take the seed experiment.
Lynne: Cause we did that the most, anything we did that 12 times and what the scientists from the university of Arizona would do, would it be to get four sets of seeds, three seats, each label them ABCD, take photos of them, send them to me. And then I would either find my audience around the internet or if I was actually speaking in front of an audience, invite them to send an intention to one of the sets of seeds, we would choose the randomly. We wouldn’t tell the scientists which one we chosen, we’d send intention to the seeds. And then I tell the scientists were done and they would then plant all four sets of seeds, measure them five days later and only then would I unblind the study and say, Oh, it was seeds a or B whatever it was now, let’s just look at this first time we did this.
Lynne: I was in Australia. I was in Sydney, Australia in front of an audience of 700. The seeds are sitting back in a lab in Tucson, Arizona. Nevertheless, we had an effect and those seeds that we sent intention to grew significantly higher than the controls. So we’re 8,000 miles away from those seeds. And nevertheless, we had an effect also this, we weren’t sending intention to the seeds. We were sending intention to a photographic representation of those seeds. So to me, that was just astounding. And by the way of in those 12 experiments, every time we did them, the seed sent intention group significantly higher than controls, whether it was, I had audiences in New York and South Carolina and a lion Dallas. I also had people over the internet scattered around the globe on the internet, sending intention. And every single time the seeds sent intention grew significantly higher than controls.
Lynne: So that to me was fascinating because it demonstrated we have a kind of psychic internet that can affect things by focusing on them by collective focus, no matter how far away we are, no matter whether we’re sending it to the thing itself or just a symbol of the thing. But you know, that’s astounding in itself, but not really the interesting part of the story, to be honest, please keep going. Well, the interesting part of the story really had to do with, uh, 2008 later that year, I decided to, I was a little tired of seeds and water and we had done a lot of those experiments. So I said to my, I got together a scientific team and I said, let’s do something. Let’s, let’s try to lower violence in a war torn area. So I was looking around the globe for a good place.
Lynne: And I found Shira Lanka, which had a 25 year ongoing war. And the reason I chose it is that the scientists wanted me to have a place where we had at least two years worth of weekly data on injuries and deaths prior to our experiment and the ability to collect it reliably afterward for a couple of months, because you can’t just measure. Yeah. Violence goes down for a week afterwards. It’s meaningless. You’ve got to look at a longterm trend and see if you buck the trend. If it’s been going up and it suddenly goes down and stays down, that starts becoming compelling. So we did choose Srilanka. We sent intention, it was a fascinating result, violence actually quadrupled during the week of our experiment and then it plummeted. But here’s the interesting part. And yes, we did buck the trend. It started, it went lower than that.
Lynne: And it had been going up consistently and it went down. But that, wasn’t the interesting thing. The interesting part of it was that that week when we were sending intention and violence, quadruple we’re, the government won a number of decisive battles that turned around the entire course of the war. And they have been essentially losing the rebel forces, had the entire North, uh, captured and cut off. And they, the government was able to reclaim that. And then within five months after that, this intractable 25 year war was over. So did we do this, you know, short answer, who knows, um, the scientist, dr. Jessica Utz, who’s a professor of statistics at the university of California said, you know, and she demonstrated with a statistical analysis that we’ve bucked the trend, but you know, all she could say when I said, well, wow, that very week of our intention, what’s the most important week of the entire 25 plus year war. And she said, well weird, isn’t it weird? Huh? So that was weird. But what was even weirder was what came back from the participants I had about 25,000 people.
Lynne: Yeah. There were about 25,000 people and I had them fill out a form afterward telling me how it was for them. And I basically wanted to find out if they’d had with able to come onto the internet and it had been a good experience for them. And what ended up happening is I got back foundations of responses saying things like this. I felt I was part of a higher network. I was tingling and sobbing uncontrollably. I felt like there was electricity coursing through my body. I felt like I was in the tractor beam and star Trek, you know? And, and it stopped as soon as the experiment finished. No, remember these weren’t even people in the same room, these were people in front of their computer screens by themselves having this extraordinary experience of connection of mystical experience of some sort of altered state just by taking part in this thing.
Lynne: So that was weird. But what was also weird is what happened in their lives. They reported essentially that their lives have become more peaceful. They had made up with people that had been estranged from us. It was a thousands of responses again to the survey. Um, they were getting along better with their coworkers, their family. They’re not so nice bosses. They were, um, in love with, I think more than 40% said, they were in love with everyone. They came into contact with, they were hugging strangers. You know, I’m saying to myself, what on earth is going on here? There had to be, I started realizing there was some weird mirror effect because as I ran the experiment, if the focus was peace, their lives became more peaceful. If the focus was healing, someone, we had thousands of people on a healing experiment for this Gulf war veteran with PTSD. And I got back answers like this, you know, I had terrible arthritis and it doesn’t hurt anymore. Um, I have Crohn’s disease and my gut feels normal. Um, I’m getting over my own anxiety, you know, hundreds and hundreds of responses like this, where people themselves were getting healed. There was something in this whole thing of a group prayer, which is essentially what it was that was healing, the participants, the as well as the receivers.
Guy: That’s amazing. That’s amazing that, wow. So from there you you’ve done that. This was back in, you said 2008, this huge experiment. You’re getting that kind of feedback back. And I’m fascinated from that. Cause that would blow my mind if, if, if I was part of that experiment and you see in that, then what made you decide to take it to groups of eight people? So you’ve gone from since to past to eight.
Lynne: And you know, when you said, by the way it blew, you know, it would blow my mind. Well, it blew my mind and that’s why it’s taken me 10 years to publish this book because for a long time, I didn’t believe it. I didn’t know what to do with it. I had to understand it. I had to study it. I had to think about it. I didn’t want to tell anybody about it. You know, so I told my community bit, but I kept it low key. The groups of eight came about by total accident. I was, it was 2008. Still we’d run some of those experiments. And I thought to myself, well, people like, you know, when they do this kind of thing, they have workshops. I guess I should run a workshop. But remember I’m, I’m a journalist by training. I’m a hard edged reporter.
Lynne: So I’m not sure how to run a workshop and I’m thinking, well, how do you show people that they can manifest stuff? Obviously we were getting these amazing, yeah. This amazing outcome with these experiments, but how do we demonstrate this? It can affect you personally. You know, you can’t very well manifest a new job over a weekend. So I’m sitting there with my husband. He’s also a journalist works with me on what doctors don’t tell you. He runs the company and we’re which wasn’t about it. And I said, well, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll just put them in groups of eight and have them send healing intention to some member of the group with a health challenge. And he goes, yeah, I like that. The power of eight. And you know, that’s how it came about. So we, we, for our first workshop in Chicago, we put people into groups.
Lynne: We asked them to choose a member of the group with a health challenge, all come up with the same intention, um, all hold hands. Now I had studied for my book, the intention experiment I’d studied with intention, masters chigong masters, master healers, Buddhist monks. So I knew the various techniques that they used for intention. Some of them were individual and some of them were common among these different disciplines. And between that and the science of what had worked with intention in the lab, I formulated a thing called powering up, which is a distillation of those practices that seem to maximize intention. So I knew all about that, but I didn’t know what a group process like this should do and how it should work. So I’m telling them they all have to hold hands, all have the same intention, you know, visualize the person. I’m making it up as I go along.
Lynne: I don’t know. And so I expect it’s going to feel like somebody got a BackRub, you know, like a facial have nice little feel, good exercise. So the next day we tell them, come back and just tell us how it was for them expecting they’ll say it. I felt nice and relaxed. I had a good night’s sleep last night. That’s not what happened. What happened is we hand them the microphone in turn and they say one after another, Oh, my knee is killing me all the time with terrible arthritis. And it feels normal. And I’m walking normally today I have terrible IBS. I always have a bad stomach. It’s been normal. Um, from last night I have headaches every day in my life and the headaches are gone. And so it went on, I have cataracts and they feel they are 80% better. That was mumbling.
Lynne: I mean, we’re just sitting there shocked thinking, Oh my God. And also discounting it. You know, the journo skeptic in me was saying, Oh, this is just a placebo effect. You know, you know, it’s just the expectation. Yeah. It was nothing to do with the procedure itself. But every time I did this and I’ve done this hundreds and hundreds of times, since every single time groups with workshops and conferences, people have announced incredible healings. There was a woman with scoliosis where her daughter wrote me afterward to say that her back had straightened so much, but they had to change her rear view mirror. Uh, there was a woman who was a stroke victim who couldn’t visualize, you know, she, she couldn’t focus her eyes after her stroke. And after her intention being the subject of her intention, she could focus. Normally there was a guy who showed up with a brace. He could hardly move his arm. And the next day he had the brace off, he was moving it. Normally there were people with terrible back pain, arthritis, walking, normally a woman with ms who showed up the next day without her crutches and on and on and on and on with me. So shocked and not knowing what to make of this. And also continuing to say, Oh, placebo effect. Until I realized that the number of the people getting healed, where the centers, they weren’t even the receivers.
Guy: Wow! Are you then there’s one person being selected for, to send intention then what are they feeling when it’s going on? Like.
Lynne: Oh, all kinds of things I ask people to report back after it. I remember this is just, you know, we’re doing this for 10 minutes in a conference. People are just in groups of eight or in my workshops, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. It’s not hours. You and it’s, it’s not sort of getting in the mood for it. I put people in groups, they do it. I’m the person getting, it will say any number of things, feeling enormous energy, enormous heat, shaking, crying, a lot of shaking, crying, a lot of, um, that part of their body that they’re trying to heal feeling instantly better feeling a little worse and then feeling better. You know, there’s all kinds of things, but there’s definitely an incredible reaction.
Guy: Okay. So you, you know, something’s going on when you’re in there?
Lynne: Oh yeah. But the centers do too. The sender’s talk about incredible connection feeling like they’re in an altered state, intense visualizations. Cause I asked them just to visualize that person being healed and the same for the person themselves visualize yourself being healed and they’ll get all kinds of, um, visualizations still also get common visualizations, which is very cool. Wow. One time I had a situation where they were trying to heal some woman, a back pain and they all imagine this white light with their spine coming out. They all imagine the same image of her spine coming out and being infused with light and then going back in her body.
Guy: Amazing. That’s amazing. That is amazing. Do, is it a skill that you can learn or is it something that people can just turn up and go, right. We’ve got eight of us. Let’s give this a go. What have you found over the years when doing this?
Lynne: There’s a certain skill and becoming a good intender. I mean, I run a, an intention master class once a year. Um, I have people come in and I teach for six weeks and then I put people into groups and I monitor them. I send them challenges. I basically worked with them over the year and then we do a couple of bonus calls, et cetera. Um, so I’m teaching them the what sorts of things I know work best. And I’ll give you one example. What’s really important, really important. And from my experience is being specific. Most people have very general intentions. They’ll say things like I want to be rich. Yeah. And they won’t say, well, actually I don’t necessarily want loads and loads of money. What I want is a new job. Well, I want is some more time to be with my children or grandchildren.
Lynne: What I want is time to pursue my hobbies. I want is just a little freedom. You know, it’s not necessarily that, but I think the money will do it. And that’s not really what they want. So you need to tell the universe what you really want. Be very specific about it. You know, I had a group recently in masterclass that said, Oh, we’re all intending together to win the lottery. I said, Oh, okay. Pretty poor odds on that one. Aren’t there. What do you really want? Why do you want to do that? And they said, well, Mmm, Jane over here needs a bit more money than she has to take care of her daughter. And Joe over here wants to buy a new car. And I said, well, why aren’t you intending for Jane to get the money she needs exactly what she needs and Joe, to get exactly what he needs for the car.
Lynne: Why are you asking for something nebulous like this, you know, and also to throwing it together. So that’s a really important thing. But when you said years of training, many of the things that I had to do to convince myself, or to actually study why this works. And I was very fortunate in 2015 life university, which is the largest chiropractic university in the world. I had spoken there and they offered to put their neuroscience department at my disposal and psychology departments. So we can study these groups. And I went, Oh, that’s so fantastic. So we did our first study and the first study was of seven groups. And we only got student volunteers and we put them into groups and we monitored what was going on with the senders. And here’s what happened almost immediately. They had big brainwave changes that were a turning off of a lot of the parts of the brain.
Lynne: Just really big quieting of the parts of the brain that distinguish between self and not self. So like the parietal lobes located around here, they orient us into space. They tell us, they tell us how to navigate by saying, well, this is where I am. That’s where the rest of the things, you know, the universe begins and that was turned way down. So were the frontal lobes, particularly the right frontal lobe, which is the executive function, but also the part of the brain part of the executive function, but part of the brain. So that’s the thing that really is doing a lot of the cognitive thinking, but it’s also the part of the brain that’s involved in worry, doubt, negativity turned way down. So these were essentially people experiencing an ecstatic state of oneness. In fact, their brainwave signatures were absolutely identical to those of Andrew Newberg, dr.
Lynne: Andrew Newberg, when he studied Sufi masters and Buddhist monks in ecstatic prayer. But unlike those types of people we’re getting into that state, it takes years of discipline and training and hours of priming to get into the state. My people were total novices. Most of them had never even meditated before. And all they had in terms of instruction, was it 13 minute video from me telling them the rudimentary is of what to do? What do I, well, the book, the entire book is all about why this is. I think there’s a number of things that go on. There are undeniably group effects. Yeah. When people get together in a group, they feel they merged their brainwaves, start mimicking each other. We know this from lots of other studies. Um, and there’s what this famous psychologist, French psychologist, Emil Durkheim used to called it a collective effervescence.
Lynne: There’s something that happens when people come together and agree. That’s one thing. Yeah. Two of course there’s the power of intention and collective intention, which we’ve seen is very powerful. But three and something almost never talked about is the power of altruism. The getting off of yourself, the fact that people are sending to someone else that has an extraordinary, powerful effect. And I can explain this best with a couple of anecdotes. Um, there was a guy called Wes who is in a group of mine last autumn. He was a Vietnam vet. He was American. This was in Denver. Um, Wes had wanted to be a scientist and he was at university studying to be a scientist. And it is finally going into his final year when he got drafted. And at that time there was no lottery. You couldn’t opt out. He had to go.
Lynne: So it was so traumatic for him that he came home very depressed. He never finished his college degree. And he just went into a downward spiral. His life just really kind of kept going downwards. There was only one little light spark when he married his second wife and then she got cancer and died. And he spent a couple of years driving long distance in a truck just to payback the extraordinary medical expenses in America. There’s no national health service. So his life he’d got to the point at the point, I met him at the age of 65 where he was basically just saying to himself, what’s the use. He was living in an apartment in a senior area. And he’s, it was hard for him to even get out of bed. There was no, he had trouble even making breakfast. So he was part of this group.
Lynne: Yeah. Cause he belonged to a church called the mile high church, Denver. And we’ve got, I got together to sample groups there. And for his group, he decided not to put himself forward because, uh, there was a woman there with cancer and he felt well, she’s more deserving. So he didn’t want to just talk about his depression. So he sent to her, then he contacted me a couple of days later and said, it’s unbelievable. I bailed out of bed in the morning. The grass is greener than it’s ever been. The flowers look more beautiful than they ever have. I suddenly have all this energy. And then he wrote me a few months later to say, I’m doing power walking for 90 minutes. I’m lifting weights. I’d feel like I’m still a young man. I have the energy of a young man. I started writing, I started doing this and he said, and I have this weird dream.
Lynne: It was not even put into words, but a feeling where he was on a bridge. And he met his 19 year old self who said to him, there’s still time or somehow communicated to him. There’s still time. So his life had totally transformed, transformed. Why the act of sending not receiving. So I know amazing. But when you look at the studies of altruism, you see that altruism is likable at proof vest. People who give in any capacity live longer or happier or healthier in every regard. Um, and that demonstrate is demonstrated over and over again, because what it does is it has a profound effect on a thing called the Vegas nerve, which is the longest nerve in the body. It goes from the neck lines through all of the major organs. And it turns on a lot of the things in the body involved in compassion, like the release of oxytocin, the love hormone as they call it, which gets released when we are caring for a young child or something. And what it does is it sort of has this virtuous circle effect on the immune system. It just keeps improving it. So that’s one effect. It also makes us much more tolerant with people, not like us, more compassionate in the world. So it has this enormously positive effect. That’s the physical thing going on with altruism. There’s a lot of other things happening to mentors.
Guy: Yeah, totally. I’m gobsmacked here. What I’m hearing at the moment, good. Somebody listened to this stuff might be hearing this for the first time and not even thought about intention before or anything. You might raise it eyebrows slightly to work on. Really what you know, um, is there any kind of small experiment somebody could just go off and do to start with, just to say,
Lynne: Oh yeah, I have plenty of experiments in my book. Well, first of all, they should know that aside from that brainwave study that we did, we also did a year long experiment where I took 250 people have them go through my masterclass experience for six weeks and then put them into small groups and monitored them month by month, over an entire year. Now of the groups that stayed together that were working consistently together, that was about 150 people of those, 150 people, pretty much 100% of them had major life transformations. They God, over there was one woman who had 15 years of chronic fatigue got over it. It was a guy who a clinical psychologist imagine how embarrassing this is, who suffered from lifelong suicidal depression. And it never actually tried to act on it, but he had moments of real, real depression. Um, he asked his group to send intention, to find the cause of it.
Lynne: And soon after went to see a practitioner and discovered that one of his liver filtration systems wasn’t working and in resolving that his depression lifted, it was extraordinary. He had been trying to find any kind of cure for years and years and years. Um, there were many stories like healing stories. There were loads of people who had new startups that were doing really well, new jobs, dream jobs, coming to people, even in their fifties, there were, um, people who needed money and got incredible windfalls just when they needed it. Surprise amounts from the bank. One woman, it was down to her last 200 pounds, UK from the UK and suddenly gets this letter saying you qualify for a certain kind of funding from Lloyd’s of London as a former impro employee. Never knew anything about it, extraordinary stories like this, but there was a few, there were a few that weren’t having that to begin with.
Lynne: So one of them was Andy and Andy was trying, she was getting a divorce. She was trying to get a new job. She was, she had sold her gift store. She didn’t know what on earth to do. She was just kept getting rejected and she a very bright, positive woman. And so we were trying all kinds of things, but we were in the groups and I finally just said, I was a little exasperated, Andy, just get off, stop intending for yourself and 10 for someone else. And I had just been notified by a young about a young boy. Who’s 15 years old, Luke who, um, had just broken up with his girlfriend he’s uh, as first serious girlfriend. And so he, you know, in a fit of it, adolescent angst, he had thrown himself off a 40 foot structure onto hard ground. And he broke every bone in his body.
Lynne: He had nerve damage and brain damage. And you know, his, his stepfather wrote me in and said, please do an intention for him. So we set up a healing visual among the masterclass groups and we sent intention for loop over and over again for about, I think it was three consecutive times. Well, his stepfather gave us a running commentary of his reactions after the intentions and Luke healed and got out of the hospital in record time. Now that could have been, you know, and a lot of the times of intention showed a big shift, some physical shifts, a mental shift, maybe that was good doctoring. Maybe that was us. I know it wasn’t a placebo effect because unlike his parents, Luke being a typical teenager thought the power of intention was pretty stupid. Right. But the most interesting thing is what happened to Andy because Andy, the moment she got off of herself and started intending for Luke that next week, she gets a call out of nowhere, out of the blue and it’s for a dream job.
Lynne: And this happened over and over and over again. So it also indicated to me, there was something about the power of getting off yourself. That was really, really important here, you know? And that’s, uh, something we don’t hear much in the self-help movement because it’s just the term self-help, you know, what am I doing? Yeah, exactly. But what my work shows is some of the biggest transformation occurs when you get off of yourself and, you know, start intending for someone else.
Guy: How much is science looking at this right now? Like..
Lynne: Well, science has done a lot of work on altruism. Um, when you said for someone who doesn’t believe what about experiments? Um, and there was one very interesting experiment that was kind of similar in one way. It wasn’t a study of depression and this was a psychologist who was also a priest. He wanted to see whether you could use prayer to heal a mental illness.
Lynne: You know, there’s been plenty of studies of, of, um, prayer used to heal physical illnesses and some pretty good results in a number of the studies. Um, there’s about 150 studies in total. Mmm. But it never been used for mental illness. So he gathered together 400 volunteers, all of who had depression, he puts them into two groups, had one group, be the people who receiving the prayer and the other group were trained in how to give prayer. They were trained in how to pray. And so afterward he looked at all kinds of parameters to see if anybody it improved. The people got the prayer, they did better. They were all better. They were, you know, much improved, but not as improved as the people who did the praying, they were off the charts improvements. So that was that then the psychologist had to, it meant the giving prayer more powerful than receiving, you know, it’s more transformational.
Lynne: The other experiment that is very interesting about all of this looked at people who were living the good life, you know, we’d call it. People were living the American dream. They had a lot of money. They’re going on. A lot of holidays, they were pleasure seekers. They were enjoying the good life. And they looked at their immune systems and they were shocked to discover these people had terrible immune systems. They were candidates for heart attacks, diabetes, Alzheimer’s all those degenerative diseases. And then we looked at another group who were less affluent, but who were living a life of service, they had extraordinary, robust immune systems. These people are going to live forever. And that’s really what it comes down to is the whole idea of a life of purpose, a life of, you know, of service that is an extraordinary powerful healer. And that’s just something that never gets talked about in self help. Yeah, totally,
Guy: Totally. It’s interesting as I’ve moved into a new direction in life, which is definitely of more of service and getting the message out there and actually trying to empower the people themselves. It’s so rewarding on a personal note, you know,
Guy: There’s chalk and cheese too. When I was doing something I hated which I did for 10 years.
Lynne: Oh yeah.
Guy: It has to affect you. There’s no doubt about it. You know?
Lynne: Sure. Absolutely.
Guy: Well, one question that popped in there as well was if salts on a thing, it can be that powerful. Then what does that tell us about us? The way we think about ourselves quite often on the negative loops. Oh, hell no. Selves every day or can be?
Lynne: well, this is one thing that I teach is that you have to start monitoring what you’re thinking all the time, because you’re, you’re beaming it out 24 seven, the university is hearing all of that and all of your negative. Self-talk all of your judgmental things about everyone else, all the flotsam and jetsam going through your head all the time. That’s an, all those mendacious. Think you think about everybody else and yourself that all collectively becomes your life’s intention. That’s what you’re beaming out to the world. That’s what you’re broadcasting.
Guy: Yeah.
Guy: And, and it becomes so habitual. We don’t even know we’re doing it and half the time.
Lynne: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely
Guy: Amazing. No, I’m aware of the time Lynne and I’ve got a few questions for you that I wrap up for the show, but when you book the power of eight, which I’ve got beautiful cover by the way. Absolutely love it.
Lynne: Thank you. Me too.
Guy: Everything that we’ve discussed today is pretty much a new book I’m guessing, right Totally.
Lynne: Yeah. Yeah. In the main, yeah. Yes. And more core said, and you talked about how to do it. We have instructions how to do it. Experiments where people, I have experiments in the book where you can embed a thought in water and see if other members of your group can pick it up. I do that little experiment a lot. Um, that’s a whole other story. Water is a, is a tape recorder of, of water is got all kinds of physical properties that are unlike anything else. And one of the things it does is it’s molecules polarize around any other charge, particle and essentially tape recorded. And so what we found is you can embed thoughts into water and they can be picked up by other people. I have experiments there about making plants grow faster and lots of other fun things you can do with a group and everything about how to set up group. And of course, all of the science to support all of this brilliant.
Guy: I’m definitely going to try a couple of this official, uh, I’ll let you know how it goes.
Lynne: Please do that’s wonderful.
Guy: Thanks. Well, look, um, I’ve got a couple of questions for you that I ask everyone on the show and I’m just going off topic slightly, but I’d be curious to see your answers. And one I’ve been asking everyone is what’s one of your, maybe low points in life, but as later on, turned into be a blessing.
Lynne: Ooh, that’s a great one. Yeah. Um, pretty much everything. This is the great thing about, Mmm. As you get older, you have a rear view mirror and it tells you that life, your life was perfect and everything you needed to have happen happened. So my low point, I suppose, was getting divorced first time around, um, I, my marriage was only two and a half years. I’d moved over to the UK after starting a book here and just falling in love with the place I met, my first husband, we got married and that all blew up in my face. And I thought, Oh my God, that was really one of my lowest points that I’d made such a bad choice in my own head except, and I was also working at a job as an editor. I hated, but it led me to the love of my life who was in fellow editor there, my husband, Brian, and we’ve been together for 33 years since. So yeah. So, um, it was, you know, it was an extraordinary thing that happened, a bad thing turned into an amazing, good thing.
Guy: Yeah. Love it. Love it. The next question is if you could have dinner with anyone tonight from any timeframe at all, who would it be?
Lynne: Oh, that’s such a hard question. It’s a choice between somebody like, um, Mmm. One of the quantum, somebody like Eisenberg, you know, to talk to him about what he thinks about quantum physics and where it’s gone. Mmm. Or Niels Bohr and Jesus. I mean, because Jesus, I’d like to know from Jesus, was he happy with what they did with the church? Or did he have different plans for it? Because one I found and it’s in my book, the power of eight was that there was a mistranslation in the Bible about how he explained how to pray the way it’s been translated. As he told the apostles to pray with one accord, which is a very lame expression, what he actually said in the Hellenic Greek, or at least according to, you know, the, the initial, um, words is it used term Houma. They used the term homophobia Dawn, which is a Hellenic Greek, which the Bible was in originally too.
Lynne: And that’s a musical term that means passionately with one voice. So Jesus was essential. And it’s mentioned about 15 times in the acts, the part of the Bible that describes the, the apostles getting together after he, Jesus supposedly is sanded and they, they were starting up the church. Um, and it means they were, he was constantly telling them when you pray all pray together, we want passionately with one voice and you will heal and you will be able to be healed. And so I kept wondering this to me was because I was looking for an answer to seat, lots of antecedents to this, why this power bait stuff works. And that fascinated me and suggested potentially that he was trying to transmit this power people we hold when we were in a small group and we’re praying together. So I would love to ask him, is that what you meant?
Guy: Yeah. That would make a great dinner conversation. Um, last question. Um, what is one thing about yourself? Most people wouldn’t know.
Lynne: Oh, I don’t know. I think what you see is what you get a little bit, um, uh, I don’t talk too much about my children. Um, I have two grown up daughters, um, and they are fabulous and they are an interesting, a Petri dish of their own because one of them is biological and one of them is adopted from Russia. So I’ve had two different experiences as a parent and they have both been amazing and they are one’s 21, one is 28 and they are gorgeous, gorgeous girls. So I guess in my heart on a very, very close family person, um, I cooked dinner for everybody every night. And, um, and we are very, very close as a family. So maybe I don’t talk, I don’t talk about that. Cause I don’t want, um, them 70 kinds of public life unless they choose it. Um, but that’s a really essential part to me.
Guy: Yeah. I love it. And then I have it and um, everything we covered today, is there anything you’d like to, um, I guess finish on for our listeners to ponder on,
Lynne: Um, just, you know, form your own group power of eight, if you can’t, if you don’t have eight people, you know, read my book and find out how, um, we have a section of my website, uh, Lynnemctaggart.com/forum where people can join their own and make their own, uh, Power of eight groups. We’ve got hundreds forming people, just let other people know about where they are in their time zone and other people join in and you meet each other on Skype. And in my experience with my masterclasses, most of my masterclass members have these transformational experiences and they’ve never actually physically met each other. They’ve just worked together on Skype. And of course the other thing I’d love to say is I’ve got once a year, I do a retreat and I’m doing a fantastic retreat in Tuscany this year. Mmm. And I will be not only running a, an intensive for power of eight groups and intention in the mornings, but, uh, excuse me, in the afternoon we get to go to Florence and Sanjin Jimmy Onno and Sienna, the County trail, and swollen this beautiful Villa with a spa and a pool that you’d like to find out more that I think September 3 to October 6th, go on globalj.org or check out my website, Lynnemctaggart.com under events.
Guy: And you’ll find out more. That sounds phenomenal. You might just see me the Lin. I promise you. And I just want to tell everyone as well about your book, the power of eight, I ordered it on book depository of all things from the UK and it arrived here in Australia within a week. So easy place to get it and I’m loving it. Absolutely loving it. Lynn,
Lynne: thank you so much.
Guy: Amazing. I linked to all the show notes for everyone anyway, but that, wow, that was fascinating. That was absolutely brilliant. And um, yeah. I just want to acknowledge you Lynne, for everything you do and you know, I’m so glad in 2008, or you took 10 years to get the power of eight out there, but you, you did it and got it out there and getting this message out because it’s absolutely fascinating it’s changing lives. And, uh, I look forward to delving into this work more.
Lynne: Thank you so much.
Guy: Thank you for your time today, Lynne. Cheers!
Lynne: Thank you.