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The Power of Eight: Harnessing the Miraculous Energies of a Small Group to Heal Others, Your Life, and the World
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The Intention Experiment: Using Your Thoughts to Change Your Life and the World:
https://amzn.to/3abX7oc
The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe
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Living with Intention: The Science of Using Thoughts to Change Your Life and the World:
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The Power of Eight
https://www.learntruehealth.com/the-power-of-eight
Highlights:
- What is the power of eight
- How did power of eight start
- Positive intention vs negative intention
- What power of eight session looks like
- What time travel intention is
In this episode, Lynne McTaggart shares with us how the power of eight started. She shares how powerful sending and receiving intention is. She also shares how people can get over big or small traumas through time travel intention.
Intro:
Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. You’re going to love today’s interview. I would love for you to join my new membership that I’ve spent the last four months creating. I’ve filmed a bunch of wonderful videos and every week I upload new videos teaching you how to cook in a way that heals your body and also cook and prepare food in a way that your kids will love, your spouse will love. It’s delicious food but it is whole foods and that there’s no processed foods, minimally processed and it taste delicious. So if you want to learn some amazing recipes, even if you could just improve your health by adding more nutrition in the form of food to your life, please come join come check out the Learn True Health Home Kitchen. I would love to see you there. The community so far is loving it.
One of our members said that within five days of applying some of the things that she learned in the membership, her chronic headaches went away and that she noticed she had more energy. She was actually feeling like she could sleep at night. Come join the Learn True Health Home Kitchen and learn how to use food as your medicine to eat delicious food that also heals your body. Go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. That’s learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. You can join as a monthly member. It’s $9.97 for a whole month. You can come check it out. You can join as an annual member and use the coupon code LTH for a big discount. Come learn how to make delicious food that is also healing for your body. Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. I hope to see you there.
[0:01:56] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 414. I am so excited for today’s guest. This has been a long time in the making. Lynne McTaggart, I have wanted to interview you for a really long time and our schedules finally aligned. Today is the day. I’m so excited. A really good friend of mine, who’s a mental health counselor about a year ago, wrote me a text saying, “You have to interview this woman. I just finished her book. It’s life-changing. Oh my gosh. This is amazing.” I really take her opinion seriously because she’s a mental health counselor and she is really grounded in what works, what doesn’t work. She has to be. She actually, after reading your book The Power of Eight, she owns a clinic and she runs the clinic. About 80% of her clientele are there to end alcohol and substance abuse. So she does individual therapy and she has therapists underneath her as well and she also has group therapy. So most of her clientele is there to end addiction. She immediately started using the tools that she learned from your book, The Power of Eight, in her group sessions.
So, when they all came together two or three times a week to do their group therapy for ending their substance abuse, addiction or healing it; all the things she learned from your book she started doing with them and started seeing some fantastic results. Then she started doing it to shift things in her personal life. I’d get a text, “Okay, at 9:00 in the morning we’re all going to put this intention out there together.” So we started this intention circle, which was so great. So finally you’re here on the show. I think that your tools are so relevant for everyone listening. So I’m very, very excited for us to learn from you today. Welcome to the show.
[0:04:06] Lynne McTaggart: Thank you so much. It’s great to be with you, Ashley.
[0:04:10] Ashley James: Awesome. Absolutely. Now, here’s another example of serendipity. I just texted my godmother and I just felt this urge. I don’t normally tell her who I’m interviewing. I just felt the urge to tell her and I said, “I can’t believe it. I’m so excited. I’m finally interviewing Lynne McTaggart today.” My auntie, I call her my auntie. She wrote back, “You’re not going to believe this. I’m holding her book in my hand.” I’ve never talked to my aunt about you at all. She said, “I can’t believe it. I’m holding her book The Power of Eight right now in my hand.” I said, “Yeah, exactly. I just knew it. Something in me knew to tell her.” So she’s really excited. So she’s going to text me a question for you while we’re doing our interview. But this is how exciting it is. Finally, I have you on the show.
All my listeners want to achieve better health emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually, energetically. All my listeners want a better life for themselves and their family. This is something that you teach people. You’re considered an intention guru. It’s almost like learning how to master the ability to manifest. I am so excited to dive into this, but before we do, I’d love to hear a bit about your backstory so that we really understand what happened in your life that led you to become this best-selling author of teaching people how to control their thoughts in a way that manifests what they want in life.
[0:05:51] Lynne McTaggart: Well, I mean, I never set out to do this. My background is investigative reporting. So, when I started out my career, Ashley, I broke baby-selling rings. I was trying to put bad guys in jail kind of thing. I came over to the UK to write a book. At that point, it was a biography of one of the Kennedy sisters. I fell in love with the place, never left. At that, which was my early 30s, I got ill and I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I went from very conventional doctors to very outer rim of alternative doctors and nobody could tell me what was wrong with me. Now, it turned out I had a faulty microbiome. No big deal these days, but back in the early 80s, it was.
So, I finally realized if I was going to get better I was going to have to research this myself. So I researched what I thought I had. Then I researched the right doctor to work with me, to heal me. He was a pioneering nutritional doctor, a medical doctor who was not using drugs anymore, he was using supplements. He was using food and supplements as medicine. We got me better and I was so impressed by this that I probably got pretty boring on the subject. My husband sort of turned to me one day and he said, “Don’t tell me, tell the world.”
So, we started a little newsletter then called What Doctors Don’t Tell You. This was 30 years ago. We carried on and we still carried on. It’s now an international magazine. We run the one in America and the one in the UK. We also have its sister publication called Get Well and a Get Well show, an exhibition, a health expo that we just had in London. So, in the course of doing this work and when we started the newsletter, we decided we want to show people what’s really proven to work in alternative medicine. So, I kept coming across, when I was doing research, very good studies, studies of spiritual healing. I kept thinking to myself, “Wait a minute, if you can have a thought and send it to someone else and make them better, that completely undermines everything we know about how the world works.”
So, I set off on a quest essentially to find out what this was. Do we have human energy fields? What was going on? So, I persuaded my publisher to let me go on a journey and to write a book without a compass. I had no idea what I was going to find, but they agreed to do a book that I wasn’t even sure the content of. I started talking to scientists in quantum physics, pioneers in consciousness research. What each of them were telling me was a tiny piece of what together compounded into a completely new science, a new view of the world. So I wrote that up in a book called The Field, which was a best-seller, an international bestseller. One night afterward, I realized there was some unfinished business because there was a lot of evidence in there that actually thoughts are an actual something with the capacity to change matter.
So, the journalist in me was very curious. I kept thinking, “Well, what are we talking about? Are we talking about a tiny shift of a quantum particle? Are we talking about curing cancer with your thoughts? I wrote a book called The Intention Experiment, which was the science of intention, all the science about the power of your thoughts, but it was also an invitation to take part in experiment. I wanted to do this and test this in the biggest possible way. I started thinking about it. I knew a lot of scientists in consciousness research, scientists working at prestigious universities like Princeton, Penn State, University of Arizona, University of California. I also have lots of readers because the field was in 30 languages. So I kept thinking, “Well, if I put them together I’m going to have the biggest global laboratory in the world.”
So we did. We would set up these well-controlled experiments with scientists. Every so often I would invite my readers to all send the same thought to that target. To be honest, Ashley, I did not think it was going to work. I thought maybe we’d have some very subtle effect but we did. It did work. It really worked. I mean, we’ve run 33 experiments. Everything from trying to make seeds grow faster to trying to purify water to lowering violence of war-torn areas and to even try to heal somebody of post-traumatic stress disorder. Of those 33, 29 have shown positive, measurable mostly significant effects. There’s no pharmaceutical drug out there that has that kind of track record, but it was really the small group thing came about because I was trying to figure out how to start running workshops in this. This is back in 2008. I wasn’t really sure how to scale down what I was learning in the intention experiments.
So I was kicking it around with my husband one day and I said, “Well, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll just put people in groups of eight or so and have them send healing intention to a member of the group with a health challenge.” He, being a good headline writer, said, “I love it. The Power of 8.” That is how it had started, just completely by accident. We did this in Chicago, our first workshop. Put people in groups of 8 or so. Had them send healing intention to a member of the group with a health challenge. Again, I didn’t think it was really going to work. I thought it was going to be a little feel-good effect like relaxing, having your back massage or something like that. That’s not what happened. Next day when people came in to talk about how it had been for them the day before in the workshop, they said things like this, “I have cataracts and they’re 80% better.” “I have a very bad knee from arthritis and I’m walking normally today.” “I have IBS and it feels like it’s cleared.” “I have depression and I feel lighter and better today. I feel like it’s gone.” On and on and on it went. I didn’t believe it. I really didn’t believe it. I thought, “Well, this is a placebo effect.” But I have now seen this happen in thousands of people’s where there have been healings in an instant or healings over time with a power of a group.
[0:13:19] Ashley James: That is amazing. I love that your husband came up with the name. That was some divine intervention to come up with that. So you didn’t do experiments where we did a group of six and a group of 10 and we found out that eight was the best?
[0:13:35] Lynne McTaggart: No. It doesn’t have to be eight. As I say, that was just me plucking a number out of the air. I mean, we have had groups of six, we’ve had groups of 12. It doesn’t need eight. Eight is kind of a Goldilocks figure, Ashley. It’s not too big and it’s not too small, but it works with six or five, it works with twelve. I think more than twelve it gets a little unwieldy. The point is a group, a small group of any size.
[0:14:06] Ashley James: You said that thoughts can change matter and you saw it in large groups of people. Did you do any experiments where you saw significant changes in something with one person’s thoughts?
[0:14:20] Lynne McTaggart: I mean, there are plenty of studies of that and they’re all in my book, The Intention Experiment of individuals sending intention to everything from bacteria to plants to single-celled organisms to full-fledged human beings and they’ve been able to change things. There’s no question. There’s huge, huge evidence of that. It’s without a doubt now. I was interested in the power of groups. I figured, “Well if one person has that power, does it get magnified in a group?” That was the other thing that really intrigued me. So that’s really why I wanted to do the intention experiment. I wanted to see what if there are thousands? What happens? With the intention experiments, we’ve had everything from 3,000 people to 25,000 people participating.
[0:15:19] Ashley James: This reminds me of what happened in DC several years ago where they meditated for peace and that the crime rates dropped significantly during that summer. This is the kind of experiments you were doing where you were taking many people with a single focus. Then you would see that it actually got results. Why is that? Is it that we’re all part of a morphic field? Is it that our thoughts really do create reality and matter is an illusion? Why is it that a group can get together and change reality?
[0:15:57] Lynne McTaggart: First of all, the studies you’re talking about, which were done by the Transcendental Meditation people, were very good studies, well-controlled. What they were looking at was just the effect of passive meditation. So the people who are part of that, what they looked at was, and they did it with 48 cities around America and Washington DC was one of them. They wanted to see what would happen if there were a critical mass of meditators meditating. They found when they reached a certain critical mass, the crime rate would go down. Now, these were not people intending for lowering violence, these were people just meditating. Essentially their theory, and that’s really all we get to call it, is that it creates a change in the field. When there are lots of people meditating, it really changes and calms things in the field.
I don’t know about that. There certainly are studies. Their studies are very good, but the why for them, I can’t really speak about. What I can talk about is what we did, which was a very highly focused thought. So our people weren’t meditating. They were in a state of hyper-awareness, hyperfocus, which is the state I try to get people in with intention. It’s not a quiescent state, it’s a state of a high degree of focus. I have them hold a particular thought. Our intention is that we will lower violence in St. Louis Missouri, in the Fairground section of St. Louis Missouri by at least 10%, something very, very specific. We’ve done this seven times now with violence lowering. We’ve done intention in war-torn areas like Sri Lanka and Afghanistan. We’ve also done it in very highly violent places like Washington DC, a section of Washington DC and also a section of St. Louis Missouri, which is officially the most violent place in America.
With that study, we worked with the team of scientists. One of them was a noted statistician in consciousness research called Dr. Jessica Utss from the University of California. She examined three years’ worth of data around St. Louis as a whole and also the area we were focusing on, which was the most violent part of St. Louis, the Fairground area. So we looked at both property crime and actual crime, violent crime. She found that the crime rate had been going up and up and up in all areas of St. Louis, particularly Fairground. From six months onward, after our intention, property crime continued to go up in St. Louis as a whole. Violent crime St. Louis at the whole continue to go up. Property crime in Fairground continue to go up, but violent crime, the focus of our intention, went down by about 43%.
[0:19:18] Ashley James: Wow.
[0:19:19] Lynne McTaggart: We’ve done seven and all seven have shown measurable, documented lowering of violence.
[0:19:30] Ashley James: Was it advertised and people in that area know that this was happening or was it completely oblivious to the people in those areas that this was going on?
[0:19:44] Lynne McTaggart: Yeah. We didn’t advertise it to the St. Louis people. We let our community and other communities in the consciousness that we were doing it and invited them to be part of it. We didn’t let St. Louis know about it.
So what is this? Well, I think that there’s a lot of things going on. I think, certainly, there is a power of thoughts. There’s almost like a psychic internet that gets created. I give you an example of that. With my intention experiment, one of the early ones we were doing trying, to make seeds grow faster. We were working with the University of Arizona. They would get four sets of thirty seeds: A, B, C and D as they were called. They would photograph each set, send me the photographs. When I was speaking in a particular area, we would do a new study.
So my first place that I was speaking was in Sydney, Australia. They were in Tucson, Arizona with the seeds. So they sent me the photos with the audience we chose randomly, one of the four sets. Didn’t tell the scientists which ones, sent intention to that set of seeds. Didn’t tell the scientists which ones. Let them then told them we were done. They planted the seeds and five days later after they’ve measured all four sets of seeds to see how high they grew, did we unblind the study and tell them, “Well, actually, we send intention to seeds A,” or whichever one it was. We ran that study six times. Every single time, the seed sent intention grew significantly higher than the controls. One time twice as high.
Now, unpack this for a second. That first study, we’re in Sydney, Australia. The seeds are in Tucson, Arizona, 8,000 miles away. The audience isn’t sending intention to the seeds itself, they’re sending intention to a photograph of the seeds. Nevertheless, we had an effect. So, that’s what I’m talking about with some sort of weird psychic internet. The even more interesting thing, that’s interesting, pretty amazing but not the really interesting part of the story. The more interesting part is what happened to the participants? Because once we started doing peace experiments in 2008, we started sending questionnaires, surveys to the people who would participate. We got thousands of responses back where people said things like these, “I’ve made up with my estranged relative.” “I’m getting up along so much better with my wife.” “That boss of mine, that horrible boss of mine, is suddenly being so nice to me.” “Now, I am in love with everyone I come in contact with.” That was about half of the people said that. That was the most. They were basically talking about hugging strangers in the street. There was this incredible change in them that was a kind of their lives became more peaceful. More peaceful, more loving, more connected. So that’s the thing, that rebound effect, that mirror effect was what started to really interest me.
[0:23:07] Ashley James: It’s as if they plugged into a different internet like you said. They’re plugging into this internet where the intention and the energy is about love and peace. The morphic field they were living in, the life, the goldfish bowl that they were living in has changed. They took themselves out of the petty, the angry whatever they were in and they put themselves in a different vibrational state. So then, they started seeing their entire world in a different way. It changed their perception.
[0:23:48] Lynne McTaggart: Absolutely. Absolutely.
[0:24:27] Ashley James: That is brilliant. Now in your book, The Power of Eight, you teach people and teach groups how to do this. What about individuals? So I want to talk about groups, I want to talk about individuals because individuals are listening to this. Maybe some people, like introverts, would be shy to go find a group of people to start doing this with at first and they want to build up their confidence by doing something alone. Can people practice what you teach alone and then go find a group? Should they just go find a group because that’s so much more powerful?
[0:24:28] Lynne McTaggart: Well, I would recommend that they find a group. It doesn’t have to be a group that’s physical. You can meet virtually. On my website, lynnemctaggart.com/forum, you can sign up to either join an existing group, and there are thousands of them going, or you can create one and advertise one in your time zone. Just say, “Hey, I’m looking for people to do a power of eight group with.” Yes, you can practice the rudimentary of intention, but it’s the power of the group. I’ll tell you what the real secret sauce is and why you do need a group. That is because for so many people if they’re stuck in their lives, the way that they get off of that is by getting off of themselves and sending intention to someone else. That’s why a group, small groups, are so powerful because I’ve seen this over and over and over again.
When I first started noticing that this was going on, I started looking at it from different ways trying to understand this because I didn’t believe it. At one point I decided to put people in groups, have them follow a course of mine for a whole year. I would put them in groups after they’d gone through some teaching with me over six weeks. I’d study them. I would monitor their progress over an entire year. Now, we had some amazing things and we continue to do so.
With that first group, there were 250 in the first group. About 150 continue to meet regularly week after week after week. Of those 150, pretty much 100% of them had major life transformations. We had an Allison who had vitiligo and started repigmenting. Trudy who regained most of her hearing, she had hearing loss. We had Mitchell Dean who was a psychologist who suffered from his own suicidal thoughts. He had suicidal depression and nothing had worked. He was an integrative psychologist, but when he put it out to his group to help him find the path to healing. After they did an intention for him, he was compelled to go to a Chinese herbalist who wanted to test his liver filtration systems. He found out that one of them was blocked. As soon as that was unblocked, his depression lifted.
So we had amazing stories like this. People who were in financial straits suddenly get this incredible ongoing windfall of money. Extraordinary people stuck in their jobs, like Melissa, who in her 50s ends up getting this new dream job, but some people, in the beginning, were stuck like Andy. Now Andy was a very talented marketing person and coach. She had sold her gift store and she was going through a divorce. She had two small children so she really needed a job. She couldn’t find a job no matter what they were doing, her group’s intention, all of the stuff she was stuck, stuck, stuck. So I went through all kinds of things with her and I finally just said, “You know Andy, get off of yourself.”
I had a particular person in mind for her to focus her intention on. There was a young boy called Luke who was 15. He had just broken up with his first serious girlfriend. When he was in a fit of adolescent angst, he threw himself off a 40-foot structure onto a hard ground. Luke broke every bone in his body, had nerve damage, brain damage. His stepfather and his mother didn’t think he was going to live according to what the doctors were telling them. So, they wrote to me and said can you put him on an intention circle. So I asked this masterclass that had been formed with these groups. All do a healing vigil for Luke on three successive Sundays while his parents kept a running commentary of what was going on with him.
Luke ended up healing in record time. Within a few weeks, he was whizzing around on a wheelchair. With a few more weeks he went home against every prognosis of the doctors. Now, he’s a healthy 18-year-old boy. So amazing. Was that down to us or good doctoring or maybe a combo of both, who knows? But what was really fascinating is what happened to Andy. Because Andy, the moment she got off of herself and started focusing on Luke, she gets a call out of nowhere from someone she doesn’t even know offering her the perfect job. That happened over and over and over again to the point where I started realizing that the real secret of this, the real reason why people are getting better is this thing of altruism.
Altruism is like a bulletproof vest. The science shows you that people who do things for other people, no matter how slight, live longer, happier, healthier lives. If you have an illness and you help somebody with the same illness, you’re more likely to get better. Even if you’re a volunteer you’re more likely to have a healthy life. You’re more likely to have longer life. It’s really extraordinary the science behind it.
[0:30:24] Ashley James: Now, what’s the difference between the power of eight or this group intention, the system, you’ve developed a system, that has proven time and time again to work for the intended target but also for everyone doing it, which is great. What the difference between that and prayer? You go to church on Sunday and the whole church prays for someone. What’s the difference?
[0:30:51] Lynne McTaggart: Well, I think it’s different. It’s a secular system, first of all. Secondly, you’re not praying to a supreme being where you basically say to God, “You decide. Thy will be done,” is what we say in church. You decide essentially. With intention, this is a very specific request to the universe. This is what I’d like, please. Also, there is the energy, the something, the alchemy that goes on in this group. Now, everybody, we just had a health show in London Olympia and I did a Get Well show. I put people into groups of eight and let them experience that. People talked about this extraordinary buzzing energy they were feeling. I’ll give you an example.
A few months ago, I did this at a conference. A woman, I swear to you, Maya, young woman who had had some sort of idiopathic paralysis from the neck down that occurred that was tragic because she was a dancer. She was in and out of paralysis and when she came to the show, she was in a wheelchair paralyzed from the neck down. The group did for her. She described this extraordinary buzzing, this energy that filled he with such gratitude, with such force that she felt, “I can’t keep this for myself.” So she started intending to send some of that out to one of her relatives who was ill. Anyway, the upshot is, when we were calling on people afterward who were raising their hand to say what had happen to them, she put her hand up and she thought to herself, “I got to stand.” She stood up and turned around and talked to everybody. It was just astonishing. Absolutely astonishing.
It’s that group thing, there is a group feeling of oneness that people talk about all the time that is something much, much bigger than them. Like they’re almost inviting in a power even outside the group. People talk about that all the time. Light behind chairs, the chair of the circle, light being’s there. Someone who had a bad knee and afterward was able to do a deep squat after this ten-minute intention. Talked about feeling warm mitts around her he even though nobody in the group was holding on to her knee. It’s that kind of thing. There’s something bigger that gets produced.
[0:33:36] Ashley James: You’re inviting in healing angels.
[0:33:40] Lynne McTaggart: I guess you are. Who knows? Look, I’ve started recognizing that intention plays a big part of it. Group intention plays a big part of it. The group effect itself. Groups are, as one psychologist called it, a collective effervescence. They have their own amazing effect and power. Altruism plays a huge part in it. Just getting off of yourself. What happens with altruism is when you do something for someone else, it activates a thing in your body called the vagus nerve. It’s the longest nerve in your body and it starts in the neck, winds its way through all of the major organs of your body. It’s kind of a love nerve because it gets activated when we do something good for someone else like a child in need. When it does, it also makes us feel connected to everyone, even people we are nothing like, we feel more connection with the other. So, there’s an extraordinary spiritual side to this that gets activated in a group and a group that is involved in an altruistic intention.
[0:34:57] Ashley James: There are studies that show that people who are depressed and suicidal when they join a group and volunteer, so dog-walking; feeding the homeless; community gardens that time and time again, they see that depression lifts and suicidal thoughts melt away. Joy starts to fill their life and that people who volunteer live longer. They are happier people and they live longer. So you’re explaining one of the physiological reasons why because it’s stimulating the vagus nerve. It connects our two brains because they’re saying now that there’s like a second brain which is our gut. That there’s so many nerves happening in the gut. The vagus nerve is sending more signals to the brain than the brain is sending back down. So the brain is receiving all this information. We have an intuition I believe. We call it like a gut feeling. I think the gut perceives also. So when we have a really clean and a healthy vagus nerve, we have better digestion; 25% of our serotonin, I believe, is produced in the gut of a healthy microbiome.
So, there’s joy and happiness, there’s better digestion, better absorption of nutrition. When the gut, when the vagus nerve’s inflamed, they see that people have chronic depression and also have developed digestive disorders like IBS. We can do something like be altruistic, volunteer, join a power of eight group and actually have a physiological effect on calming the vagus nerve, which supports our physical health. I love that. I love that we can start to see the actual physical benefits of something mental and emotional because the mental-emotional body is connected. We’re all connected. That’s really cool.
[0:37:14] Lynne McTaggart: Yes. The amazing thing of it is, as I say, in a group, it’s not just the receivers that get healed, it’s the senders too. Now, with one group, I just organized a group in Denver with the Mile Hi Church. So we had this group of eight and one of the members of the group was a guy called Wes. Now, Wes wanted to put himself forward because he suffered from depression and he had this miserable life. He was 65 when I met him and he was there with the group and he had big hopes and dreams to become a biochemist or a doctor even. He was at university when, I think his third year, he got called up to be drafted at the very end of the Vietnam War when there were no more draft deferments for college students. So he ended up going to Vietnam getting totally traumatized by the situation, coming home deeply depressed, didn’t finish university and his life went down in a downward spiral after that. Even when he met the love of his life, had married his second wife, she didn’t last long. She died of a fast-growing cancer.
So, he got to the point by 65 where it was kind of what’s the use? He barely could get himself up in the morning. So he was there and he did this whole thing. He wanted to put himself forward but there was a woman in the group with stage four cancer and he thought she was more deserving. So he did that. That first night, he went to bed and woke up and it was almost like Scrooge on Christmas morning where suddenly he’s like this totally different person. He’s smiling. He used to avoid people. He’s suddenly smiling and saying hi to them. The grass was greener than he’d ever seen it. He had a cup of herbal tea and he said it knocked his socks off. All of his senses were really heightened.
So then, the next night goes to bed. He has this amazing lucid dream he said almost like a vision where he’s meeting his 19-year-old self. They’re back in campus and the 19-year-old self is somehow communicating to him, “Don’t worry, there’s still time.” From then, Wes was a totally different person because he suddenly started doing power walks, he started writing, he started joining classes, he started coming to his church, Mile Hi Church, and is very active in a power of eight group. He’s a completely different person after that one 10-minute session.
[0:40:05] Ashley James: Oh my gosh, I’m crying right now. I think my favorite thing in the world is hearing about people who felt hopeless and then they had a breakthrough because it’s never too late. You’re not a lost cause, you’re not broken, it’s never too late. You can have a better life even if you’ve been suffering. I remember feeling so sick. In my 20s, I was so sick I just didn’t want to live anymore at times because I felt like a prisoner trapped in my own body. I was suffering so horribly. I was able to use natural medicine to overcome it and that’s one of the reasons why I do this show is to help people who are suffering like me. There is a way to heal yourself. The road sometimes is long, but sometimes it’s short. Sometimes you do something like join a power of eight group and you have these amazing results, but there’s always hope. There’s always something there for you to learn. I believe that there’s no lost causes. This is my favorite kind of story is hearing of people who triumph. Every single person deserves that. Every single person deserves to create the life that they love.
[0:41:29] Lynne McTaggart: Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, that’s the thing that’s really amazing about it. When you do see studies of what happens when people do for other people and how that changes them. One of my favorite studies is a study of prayer and it looked at took a group of 400 people with depression. They put them into two groups. One group where the people who are going to get prayer for them, and the other group of 200 we’re going to be people who are going to give the prayer. So they carried out the study and afterward measured the effects. Now, the people who got the prayer did really well. They improved, but nowhere near as much as the people who had given the prayer. They were off of the charts. So that was I think one of those interesting things. Also, another study of people looking at people who have what we’d consider the good life, all the money in the world, everything that they want, go on a lot of holidays, have a lot of material things. When they looked at their immune system markers, a group of researchers, they found they had terrible immune systems. These are people who are going to die of any one of the number of degenerative diseases: heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, etc. They were going to drop like flies, they look like, at another group who weren’t as affluent but who were living a life of service, of doing for other people. Those people had robust immune systems. They were going to live forever. So, there’s another example of the power of getting off of yourself and doing for other people. It’s really extraordinary.
[0:43:26] Ashley James: That’s so beautiful. I love it. My aunt texted her question. She says, “So, I’m in a group. Based on her book The Power of Eight, there are eight people meeting once a week on Zoom. We are into our third week and plan to do eight weeks for all eight people. Each week we let each person in the group say their intention for themselves for this week and then we pick one person after that who we’ll all focus on, figure out what intention will suit that person’s issue the best and we all repeat silently to ourselves for 10 minutes. The same intention for this one person. We meditate on it. My question is, at the beginning of the call, is it a good idea for each one of us to tell our own personal intention first or is it better to only focus on the one person’s intention throughout the whole our together?”
[0:44:20] Lynne McTaggart: Well, you can talk about your intentions, your personal intentions, but if you’re doing it for an hour, I wouldn’t try to do everybody in the group in that one hour. Sometimes it’s good to just send and sometimes it’s good to receive. So, if you’ve got an hour, you might want a little time to talk about things after each intention and to break and have time. So having about three people to four people being the targets of intention would be a good idea at most in an hour. You’d want them to talk about themselves, what’s going on with them, and then everybody shares some feedback afterward because some of the stuff that I talk about is also having visualizations of success, very strong visualizations not just holding the statement and bringing it down to your heart but also holding visualizations of success.
[0:45:18] Ashley James: Maybe you could walk us through what a session looks like so that the listener went and got seven other people together, walk us through what it looks like. Of course, they’ll get your book because they’ll want to dive in deeper but for those listening today that are really jazzed and just want to go try it, can you walk us through step by step what we should do with a group of seven other people.
[0:45:41] Lynne McTaggart: Sure. I mean, it doesn’t have to be aid, as I say, you can be on Skype or Zoom or a conference call or you can be meeting in person. You design a very specific intention statement together. It helps to have one person be the leader stroke timekeeper. So, one person gets nominated as the recipient, everybody else is the sender’s. You decide together on the intention statement, make it very specific. If you want to heal the big toe of somebody’s right foot say, “Our intention is that Jane Doe will be healed of all pain in her big toe of her right foot.” That kind of thing. You hold, you then start breathing together, you then formulate the intention bring it down to your heart, send it out to the person. I’m just giving you the big broad strokes. There’s a lot of details. In fact, there are 13 keys to intention mastery. I talk about a number of them in my book, The Power of Eight, and also in The Intention Experiment. I teach these very in-depth and lots of other things about in tension in masterclasses, but these are the broad strokes.
So, we take you down to our hearts, we send it out. The person receiving just opens up their hearts to receive. I say hold it for just 10 minutes because sometimes people aren’t as proficient in focusing and it requires a high degree of focus, focusing on the outcome that person being healthy and well in every way. Imagining them running around or being blooming with good health. Hold and you don’t need to do more than 10 minutes. Lots of people do things for hours, you don’t need it. We’ve seen so many healings in an instant basically. Then you slowly come out. The timekeeper says, “Time is up.” You slowly come back in onto the call and then it’s good to have some feedback. What did the receiver feel? What did the senders feel? What did they visualize?
[0:47:56] Ashley James: So in one call, like you said, you could do three or four people if you wanted to.
[0:48:02] Lynne McTaggart: Yeah. I wouldn’t try to do all eight because you wouldn’t have enough time.
[0:48:05] Ashley James: Right. Right. Because it sounds like it would be about twenty minutes per person if you’re really intentional with the time.
[0:48:13] Lynne McTaggart: Sure. Do understand that people get healed toward the senders just as much as the receivers, in some cases more so. Remember Wes? He wasn’t a receiver, he was a sender and his life got changed in those 10 minutes.
[0:48:29] Ashley James: This makes me think about hurricanes where we’ve seen them veer off all of a sudden. There was no explanation as to why and everyone in Florida and everyone around Florida is just intending for it to move. Then there are other times where people are expecting worst-case scenarios and I wonder, have you seen negative things happen where if a group of people believe something really bad is going to happen, could we also create something negative?
[0:49:08] Lynne McTaggart: Oh, yeah. There’s a huge batch of research about negative intention and I’d like to tell you, Ashley, that positive intention is more powerful than negative intention, but I can’t. It works just as well. If you think about it, I mean Qi Gong masters use a thing called destroying mind to overcome the opponent if they’re doing a kind of a fight with them. That works very powerfully. There are other situations where they’ve done very well-controlled studies of people sending negative intention to anything from bacteria, to plants, to all kinds of things like that and they have a very powerful effect. They’ve even done studies where they do a trade. They start to do a positive thing for a while then a negative thing for a while, positive thing and it creates a kind of zigzag effect. So yeah, we can have negative intention too. So people expecting the worst, it’s like that old, I think it’s an old Buddhist story of somebody coming to a new town and eating a Buddha and saying, “So what’s it like in this new town that they were about to move in?” And the Buddha says to them, “Well, what was it like in the last town?” And they said, “Oh, it’s terrible. People were so unfriendly.” And he said, “Well, yeah. They’re going to be unfriendly in the next place.” Then somebody else comes along and they say, “So, we’re moving into this town. What are people like here?” And he says, “Well, what were like in the last town?” “They were so lovely. They were so friendly. They were wonderful.” And he said, “Well, the people here in this next town are going to be lovely too.” So, a lot of it is depending on your point of view and what you do.
I’ve actually worked with a group of intenders in Florida trying to move one of the hurricanes and it certainly missed that area. It was aiming for it and it missed it. Did we do this? Short answer, who knows, but it’s interesting and it seems to happen quite a lot.
[0:51:14] Ashley James: Oh, that’s so brilliant. Now you have an intention masterclass. I believe it started in January. Can people still join?
[0:51:23] Lynne McTaggart: Well, I’m due to do the fifth one on Saturday. These are all recorded so if people were really desperate to join, we could probably fit a few people in. They would get the first four sessions if they join this week and they could join the fifth session, which is all about how to protect yourself from negative intention. They could join it and be part of it. Now, what happens is, they get six live webinars from me, and these are also recorded if you miss them if you’ve started late too. We are putting people in groups of eight or so. We put them into more so that there will always be eight that on their calls. Then we encourage them to meet weekly with their group. Once my six are finished, and then I send them weekly challenges, advice, guidance. I also have a system to monitor their progress, every person’s progress on the masterclass. They get four catch-up calls with me where I teach them some more through the year and they get to ask some questions. We have a private Facebook page where they can ask more questions and there’s a lot of feedback that goes on.
So the real work happens with the groups, but they learn a lot from me about using intention for relationships, using intention to become a better receiver of other people’s intention, the thirteen P’s and so forth and how to be really successful in a power of eight group.
[0:53:05] Ashley James: I know that you also teach people if they feel like their choices are not in their own control, that you teach people how to use their thoughts to change that behavior. Because some people feel like, “Oh, I wish I could stick to this way of eating, but I can’t control going through the drive-through,” as an example or, “I keep wanting to go to the gym but I just can’t make it there.” It’s like they want to do something but then feel like their behavior is not in their control. That’s something that you teach as well as how people can overcome that.
[0:53:51] Lynne McTaggart: Yeah. What we also teach is, and I’ve run a retreat with my husband on this and we’re going to be in amazing place in Italy in the Piedmont area where I’m staying in a castle and we’re also going to be visiting Damanhur, that amazing spiritual community that’s been considered one of the eight wonders of the world because it has these extraordinary subterranean cathedrals in there, very, very sacred place. I’ve been working a lot with intention and sacred spaces, and some of the science does show that intention seems to work faster and better when there’ve been a lot of sacred work in certain areas. So we do that, which is really interesting, but we also work on healing the past through the power of eight because my husband has a lot of work about how the past becomes you and lives through you and creates the you you present to the world. We combine that with a lot of time travel intention and we work with people and help them get over some of the big and small traumas that have limited them in their lives from manifesting to life of their dreams. So this year we’re going to be going for, we only do one retreat a year, we’re going in early October. So there’s going to be more up about that on my website too.
[0:55:21] Ashley James: That sounds beautiful. What do you mean by, I mean I think I know what you mean but I’d love for you to explain it, time travel intention?
[0:55:30] Lynne McTaggart: Well we actually use intention through various techniques to go back to moments of trauma and essentially erase that tape. We don’t erase what happened, but we erased the tape. So we erase the footprint that is limiting you. It’s quite a complex technique, but essentially it really means what we are doing is getting rid of that emotional trauma, the emotional footprint of it.
[0:56:02] Ashley James: Beautiful. Well, I love the work that you do. I would love to have you back on the show to dive deeper into these topics. This is sort of the manual we should have been born with to learn how to use this tool in between our ears and our heart. Science now is finally starting to prove that this exists, that we can affect with our thoughts, can affect reality. I just finished an interview with a woman that had just published a documentary called Superhuman. The entire documentary is following experiments proving that thought affects the world. It’s wonderful to now interview you and get that many people, including yourself, many scientists, are all working together around the world to prove that there’s something. Thought is like an invisible arm that we have. It’s not only a sense because we can perceive. People get intuition or psychic abilities, but that our consciousness also effects. So it receives but it also puts out. In this documentary, they were at I think Stanford, she was able to within 10 seconds, by just using her consciousness, just in tension, she changed the conductivity of DNA. Then they did another experiment within 30 seconds she changed the pH, which is in increasing the hydrogen in water while it was all hooked up to electrodes. All kinds of experiments like that just to show that anyone, she was coming in blind, never done it before, that everyone has this ability. Most people are walking around handicapped because they don’t know that they have this ability.
So your books are showing them and teaching them how to use this God-given ability to create a world. We’re kind of walking around like children creating a world chaotically with our thoughts not really taking responsibility for them because we don’t realize how great of an impact they have on our reality. So we need to harness this power and focus it towards what we want.
[0:58:49] Lynne McTaggart: Absolutely.
[0:58:50] Ashley James: Yeah. So bring it together, focus it. It’s kind of like the difference between a sailboat where all the ropes are loose and everything’s flapping about and it’s just kind of going with the current versus focusing the sailboat to harness the wind to go where we want it to go. So we can use your tools to learn how to do that.
[0:59:13] Lynne McTaggart: I like that. I like the idea of harnessing ourselves. Sounds great.
[0:59:18] Ashley James: Yeah. Lynne, your website is lynnemctaggart.com. Of course, the links to everything that Lynne does, including her intention masterclass and all her books, are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Is there anything that you wanted to make sure you taught today or anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?
[0:59:42] Lynne McTaggart: Well, just that I think the power of thoughts really should give you hope and the power of the group should give you hope because we in the spiritual community, we think we have to spend years practicing or hours priming ourselves to get into a mystical state. We did brain wave studies with neuroscientist at Life University, one of the largest chiropractic universities in the world, and they found that during power of eight groups, the brainwaves of the participants, who are just novice students, would change and not look anything like meditation. They resembled Sufi masters during chanting and Buddhist monks during ecstatic prayer as measured by the University of Pennsylvania. So, my message is just this: you don’t need a sweat lodge, you don’t need years of walking around on your knees, all you need is a power of eight group and a common intention and it’s your passport to the miraculous.
[1:00:53] Ashley James: Beautiful. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I’d love to have you back.
[1:00:56] Lynne McTaggart: I would love to be back, Ashley. Thanks so much.
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