269. Healing with Thought & Power of 8 - Lynne McTaggart

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This is a very special live stream. I hosted on the conscious awakening network. You can participate in these live streams as they come up, you simply need to register to get the link. They're free. And I love the feedback I get from people who joined about how they feel as they participate. Be sure you're staying informed about upcoming events by joining my newsletter. 

Just go to Kara goodwin.com, scroll to the bottom of the homepage and sign up to receive my newsletter. You're going to get a lot from this discussion with Lynn, you may need to listen to it multiple times. She is such a powerhouse and she's doing really amazing work. I'm so inspired to start a power of eight group. And I think you will be to, once you hear what she has to say about what the research is showing. 

[00:01:00] If you want to be a part of the group that I formed, please contact me@karaatcaragoodwin.com and I'll keep you posted. And now enjoy the recording of this special live stream with lynne mctaggart 

Kara Goodwin: Okay. Wow. Well, thank you for being here. We are. We are live streaming here for the Conscious Awakening Network for the Meditation Conversation Podcast. We are, some of us are here on Zoom, we're also on YouTube, Roku, Amazon Fire, the Conscious Awakening Platform. many apps that. the tech person told me about that I was not familiar with.

So, um, I welcome all of you who are joining and I thank you and what a joy to be with you. Lynn, thank you so much for joining us today. This is such an honor. 

Lynne McTaggart: Oh, I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you so [00:02:00] much. 

Kara Goodwin: Well, let me give a little bit of an introduction for, the amazing work that you're doing. So, Lynn McTaggart is an award-winning journalist and the author of seven books in including the Worldwide international 

Bestsellers, the Power of eight, the field, the intention, experiment, and the bond. All considered seminal books of the new science and translated into some 30 languages. She's consistently voted one of the world's top 100 spiritual leaders for her groundbreaking work with consciousness in the power of intention.

Lynn is known for the quality of her writing and in-depth research, her inspirational speaking style, and her uncompromising role as a new thought leader and spiritual change agent. Thousands of people working with Lynn report ecstatic transcendent experiences. Personal healings and dramatic long-term life changes.

And she's also the architect of the Intention [00:03:00] Experiment, which is a global laboratory involving thousands of people around the world testing the power of group thoughts to heal the world. So what a joy again, Lynn, to have you here. Thank you so much. Your work is so powerful. I love your books. In particular, the Power of eight was, has just been a phenomenal in kind of shifting understanding of the power of group intention.

And I'm like bursting with excitement about your initiative to evoke social change with the eight revolution, which we'll get to in our time together today. but before we get into that, can you help us to make sure everyone's on the same page by explaining a little bit about your research in consciousness and intention?

Lynne McTaggart: Okay. Thank you for that lovely introduction. I really got hijacked into this work. I was minding my own business, being an investigative [00:04:00] reporter. I started out life. doing things like busting baby selling rings, you know, wow. I would hit tape recorders and posing undercover and all kinds of things like that.

And, you know, my, my plan was to put bad guys in jail basically. And I then when I moved to the UK as a result of writing a book and coming to London and falling in love with it, and then falling in love, I stayed here and my husband and I started a health magazine called What Doctors Don't Tell You.

And in the course of doing that work, I came across some really good studies of spiritual healing and I wanted to figure out how that could work because. What that really meant was having a thought, taking it and sending it to someone else and having that person get better. And I kept thinking to myself, [00:05:00] well, that on its own undermines everything.

We think about how the world works. And I'd seen some other studies that also suggested all kinds of things. I thought it might be human energy fields, and so I went to investigate that. And I figured I'll just talk to some leading edge quantum physicists and people working in consciousness research.

They'll tell me about these human energy fields. I'll write it up and that'll be it. So I convinced my publisher to let me go on a journey without a compass really. And, in the course of researching, investigating, and talking to all of these scientists, Many of whom I had to interview about 20 or 30 times to a understand what they were talking about.

Cuz scientists talk in math, they talk in code. 

Kara Goodwin: Yeah. I appreciate you being like a transducer for the information so that it [00:06:00] can be understood by non-scientists. That's so important. 

Lynne McTaggart: Absolutely. And also, they don't like to venture beyond their little patch of experimentation. So I realized with a bit of alarm that I was going to have to synthesize all of this stuff together.

So that became my book, the field. But there was unfinished business as far as I was concerned. There were a lot of implications and experimental evidence that thoughts are an actual something with the capacity to change physical matter. So again, being that investigative reporter at heart, I kept saying to myself, well, what are we talking about here?

You know, are we talking about a tiny subtle effect or are we talking about curing cancer with our thoughts? And I also had become increasingly interested in. What happens if a lot of people are thinking the same thought at the same time? There were some good studies [00:07:00] from the transcendental meditation folks, but it was all about just critical masses of meditators not thinking anything and suggestions and good evidence that made.

The crime rate go down in 48 cities. They did a study of, so I wanted to see, well, okay, what happens if you're actually deliberately sending a thought to something on Unless, so I wrote my book, the Intention Experiment to answer that what, how far can we take this? But also set up the intention experiment, an ongoing experiment that, where I would work with the.

Noted consciousness researchers, scientists working in prestigious universities around the globe. And I'd also invite my readers, and by then I had a lot of readers around the globe to take part in these periodic experiments. So we started that. I've run 40 [00:08:00] experiments to date. Everything from trying to gr make seeds grow faster, to purifying water, to lowering violence and war, torn in violent areas to healing someone of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Of those 40. 36 have shown measurable, positive, mostly significant effects. and we've done all kinds of things in all kinds of places around the world. but it was really in scaling it down, which really happened by accident. Trying to scale it down to just small groups. In a workshop, what has become known as the Power of Eight, where I really saw healings because I've now seen thousands of people get healed In doing that.

One time, I was shocked to see we had instant healings. We had someone with cataracts who said she was 80% better. 10 minutes as part of a power of eight group, I've seen two people get up out of their wheelchairs [00:09:00] and thousands of people get healed of anything, including stage four cancer. Had a two, a few cases of that just recently.

So my work really segued into this kind of real focus on intention and particularly group healing, healing the planet, healing each other. Rebound effects in doing that all really essentially by just following my nose, following what journalists do you pull on a piece of string. Yes. So I'm still pulling.

Kara Goodwin: Yes. Thank you for taking us through that. And it's incredible the, you know, I've been a part of the Power of Eight Healing. For my daughter who has scoliosis. And in your book you talk about, that's one of the cases that comes up a couple of times is scoliosis. the curvature of the spine and different back issues and things.

And,the feel, you know, I'm gonna, we're on [00:10:00] meditation conversation. I'm an experienced meditator and I do group meditations as well. It was fascinating, the difference that I felt. In the power of eight meditation, just that it's like a palpable field, where you know, it just, you do feel that you are part of something bigger and that there's a purpose behind it.

And it's incredibly, it's fascinating and so beautiful. 

Lynne McTaggart: It's amazing. Absolutely. And you know, you, thank you for bringing that up because. A lot of people think of a power of eight as nothing more than group meditation, but as you said, there's something very different and about it and we quantified that.

I did brainwave studies on Power of eight groups. I was very fortunate that Life University, one of the largest and most prestigious.

 [00:11:00] Got interested in the Power eight and said, Hey, we'll do some studies on this. So we got hold of student volunteers, put them in groups of eight and had them send healing intention to a member of their group, which is what we always do in Power eight groups, and we found very quickly. That the brain started changing.

We put a an e EEG cap on one member of each group who was a sender, and we found almost immediately big changes occurred that were completely the opposite of what happens and what has been recorded in brainwave studies of meditators. For instance, with meditators, the brain slows down. And you get more of a preponderance of slower brainwaves, like alpha or delta bra, brainwaves in power of eight groups, certain brainwaves, very different ones turn off, [00:12:00] they turn way down.

So, The parts of the brain. What we discovered was a big di diminishment of the parts of the brain that make us feel separate, like the parietal lobes, which sit back here. They help us navigate through space. They tell us, this is me, this is not me. They were dialed way down and so were the right frontal lobes.

Those involved in worry, doubt, negativity. Also dialed way down. So our brainwave studies looked nothing like those of meditation. They looked almost identical though to the brainwave studies carried out by the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Andrew Newberg and noted neuroscientists on Sufi masters undergoing chanting or Buddhist monks in the midst of ecstatic prayer.

So our people are, Essentially are in a state of ecstatic oneness, and that's where [00:13:00] you feel the alterations in the body, the energy rushing through you, the feeling of being almost disconnected and part of some bigger hole, all of those kinds of feelings. Where you are essentially losing that individuality and entering into a state of oneness is the real secret sauce in a Powerade group.

It's, I believe, the gateway to healing. And of course we have healings, not only of the recipients, but the senders too. 

Kara Goodwin: Yes. I wanna talk about the rebound effect before we get off the topic of the research of the brain. Has any, research been done on the heart with the power of eight? Because even as you're talking about this, my heart is like, woo, just.

Get, you know, I can feel it growing exponentially. so I'm curious if you've worked with like HeartMath or anything like that to see what's going on with the heart with 

Lynne McTaggart: these. The heart, I love HeartMath and they're dear friends, Howard [00:14:00] Martin and Debbie Rosman of HeartMath, and I love what they do. what I.

What I've decided to do is to stay with what we've learned over all of these studies. You know, we developed the way we do intention in a group essentially by trial and error. With my intention experiments. We've been doing it since 2007. I also studied, how people do intention, who are intention masters.

he master healers, Qigong, masters, Buddhist monks. And I found that those separate organizations have differences, certain differences in their modalities, but also a lot of commonalities. So I tried to distill the science, these practices, and then what we were learning in our Power of Eight and intention experiment groups into a simple program.

And I have found it's really important not to [00:15:00] add and subtract. Not to start throwing in other mod modalities. Now, just to explain, we're getting to where HeartMath also is in a different way. HeartMath works with heart rate variability. It finds that people with a lot of heart rate variability are healthier, and they get there by having people focus on the heart with appreciation and gratitude.

And they can measure it. Measure changes in heart rate variability. The thing that controls heart rate variability is the vagus nerve. It is the longest nerve in the body. It starts in the neck, winds through all the major organs, and it controls the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. It controls fight or flight.

You know, we see a bear and we are either gonna run away, fight the bear, or freeze. And just sit there, as you [00:16:00] know, and pretend the bear doesn't see us. So the sympathetic nervous system is oftentimes out of whack and people who are traumatized or unhappy or whatever, and the other part of the vagus nerve, also regulates the parasympathetic nervous system.

The rest and digest part, there's a third part too. The vagus nerve, which is connection, safety, and connection in groups. So what Regularizes, and this has been studied at, university of North Carolina, chapel Hill, what regularizes, that vagus nerve, which is so important for heart rate variability, for sympathetic nervous system getting calmed down for every, essentially every part of your body.

So important. Is group work, feeling close and connected with a group. Mm-hmm. So that's what we do. [00:17:00] Yeah. So that's how we get there. It's all about the group. Yeah. Right. 

Kara Goodwin: Oh, that's amazing. You know, one, one other kind of interesting thing that I found through the work with the power of eight is because it's quantum, you know, it's a lot of, well, the one that I did was virtual, but there were times after it was done that I felt like I could tap back into it and re-experience.

The field, that field that was created in that time. 

Lynne McTaggart: Oh, absolutely. And I've had many, many people say exactly that. People who have tapped into an experience they felt during the intention experiment, one of the intention experiments, or more recently, we had a really interesting thing. I run a retreat every year and just one, at least at the moment.

And we ran it last year and we're [00:18:00] doing it again in September at Broon Hall, which is a 3000 acre estate in Yorkshire, in, in the uk. That was the runner up for the set location of Downton Abbey, and so it's this beautiful, amazing estate, you know, this extraordinary stately home and 3000 acres in these historic cottages.

It has a very spiritual set of owners who have also included things like a beautiful spiritual meeting place, a fire pit, labyrinth, all of those kinds of wonderful things as well in this beautiful. Area of the Yorkshire GA's. So we had a group last year and I put people into Power of eight groups and our workshops there, the retreats are all about intention to heal your past.

So we have a whole big program that I work with and I work with my husband, Brian Hubbard, who is the author of the [00:19:00] Untrue Story of You and uses a technique he developed called Time Light. based on his own experiences, he developed it to get over abuse. He had as a child by a very verbally abusive father.

So we, we put our stuff together. Anyway, we had a group a. Everybody got put into groups very initially, and there was one woman in the group who hadn't thought she'd be able to come to the retreat. She had stage four cancer. She had been planning to come with her son. They almost pulled out. They decided to come.

So she was in the group stage four melanoma. So the group decided to go into the library of this 16th century historic mansion, and they just felt this amazing feeling, and I talk a lot about the spirit of place that. that when intentions are done repeatedly in one [00:20:00] place, it changes the atmosphere and it makes the intentions work faster and better.

It's been, that's been quantified in scientific research, but also sacred spaces seem to have a different vibe. And in one of my retreats, it was in Italy. And I had groups go to the tomb of St. Francis of Assisi, and they had amazing experiences doing power of eight groups there. So anyway, this group, this Power of eight group at Broughton, our retreat went into the library.

They didn't intention for Esther, the woman with stage four cancer. Everybody felt this extraordinary, palpable feeling of energy and healing and peace and light and love. Esther, the doctors, by the way, gave her months to live. Wow. Esther goes home and she said that was so transformational for her. It completely [00:21:00] started her path to healing.

She decided not to have chemo. She decided not to have radiotherapy or anything else. She had some alternative treatments, and six months later, she was healed of stage four cancer. Now, The group continues to meet virtually every week, every Thursday, and whenever they do an intention for any one of them, they go back into the library.

They all go back and they revisit that place. And I talk a lot about that too. When people do intentions, I suggest they do it in the same place as much as they can. And if they're not in that place, they mentally go back to it. Hmm. 

Kara Goodwin: That's so fascinating. I love that. Now, you have hinted a couple of times about the rebound effect, and this is a fascinating kind of knock on effect, that it seems that you weren't even [00:22:00] looking for this, but it just kept appearing with people who are participating in the power of eight groups.

So could you share what that is? 

Lynne McTaggart: Sure, and by the way, I should say, I wasn't looking for any of this. Part of my little journey was trying to back in 2008 after some initial, positive results with the intention experiment. As I mentioned, I thought, well, let's scale this down. In a workshop setting, but I wasn't really sure how to do that.

So I was kicking it around with my husband, Brian and the team, and I said, I don't know, maybe I'll put them in groups of eight or so and have them send, intention to a member of the group with the Health Challenge. And my husband's a great headline writer. He's also a journalist, and he turned to me and said, I love it.

The power of eight. That's how it started. We did not expect there to be instant healings. We [00:23:00] did it with people thinking this is gonna be a little nice little feel good effect, like somebody massaging your back or getting a facial. And so we have the groups. Do the intentions for a member of the group of the Health Challenge sent them away at the end of that Saturday.

They came back on Sunday and we gave the mic in turn to anybody who had been a recipient and we got answers like this. It was not a feel good effect. It was, I have depression. And I've had it for several decades and it's all lifted today. somebody else who had been walking and limping, I have very bad knee arthritis and it's gone.

Today, I'm walking normally. Somebody else, as I mentioned, I have cataracts and they're 80% better. So we were saying to ourselves, what the heck just happened here? And so that set me. Onto [00:24:00] continuously, essentially experimenting with it and trying to learn about this because I was terrified, which is one reason why it took me 10 years to finally publish a book about this.

I wanted to understand it. I wanted to, parse it. I wanted to try to get behind why on earth is this happening? No. One thing, as you say, I started noticing both with the intention experiments and also with the power of eight, was that it didn't matter whether or not you were the recipient or the sender.

You could still get healed. Now, I'd first seen this with intention experiments from 2008, I started surveying the participants. Basically to find out how things were going for them. Could they do the intention, you know, some of the things that were going on with them. [00:25:00] I was shocked to find and to hear them say things like, I felt like I was part of a higher network.

I was crying uncontrollably. I had so much extraordinary energy that I felt and I felt that too. Remember, everybody was participating as we are now in front of their computer, screened by themselves. Yet there was this such pal palpable energy. When everybody was holding the intention at the same time, which is what I always do for those 10 minutes, that it was feeling like I had to move away from the computer.

And I almost always do when I'm doing an intention, I can feel the energy. So people were reporting that. But they were also reporting changes in their lives, particularly with the peace intention experiments to lower violence somewhere, [00:26:00] or the healing intention experiment with the peace experiments we found.

That, about half of the people report more peace in their own lives. They're getting along better with their estranged partners or children. They're getting along better with their coworkers or boss. And again, half of them say, I feel more love for everyone. I feel I come in contact with, you know, they're hugging strangers.

So that is happening, but also I would say a third to 40% of the people report healings of some sort. their arthritis goes away. they are, have better digestion. Their pain is gone or improved, and we hear that all the time too. Extraordinary healings. So we see that in the intention experiment, [00:27:00] but what I've also seen with Powerade groups are extraordinary healings or healings in people's lives.

So not just physical healings, but a financial windfall comes in just when they needed it. Or they get a great job offer after getting off of themselves and doing an intention for someone else, or a relationship comes out of nowhere or is vastly improved after doing an intention for someone else. So when I started noticing this, I started looking into the science of altruism and I found wow.

That seems to be the key here. Altruism is like a bulletproof vest. People who do things for other people, no matter how, small, helping your neighbor with their garbage or whatever, [00:28:00] volunteering for something, those people live longer, healthier, happier lives. So I started seeing that and seeing that.

Connection and giving is really essential to us that it protects us against everything from heart attacks and stroke to the common cold. So when people are stuck in my, when they're in my courses or workshops or whatever, invariably I will say, get off of yourself. Stop intending for your stuff. Start intending for someone who needs it more and watch what happens.

So I've seen so many cases. I love these two. and there are many, a thousands more, but there was a woman called Andy who was going through a divorce, had two small children. really [00:29:00] needed money and needed a new job, and she had been trying for months with her power bait group to manifest a new job.

Nothing was happening. So I finally said, Andy, get off of yourself. I. Intend for this young boy who tried to commit suicide. I had the whole masterclass. My masterclass at the time, intending successively for this kid called Luke, tried to commit suicide after breaking up with his first serious girlfriend and was in the hospital with everything broken.

He'd thrown himself off a 40 foot structure onto hard ground. So Andy did this, and the very next week. She gets a call out of nowhere from somebody she doesn't even know, offering her dream job. I saw it with another woman called Lisa, who was trying to write a book on a modality she had discovered as a body worker for healing [00:30:00] trauma, but she'd never written a book before.

She'd gone through three editors. It was getting nowhere, and she was terrified about the whole prospect of marketing it. Getting nowhere. Their intentions were getting nowhere with her. So I said, again, Lisa, get off of yourself. There must be somebody in the group who needs intention more than you do. And she did.

She sent intention to Diane who had big money problems. Lo and behold, the very next week, Lisa gets compelled to go into a store. She doesn't even need to buy anything from. And when she goes in, she sees a woman that she's met once or twice. I think it was only once. So she feels again, compelled to speak to that person.

She doesn't even know her. I think she was just introduced. Once goes up, they start chatting. It turns out the woman is a former book publisher [00:31:00] and she's now a book coach. And as soon as she hears about Lisa's. Stole project, she offers to walk her through the whole thing. Upshot, the book gets published and it becomes an Amazon bestseller.

So I see this again and again and again. It is really part of the process. And as I say, it doesn't matter whether you are the sender or the receiver. You also get healed in this process. That's 

Kara Goodwin: so incredible. So if there are people who are listening and they are, I'm sure, chomping at the bit now, if they've never experienced the power of eight, how can people learn about.

How to do it and how to find a group or create a group. I know you've got a lot of resources. Can you share a little bit about that? Sure. 

Lynne McTaggart: If you join my website, lynn mctaggart.com, [00:32:00] you'll find a load of resources, some information about ru fundamental information about how to set up a group. Also, that kind of basic information is in my book, the Power of Eight too.

but. You can also join a Power of Eight group by joining my community. So I have a private community section on my website. It's completely free to join, and what I do is recommend that people simply get there and put up a little notice, post something about yourself and say, Hey. I live in X time zone and I'd love to form a group Who else is in that time zone?

And that's how loads and loads and loads of my Power eight group start as part of my community. You can also join a thing called the eight Revolution, which is a little idea I [00:33:00] had in just looking at the state of things at the moment. The. Know the mistakes and the lack of leadership shown by our, the folks in charge, both in America and in the UK and everywhere else.

I can see all of the crises we face now, new banking crises, climate change crises, all of those crises, war cetera, et cetera. And I started thinking, you know what? The guys in charge have no idea what to do about this. In a sense, every important major social change has started from the bottom up. So I said to myself, I need an army of changemakers.

And then I realized I've got an army of changemakers. I have tens of thousands of power VA groups around the world. So I've suggested to the any people who already have a group to join the eight revolution, [00:34:00] and I will give you free. Tools to essentially bring intention and other skills to heal your neighborhood, to create a different situation, to create essentially a social revolution.

You don't have to give up the day job of few things here and there can create extraordinary change. So, Everything in my community site, everything in my eight revolution is completely free for people to join, so they can do that. Now, if people want to move up a gear, they can also take courses. With me. I have level 1, 2, 3, and four courses.

In intention at the new science and much more so they can find out about it. We have a course that's just kicking off, on Saturday, June 24th called Intention Essentials, which is my level one intention course, which [00:35:00] talks about the seven keys to an intention mastery. I have a year long course called the Power of Eight Intention Masterclass, where I teach people for six sessions.

Then I put you in groups. And monitor you for a whole year. And we have me meetings again to tweak what you're doing, et cetera. So you work with me for a whole year and much more retreats using intention to heal your past. And in those kinds of things, I use retro intention techniques that I've developed.

To go back and heal people's past and much, much more. So you can find out more about this. And also the intention experiments. We're gonna be running some more of them again through my community site so that it's private, you don't get bombarded with ads. And also it's not subject to censorship. So that's another reason why I'm doing everything through my community side.

So there's lots of stuff in all kinds of price [00:36:00] points, including free for people to, to have to find out more. That's amazing. 

Kara Goodwin: Thank you so much. So, Well, I have more questions. I do also want to open up for anybody who is watching on Zoom, we do have the chat there, so if you have questions, you can, type those in there and I'll get to all the ones that I can.

Lynn, it seems that things are accelerating. I. In a major way lately. So you mentioned that the, kind of the impetus of the eight revolution and some of the things that are being observed in terms of like breakdown, across society, but it also feels like in, in some ways humanity is beginning to shift into more expanded consciousness.

Um, since you're on the bleeding edge of consciousness research, I wonder about the types of changes that you may be experiencing. [00:37:00] Recently compared to when you began this type 

Lynne McTaggart: of work? Oh, thank you. Well, I started this work that, that foray into the work that became my book. The field was in the 1990s, so that book was published in 2002.

So that's how long I've been at this. what I discovered Is more pushback over these decades. So there was much more open-mindedness, and I see that also in our magazine, what Doctors Don't Tell You, where the other side of the coin was always open to debate. Back in the nineties when we launched it in 1990, that magazine has been going for all of this time, and we noticed that there was the ability to debate.

Now I think people and their attitudes are very, very firmly in entrenched, and there is no dialogue on so many fronts. [00:38:00] And I think that, and also there is a shutting down of free speech. All of these things are worrisome. However, the human spirit is quite amazing and adapt and adaptable. I think what we are going through is a another revolution.

I mean, we've had the in, we have the neolithic revolution, we had the industrial revolution, we've had the information revolution. People say it's the AI revolution, and I'm not sure it is. I think it's more the consciousness revolution and where we are realizing. Finally that we've been operating according to a wrong story.

You know, lots of things write the story we live by, but probably the major author is science, at least in our modern world. You know, science tells us who we are. It writes the story we live by, tells us who we are, and from there we determine [00:39:00] how we're supposed to live. Now, the scientific story we've been living by.

For several centuries now, is a scientific worldview created more than 300 years ago by Isaac Newton, which described a very well-behaved world of separate objects operating according to fixed laws in time and space. And that idea was augmented. By the discoveries or the theories of Charles Darwin, who was very influenced by population explosion theories of the time and decided there wasn't enough to go around.

So life must proceed through struggle. He never coined the term survival of the fittest. That was essentially his PR agent. But, but that idea. Took hold grip. The public imagination was a justifying principle [00:40:00] for things like colonialism and even Hitler loved Darwin. Um, and it, because it said, well, the fittest survive and, you know, these other people aren't fit enough.

But that kind of mindset, competitive individualism, when you put it together, we're getting to a real end of days with that. We're seeing it now where there's such a vast disparity between rich and poor, where riches and that kind of amassing of great wealth is stripping and destroying our planet and creating a.

Desperation on so many fronts, and we're starting to realize that there's no tweaking of the budget or, of inflation that's going to fix this overnight. This is a bigger issue. And so we suddenly have, we suddenly [00:41:00] realize it's not gonna just take a change of president. It's gonna take a fundamental change of story.

Of who we are and how we're supposed to live, and that's why I started looking at a ground up approach. Just inviting power of eight groups to belittle agents of social change again, without having to give up the day job. Because when you look at history, you realize that every major social. Change every social revolution.

Started with small groups, as Margaret Mead famously said. No, Gandhi helped India. Helped India to liberate itself from the British by essentially small groups, by going to little villages and giving them a spinning wheel and saying, if you have your own industry, you don't have to rely on the British.

And also by getting small groups to [00:42:00] say, Nope. Nope, I'm not gonna do that. And the same with Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement started with small groups. every kind of social revolution has started with a small group. And so I thought, right, if we have lots of these little small groups, and we do have, as I say, tens of thousands exist now around the globe, Let's bring them all together.

Let them communicate with each other. Let them try out many of the recommendations, the tools that I've offered for people for free, and report back and see what happens. And my tools are oral about revitalizing. Neighborhoods and small and communities, you know. Now there's been a great stripping away of all of that and isolating of PE people.

But for anyone who's read my book, the Bond, you will [00:43:00] know I. Which was a book looking out was Darwin Wright were we meant to be competitive individuals? And of course the overwhelming answer in the science is absolutely no. We are not separate in any way, in every aspect of our lives and we need connection essentially more than we need to breathe.

So I feel that a lot of modern life from buying things online, To having to been, to being isolated and having to have been isolated for years during lockdowns. With all of that, we have become increasingly isolated, which is not only terrible for our personal health, but also terrible for communities and the way to start creating change and creating a more.

Equal and [00:44:00] happy life essentially is to revitalize communities. We were never meant to be alone. We were always meant to be part of something bigger, a community. So they need to be revitalized and work differently than they do now. And that's what. The power of the eight Revolution is all about, and as I say, my little tools are all about making big connections.

Even if you don't agree with everything that other person stands for, even if their politics are completely different from you, you can, part of what I teach in some of my intention courses is using intention to get along with anybody. 

Kara Goodwin: Well, and that's where you had that amazing, experiment or the initiative, on the 10th anniversary of nine 11 with Americans and, Afghans.

Am I correct? Is, was ITF Afghanistan? 

Lynne McTaggart: it was the focus of our intention [00:45:00] experiment on the 10th anniversary was Afghanistan, the two most violent, provinces in Afghanistan, but the two sides coming together to do the intention together were Americans and Arabs. Okay, so on the 10th anniversary I just thought, you know, I'm sick of watching these buildings come down.

Let's do something different. So I partnered with a guy who isn't, who has, he's like the Deepak Chopra of the Middle East. His name is Dr. Sal, Rashed, and he has sponsored. my workshops and talks, if, in the Middle East, I speak around the world and he has been one of the organizers for the Middle East.

So I called him and said, Hey, would you like to invite your following? He has a big following. To take part in this experiment and he liked the idea. So we did this and we had participants from loads of different Arab countries and America [00:46:00] and other Westerners, and we did the intention afterward, I got information from NATO to show that the violence had lowered.

By some extraordinary percentage in just those two provinces compared to the rest of the country, after our experiment. And so we had interesting, positive results. You know, lots of things can cause a change during a war. so it's. Impossible to say, yeah, definitively we did this, but we've done this 10 piece intention experiments.

They've all had an amazing outcome. So that starts getting interesting. It starts saying, yeah, maybe there is something here. But that wasn't the more interesting part of the story. Most interesting part of the story is what happened with the participants. So they started, they were writing on my Facebook page, and I [00:47:00] noticed after a while they were messaging each other.

They were saying, your God is my God, that from the Middle East and the Americans were saying. I really loved this because it's really healed. this experience for me, nine 11 and people were saying, you're my brother from the other side. We love you. And it was a big love fest. And so that was extraordinary.

And then, in 2018, I did something similar, but I had this amazing equipment. I was in a studio where I could put cameras in nine different locations. So we put cameras in eight, in the conference rooms of eight Arab cities, you know, from everything from Saudi in Saudi Arabia and Jordan and Oman, and.

Kuwait, et cetera. And the ninth camera we put in an auditorium filled with Israeli Jews. So we had Arabs in Jews doing an intention [00:48:00] to heal violence in Jerusalem, which would have been experiencing a lot of violence in one particular area. So I had to organize this and nobody on either side wanted to talk to the other.

I mean, they were, you know, these were hated enemies. And so I had to broker the whole thing. So when we did it after the intention, I had all these different groups and auditoriums do it, and we also, broadcast it live over YouTube. the equipment was such that I could speak to them and they could speak me to me back and they could also speak to each other.

So it was a bit, almost like a little zoom situation. So it was amazing because I. Despite them never wanting to talk to each other beforehand, after the experiment, they say again, it was a love fest. People say saying, your God is my God. We have to stop all of this fighting, et cetera. You're our [00:49:00] sister from the other side of my brother from the other side.

You know, we love you, sister. And so again, a love fest. And it was quite amazing. And we, the press about it was extraordinary too. It went viral all over, not only, Israel, but also, a lot of Arab countries too. So what I found, there's something about group intention too, that heals, enmity. And that en enables the heart to leap across the fence.

Wow. 

Kara Goodwin: I mean, that's, it's huge. And the healing on an individual level too, that is experienced through that type of bond and that relational healing is just profound. That's amazing. Well, I am so grateful to you, Lynn. Thank you. [00:50:00] Just. Generally for the research and the initiative, you're a huge soul that's making profound change here on this planet, and I thank you so much for heating the call.

I'm sure in the decades that you've been doing this, it's not been easy to be at the forefront of, this type of research. So thank you so much for your service and thank you so much for being here today. It's been an absolute joy to be with you. 

Lynne McTaggart: Thank you so much. It's been my pleasure to thank you. 

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