The human mind is the source of our thinking. Our ideas, emotions, and behaviors are all interconnected. Thus, influencing how we feel and act. Negative thinking, on the other hand, can contribute to issues such as social anxiety, harmful habits, and stress. So, is it possible to adjust our mindset in order to overcome difficulties and accomplish more in life?
In this week’s episode, Matthew Brownstein delves into the different modalities of hypnotherapy, the philosophy of mind, and how it can help to adopt the right mindset to live life happily.
Anahat Education Group, Inc. CEO and Founder Matthew Brownstein aim to nurture individual and group success by providing leadership, vision, and purpose for all of our interpersonal relations. Matthew has dedicated his life to offering wisdom and truths that relieve suffering while promoting health and enlightenment.
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The Art of Hypnotherapy and How The Mind Works with Matthew Brownstein
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I’d like to have with you a more specific discussion around the topic of mindset. Most of my interviews are about people who pursue their own paths, go after their passions, and hoping that by being inspired by those stories, you would adopt more of the mindset that, “I can, I will, I should, I am going to be the one to pursue the path that I really want to.” Today, my guest, Matthew Brownstein, is someone who actually focuses on helping people adopt the right mindset. He is the CEO and founder of the Anahat Education Group.
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Matthew, welcome to the program.
Thanks for having me here, Stephen.
This podcast is all about mindset and you’ve spent a lot of your life studying the human mind and how we can go about adopting the right mindset.
Yep, my whole thing is mindset. That’s why I felt we’d be a good fit. My background is meditation, spirituality, philosophy, hypnotherapy, neuro-linguistic programming. Yep, all of those modalities just point to the mind and how important the mind is in helping us to live our very best lives.
Now, when it comes to those different modalities that you’re talking about, whether it be your spiritual background, your philosophical background, meditation, mindfulness, broader practice around it, or even the neuro-linguistic programming or essentially how we’re talking to ourselves, do these all go in tandems or do you tend to adapt it more along the lines of which one is going to resonate with this specific person, maybe someone’s a more spiritual person, another person is more into the intellectual philosophy, maybe another person’s more into how you train your mind?
Yeah, I think they all go in tandem, the way that a plumber would walk in with every tool, or at least in the truck there’s every tool, but you have to cater, whether, so even for myself, it’s not like every time I go into meditation or do hypnosis, I’m using all of those modalities but, generally, the work I do is client centered so I would just say, “What are your goals?” or, “Where are you blocked?” like where’s the issue, where’s the goal, and then we just pick the best modalities to help to move towards that, and being client-centered work, I will often present the modalities that I think would be best, like, well, we could use hypnotic programming for this, maybe we could do hypnotic regression for this, maybe you just need to learn some self-help techniques. Once I present what I think could be the best options, I love it when the other person, whether it’s a client or whomever, actually picks the modality and then they’re that much more empowered to realize it’s their journey, not me, I’m just the facilitator.
I see, and so does it often happen that your client will then either try something and have to iterate and say, “Okay, this didn’t work as well for me, maybe I should try another modality,” or maybe, if it’s self-talk, I need to just change up the words I’m saying to myself, does it oftentimes happen where the first thing you come up with based on the client’s personality situation, specific blockages is the one that works?
I think, over the years of experience, usually, the first modality chosen is the one that’s going to work, been doing this for over 25 years now. However, we work in NLP with the model that there is no failure, only feedback, and another model called TOTE, that’s an acronym for test, operate, test, exit. So I can test, say, “Okay, how you doing?” “Well, from 1 to 10, I’m at a 9, doing pretty bad.” Okay, let’s do operate, let’s do some technique to help make that better, and then we test again. And, okay, if that number went down to let’s say a 5 but we’re not down to a 0 yet, so then we operate again, we use another technique. So with this test, operate, test, exit model and the idea that no failure, only feedback, we just keep applying different techniques until we get you to your goals and, again, you can’t fail if you’re coming from that perspective.
That also takes into account the idea that, sometimes, in one part of your journey when you’re first beginning, you need one thing, but then as you grow and progress, you get to another stage and maybe at that stage, you need to address something else, you need a completely different modality to address that.
Yeah, again, a longer term client relationship, you’re going to pull from any tool in your bag of tricks, so we’ll come up often come in for some issue and then realize how much we can help them with, then, next thing you know, they’re talking about all these other issues. And if you have enough training, then there are usually plenty of modalities. A current client of mine has leukemia, and we actually, working with his physician, have normalized the blood levels, the blood, yeah, the T cells have dropped, white blood cells have dropped, and the platelets have gone up and everything is pretty well balanced now and I say, “Okay, what do you wanna work on today?” He’s like, “Well, not the cancer, we beat that.” And then we started with excessive urination at night. It was like 10 bathroom visits a night, and one session in that, dropped it to about two visits per night. And, yeah, so a whole bunch of modalities that help to make these mental shifts occur. But the beautiful thing is, when you target the mind, you can change your mind like that. So if somebody is stuck in a fight or flight-type response, how quickly can we get them out of that? It can be sometimes instantaneous. So while the modalities seem like they take time, when the actual shifts occur, they’re very quick because we’re working in the mental level.
Oh, wow. Okay. And so it sounds like you’re also working on shifts in physical outcomes from the mental level.
Yes. My background is actually in Chinese medicine and I studied a lot, a lot, about the energy medicine model, the acupuncture meridians, the chakras, and that’s all great, yet I was saying, “Why is this energy so out of balance? Why does everybody seem to need an acupuncture treatment to rebalance their energy? And how is the energy blockage affecting the physical body?” but once I realized, oh, this is largely mental emotional, we have thoughts that create negative emotions that affect our physiology and our energetic physiology or energetic anatomy, once I started focusing on the mental level, I saw a cascading effect from the mind through the emotions through the energy body into the physical body that really laid the ground for miraculous change. So I started giving lectures all over called Healing the Mind, Healing the Body, and people would just hear those lectures and sometimes walked away changed, like literally healed, because they’re saying, “Oh, this problem is in my mind, of course it is. My doctor said it’s stress but only prescribed a medication. I heard a lecture from Matthew saying my mind can overcome this,” and so here’s a quick story, I had a client, he couldn’t wear his dentures, he had a really strong gag reflex, and while I’m working with him, yeah, and we resolved that in one session but while I was working with him, his wife was in the room and she kept hearing me say to him, “Nothing outside of you can make you gag.
Nothing outside of you has power over you. Click To Tweet
It is your mind that’s causing this response,” she kept hearing the message, only your mind is causing the response. She called me and said, “I just wanna thank you, my husband can wear his dentures now. It’s great. We can be social. We can go out.” She said, “And, during that session, I stopped smoking.” I said, “I didn’t even work with you, how did you just stop smoking from sitting in the room?” She said, “I kept hearing you say over and over again nothing outside of you has power over you,” and she extrapolated that over to cigarettes and just said, “Yeah, these things don’t make me do this. I make me do this and I don’t have to do it anymore.” So, yeah, two people healed in one two-hour session by just making a mental shift.
Now, that sounds like a really miraculous turnaround on some things that seem really conditioned and I’ve been, I don’t want to say conditioned but I’ve been always thinking this along the realm of subconscious and subconscious training of the mind requiring 21 days or whatever the repetition is. It sounds like you found a faster way to get people out of the mindsets that are causing some of these terrible ailments.
Yeah, I don’t know who came up with that idea that it takes 21 days to change something, it’s just not true from my experience. In just five minutes of talking to you, told you about three case histories, I can go on for like hundreds and hundreds of these case histories, where the change occurred within 2 to 10 hours. If you’re stuck in a fear-based response, once I show you your subconscious mind, you’re safe. You can relax. It’s amazing how quickly the body can shift, how quickly the mind can shift, how quickly our behaviors can shift once that change occurs, but it does have to occur on the subconscious level or else it’s just largely cognitive, but when it happens in that deeper mind and the emotional, imaginative mind, then the change is actually very quick.
So, how does someone tap something into their subconscious? Because I know that maybe that 21-day theory comes about in sense of how you take your conscious mind and then you train your subconscious over time, kind of the habit generation, how long it takes to train yourself to brush your teeth at the same time every morning, things like that, but it sounds like there’s another way to tap directly into your subconscious without going through your conscious mind.
Right, yeah, and that’s what hypnotherapy is all about. So in a cognitive behavioral approach, we keep changing behaviors, changing behaviors, eventually, we hope that behavioral change repeated enough will make a subconscious change or just becomes a new habit, a new neural pathway. But if we go directly to the subconscious, which is the part of us that motivates our behaviors, so let’s say simply somebody smokes, they’re smoking and smoking, if you try a behavioral approach to that, maybe you can get them to stop, but, quite often, within two hours, I can have that person in hypnosis. So the answer to your question, how do we get the programming in there, we need the hypnotic state first of all to bypass the critical part of the conscious mind, which can reject suggestions. What happens is if I say to you in your regular waking consciousness, like right now, if I say, “You’re now sleeping better at night,” I can just give you that suggestion, but that can easily be rejected if it doesn’t match what you already know in your subconscious memory banks. For instance, if you believe you’re unlovable deep down inside, then I say, “Of course, you’re lovable,” the critical part of your conscious mind will check in a millisecond that the subconscious programming and say, “Is that true? Are we lovable?” Subconscious says, “No, we’re unlovable,” suggestion gets rejected. So the first step is induce the hypnotic state. The second is going to be, and very basic work here, properly worded suggestions that don’t reengage the critical mind. We need to often do a lot of repetition of suggestions. But, again, that’s really basic work, just putting someone in hypnosis and kind of reprogramming them. Deeper hypnotherapy work, or our style called interpersonal hypnotherapy, goes much more to the root cause. So if you believe you’re unlovable, well, where did that come from? If you keep smoking to suppress negative emotions, where do all those emotions come from? So we don’t really focus on behaviors in the deeper work or even on the emotions, we want to really look at the negative beliefs we hold in the subconscious that are causing the negative emotions which cause the negative behaviors or the psychosomatic illness. But once you get to the belief systems, you say, “Oh, okay, all that low self-esteem, all those negative emotions, come from beliefs, like I’m stupid, I’m unlovable, I’m dirty, I’m disgusting, I’m powerless, I’m trapped, I’m helpless,” but where did all those negative thoughts come from? Those come from your memories, which really are from your past events. And within those memories, we have relationships. So this goes back to our brand interpersonal hypnotherapy where we’re actually looking at the relationships within the subconscious even more than memories, beliefs, or emotions.
And so when you talk about this very root cause of relationship, you’re often talking about something bad that someone’s had happened to them in the past and they might not even actively been thinking about, “Oh, this person when I was a teenager, this person when I was growing up, this person five years ago in my adult life,” but something about that relationship made them feel unworthy or, in the case of some people I’m trying to reach, not naturally successful, not naturally deserving of the kind of career, the kind of life, the kind of pursuits that they really want to be having and feel would make them happy.
Yeah. Well, if you take any symptom, whether it’s a behavior or physical discomfort, psychosomatic illness, then we just say what are the emotions underlying that, so, let’s say, of stress-induced headaches, not a physical cause, so there’s headache, that’s your symptom, but underneath that are going to be your emotions, the emotions that you call stress, but that’s going to be hurt, sadness, fear, anger, grief, guilt. Where do those come from? Your belief systems. Powerless, trapped, helpless, unlovable, not good enough. Where did those come from? Your memories, but it’s going to be a relationship in those memories, like your father, for instance, dad made you feel all those things. So once you see the headache isn’t a thing, it’s a thought made manifest, then we go to the deep metaphysical principle of learn to translate things into thoughts. Everything that’s a thing started as a thought. A computer, we had to think about to make a computer. You want to make a beautiful picture, it starts in your mind before you can manifest it externally. So when you get to the real root cause, and you see, “Oh, you were five years old, your dad was screaming and yelling at you,” then that parent-child conflict is seen as the root cause. The parent-child conflict in the subconscious is rooted in guilt primarily, the parent making the child feel bad. So, therefore, what we really find is unforgiveness at the root of these physical manifestations. Therefore, the headache is not a physical problem to be corrected, it’s not even a negative emotion to be resolved, it’s an unforgiveness. Once we see that forgiveness is the real root of mental change, then pretty much forgiveness is the root of all healing in the mind to heal the body, so, yeah, I just meditated for years on this and I’ve come to the conclusion, forgiveness is at the root of all mind-body healing.
Can you talk a bit about this idea of the root of all suffering and the root of all suffering is that this continued guilt, this non-forgiveness of ourselves, these continued beliefs that we have?
On almost every level, I want to say yes to that question. If you come at it from a deep religious, philosophical, metaphysical principle, Judeo-Christian model, that there’s a fall, that somehow we got separated from our source, the idea of like Adam and Eve being kicked out of the Garden is like now they’re on a long guilt trip. You did something bad, now you’re on a long guilt trip. Then what do you need to resolve that? Forgiveness, the idea of atonement. So we find that in religion, no matter what approach you take, you realize, oh, there’s a sense of separation and we need to get back to a sense of oneness. In A Course in Miracles, that is absolutely the model.
The problem, the one problem for all suffering is separation, and the solution is oneness. Click To Tweet
But what is the means of that shift? How do we get from feeling separate to feeling one or moving from fear to love, moving from an illusion of who we are to the truth of who we are? That mechanism is forgiveness. In analytical hypnotherapy, the root of essentially every problem is that parent-child conflict rooted in guilt. So if you look at it from a religious perspective, pretty much guilt. Look at it from a psychological perspective, pretty much guilt. What is the way to get people to stop hating themselves, attacking themselves, being angry at the world, like all that negativity, is really just rooted in unforgiveness. Once we make that mental shift, that’s where we see real miracles occur, where you can’t believe something could change that quickly but it’s because you addressed it at the absolute very root cause of the issue. If not, you’re really just treating symptoms or things in between the problem and the symptom, like memories, beliefs, emotions, energy imbalances. But if you really look at the root of all of that, one problem: separation; one solution: oneness. How do we get back there? Forgiveness.
People who are living a life that they’re not really inspired by, people who maybe have an idea, they’re like, “Oh, if only I could do this,” but they really feel like they’re never going to do this, they’re never going to have the life they want, oftentimes involves being stuck in a job that doesn’t really inspire you or being stuck in some sort of lifestyle. That stuck feeling, that feeling you can’t get out of this, “I can’t move on to something different even though I desperately want to move on to something different, I desperately wanna create a different life,” all kind of originates from this idea of separation, being separated from that oneness, from that source.
Although we’re not really separate ever. You can’t be separate from — like how could a fish be separate from the ocean? The great poet Kabir, he said, “I laugh when I hear the fish in the ocean is thirsty.” So, if you’re in the state of oneness, why in this example of somebody who’s stuck, I’m stuck, I’m stuck. When we learn to translate things into thoughts, the life, the thing called your life where you’re stuck, actually, the thought came first. So what comes first, the mind or the symptom? So you could say, “Well, my ulcer makes me angry.” Well, maybe your anger causes your ulcer. “My life makes me feel stuck.” Maybe you believe you’re stuck. So if I said to the person you were just describing how do you feel, “I’m really angry, I hate my life. I hate my situation.” How does that make you feel about yourself? “Makes me feel stuck and out of control.” I guarantee you that person felt stuck, trapped, and out of control before they ever even knew what a career was, before they were 10 years old. They were feeling stuck, trapped, and out of control. So thought inevitably externalizes itself.
It’s such a simple principle but I think people, I don’t know, we lose common sense at some point that my thoughts influenced my life, my thoughts influenced my body, but what’s happening in my life is a direct reflection of my thoughts. So if I want to figure out what negative thinking do I have, just look at the current situation and, really, whatever’s happening now is the result of past thinking. So really, what do we have to change? Only the past thinking, because you’re really not separate from universe, you’re not separate from universal intelligence, I don’t know your audience and all the words they might use but people who believe in God, you’re not separate from that. But why do you feel like you are? Again, it always goes back to your mind.
Is that where the NLP comes in the sense of like the way you talk to yourself, even some other concepts like what information you surround yourself with, what do you read online every day or where do you read it, what kind of people are you around, does that all have an influence on basically what your thoughts are and then what your thoughts are leading to what result you create in your life?
NLP is a very vast field of study. I like the definition, the founders, Richard Bandler, John Grinder, they said NLP is a way of thinking that leaves behind a trail of techniques. But, essentially, NLP works with the structure of what’s happening in your mind where hypnotherapy works more with the content of what’s in your mind. So content is, okay, what happened in your childhood, you’ve got all these memories, you have all these negative beliefs, negative emotions. NLP really doesn’t focus on that much. It focuses more on structure, which is to say what are you doing with your mind now. So where NLP says this is a way of thinking that leaves behind a trail of techniques, the way of thinking is to model human excellence. So if someone can do something, then anybody else can do it, it’s one of the NLP presuppositions. So the NLP founders studied really great minds., Milton Erickson, Virginia Satir, Fritz Perls, they said, okay, these people are excellent at what they do, how do we model what they’re doing so we can duplicate that in others? That’s what left behind the trail of techniques. So, how you structure your mind in NLP becomes much more fluid. Let’s say you’re afraid of spiders. If you put an image of a spider right in your face with all those eyes and the fangs and the eerie legs, well, anybody’s going to feel scared. But once you realize, “Oh, wait, I can move that picture 20 feet away from me, I can shrink it down really small, I can move it off to the left, I can put it in a little frame and make that picture black and white, now that spider doesn’t seem to have as much influence over me.” Once we realize with that simple, it’s called a submodality distinction, once we learn we can change that, that structure, we realize we’re empowered to respond to life the way we want to instead of the way we appear to have been programmed, neuro-linguistic programming. The idea is we are already programmed, hypnotherapy works to change deep subconscious programming with the content that’s in there, and NLP can certainly do that because they’re so hand in hand, NLP and hypnosis, but, again, NLP will focus more on the structure of what you’re doing now in your mind because if you keep having a problem, it means you keep repeating the same pattern over and over in the present moment and the only place you get to make that change is in the present moment.
So I think a lot of people have heard or seen a show where someone’s afraid of public speaking and someone will say, “Picture the entire audience is naked or the entire audience is wearing a silly hat,” or something like that, and you’re saying that that is actually an NLP technique.
You could absolutely work in NLP in that way because you have three major representational systems: the visual, what are you seeing when you stand in front of the audience; what are you hearing, including your own thoughts; and what are you feeling. And once you realize you choose what you think, you choose what you feel, and even bigger than that, you choose the life that you would live so when you walk in front of a group, you’re not seeing anything in the room. NLP stands for neuro-linguistic, the neuro part is the data coming in through all of your senses, what do your eyes see, what your ear is hearing. The linguistic are the mental maps, the mental filters that we put on those impressions. So, you walk into an audience, into big, large group of people, there’s really nothing happening. It’s only happening in your brain. You’re not really aware of what’s going on out there. Knowing that you’re only responding to your internal structure, your internal map of what’s happening out there, you can change the map. Your subconscious doesn’t know fact from fiction. So if you picture an audience that hates you, that’s going to ridicule you, well, that’s how your body’s going to respond, in a fight or flight way. But if you picture a naked audience who’s actually much more vulnerable and insecure than you are, then, great, you go out there, or if you just see an audience of friends, but the point is, you can change the way you’re perceiving reality because you’re not actually seeing reality.
So does it matter what content you’re choosing to receive? So, picture someone deciding, “Okay, I’m gonna read this book,” versus, “I’m going to ‘doom scroll,’” or some of these other areas where people oftentimes receive more negative content or is it more about understanding the content for what it is and not being physically manifested in this negative content, understanding, okay, this is just one person writing that they think the world is falling apart because of X, Y, and Z?
Right. Well, the content that appears to be outside like I’m saying, we don’t actually perceive. We perceive what’s happening inside, but here’s the thing, we choose how we feel about content before we actually experience the content, then once we do, the emotion is already prewired. So, for instance, if you say, “When I pick up the newspaper, if the stock market went down today, I’m going to be mad,” that content of the newspaper has nothing to do with how you feel. You could have said, “Hey, I’m a day trader and I do short sales and I like when the stock market goes down.” Well, now, stock market going down, that newspaper just made you feel thrilled.
You're the one who chooses how you feel about life. Click To Tweet
And then when that event happens, again, you’ve already made that decision. So if you say, “Yeah, if my kids, if they come home late again, I will be so pissed.” Well, when your kids come home late again, you’re the one who’s so pissed. Or you could say, “My kids come home late again, I’m going to be assertive, I’m gonna lovingly sit them down, I’m gonna lay some boundaries, remaining in a place of inner peace.” It’s your choice. So it’s not the external content, it’s what we’re doing in our own minds.
So we can’t really control it. I know, sometimes in my past, and some people try to control for some of those, I’m going to avoid negativity, I’m going to avoid these negative things, and there seems to be some merit for, at least in the sense of like when you need a break from certain things, but what I’m wondering is it’s not so much about avoiding all things negative, it’s about if you have the right mindset for it, it won’t seem as negative and it probably won’t appear as much because you’re not looking for that thing.
Yeah. I mean, if we walk into, let’s say, a movie theater, and all the seats on the left have needles and it’s all disgusting on the left, there’s razor blades in the seats, and on the right, it’s all cushy and wonderful, I mean, of course, we’re going to sit to the right. So, of course, as biological organisms, we’re going to move towards pleasure if we are sane. However, I wrote a book called Peace Under All Circumstances, because while we do have a propensity to want to move towards what’s pleasurable, this is a world of duality. There’s yin and yang, there’s up and down, stocks go up and stocks go down, you’re healthy or you’re sick, it’s always up and down. So if you go to the beach and you sit there and say, “Okay, I like when the waves go up but not when they go down,” well, what a fool, right? You’re miserable half the time. “I like when it’s sunny but I don’t like when it rains.” Now, you’re miserable every time it rains. But if you say, “I’m gonna be at peace whether the waves go up or go down,” “I’m gonna be at peace whether I’m sitting on the left side of the theater or the right side of the theater.”
If you still think, “I must always be around positive things to be happy,” it will never work because you can’t make the world always be positive. So I hear people saying, “Oh, I never watched the news.” I watch the news two or three times a day. I want to know what’s going on out there. But does it affect me emotionally? No. Why? Because I made a choice that I’m at peace no matter what’s happening and I choose to be well informed.
So I also want to get a little bit into your personal story. What made you decide to start Anahat Education Group after everything you had done studying Chinese medicine, philosophy, and everything else about the human mind?
Yeah, it’s a 30-year journey there but the short of it is when I was 19, I had a very powerful spiritual awakening where it was all oneness. It was everything we’ve been talking about, a direct experience of love and bliss and everything I’d ever want to feel and that’s just the short, very powerful experience. That led me to study religion and philosophy in the university and then Chinese medicine for my master’s but it wasn’t quite it. Eventually, I found hypnotherapy, I was like, yes, the mind, I want to dedicate my life to the mind. So when I was 24, 25 years old, I had finished a lot of my graduate and postgraduate studies and then said, all right, well what do I do with my life? So I went up to the woods in Colorado, actually, you may know that amazing city at Crestone, Colorado, it’s a very spiritual place, there’s all these monasteries and ashrams, it’s incredible, like 500 people live there but there’s like 30 monasteries in this one city. I was meditating in the woods, fasting and praying and just saying, okay, spirit, you know, whatever we call that, but I was like, “Okay, God, what do I do with my life? Where do I go? How do I do it?” and that higher wisdom voice came to me, it took four days, it said, “You’re going to open,” at the time it was called Anahat Meditation —
Four days, wow.
Yeah, it wasn’t too bad but it’s like, hey, there’s the rest of my life, I think I’m wise enough to dedicate some time to figure out what to do with the rest of my life so, yeah, went into silence, solitude, no food, nothing, just sit in meditation until I figure out what to do with my life. And then my higher wisdom said, “Open Anahat Meditation Center,” that’s what it was called at the time, “Do it in Massachusetts, and do it based on these principles,” and I wrote down those life principles and that guided my life ever since. Eventually, we turned it into Anahat Education Group when we were already a state-licensed hypnotherapy school, we were at the top of the skyscrapers, we were doing really well and I realized this isn’t a meditation center anymore, like when I was in my early 20s, this has just become a really robust group of educators and professionals and then it became Anahat Education Group. But, really, we run the Institute of Interpersonal Hypnotherapy, which is a way that I get to infuse all these deep spiritual, metaphysical healing principles into an ever more legitimate profession. We keep working to raise the standards of hypnotherapy education so it can be a more respectable profession but, yeah, Anahat Education Group really is like the spiritual hub, if you will, of the work I do in the field of hypnotherapy, which gives it much more depth than what I found in a lot of other hypnosis trainings where they’re only talking about the technique. But what fuels my work, the word “Anahat” literally is the heart chakra, it’s referring to the very essence of your being. And that goes into a lot more.
But that’s the brief overview of a 30-year journey with all this stuff.
One thing I’m also wondering is from the standpoint of when you went to Crestone and you had the four days away and it came to you, what made you trust that? Because I think a lot of people have ideas or even have like things come to them but don’t necessarily have that self-trust or a thing like, “Oh, wait, but it’ll never work because of X, Y and Z,” you oftentimes will come about. What made you actually say, “Okay, I wrote this down, it’s gonna be Anahat, it’s gonna be in Massachusetts,” and then you actually went and did it?
Yeah, I know it seems crazy. It all started when I was 19 and I had that spiritual awakening because I didn’t ask for that experience, at least not consciously. I was atheist, agnostic, I didn’t believe or care about God, it just wasn’t in my radar. But when that experience happened, it was so wonderfully benevolent, it was awe inspiring and I just said I’m dedicating my whole life to this experience. So being a religion and philosophy major, I started seeing there’s tremendous consistency in all the world’s religious and spiritual wisdom traditions. So that built faith, that, well, if all the saints and sages keep saying the same thing, there’s probably some truth to that. Yet, in my early studies, in my first Chinese medical college, I was studying with a medical intuitive who was very psychic, very gifted, just off the charts, and he’s one of the ones who first taught me how to talk to my “higher self.” And he had me go into meditation, he said, “Ask that voice a question,” he just said, “Ask a question, you’ll receive an answer.” And I said to that voice, it wasn’t even a voice yet, it was just to the empty space, I said, I was in deep meditation, there’s no real content inside and I said, “How do I heal my girlfriend at the time of ulcerative colitis?” And that voice said, “She’s already healed,” and I said, “No, she’s not. She’s quite sick,” and the voice said, “She’s already healed.” What I’ve learned over the years is that, if we just want to call it God for being simple about it, there is a reality, I tapped into that at 19, I’ve learned that that reality is on our side and it will talk to us, commune with us, reveal to us if we just ask and receive. Eventually, I realized years later, that voice was right. She’s already healed. I had to stop seeing her as sick, like a healer sees the client/patient as already healed. One of my clients recently said, “Don’t you see how much better I am?” and I said no, he’s like, “What do you mean?” I said, “You were perfect when you walked in, you’re perfect now.” So I have learned that there is a higher, wiser mind, whether you call it oversoul, superconscious, higher self, God, divine mind, Holy Spirit, it’s there. And to not tap into it is really unfortunate. People suffer so much when they only turn to their subconscious or conscious minds. But once you realize you have a superconscious mind and that you can trust it, that it knows better than you, I think it’s not just trusting it, it’s distrusting my own mind. I had a teacher who would frequently say, “How many times has your mind been wrong? How many times did you perceive…” Like if your conscious mind is wrong 20 times a day, why do you keep turning to it about how to run your life? So it was actually a spiritual teacher early on who made it very clear you cannot trust your own conscious mind but there is divine mind and if you turn to it, it’ll make your life infinitely better. So it was really doing the experiment. It wasn’t blind faith. It was, “All right, let me start listening to a higher, wiser mind besides mine.” I was meditating one morning in those early years and that voice out of the silence said, “You’re going to get a speeding ticket today.” I said “Well, no —
Oh, wow.
Yeah. I said, “No, I’m not because you just told me that and now I won’t speed.” It said, “No, you won’t be paying attention, you’ll get a ticket.” And sure enough, I’m driving to acupuncture school, I look in the rearview mirror and there are the sirens, pull over, I’m like, “Hello, totally expected you,” and then, sure enough, when I reflected on it, I wasn’t paying attention at that moment to the speedometer and that voice knew. So I’ve had enough of those experiences to realize there’s something wider than mi neurotic conscious mind and knowing that my mind is constantly wrong about things, I’m going to trust something higher. So, yeah, don’t trust yourself as much, trust God, tends to work out a lot better.
And it’s interesting how you’re talking about all the different religious traditions and all the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam seem to have some sort of element of trust God and not yourself and the same can be said of Hinduism, Buddhism, just phrased in a different way probably for a different audience, to be 100 percent honest. One thing I wonder is what percentage of population do you think are tapping into their higher mind?
Well, we would say I think the studies show that 95 percent of the population believe in God or some form of higher power, but how many are actually tapping and living from that, I don’t know that there’s any statistics on it but my experience of humanity is it’s not the majority because the world is such a reflection of egoic thinking rather than spirit thinking. So if we just make a distinction between ego and spirit, then we have a distinction between fear and love.
Ego is fear based, spirit is love based. Spirit is love. Click To Tweet
So how many people in this world turn to love to motivate their behaviors? How many people follow the trust your joy, follow your bliss mindset? How many people have surrendered to divine consciousness and been lifted up to heights they couldn’t have imagined? I think that’s the minority, unfortunately.
Yeah. So if the world is majority fear based, majority in the ego but someone taps into their higher self, someone adopts a better way of thinking, adopts trust in some of these messages that they’re getting, trusting the right messages, are they able to manifest a world around them that generally doesn’t reflect that fear, ego-based reality that most other people are in? Do they naturally find themselves in the right situation, in places that just tap into that different level of energy?
Absolutely. My experience being a religion and philosophy major is studying the great saints and sages, you ask those people for their blessings, you don’t ask the guy who’s in a mental institution or lying in the alley in his own feces, you don’t turn to those people. Sorry, I’m just using extreme examples. You don’t turn to that guy whose life is totally dysfunctional and say, “Oh, please bless my children,” but why don’t you turn to the saint and say, “Please bless my children”? Somehow we know that person, they’re tapped into some kind of power. We all know this on some level that if we heal our minds, we can heal our lives, but when we really learn to turn it over to a higher power, again, whatever you want to call that, but I would be remiss to not talk about it, like we’re talking about it because even though we want to respect atheists and agnostics, there’s a reality, call it whatever you want, but when you give your life to it and let the higher mind start running the show, you’re literally turning it over to the infinite creative power of the whole universe as opposed to your own silly thinking, your own fear-based egoic thinking, so, yes, I have seen an incredible power to manifest whatever I want in my life, I can tell you hundreds of stories of I sat in meditation, I visualized something, I went through what I call the creating manifesting formula, 12 steps I take my students through of how to manifest whatever they want in their life and a lot of people know about this stuff now, Law of Attraction, The Secret, all those teachings that are now out there, but, yeah, when we learn to get our imagery, our emotions, and our thoughts aligned with what we want, the universe tends to match that. I mean, it does match our thinking. But when you really go beyond even the conscious creating and manifesting to a deeper level of pure surrender, you don’t even have to visualize positive things. If Law of Attraction is true that if you vibrate at a certain level, whatever you’re vibrating at, you’re going to attract like, like attracts like. So if you just prioritize the highest, to seek the highest spiritual levels of being, the highest way you can vibrate, more love, more peace, more joy, more bliss, you don’t have to think about anything else, you will just keep attracting better people, more money, better relationships, you’ll have more purpose, more mission, more direction, things flow.
All you have to do is prioritize spirituality and everything else takes care of itself. Click To Tweet
It’s one of the deepest secrets and I think like you’re asking me, like why do people not just do that, like we’re afraid. Christ said it, “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and all things are added on to you.” Well, why not just do that then? Why not take that risk? And having this, I mean, like what happens after you die in this context, it means find the peace and love and joy within yourself and then watch what happens to your life. You barely have to plan or think about anything when you just learn to meditate on that highest place within you. Everything else takes care of itself.
Now, if someone is, not sure if the word would be receiving messages, but if someone has thoughts, series of words slip into their brain or they appear in front of them or something like that, how would someone go about determining whether this is a higher spiritual message versus just more potentially neurotic thoughts from their ego-based self?
Yeah, the idea is discernment and we need to learn how to use discernment beyond just how we normally do. So, for instance, I can discern the difference between a microphone and a computer monitor, a water bottle versus a coffee mug. I don’t necessarily apply that to spirit versus ego. So we really just want to learn to discern when is it ego, when is it spirit. When it’s ego, it’s usually fear based. When it’s ego, it’s normally just a bunch of English, whatever your preferred language is in your head, but, for us, like I just hear English in my head, that monkey mind, that continual chatter. Realize that’s not the voice for God, that’s not your higher, wiser mind. So if we understand what the subconscious mind is and the conscious mind, we generally can say most answers that are going to come from that, for most people, are ego based. But when it comes from spirit, it speaks with unmistakable clarity and overwhelming appeal. That’s in A Course of Miracles. It says why would the voice of the ego seems so much louder? And it’s like imagine like the cap of a pen, if you look in that little hole when you put your face right in it, well, everything seems so dark and the universe is so small and it’s so limited. Well, you’re just focused on the most miniscule part of the universe. If you learn to pull back and —
Now I have to do it.
Right, right. I mean, if that, yeah, if looking in the very tip of a pen is like the whole of your universe and you say, “Well, where’s the sun? There’s no sun, there’s no ocean, there’s no universe,” well, you’re just too myopic to realize where you are and what’s even happening. So it’s not that the ego is louder than spirit, it’s just that we’re too focused on it. So, first, learn to discern the difference. And then when you hear the voice for spirit, again, it speaks with unmistakable clarity and overwhelming appeal. It’s a voice that, and it’s not even English, in Conversations with God, Neale Donald Walsch was homeless, he was destitute, and he starts writing a letter to God, he says, “I sure as hell,” and that higher voice stopped him and said, “Wouldn’t you like to be assure as heaven?” And he heard this voice. And then, years later, they interview him and say, “What happened after all those revelations? How is your life different?” He said, “Well, I’ll never have to worry about money again.” What an amazing answer. Everybody trying to find money. He was homeless, couldn’t find money, but he found God and the money followed. “Seek ye first the kingdom and all things are added on to you.” So if we just want to put our attention on that, then life becomes infinitely better. And I don’t care if anybody’s atheistic or agnostic, it’s an experiment. You don’t have to call it God, just learn to surrender, learn to let go, stop being the doer and just learn to really go with the flow, learn to listen, instead of like we’re always just talking, talking, whether it’s to others or in our own head, constantly talking. When we meditate, we get really quiet and we learn to listen. And when you listen, you can hear. But most people don’t stop and ask. They don’t actually sincerely listen. So, yeah, if we’re going to say you’re going to hear the voice of higher wisdom, you’d want to train your mind to actually be a good listener first because most of us are really good at talking but not very good at listening.
Yeah, what they call active listening versus people who are just waiting for their turn to talk, essentially. So, Matthew, one final question, now that my audience has gotten to hear everything about Anahat Education and everything that you do, your story, where you come from, what you believe in, what will be the best way for anyone listening that’s interested in finding out some more information and possibly getting a hold of you?
Sure. The hypnotherapy side of things with tons of free resources is instituteofhypnotherapy.com. Again, instituteofhypnotherapy.com. I also have a website called onlinemonastery.com, with 100 plus hours of free meditation teachings and that’s really the essence of Anahat Meditation Center on Anahat Education Group is this meditation system. So totally free, it came to me in my own meditation so I didn’t have to pay for it or I don’t monetize it. It came to me, it’s extremely valuable, and I offer it to others. So, again, that’s at onlinemonastery.com. And then, yeah, and our hypnotherapy training, there are literally hundreds of free hours of training for people who are interested.
Oh, thank you so much. And, Matthew, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, telling us all about how we can use some of these techniques to adopt a better mindset. Because, as I mentioned throughout my podcast, we all have different backgrounds, we all have different struggles, we all have different pursuits, different things we want, but the commonality amongst all of it is the mindset, is what mindset you’re coming at it from and if you’re coming at it from the mindset that you are able to do it, that these things are going to happen, well, it’s much more likely to happen than if you’re coming at it from that limited mindset of feeling stuck, which is a mindset that I’m perfectly aware of. I would also like to thank everyone out there listening for tuning in to Action’s Antidotes. Thank you for all the episodes that you’ve tuned into, whether this is your first episode or you’ve listened to all 72 of them so far, and I would like to encourage everyone to tune into more episodes of Action’s Antidotes where I’ll talking to more interesting people who are following their true passions, who have found their place in life or are in the process of finding their place in life, a place that really resonates with them.
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About Matthew Brownstein
Matthew J. Brownstein is the CEO of Anahat Education Group and the Executive Director of the Institute of Interpersonal Hypnotherapy. Matthew founded the International Association of Interpersonal Hypnotherapists, and OnlineMonastery.com where he teaches the Anahat Meditation System. He is the author of five books including The Sacred Geometry of Meditation, The Sutras on Healing and Enlightenment, and Interpersonal Hypnotherapy. Matthew is a student and teacher of A Course in Miracles and offers free classes on Meditation, Hypnotherapy, Spiritual Growth, and Life Mastery Work through the Institute. He is the founder of the Interpersonal NLP Society, Silent Light Publishers, and IGE Business Networking Groups. When not working on the Vision of Anahat Education Group, Matthew enjoys hiking, kayaking, yoga, and meditation from his home in the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York.