3.4M+ views, and still creating ripples... What do you do when you have a debilitating chronic illness and the medical system you've dedicated your life to has no answers? For many, this leads to a feeling of learned helplessness, being punted from one doctor to the next only to be told your tests are "normal." In this powerful and personal conversation, Dr. Mark Hyman talks with Dr. Cynthia Li, a conventionally trained internist who found herself on the other side of the ste

What If the Heart Knows Before the Mind? A Deep Dive Into Heart Coherence The heart is by far the master rhythm maker in the body. Think of the heart as the conductor, and the body is the music it's playing. If the conductor gets out of sync and gets frustrated and frazzled, the music becomes very discordant. That's what's playing out in the body. It's a very energy inefficient state. Coherence, on the other hand, is a very energy efficient state. What happens when an enginee

A physician, author, and public figure, Dr. Mark Hyman has been transforming Western medicine for 30 years. As a young man, he taught yoga and wandered Tibet and Nepal in search of meaning. As a young doctor, he became disheartened by conventional medicine. “The way we were treating disease wasn’t working,” he says. “We can’t just cover up symptoms with medications. We have to understand the body as a biological system — an ecosystem.” This led him to research root causes of

This is an invitation to shift your allegiance from the activities of your mind to the eternal presence of your being. Born Merle Antoinette Roberson in Texas in 1942, and raised amid the pines and hymns of Mississippi, Gangaji grew up believing fulfillment lay in doing things right—marrying young, raising a daughter, teaching school. Yet beneath those roles ran what she called "a deep and persistent longing." After her divorce, she moved to San Francisco in the 1970s, taking

Most of us try to avoid anything that triggers us at all costs. Especially if we have sensitive nervous systems. But what if triggers, approached consciously and incrementally, can be a source of deep healing? Cynthia Li, MD, gave this presentation for the World Consciousness Community (a global qigong community) to illuminate how, through embodied consciousness practices, triggering events can potentially contribute to deeper healing, rather than just keeping us in a trauma

Cynthia Li, MD, offers these playful "Pure Consciousness in Daily Life" workshops for the World Consciousness Community (a global qigong community) as a way to integrate qigong theories and methods to transform your health, relationships, and day-to-day life. Although this workshop was given to support of students enrolled in ongoing courses, it can also support students new to coherence and qigong practices.   ✨ In this talk, you'll learn about: • the common pitfalls of dee

A young man arrives in the Big City with two hundred dollars in his pocket, no English at all, and memories of horror so fresh that he sometimes confuses past and present. When Deo first told me about his beginnings in New York, I had a simple thought: “I would not have survived.” And then, two years later, he enrolls in an Ivy League university.  -- Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder on Deo Niyizonkiza, in his book, Strength in What Remains Following a childhood witn

What is functional medicine? Inside the growing health trend. March 10, 2022. Functional medicine aims to understand the root causes of symptoms that people are having, and the health trend is steadily growing in popularity. NBC’s senior medical correspondent Dr. John Torres joins the 3rd Hour of TODAY to talk about how this approach differs from traditional medicine, as well as its most common treatments. Dr. Torres interviews functional health coach Palmer Kippola and Cynt

A Catalyst for Healing: Creating Energetic Fields for the Critically Ill to Access the Immaterial We don't have to exclude one dimension of our being. We can be holistic, meaning we can have a mystical side and a spiritual side and a revelatory side. We can also have science and learning and foundations of knowing in this physical world through randomized, controlled clinical trials, etc. ... It is an embodiment of the polarities. It is a whole reality. Shay Beider had a mom

Whether you're healthy, unhealthy, whether you're diagnosed with a disease or not, whatever challenge you're facing, it's always a result of your whole past. And the past has happened already. You cannot change it. But the good news is whatever you have experienced, whatever you are experiencing now from the external interactions of life, it's all happening inside of your body, inside of your energy system. You have access to your own energy more than anyone else, more than y

Cynthia Li was a successful doctor in her 30s when an autoimmune disease torpedoed her health. She and her doctors were baffled. Her test results were normal, but mysterious symptoms wracked her body. Li's memoir, Brave New Medicine: A Doctor's Unconventional Path to Healing Her Autoimmune Illness , follows her long journey to understanding her condition, rethinking the way medicine is practiced, and finding her way back to health. Michael: You were able to move in a differen

(Recorded in October 2023) Cynthia’s experiences as both doctor and patient through an internal “dark night of the soul” and a medical condition affecting her immune system point to tools for building personal immunity and resilience in the face of crises. She has been deeply involved with Commonweal’s work in environmental health, Healing Circles, and Rachel Remen’s Healer’s Art program at UCSF School of Medicine, which began at Commonweal. Host: Michael Lerner, PhD Michael

Gut-based decision-making—the supercomputer in that case is the vast database of experiences from early life onward, stored somewhere, likely in the brain. Every time you experience something, it’s stored as an emotion and an image. Because the brain and the gut are so closely related, the emotional experience is often colored by some gut feeling (rumblings, “butterflies in the stomach,” for example) that we may not experience consciously. With a unique combination of researc

The Healing Power of Sound and Vibration Losing all of the basic functions of being a human being was the greatest teacher. It was an opportunity to go fully into the teachings I had received around energy, sound, and vibration. At the age of 23, Madhu Anziani was in a life-changing accident. He broke his neck, and a spinal cord injury left him paralyzed him from the neck down, incontinent, and unable to breathe on his own. About to graduate with a degree in jazz and world

The Infinity of an Open Heart: Writing Stories From Heart Coherence I sometimes wonder, what would it be like if we changed the phrase from "my heart is full" to "my heart is empty"? The stories that life might fill into that space are often much braver and much bolder than my small self would dare to share. Stuck in your writing or creative project? Stuck in your healing journey? Telling new stories has to do with new perspectives, new observations, new dimensions of ourselv

This podcast is part-conversation, part-embodied workshop. What happens when rigorous science meets embodied wisdom? Peter Wayne, PhD, a researcher and professor at Harvard Medical School, is an esteemed researcher—the principal investigator for over 35 studies sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, and co-author of over 200 peer-reviewed articles. The primary subject of his research is holistic healing methods, especially tai chi and qigong. Both are described as mo

This podcast is part-conversation, part-embodiment workshop. Make the world your Temple. In 2019, Sarah Tulivu had been given this clear instruction to go out into the wide world by two Taoist masters, while living and training full-time as a monk in a Taoist temple in Guatemala. For six years, she had practiced meditation and the embodied consciousness practice of taiji (tai chi) for six to seven hours a day. In the two years prior to her monastic life, Sarah had been a deep

The Middle Way in Medicine and Healing: Where East Meets West, Ancestral Meets Novel When Dr. Akil Palanisamy faced a debilitating illness during medical school, he was prescribed bone broth. The Ayurvedic practitioner working with him at the time knew he was a vegetarian who had renounced meat a few years earlier. But she saw bone broth as necessary to nourish his depleted body and rebalance his energy. Torn and in desperation, he turned to the story of the Buddha, who had e

This podcast is part-conversation, part-embodiment workshop. Unlike Greek, Aramaic presents a fluid and holistic view of the cosmos. The arbitrary borders found in Greek between "mind, "body," and "spirit" fall away. By examining the “heart talks” of Jesus, he addresses universal themes like, How do we find renewal and healing amidst challenging times? How do we keep our hearts open? Or more fundamentally, who am I? Neil Douglas-Klotz, PhD, a renowned scholar in psychology an

I'm Steve Loyd, and I'm hurting. With these words, Stephen Loyd, MD, began his first 12-step group meeting. His addiction to pain pills had escalated to about 100 a day by 2004 when his father intervened. “I’m gonna lose my wife, my family, my house and cars,” Dr. Loyd said when confronted. "None of that stuff’s gonna do you any good if you’re dead,” his father said. It was a hard road to recovery, but it led Dr. Loyd on a path that eventually had him rising from addict to Te