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Biohacking Resilience from Dave
Asprey
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Inner Resilience: The Mind-Body

Connection from Pedram Shojai, OMD
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The Resilience Roadmap from Jodi

Cohen, Founder of Vibrant Blue Oils
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 1
Biohacking Resilience
Dave Asprey
Jodi: Hi, I’m Jodi Cohen, your host. And I’m
so excited to be joined by Dave Asprey, an
entrepreneur, a four-time New York Times
bestselling science author, and the host of a top
100 podcast, Bulletproof Radio, which has more
than 200 million downloads. And you have been
biohacking for how many years?
Dave: Well, I coined the term for what we do. So I
would say longer than there’s been a term but at
least 15 years, probably closer to 25.
Jodi: Well, I’m excited to talk about biohacking
resilience. And I’d love to first ask, how do you
define resilience?
Dave: Resilience is knowing that you have more
than enough energy to handle whatever life
brings your way.
Jodi: That’s a great definition. So talk to me about
like, what is your routine? What do you do on the
daily to kind of bolster your energy?
Dave: Well, there’s two things that are really
important. One of them is recovery. So you
handle the stress from the day before, or the
biological stress and stress can be emotional,
it can be spiritual, even. It can be physical, it
can be an infection, a heavy workout, drinking
alcohol or eating fried stuff, or whatever, these
are all stressors, and they all kind of go into
the same bucket. So it’s how much stress went
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into the system? And how effective were you at
recovering?
And so what I’m looking to do is say, the stress
that goes into the system, I don’t like useless
stress. So if it’s a stressor that doesn’t do anything
positive in the world, or in my life, why am I doing
it? And can I do it less or stop doing it? So that’s
a part of my daily practice. And a lot of that is
mindset and mental, and emotional.
And then the other part of it is, alright, how
do I recover faster than Mother Nature wants?
Because Mother Nature’s goal is make sure that
you can reproduce and be around long enough
that nothing eat your babies, and then we’re done
with you, you can die. That’s just kind of how it
is when you’re a life form on the planet. And it’s
true, whether you’re a worm or a human, it does
not matter. Even a tree follows the same basic
rules and those rules are behind pretty much all
of biohacking.
What it means, though, is that every day, you
have some amount of energy that you put into
something and you can put it into folding proteins
to stay young, you can put it into hating someone.
It’s all electrons. The same electrons that power
your iPhone power you but your iPhone gets it
from just plugging into a charger, you get it from
combining air and food, and turning that into
electrons.
 2
And we all know what happens if you have way
too many apps open on your phone, and the
screen is running on brightness all the time,
well, the battery dies before the end of the day.
And if you have less apps open, and using less
energy intensive ones, you can have your phone
working all the time you want it to, doing the most
important tasks. Well, you’re the same. So how
do you recharge? When do you recharge? And
how do you not have more apps open than is
necessary?
It turns out most of us have a lot of apps open all
the time around resilience that are not necessary.
We’re worried, we’re anxious, we have a voice in
our head that says things that aren’t even true or
aren’t even nice and we believe that voice is us.
So for me, my practice is half making sure that I
am the best in the world at turning air and food
into electrons so that I have the biggest, baddest
battery and the ability to deliver as much current
to my life force as there is.
And then, okay, I’ve got lots of energy, and then
how do I waste it less? So I don’t eat toxins. At
least I do my best not to. And I know that if I
do breathe dirty air, air pollution or toxins or
whatever else, I’m not going to be anxious about
it. I’m not going to be afraid. But I am going to say,
“Hmm, are my detox systems running really well?
Can I keep my fire burning brightly?” and that
builds incredible resilience.
What does that mean? It means that I have been
measuring my sleep every night for the last
15 years. I was CTO and co-founder one of the
companies that gets heart rate from the rest. In
fact, the first one to do that. The company got
bought by Intel years ago. So I’ve been doing that
kind of monitoring. Today I use an aura ring. And I
look at, how did I sleep last night? And I get more
deep sleep and more REM sleep in six and a half
hours than most college students get in eight
hours.
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As you age, you’re supposed to get less deep
quality sleep. So what’s happening there is sleep
is not about number of hours; it’s about quality.
People are saying, “Well, that can’t be true.” But
hold on a second here, if you were say, running a
marathon, is it about how many hours it took you
to run a marathon? Like, more is better? Or was it
about you ran a marathon very effectively in less
time and you both got there?
So I want to get the distance but I want to do
it in less time, including for sleep, the distance
is measured by how well I recovered. And
fortunately, I can measure it and I can prove that
what I’m doing works. In fact, I’ve taught many
thousands, tens of thousands of people how to do
that. I have a sleep challenge that is free, that’s on
the daveasprey.com site.
And then the next thing I do, that’s really
important, I do intermittent fasting most days,
and my most recent book was called Fast This
Way. And I’ve taught at this point, 70,000 people,
in the fasting challenge. “Hey, spend two weeks
and I’ll teach you every day, how to effortlessly go
without food for 24 hours, or for 12 hours, or 14,”
and that’s at fastthisway.com.
The interesting thing there, though, is the reason
you do fasting. There’s two kinds of fasting, one
of them is a spiritual fast to go deep and edit the
voice in your head. Well, that usually requires
journaling and resting, and multi days of fasting.
And I did that in a cave, while I was writing the
book. Well, the working fast is about having more
resilience.
So this is a fascinating, Jodi, because if you
wake up, and you say, “Alright, I’m going to eat
something right away,” well, some percentage of
your energy goes right away into your stomach
to digest the food to get more energy back
later. Well, that means all morning, you’re not
performing very well. If instead you have an
 3
empty stomach, or there’s a few things you can
have that won’t mess with you.
But you do that and then all morning long, all of
your energy goes into creation, and thinking and
feeling good. And you’re not hungry at all, when
you do this right. So you’re not distracted and
you’re in the zone. And then lunch time comes
around, “Yeah, I’ll have some lunch,” and you eat
the right stuff for lunch. And once you do that, for
the next four hours, there’s no 2:00 pm crash, you
don’t need candy in the afternoon.
And all of a sudden, dinner time comes, “Yeah, I
guess I could eat,” and you do that and then you
don’t want dessert afterwards. And then you go
to bed, and you’re fasting while you’re asleep.
And you wake up and you do that, it turns out
the same number of calories, radically different
amount of resilience. And teaching people how
to do that without what they expect, which is, “If
I don’t eat six times a day, my body will go into
starvation mode, and then I’ll get hyperglybitchy
and hangry, and it’ll be the end of the world.”
Okay, this was me when I weighed 300 pounds.
That was literally what I believed. And I can tell
you the reason I fasted in a cave for four days,
that was my first fast because I’m like, “I might go
into starvation mode and I know I’m gonna yell at
everyone. So if I’m alone in a cave for four days...”
I also know that I used to eat when I was lonely.
Like, okay, I can just face all that.
But writing a book about the psychology of fasting
so you can fast without burning energy on worry
about not having enough food, it takes 90 days
to starve to death, not 12 hours, but the voice
goes, “Oh my God, if you don’t have tacos for
lunch, you’re gonna die!” And like, no, that’s not
how it works but we feel like it is. So my resilience
practice, I don’t eat breakfast, the vast majority
of the time. But sometimes I do, just so my body
knows, “Hey, sometimes you gotta eat.”
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And I good stuff. Based on the Bulletproof Diet,
people lost a million plus pounds on that. And
it’s what today you’d call a cyclical, clean keto diet
with no omega six fats. So there’s elements of
no lectins. And there’s elements of carnivore and
grass fed and all that. It was just an early, early
book that accounted for all of those things in
one diet. So I do that. And I have carbs at dinner
because they help you sleep better, but I don’t
have tons of sugar.
And when you do that regularly, this is what no
one really talks about, the mitochondria, the
ancient bacteria in your cells that we like say,
“Well, they’re the power plants for your cells.”
They’re power plants but they’re also sensors of
the environment around you and they’re factories,
they make electricity, sure, but they also make
hormones. And they make peptides, and they
make all kinds of signaling compounds in the
body. So people don’t usually understand, “Oh,
some neurotransmitters are made by these?”
So these are really in control of a lot of our small,
automated biological systems. If you eat good
fats, which means not seed oils, not omega sixes,
more saturated fat, more monounsaturated
fat, over about two years, half of the fat in your
mitochondria changes to be stable. And when that
happens, you have batteries and factories that
can make more than they could before. And when
this happens, your resilience goes up because
your net energy capacity goes up.
So the same time that goes up over time, you’re
learning to not be afraid of being hungry, or at
least having an empty stomach, even if you’re not
feeling hungry. You’re learning to not be afraid of
criticism from your mother in law or whatever the
heck your stuff is. And all of a sudden, like, “Wow,
it’s the end of the day. I got everything done. I
actually got to talk to people I care about. I’m full
of energy. I want to see my kids.”
 4
“I don’t care if I have to commute home. Some
stupid headline from the Washington Post or New
York Times or something that was trying to make
me fall into a fear state, it didn’t even touch me,
because I had resilience. I stayed in the zone. I
stayed in charge of myself.” Versus just going to
low power mode where you’re like, “I can’t really
think about that. I’ll just react about that.” You
don’t want to be there and part of that is having
the power of eating the right foods and sleeping
really well.
[10:00]
Jodi: That’s so beautiful. And what I love is that
you have so many cool gadgets. But all of these
things are just leaning into your natural body,
what you eat, how you sleep, recharging your
mitochondrial body. What are some of your other
favorite hacks for resilience?
Dave: Well, there’s something called slope of the
curve biology that I introduced in Fast This Way,
which sounds like a really fancy term. But we have
this puritanical idea that you should suffer to
improve, there’s actually not data to support that,
in fact, the data supports the opposite of that.
So, “Oh, you want to get strong cardiovascularly?
You must go for a 90 minute run or run five miles
every day.” Well, I have data and this is behind
one of my companies called Upgrade Labs. We’re
in the middle of franchising to at least a hundred
locations across North America.
Jodi: Wow.
Dave: Oh, yeah.
Jodi: Congratulations.
Dave: Thanks. But what are the things we do
there? We use artificial intelligence, and look at
your heart rate as you’re riding an exercise bike
really slowly. And then you suddenly accelerate
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really quickly, for 20 seconds. And you do that
twice in five minutes. And you get better results
than someone who sits on a bike and sweats their
butt off for 45 minutes, five days a week.
Jodi: Wow. So you’re really figuring out how to get
the biggest reward, the biggest bang for the buck.
Dave: Yep. And what’s going on there, is the body
doesn’t care that, “Oh, you got your heart rate
up, and you’re sweating, and you kept it up for a
long time.” So if you’re to draw a curve of effort,
there’s all sorts of space underneath that curve,
like, “Well, there’s a lot of volume there.” What
the body responds to and adapts to, is change,
the speed of change. So you’re going from really,
really slow to, “Oh, my god, there’s a tiger!” to
really, really slow.
So teaching the body to be resilient means
teaching it to expect and be prepared for rapid
change, not for huge volumes of change. So it’s
not about being really slow and then really fast for
a long time. It’s about going slow, fast, slow, fast,
slow, fast, eating, not eating, eating, not eating
versus snacking, snacking, snacking, snacking, and
these poor old 1970s people think, “It’s all about
the calories you eat.” They’re the people who
made me weigh 300 pounds, because I believe
that.
It turns out, it’s not about the number of calories,
it’s about the type of calories and the timing of
them. So having an empty stomach. So even if it’s
the same number of calories, if you’re eating it in
little snacks throughout the day, you’re not going
to get results because there isn’t that change. So if
you want resilience, you must create sudden rapid
change in the body.
The same reason I’ve been recommending cold
showers since I started writing in 2011. It’s not
that big of a deal. For three days, you’ll say, “Dave
Asprey is the biggest jerk ever,” but you stand
 5
in the shower and you let the shower hit your
forehead and your chest on full cold at the end of
your shower. And you’ll last eight to 10 seconds
the first time, and you’ll swear.
The second day, you’ll go in and go, “I just hate
my life. I’m going to do this anyway. I don’t know
why,” and you might go 20, 30 seconds. Third day,
you’ll probably go to 40, maybe 50 seconds. So
when I say you’ll go, at the end of that you’re like,
“I’m getting a headache. My head is tensing up. I’m
shivering. I can’t stand it.” But something magic
happens the fourth day. The fourth day you go do
it and you go, “Wow, this isn’t really hurting.”
And then at the end of it, you go, “I feel amazing.
What just happened?” Well, what happened is that
three days of short term cold exposure where
the temperature receptors are there, results
in a change in the mitochondrial membrane, a
compound called cardiolipin. Now you don’t have
to know any of the things I just said. What I’ll tell
you is the fourth day, “Dave Asprey is a hero,”
and the third day, “Dave Asprey is a jerk.” What
changed? Your ability to make electricity to stay
warm.
What does the body do after that? It says, “Any of
my mitochondria that can’t make heat in a rapid
period of time, get rid of them and build younger
ones.” So resilience comes from the ability to push
the accelerator and have it go really fast. And
what your body wants to do is be lazy and let you
get old, and say, “Well, if you push the accelerator,
eventually you’ll go fast.” And you’re like, “No, no,
no, anytime a cold shower could be coming, you’d
better be ready.”
And that means you are ready for any stressor
in your life, including getting a sudden illness,
including a big emotional disruption in your life,
including, “I just wanted to improve and I had
to push harder,” or, “I wanted to deal with an
old trauma.” It doesn’t matter. But it’s, “Can I
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accelerate quickly?” So that matters more than the
total speed you can go. If it takes you three days
to accelerate quickly, sorry, you’re not resilient.
Jodi: I love that. That was a great explanation of
cold. So basically, eat, sleep, move, cold showers.
What about coffee?
Dave: I mean, everyone knows coffee stunts your
growth.
Jodi: You mean your aging process? I love coffee.
I’m always up for hearing why coffee is amazing.
Dave: But isn’t coffee addictive?
Jodi: Completely.
Dave: I mean, if there’s something you do every
day that makes you feel good. And then when you
stop doing it, you feel bad. It’s addictive, right?
Jodi: Correct.
Dave: I was talking about exercise, Jodi.
Jodi: I exercise every day.
Dave: So, coffee and exercise. People who say
coffee is addictive, it’s like, “Guys, air is addictive.”
Anything that works and makes you feel good,
once you get used to feeling good, you’ll stop
doing it. At this point, there’s abundant science
that says coffee is a preeminent superfood for
humans. A reduction in all-cause mortality. Google
any disease state you can think of, and coffee, and
there’s probably a study on it that says coffee is
amazing.
The thing about coffee stunting your growth was
a rumor spread in the 1950s by a company trying
to sell you an unhealthy, burned grain coffee
substitute. So I’m well known for Bulletproof
Coffee, which is a company that I started that I’m
 6
no longer involved with. And what Bulletproof
Coffee is, is mold free coffee, because who
would have thought that mold, the ancient
enemy of bacteria, which is funny because your
mitochondria are bacteria?
So anyway, you get the mold out of the coffee,
and you blend it with something called MCT oil,
which adds more electrons to your resilience
system. And grass fed butter, which changes the
chemistry of the water so you can more rapidly
use the water in your coffee to make energy. No,
we did not know this when I invented it. I funded
research at the University of Washington that
discovered that.
Jodi: With Gerry Pollock, with the structured
water. Interesting.
Dave: Absolutely, yeah. I donated $50,000 to his
lab and said, “Could you look at water?” and he
said, “Hmm, let’s see what’s going on here,” and
that was the end result. Not about Bulletproof
Coffee, he just looked at grass fed butter fat and
looked at MCT oil, and found that they changed
the structure of the water. So that’s one of the
many reasons that blending that stuff in instead
of milk makes a difference.
So yeah, Bulletproof Coffee, for me is a massive,
important thing that I do every single morning.
And the good news is that you can do this while
fasting. In Fast This Way, I talk about three fasting
hacks. So remember, if you’re worried about food,
and you’re hungry all the time while you’re fasting,
it’s going to suck your energy. I want you to fast
for performance, so you feel really good at the
end of the day and during the fast.
So it was a high performance fast, not an, “Oh my
God, I can’t believe I made it,” fast. And there are
three things you can do that make fasting work
better and still maintain the benefits of fasting,
you can drink black coffee, you drink coffee with
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butter and MCT oil, and you can drink any kind
of liquid that contains prebiotic fiber. So when
people get started on fasting, if you’ve never
fasted before, you’re like I used to be, maybe
you have 80 or a hundred extra pounds on you,
maybe only have 40 pounds, but your metabolism
isn’t where you want it.
And this is about 60 to 80% of the United States
right now, we have metabolic disabilities, I’d call
it. Certainly, we have metabolic inflexibility and
resilience comes from flexibility. So what you do is
the first morning, you make yourself a Bulletproof
Coffee, don’t put more butter than you want in
there, you don’t have to force it, you can have
anywhere from 70 calories all the way up to a
couple hundred. If you’re a big guy like me and
you have an intense day, the fat will not change
your insulin levels. It will still work.
And you can add a scoop or two of prebiotic fiber.
And when you do that, as long as there’s no sugar
and no artificial sweeteners in there, your body
is going to think you’re still fasting but you’re just
not going to care about food. So all the energy
that would have gone into, “What’s for lunch?
What’s for lunch? Is that a cookie?” all of that’s just
gone. And it returns to you to do what you were
there to do.
And then lunchtime rolls around and you’ve
turned your hunger hormones off so effectively.
You’re like, “This is weird. I didn’t eat breakfast
but I don’t really want lunch. But I guess I could
eat some lunch,” and you decide to eat or not
eat. And that’s a sense of freedom that most
people have never experienced. I didn’t know
the difference between cravings and hunger and
there was no way I could possibly skip breakfast
or I would die. That was what I believed. And it’s
just not how it is.
So those are some things that I teach people in
the fasting challenge. That’s at fastthisway.com.
 7
And like I said, you don’t have to buy the book, it
is totally free. I just want people to know, you’re
capable of this and 70,000 plus people have done
it and the comments are, “I can’t believe I have
more energy and haven’t eaten in a day.”
Jodi: It’s a resilience game changer. Is there
anything else that we haven’t touched on that you
think is valuable to share?
Dave: Yeah. One of the biggest things is looking at
light. So there’s two things that tell the body what
time it is and they are light, number one and food,
number two, the timing of food. Now, I studied
distributed systems and artificial intelligence and
my career was as a computer hacker. So I look at
the body as a distributed system like that.
We know that for the internet and for computers,
you need to have a central clock so that you know
what time it is and some other computer over
there knows what time it is, and then you can
coordinate your actions. But if your liver and your
digestion think its noon, and your brain thinks its
midnight, you will have a less resilient system.
[20:00]
And this is a chronic problem, because the
brighter our lights and the more LED, the bright
white, blue, even the warm LEDs have way more
blue light in them than the sun does, but you
can’t really see it, but it’s in there. So what I teach
people in Fast This Way is to use glasses. And
the ones that I recommend, I wrote the patent
for, it’s a company called TrueDark , that’s one in
®
my portfolio. And these glasses control the four
aspects of light.
Blue blockers do not do this. Blue blockers are
not enough at night, they’re too much during
the day. So there’s four kinds of light and two
other aspects of light. And you tune those, and
you put on the TrueDark glasses, about an hour
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before bed, and then you sleep with more deep
sleep than you did before, at least I do and the
vast majority people I’ve talked to do. So you can
measure this and see if it’s doing that. And most
people get tired pretty quickly after they put the
glasses on, which is good.
They’re just telling your body, “Oh, there’s no
light.” So even though you can see, your brain
timing system says there’s no light. If you combine
that, don’t eat before bed, don’t eat at least three
hours for bed, ideally, even more than that and
then your body goes, “Oh, that’s weird. There’s
no food and there’s no light, it must be dark.”
Because when we were floating in the ocean two
billion years ago as little organisms, we always ate
when the sun was overhead, because that was
when the algae was there the most.
So we were soaking up the algae, we got food and
light. And to this day, your body’s trying to figure
out all the parts. “Is it daytime or nighttime?”
And when you just do those two things, your
sleep quality goes through the roof, and I have
so many people learn how to sleep. But if you
eat right before bed, you’ll break it. If you turn
on the bathroom light to brush your teeth, and
you’ve got LEDs in there, you’ll ruin it unless you’re
wearing the glasses or you don’t turn the light on.
This is another huge part of resilience. And we are
going to get to the point over the next 20, 30 years
where we finally realize, “Wow, when it’s dark
outside, it should be dim inside, not bright.” And
when we do that, it’s going to have a huge impact
on insects and the world around us because right
now, we’ve lost 75% of the bugs on the planet are
gone. It’s because we have exterior lighting that
keeps them from mating and confuses them.
So if you go to my farm, all of my exterior lights
are red because bugs can’t see red lights. I can still
see but now I can see the Milky Way and I have
owls near the house and the bugs don’t want to
 8
come to my house. So if you have exterior lighting
and you’re hearing this, it’s okay to look like you
live in a submarine, get red or at least amber
exterior lights for your own sleep quality and to
help the environment around you. You want the
butterflies to come back? That’s how you do it.
Jodi: That’s wonderful, thank you. And just in case
they didn’t hear the number of ways they can
work with you and take your challenges, could you
repeat that please?
Dave: You can go to fastthisway.com and that’s
where you sign up for the fasting challenge. And
I want people to know how to feel better than
they do today. More resilient, people are kinder
to each other and they’re less susceptible to fear
based programming, which is a major issue right
now.
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So we need more energy and more power, and
more resilience than we’ve ever had and this
is part of how I’m teaching people do it. So,
fastthisway.com. And the podcast is Bulletproof
Radio. You can find it anywhere podcasts are
distributed, so one of the top 100 shows out
there. And if you want to look at the sleep
challenge, go to daveasprey.com.
Jodi: Thank you so much for your time. This was
amazing as always.
Dave: Jodi, it was great to see you.
Jodi: Thank you.
 9

Inner Resilience: The Mind-

Body Connection
Pedram Shojai, OMD

Jodi: Hi, I’m Jodi Cohen, your host. And I’m so
excited to be joined by Pedram Shojai. He is a
former Taoist monk, who is an accomplished
doctor of Chinese medicine and a green activist,
and has lectured on wellness around the world.
He is the author of several books, including The
Urban Monk, The Art of Stopping Time, Focused
Trauma, and the producer of multiple docufilms,
including the recent, Trauma. He’s also a co-
founder of Whole TV, which is a first kind of health
and wellness streaming service with live and
original online content. Welcome, thank you for
being here.
Pedram: Thank you, good to be here.
Jodi: So I’m excited to dive into inner resilience,
the mind body connection, and I’m wondering if
you could share your definition of resilience.
Pedram: Resilience is when you can stay seated
on your perch and you don’t get knocked off.
And it is one of these things that has finally kind
of come to science because 5,000, 6,000 years,
they’ve been talking about this in Tai Chi and yoga
but the concept of resilience has really come front
and center. We’re talking about real powerful
genetic pathways that get controlled with some of
these mind body practices, like NF kappa B, and
the things that would allow for your psyche to
withstand the stressors.
someone cuts you off, there goes your resilience.
And you could be having a great day, the same
guy cuts you off, and it’s no big deal. So what’s the
difference? It’s, how long is your fuse? I’m really
interested in fuse lengthening practices for people
who live in a world that’s constantly chipping away
at that.
Jodi: I love that, fuse lengthening practices. Can
you talk about some of those practices?
Pedram: Sure. There’s plenty. For some people,
its dance. For some people, it’s hiking and
gardening. The ones I gravitated towards, as a
monk, were Qigong, Tai Chi, I’m a martial artist,
I’ve been in Kung Fu for a very long time. But I do
love my yoga, I do love my power play. There’s
a lot of things that you can do to lengthen your
fuse, it could be art. But what is it for you? And are
you getting it in, in like, your daily dose?
The mystery of all this stuff is, “I’m going to live
my life. I’m going to kind of bang away and do
the thing everyone else does. And then when
I’m already at the point of snapping, I’m going
to sit down and try to do some down dogs or
stand on my head, or tap something,” and it’s
too late. That’s not how you do these things. So
it’s basically kind of the Western pharmaceutical
model of a pill for an ill being applied to
something that’s a little more natural.

You could be having a really terrible day and It’s like, “I’m gonna tug on my ears and tap my

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forehead,” that’s cute but that’s not the game,
the game is to constantly feed that meter. It’s
almost like Marty Seligman’s positive psychology
concept, where you’re constantly lengthening the
fuse and building that buffer so that when trouble
comes, you’re ready for it. So that when there’s
a pandemic or someone sneezes in your face, or
you get a flat tire, it’s not the end of the world. You
have enough resilience to kind of roll through.
I mean, it could still suck but it doesn’t destroy
you. It doesn’t suddenly give you autoimmunity,
it doesn’t give you a nervous breakdown. And
there’s so many things that can, right? People get
divorced, businesses crash, car accidents happen.
Like, there are things that come out of the blue,
and you can’t predict chaos, but you can prepare
for chaos, knowing it’s going to come.
Jodi: Exactly. You said that beautifully. I love it. So
talk to people about some of your strategies like
meditation, and how that basically lengthens the
fuse, what it’s doing in their brain and body.
Pedram: I get up and do a good half hour of
Qigong and meditation before the kids get up and
pandemonium kind of sets in around the house.
You’ve got to feed them and the dogs are hungry
and all of it. So I choose to wake up earlier and I
take care of me before I have to take care of all of
them.
So, what do these practices do? They strengthen
the prefrontal cortex. They increase the flow
of blood very specifically in energy. And when I
say energy, I’m not even talking about it in the
whoo, I’m talking about neuronal firing. So energy
potentials firing across axons and dendrites to
the predominantly serotonergic neurons in the
prefrontal cortex.
I used to own Brain Labs. We study this stuff. And
this is the part of the brain that’s responsible for
executive function, higher moral reasoning, which
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the world can use a little more of, and negation of
impulses. So when the cheesecake is presented
to you, what part of your brain says no? When
the guys say, “Let’s go for a drink,” and you’re
supposed to go to the gym, what part of your
brain says no? When you see this purse that you
absolutely must have, but probably shouldn’t buy,
because you can’t afford, what part of your brain
says no?
It’s the part that is very specifically empowered
by these practices. And it’s the part that helps
us make better decisions and stay calm and
stay rational, and sit on the perch of the better
decisions in life. And we know how to make that
part of our brain stronger. Yet, it’s not the first
thing that’s taught in kindergarten to every child
who wants to basically have a fighting chance in a
world that’s competing for the same circuitry.
And here’s the problem, this is where it gets
insidious, is we live in what’s called the attention
economy. All the apps, all the media, all the
advertising, all this crap is designed to grab
your attention and say, “You’re not enough, you
need this purse, you need this truck, you need
this vacation.” And those things come from our
impulses that are kind of driven by the amygdala
and driven by kind of the emotional limbic
systems of the brain that are like, “You’re not safe,
you’re not worthy, you’re not going to find a mate.
Here’s the answer.”
So they’re designed to kind of poke at the
primitive parts of our brain that get us to respond
very predictably. And demonstrated through
thousands of labs, and neuroscience has figured
it out, “We can get these monkeys to dance by
pushing these buttons.” The only way out of that
is to develop the part of the brain that evolved
after we were monkeys, which is the prefrontal
cortex. And that part of our brain allows us to
suppress those impulses and be like, “Monkey,
no. Monkey, you don’t need that purse. Go buy

groceries and go to the gym.” Whatever it is.
And the entire industry is kind of wired against
that. So the only way you’re going to take control
of your life and have a better life, and take things
into your hands is by doing things that empower
the part of your brain that allows you to keep
doing it. And there’s no pill for that, if I had a pill
for that, I’d be a gajillionaire. It’s just not possible
to do it that way. You have to be involved.
Jodi: You’re speaking my love language, amygdala
hijack, and how the prefrontal cortex pulls you out
of that. I’ve personally noticed, the more I activate
my frontal lobe, the more I pull out of anxiety,
depression, all of those things. Can you delve a
little deeper into how the prefrontal cortex and
the amygdala kind of work in tandem?
Pedram: Think about it, it’s like, “Hey, I feel
unsafe. That lion was trying to eat me.” “The
mortgage is due,” all the kind of abstract things
that have to do with survival, and, “Oh, this client
cancelled a contract.” What does that mean? That
means, “Oh, man, I might not have enough food
to feed my family, and they’re going to take my
house, they’re going to take my car.”
So these thoughts that are just up here, are
actually tied into circuitry that makes us feel very
unsafe and fearful, because we have these genes
that activate for fear of survival. And there are so
many things, whether it’s the business example,
or just turn on the news, and the terrorists or
the ‘fill in the blank’ are coming to get you, which
makes you feel like, “Oh, my God, the world is
unsafe.”
And that triggers this circuitry, which basically
says, “Look, hoard food, store fat, hunker down,
and stop moving,” and all these things that get
us to kind of fight, flight, or freeze. And they put
us in this kind of cycle of just like, “I don’t feel
like working out, I’m tired. I need more coffee
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because I’m not stimulated.” And you have this
like, emotional loop of emotions and thoughts
associated with those emotions that are just
kind of running in the background, zapping your
energy.
And the part of your brain that says, “Shut up,” is
the prefrontal cortex. And not to say that some
of these fears are unfounded but look, at the end
of the day, when the lion is chasing you, the right
answer is to fight or run, not freeze. And to be
in the moment of executive function, to be like,
“I’ve got to get the hell out of here and save my
children. I’ve got to save myself.” So the answer
isn’t to sit there and ruminate, and get stuck in
that limbic loop.
[10:00]
The deer either gets away or it doesn’t get it. Then
if it does get away, it shakes out all that tension
and kind of goes back to eating grass. It probably
takes a nice dump and goes back to eating grass
because it’s over. Us, we’re like, “Whoof,” Like, “Oh
my God!”
That trauma imprints in our system energetically,
biologically, hormonally. And unless we activate
the mechanisms that help us clear and release
that trauma, and get us out of those limbic loops,
they’re just like... one of the examples I use for
my students. I do a lot of retreats and take people
to lakes and all this kind of stuff. Is you get a still
pond and it’s just so gorgeous and you throw a
pebble in there, and it just kind of ripples out and
it’s so beautiful.
But then take another pebble, and another
pebble, and another pebble, or a handful of
pebbles, and all of a sudden, the water is doing
this. So the surface of the water is chaotic and
tumultuous and that clarity isn’t there. So you
keep throwing these pebbles, these emotional
pebbles into your mental kind of interface and

the water is just so choppy, you can’t even decide
what you want for lunch, let alone what you’re
going to do with the next 30 years of your life.
So these are the things that we know how to fix.
But unless you take an active role in fixing them
by empowering the part of your brain that helps
with that in your life, you’re going to constantly
be dealing with the same things. Listening to
podcasts, reading books, or journaling, but not
actually getting through it because there’s things
that need to actually release. There’s techniques
for it and then there are practices for it.
In my experience, and I’ve seen thousands of
patients in my life, the people who say, “Okay, I
got it,” and they get up and do the work, those are
the ones who get better. The other ones just keep
shopping doctors and podcasts for forever, going
for the next Hail Mary silver bullet, and looking
for someone to save them. You can get help, but
no one’s going to save you, you’ve got to save
yourself.
Jodi: No, exactly, exactly. I love your analogies.
Talk to us about the work, about the meditation,
about activating the parasympathetic nervous
system, how to do it and why it works.
Pedram: Look, why it works, we don’t know, right?
We know it works and we know it activates the
parasympathetic because it’s kind of like a binary
switch. So when you go parasympathetic, you’re
telling the troops that its peacetime economy. So
put money into books and roads, right? So the
more you water those fields, the more you train
the system to go to parasympathetic and live in
parasympathetic, the more things start going
right. The body heals, the food gets digested,
good ideas happen. The prefrontal cortex gets
innervated and gets vascular circulation.
So, how do you do that? Well, you have to do it.
Either you live in a scenario where everything’s
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just relaxing and it’s cool, and your life is pretty
cool because you live in a peaceful part of the
planet, and you don’t read the news. Or you’re like
the rest of us, where there’s bullets flying all the
time. So then it becomes a thing where it’s like,
“You know what? I could sit there and begrudge
this scenario I have in life, or I can evolve and
do something about it,” because the world isn’t
stopping, it’s on slot. So what do you?
And there’s a million ways to do this, so I don’t
want to be... I’m very kind of like technique
agnostic, because people are like, “Oh, it’s my
way,” like, this is BS. There’s a lot of ways to do
this but one of the easiest ones, in my opinion, is
breath. You’ve got to do it. I don’t know anyone
who could avoid not doing that. And it’s your tie
in, physiologically with your very existence. You’re
inhaling and exhaling something that keeps you
alive, you’re breathing in and out of the universe.
You can get all mystical about it or you could
just be like, “Hey, I’ve got to breathe. And it’s an
automatic autonomic thing that I don’t really
focus on but I’m going to bring my conscious
awareness, I’m going to retroflex. I’m going to turn
my conscious awareness around and become
observant of something that I take for granted,
like my heart beating or my breath.”
“And I’m going to continually bring my focus, my
attention on this thing that I have an internal
nexus of control around. And I’m going to become
aware of how my mind works and how the mind
is just constantly running and going nuts.” One of
the big misreads of meditation and all this stuff is
like, “Well, how do you stop your mind?” You don’t!
You stop your mind, you cut off your head.
You stop reacting to all of the myriad thoughts. I
just wiggled my toe. That sent information to my
brain and it reflected into something. The store
is open and the mind is going to have thoughts.
The question is, do you go tumbling down the

whitewater of each thought or can you sit in the
depth of that lake and you can see the ripples on
top, and you don’t react to them?
And the more you do that, the better you get
at that the more resilience you build, the more
capacity you have to just stay in equanimity and
watch the things happening in the world. Not to
say that you don’t react to it. If you see someone
getting mugged in front of you, you step up
and you help or you call the cops, but you don’t
get knocked off your perch, where now you’re
no longer useful to anyone around you either
because you’re also in a panic attack.
You are resilient in in the moment and these
practices, they do that. And I think a lot of people
kind of get knocked off because they’re like, “Oh,
I tried meditation for a week,” and that’s how it
helps. It’s not one of these, like boot camp, “Try
it for a minute and see if it’s for you,” types of
things. It’s just part of a lifestyle. It’s like you floss
your teeth. Do you floss your mind? It’s a hygiene
thing that needs to be built into the date day to
day living of humans living on a crazy planet.
Jodi: One of the things that I love is this idea of
not reacting, like kind of staying objective and not
diving in. I find personally, that helps a lot. If you
can go a little deeper on that, like, what are some
strategies that help you kind of... someone pokes
the bear, and you just stay kind of still?
Pedram: Ideally, someone’s poked the bear and
the bear has already kind of filled up his tank,
from his morning practice and his lifestyle and
his resilience, and he’s not reacting to the sugar
cereal he had and all that kind of lifestyle stuff.
It’s very easy to lose resilience with bad lifestyle
choices. You can’t meditate and drink Dr. Pepper
and it balances it out.
So ideally, you’re living and you’re wise in that
way. But then the bear gets poked and the bear
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is like, “Hey, what the hell?” In that moment, the
bear’s response or reaction might be to swat the
poker. And that’s the moment when, if you’ve
been meditating, and you’ve been doing the
work, you have this moment of prefrontal cortex
resilience to be like, “Monkey, no.” Like, “Bear, no!
Don’t swap that thing. It’s your cub,” or whatever
it is.
So you stop and you take a breath, and you re-
center back to parasympathetic and be like, “Hey,
please don’t poke me,” or, “Ha-ha, that was funny.”
But the bear that doesn’t have the resilience can’t
stop the swat and the reaction that comes almost
instantaneously from the animal part of its brain.
Jodi: Right, inhibition, the more you can train your
inhibition muscle, the easier it is, okay.
Pedram: And this is the inhibition muscle. Now,
I can talk about it, I could say, “Hey, listen, pull
ups are good for you,” and then you enter a pull
up contest and you do two, because you don’t
do pull ups at home. Or you say, “Okay, well, the
pull up contest is in three months, and I’m going
to get myself trained for pull ups.” And you show
up ready to the party. The thing is, that pull up
contest happens every single day in every one of
our lives when it comes to resilience.
So you don’t train the day before the marathon,
you train your life. It’s just the thing that I think
has really been misguided in our culture is people
just think, “Okay, well I’m having a panic attack, I’m
gonna put on some Frankincense.” “My wife and I
fought, I’m gonna go meditate it off.” It’s just like,
“Well, why did you get into a fight? Like, how did it
escalate that far?”
Jodi: Oh, we’re reactive as opposed to proactive.
Pedram: Yeah. But my problem with that kind of
stuff, Jodi, is, you know, I do a lot of media, I do
a lot of stuff and it’s like, we have these words,

where it’s like, “Oh, well, there’s reactive and
proactive, okay, got it.” And then we all kind of go
on, and we go, “Okay, well I’ve read this, I’ve read
that. Okay, check, check, check, check.”
But then I go back to my students, and I go back
to my patients, and I’m like, “Okay, well you know
the lexicon but you told me that you just got
into like a knockdown, drag ‘em out, fight with
your business partner the other day. So was
that reactive or proactive?” And it’s just like, we
intellectually go, “Oh yeah, okay, I got that,” but
viscerally, we still don’t do anything about it.
So connecting the dots has been a big part of
what I’ve done in the last five years, because you
could tell a patient what’s good for them until
they’re blue in the face and they’re like, “Oh, okay,
yeah, yeah, yeah. Eat vegetables and exercise,
and do less drugs.” You’re like, “Okay, but a; you’re
not doing any of that. And b; these are all just
buzzwords that you’re repeating back to me but
like, it didn’t get through.”
[20:00]
So it’s become this like mission of mine to be like,
“Okay, no,” like, “What did you do this morning?
What did you do to build the proactivity muscle
in your brain?” because saying, “I need to be
proactive,” is cute. That’s like me jumping into a
pull up contest, thinking I could do a hundred,
when I haven’t done any in six months.
Jodi: No, no, I get it. Like when Max died, someone
said, “Just eat, sleep, and move,” and that was
manageable, because I like to move. And in fact,
if we can talk about movement. Movement is my
meditation. I don’t know if it just forces me to
breathe correctly, or why it’s so positive. But could
you speak to that a little bit?
Pedram: Still water breeds poison, right? So we’re
designed to move. We traditionally, genetically,
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historically, have moved a lot more than we do.
And the bioelectric field of our body, the piezo
electric flow of energy to create bones and drive
nervous system action potentials, all of that is
predicated on kind of energy circulating through
the body. Blood circulating through the body,
delivering oxygen to areas of the body, and none
of that works in an animal that doesn’t move.
So one of the real kind of sins of our modern
society has been the drive towards stagnation and
devices and blue screens, and all these kinds of
things that you’ll hear about and everything. But
again, then the question becomes, how do you
truly build movement into your life? Like, I’m at
my standing desk right now. I don’t like standing
anymore, I’ll go down and do squats; I’ve got a
power plate over there. Or I’ll wiggle and jiggle
and go outside.
And the question is, “How much sun did I get
today?” and, “Can I do this phone call on a walk?”
Great, I recommend you do the same. And I do
that a lot, where I’m just like, “Hey, we don’t need
a screen in front of us, let’s walk and talk.” And
to build hours of movement, instead of like, 30
minutes of the gym with a day at the desk. And
one of the things that’s worked well, and I’ve been
around the block, done corporate wellness for
something like 2,200 companies, at this point in
my life.
I don’t do it anymore but I’ve been around it and
I’ve seen the data. It’s like, we do really simple
things like, “Hey, I’m gonna set a timer for every
25 minutes. You get up, you do five minutes of
movement, do some lunges, some squats, and
pushups, stretch, whatever. Drink some water,
pee, and go back to your desk. And we’re just
gonna do five minutes every 30 minutes. So that’s
10 minutes an hour of lost productivity, right?
It was amazing, when we first started, the CFOs
were freaking out and HR was like, “I don’t think

I could get like get time off for these people,”
they’re cracking whips on them, and I’m like,
“Yo, just trust this.” Productivity went up. Colds
and flus went down. Absenteeism went down.
Presenteeism went down, all of the markers
shifted significantly because these animals started
moving. And it was like, “Holy crap. That’s genius!”
I’m like, “How is this genius? You guys are a $10
billion a year company and this is genius?” Like, I
don’t understand how common sense like left the
room.
Jodi: I know. My kids’ grade school, they used
to give them 15 minutes for lunch and I was
like, “Why don’t you give them longer? Let them
get parasympathetic, play relaxing music.” The
principal was blown away, all the test scores went
up. Like, kind of the incidence of kids going to the
principal’s office went down.
Pedram: We’re just finishing a movie on this right
now, it’s called The Great Heist, and it’s about the
economy because schooling was set up and all
this. All the robber barons, Leland Stanford and
Carnegie and all these guys are the ones that
endowed the major universities, and they created
these very specifically to create better workers.
And the executives who we hail as like the
champions of everything in our culture, those
guys work for the board of directors, and those
are just the guys that drive the workers harder. So
the whole system is designed to just crank on
people until they break and then replace them
in the economy. And you can see the ripples of
that into obviously, psychology, psychiatric clinics,
medical clinics, people are breaking.
Jodi: Yeah because they don’t build in recovery.
My daughter’s an athlete, she feels guilty when
she takes the day off. I’m like, “No, that’s the best
thing you can do.”
Pedram: That’s part of the plan. And coach
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has to say so, if not, it’s just like, “I gotta keep
moving.” That’s not resilience. When we talk
about resilience, if rest is part of your resilience
equation, you’ve got it all wrong, like, you’re just
going to break. Rest needs to be part of resilience.
You need the downtime.
Even if you’re talking about physiologically for
an athlete, like I just need mental digestion time
because I have mental indigestion from all the
information that comes in. Emotional indigestion,
every time I talk to like my mom or something, it’s
just like, “Oh, yeah, yeah, I gotta deal with this and
this, and this.” Like, your emotions, you need time
to process some things.
If you don’t give yourself that time. Next time,
Betty says something at the office, you snap at
her, but it was because it was something mom
said yesterday that you’re still chewing on. So to
not have that built into your calculus for your day
is just insane. And we just stack our calendars, we
just do more because we can, and then we break.
Jodi: Yeah, we’re walking around too close to
threshold. So the smallest little thing sets us off.
Pedram: Yeah, you can’t redline your car for
hundreds of miles. You can’t do it.
Jodi: This is amazing. First of all, I love that you’re
open to all methods of kind of recovery. I think
that’s really positive. And the practical tools,
like every 25 minutes, just take a five minute
movement break. What are some other maybe
low hanging fruit tools that listeners can walk
away with and start doing immediately?
Pedram: Sunshine, the North Pole in the winter,
sunshine is big. Calorie restriction, so your body
isn’t constantly trying to like move things around,
is big. Exercise, we talked about. I don’t think
mind body practice is negotiable at this point.
I think everyone needs a mind body discipline.

And I think a lot of people kind of shy away from
it, because they’re like, “Oh, but I’m Christian,” or,
“Those hippies are weird.” And there’s a lot of like,
weird cultural stuff that comes in that says, “Well,
I can’t do yoga,” or, “I won’t look good in Lulu
Lemon.”
Jodi: You know what I think it is? I think when they
get quiet, they feel things and I think it’s easier to
avoid feelings because they don’t know how to
process fear, guilt, anger, or shame, all of these
heavy things that hit them when they’re too quiet.
Pedram: 100%. And then it’s, “I’ll just drink a beer
and watch the game.” I mean, trauma is like a pot
that overflows. I literally just did a 10 part series
on trauma, and you were in it. And it’s just, one of
these things where it’s like, to me, it was like the
elephant in the room. It’s like, no one wants to talk
about their trauma, because they have shame,
and they have pain and they just don’t even want
to acknowledge it.
But you see it in how we treat each other and
you see it and how we act out, and you see it
in how we metabolize stress and avert silence
every single day of our lives. And to me, it’s like
a hidden epidemic. Like, you have to allow that
pressure release valve of trauma, to heal because
hurt people hurt people. We’re living with a billion
hurt people at this point on this planet and it’s
not going to get any prettier unless we get healed
ourselves. We’ve got to heal ourselves to heal the
world.
Jodi: Yeah, that’s beautiful. Is there anything that
we haven’t touched on that feels important to
share?
Pedram: Look, it’s the next logical thing that
comes to your mind for your wellness and your
resilience that’s probably the first thing to do.
Because people look at it and they’re like, “Oh,
well, now I gotta go find a yoga teacher, and who
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do I trust?” There’s so many, like, semantic loops
that we run through and we kind of pin ourselves
to being like, “Well, I can’t start this because I’m
fat. And if I go to the gym, I’m gonna be ashamed
because I’m fat.”
Just, there’s so much of that. And really, the
answer always is, just start. Just take a walk
today, go out in the sun. And then tomorrow, do
something again, or do something a little more
or different, but just build into your operating
system. Fuse lengthening practices, whatever
they mean for you. It might be skipping a rock on
a pond, it might be walking your dogs, but build
those into your day.
And a lot of things that I do, like back in the clinical
days when I’d be with patients, and I’d be like,
“Hey, let me see your phone,” and open up their
calendar for the day and it’d all be work crap. I’m
like, “Well, you said you value your health, where’s
the health stuff on this thing? Why are you not
booking appointments with yourself, with your
spouse, with your kids, at the gym?” If it doesn’t
show up in your calendar, it’s not that important
to you, is it?
“Well, I do that,” and I’m like, “Yeah, but then
someone calls and you book an appointment and
it crowds out all the things that you said were
important.” So the way I tend to refer to it, in all
my Urban Monk stuff is the life garden.
[30:00]
You’ve got room for five plants. They each need
water in the form of time, money, energy. How
much water are the important plants in your life
getting?
How can you reallocate that water to make sure
those plants are thriving? And then, can you
identify the weeds that are pulling the water
off of your stated goals? “I didn’t tell you what

your plans are. You said it, right?” What are your
stated goals? What are your priorities? And are
you watering them enough or are you kidding
yourself? Where are the weeds? How do you
reallocate this to make your life work for you?
Not for me, I don’t care what people do. I mean,
just don’t be homicidal crazy but like, be a good
person, and live your best life. And it’s your water,
it’s your energy, it’s your breath. The food you’re
eating is creating energy in your body that you’re
now investing in this thing in front of you. Is it
worth the heartbeats you have left? And that’s a
question only you can answer for yourself with
your life and your circumstances.
Jodi: That’s beautiful. That’s very actionable.
People can right now list their five life garden
Resilience Roadmap Summit
17
priorities. I love that. Where can people learn
more about you and work with you possibly?
Pedram: Sure, theurbanmonk.com. I’ve got a lot
of online classes and learning. I’ve written, I think,
eight books at this point. So I talk about this stuff.
And then all my films and thousands more, with
shows and yoga and all that kind of stuff, is on
whole.tv. And that’s our new streaming platform
that’s doing really well, and people love it. So, I
invite you to check it out.
Jodi: Thank you. That was amazing.
Pedram: Thank you so much.
 18

The Resilience Roadmap

Jodi Cohen, Founder of Vibrant Blue Oils

Jodi: Hi, I’m Jodi Cohen, your host and I wanted
to give you some context for this summit, and my
‘why?’ So a little bit about me, I am the founder
of a company called Vibrant Blue Oils that offers
proprietary blends of essential oils, designed to
balance organ systems and regions of the brain.
I started with that as a result of my own original
rock bottom. I think that wounded healers, kind
of a roller coaster life where you have one rock
bottom, you figure out what helps, you start to
implement that, and then the next shoe drops.
I also have a background in investigative
journalism and health research, I started my
career working as a staff assistant for Senator
Ted Kennedy on the Health and Human
Resources Committee. So it gave me a really
good foundation of researching medical issues
and really understanding how to problem solve
and seek solutions. I have two bestselling books,
Essential Oils to Boost your Brain and Heal your
Body, and Healing with Essential Oils.
So my ‘why?’ is my son Max, Max Benjamin Cohen.
He was born March 8th, 2006 and he died in a
car accident on August 27th, 2018. There were
four boys in the car, one survived. He died on
a Monday and all of a sudden, probably like 30
people showed up at my house. I’m an introvert.
His dad was in jail and ultimately, going to prison,
and all these people are converging on me and
kind of dimming and glooming.
And one of them said to my daughter, “Your
mom’s never going to be the same.” So my
daughter came up to me and said, “You’re all I
have, so you can’t fall apart because I need you.”
And I kind of thought, “Okay, mission received,”
but I had no idea how I was going to do that.
So I felt like Sisyphus, every day, I would get up
determined to roll my rock up the hill and it would
often fall back down.
I just kept trying and I started tracking, what
makes me feel better? What makes me feel
worse? Keeping track and leaning into what
helped and made me feel better, and avoiding
the things that made me feel worse. The outcome
was I actually won an award. I have it behind me
and I’ll show you. My Overcomer award, which is
very sweet, very thoughtful.
But also, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with that
because in my own mind, I was still Sisyphus, I
was still pushing that rock up the hill and having
it fall down on me it but to the world around me,
I seemed to be doing okay. And I didn’t really
know why. So my researcher, Jean, kicked in and
I decided to figure out, why do I seem to be doing
better than most? And what is it that allows that?
So that I can share it with other people and it
turns out, its resilience.
I’m going to dive into this more but the idea is,
some families that are afflicted with trauma, one
sibling seems to be okay and the other seems to

Resilience Roadmap Summit


fall apart, and the difference is resilience. So, in
this summit, I really encourage you to listen to Dr.
Robert Melillo, he talks about how he assesses
trauma with the Adverse Childhood Experience
score. Then he also assesses resilience with the
Resilience Scale .
TM
Resilience is often defined as the capacity to
prepare for, recover from, and adapt in the face of
stress, adversity, trauma, or challenge. It’s not just
when your child dies or your bottom falls out, it’s
also for those minor changes, like you suddenly
discover that you have some kind of autoimmune
condition and you have to change your diet. You
need to change your exercise routine. You need
to adapt because a child leaves for school or a
parent or older relative passes away.
You can have a pretty healthy, normal life and still
hit some road bumps. So the more resilient you
are going in, the easier it is to navigate those road
bumps. I spent some time in Manhattan, I went
to Columbia Business School and the subway is
my favorite thing that I have a subway strategy. I
always try to hold on and I always keep my feet a
little bit apart. So that when those bumps come, I
can navigate them.
The few times that I was in the subway in stilettos
because I was going to a party or something, and
I wasn’t able to hold on, I really got jolted around,
it really threw off my resilience. So my goal with
this summit, is to empower you with what actually
supports your resilience, how you can get there.
So no matter what bump comes along, be it
someone cuts you off in traffic, like that happens
to most of us on a regular basis, you don’t blow
your top, you’re just able to handle it.
It also gives you enhanced energy to heal and to
support your health. So, resilience, it turns out is
the number one predictive factor for unlocking
success in any health challenge or trauma. You
need resilience in order to change your diet,
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19
improve your sleep, lose weight, keep it off,
remember to take your supplements choose to
get out of the bed in the morning. Basically, all
change needs resilience.
My speaker, David Perlmutter, who wrote the
book, Grain Brain, he basically wrote the book
on diet, said he wrote a second book, Brainwash,
with his son, Austin, because you need three
things to help people. You need to go to medical
school, you need to assess them, and then they
need to actually implement the changes you give
them. He said, the man who wrote the book on
diet, said, “You cannot start with diet,” because if
they’re not sleeping, and they’re too exhausted
to manage to get to the supermarket to figure
out what to cook, that’s overwhelming for them;
they’re not going to succeed.
So you need to boost resilience first. This was
backed up by a dear friend of mine who’s worked
with thousands of people, her program offers
kind of mindset support. She was like, “You have
to know your ‘why?’ because if you don’t know
your why, in the heat of the moment, if you’re
craving a cookie, you’re going to eat the cookie.”
If you know your ‘why?’ it’s easier to pass on the
cookie. She said that she can pretty much predict
success at this point, but if you choose to take
the mindset courses, you’re going to be more
successful than if you don’t.
So that’s what the goal of this summit is. A higher
capacity for resilience has been shown to help
manage emotions also, like anger, frustration,
impatience, anxiety, grief, depression. That also
helps to neutralize mental and physical stress
responses. So basically, I’ve discovered how I’m
still standing and what seems to help, and my goal
is to share that with you.
So part of this was kind of organized in a
Resilience Scale, which was created in 1987 by
Gail Wagnild and Heather Young. Its 25 questions
 20
that I’m going to share, but it positively associated
strengths, such as a positive attitude, personal
competence, and emotional stability and that kind
of helps you with resilience. So they’re internal
factors, like a positive view of yourself and others,
confidence in your strengths and abilities.
Being able to manage strong feelings and
impulses, impulse control. Developing good
problem solving and communication skills. Feeling
like you have some sense of control in your own
life, and not needing to control others to get
that. Seeing yourself as empowered rather than
victimized. Coping with stress in healthy ways, as
opposed to unhealthy ways.
Finding positive meaning in your life. Expressing
gratitude, being optimistic and realistic. Focusing
on the present, reconnecting with at least your
spiritual goals and creating goals and plans; being
a forward thinker. And also, external factors like
seeking help and accessing resources, and helping
others. So I just liked this little graphic, I thought it
did a nice job of kind of explaining the resilience
landscape.
Here are the Resilience Scale questions, you can
find them in the Resilience Guide that you got
as a free gift when you opted in, and also on my
website at Vibrant Blue Oils, if you just search
Resilience Scale. Basically, these are the traits of
resilience, optimism, belief in self, control of self,
willingness to adapt, willingness to be flexible, the
ability to solve problems, emotional awareness,
social support, and sense of humor, and we’re
covering all of these in this summit. In this
summit, you are going to walk away with really
actionable steps for how to support the physical,
emotional, spiritual, and mental domains of
resilience.
So here’s a quick snapshot of this week. On Day 1,
we’re doing mental resilience and mindset. Day 2,
immune resilience. Day 3, stress resilience. Day 4,
Resilience Roadmap Summit
environmental resilience. This is one that’s really
overlooked because toxicity and toxins can take
a really heavy toll on draining your emotional
reserves.
[10:05]
So the more you can ensure that the garbage
leaves your body, the healthier you’re going to
be, and the more resilience you’re going to have.
Day 5, personal resilience and self, personal
responsibility, fortification. Day 6, relationships,
and Day 7, emotional resilience. So I hope you’re
going to tune in for all of them. There are some
really great speakers on every day.
For the purpose of this talk, I really kind of
narrowed it down to 10 things that I found to be
incredibly helpful. Some of them I was already
doing, which helped me to start and some of
them, I learned through trial and error, baptism
by fire; trying to learn to swim by drowning. So the
first one that I talk a lot about, is sleep. Sleep is
really the critical foundation for resilience.
Because if you’re not well rested and you really
don’t get that house cleaning activity when
you’re sleeping, everything else is going to feel
harder. So we have Dr. Christine Schaffner, talking
about sleep. Misty Williams is talking about sleep.
There are a bunch of people that are going to help
you have better strategies to both fall asleep and
sleep through the night.
Diet, the nutrients you consume as part of a
healthy diet are the building blocks of resilience
and also, your ability to digest, absorb, and
assimilate them. We have some great speakers on
diet. Dr. Peter Osborne does an amazing job really
deconstructing gluten. We have Kiran Krishnan
talking about digestion and detoxification, really
simple actionable things that you can do to
improve your diet and make sure that you have
those building blocks of resilience.
 21
Movement. Physical movement is really critical to
resilience. A friend of mine is actually starting a
health company and she was interviewing a bunch
of doctors and she said that bar none, they said
that their patients that walk are the healthiest. It’s
because movement forces you to breathe so you
get more oxygen.
We have Leah Zaccaria, she owns the yoga
studio I’ve been going to for 12 years and several
others, and she really talks about breathwork.
Sachin Patel also talks about breathwork. Also,
movement moves your lymphatic system and
that means that the garbage is actually being
mobilized and working through and leaving
your body. This is in one of the free guides, how
movement really enhances your health, and
gets you to kind of move through and breathe
through. Your brain, your heart, your lungs, your
lymph, your muscles, your bones, movement is so
critical for health.
Which gets into detoxification because any kind
of toxicity drains your energy reserves. So if
you have heavy metals, for example, or mold
or parasites, all of those things require cellular
energy. They also turn on your immune system,
which then causes inflammation and just drains
your tank. You can think of resilience as an energy
gas tank. So the more you’re able to make sure
that toxins are leaving, the more you free up your
energy for other aspects. I have a great handout
on detoxification.
Most people don’t realize that. They know the liver
has a couple phases, we have Chris Shade talking
about that. Phase one is when you mobilize toxins
and make them more water soluble. Phase two
is when the body actually eliminates toxins. A lot
of people are really good at phase one and really
bad at phase two. Think of yelling, “Fire!” in the
movie theater without opening the exit doors. So
you need to make sure that these toxins leave
your body and once they leave your body, it
Resilience Roadmap Summit
literally frees up more energy for everything else
you have going on.
Dr. Pompa, Daniel Pompa, talks about the stress
bucket, this idea that you only have so much
capacity. So if your bucket is already overflowing,
you’re not going to have the capacity to take on
more. So the more you can kind of lessen your
burden, lessen your load, the more bandwidth
you have for resilience.
Stress management, this is the focus of my other
summit, The Parasympathetic Summit. You might
have a very, very busy life full of friends and family
and work, and financial commitments and you
might think, “Oh, my God, I can’t drop any balls.”
That’s okay, you don’t need to, but you get to shift
how you show up in the moment. So back to the
traffic incident, someone can be cutting you off
in traffic, and you’re still okay, you’re still able to
respond and flow with it, and know, “It’s alright,
I’ve got this, even though the world around me is
really stressful.”
The fight or flight response is your
parasympathetic response, your vagus nerve
starts at the very base of the brain, splits, is
most accessible right here behind the mastoid
bone. This is where I put on a stimulatory blend
of essential oils of clove and lime, and basically,
if you’re able to gear shift your physiology, your
chemistry, out of stress and into calm, it’s just a
really great way to calm your system.
Also, when you’re in stress, resources are
allocated differently. There’s this thing called a
selective attention. So your pupils, the black part
of your eyes get really big and dilated, so they
can take in more light and you can make those
immediate survival decisions. When you’re stuck
in that state, it’s almost like it shuts down your
ability to do bigger problem solving. You can’t
even access solutions; you’re just so afraid that
you kind of see the world as black and white.

When you’re able to gearshift into the sympathetic
state, when you’re not in danger, you can take
in far more options. So that’s really one of the
key takeaways, if you can recognize, “Wow,
I’m really stressed right now, I’m really kind of
overwhelmed. I don’t quite know how I’m going to
handle this,” and find a way to calm your nervous
system to do box breathing, which Elisa Song
talks about. To use an essential oil. Even to just
go outside and be in nature. Then all of a sudden,
if you look at the problem again, you’ll find a lot
more options are available to you. This is called
vagus nerve stimulation, it just helps you literally
gearshift out of stress.
Heart coherence. I’m super excited, we have both
Marci Shimoff and Rollin McCraty, who started
HeartMath, talking about heart coherence. And
this idea that when you view things through the
heart, similar to shifting into parasympathetic,
it allows more options to be available. It allows
you to see the world from a much more heart
centered place and you make much better
decisions and it really enhances your resilience.
Mindset, this is really kind of the key to
everything. It’s a collection of thoughts or beliefs
that orients the way you navigate situations. So
how you think, what you feel, what you do, and it
determines whether you give up or push through.
Back to Sisyphus, whether you say, “I’m done, I’m
dropping this rock. We’re not going any further,”
or you say, “Okay, this is hard, my moment with
my daughter. I have no idea what I’m doing but
I’m gonna just keep trying. I’m not gonna give up.
But even though I know I have hard days...”
I mean, that’s the irony. It’s not like grief goes
away or time heals all wounds. I still miss my son
every second of every day, I’ve just learned to live
with chronic pain. I’ve learned to allow myself to
be happy, even when I’m sad. It’s the ‘and’, Lisa
Fraley and I talk about this, I can be sad and still
laugh. I can be sad and still go out and do things,
Resilience Roadmap Summit
22
and make new memories. So it’s figuring out how
to do that and that’s so critical to mindset.
Then this is kind of my favorite variable of this,
this aspect of personal responsibility. Taking
responsibility for your actions and choices without
assuming responsibility for others’ choices and
feelings. In every situation, you can really look
at it, I mean, everything that goes wrong. Leah
Zaccaria wrote this great book called Seen, and
she talks about a betrayal, and she really gets
closure with this relationship with this beautiful
letter.
Where she takes responsibility and says, “Listen,
these choices that you made, I can see where I
had an impact on them and I own that, and this
relationship can’t continue. We’re done. I wish
you well, I don’t blame you. I’m not going to be in
victim.” It’s just this wonderful way of the word
responsibility breaks into response and ability or
the ability to choose your response to external
circumstances.
And when you accept responsibility for your
circumstances, you’re better able to change
circumstances. It’s also a great way to kind of
navigate any bump in the road. Like, a good friend
and I had a little hiccup and she was upset with
me for things that I wasn’t aware of previously.
And I was able to see like, “Oh, that makes sense,”
and just say like, “Yeah, God, you’re right. I’m
really sorry. I didn’t see it that way. I won’t do that
again.”
[20:00]
And the moment I kind of owned it, then it almost
like takes the momentum out the sting out of
it because there’s no conflict anymore. It’s not
like she’s pushing and I’m pushing back. It’s like
she’s pushing, I’m saying, “Oh, gosh, you’re right.
Let’s work on this together.” So it allows you to
kind of release thought patterns that make you
 23
feel disempowered, like victim mentality, blame,
judgment, virtue signaling. Stephen Covey says,
until you’re able to say, “I am what I am today
because of choices I made yesterday,” you
cannot say, “I choose otherwise.” So personal
responsibility allows you to assess the past and
also, move forward differently.
This then gets into the victim mentality. So the
victim mentality, whenever we choose to focus
external blame on others, we choose to see
ourselves as a powerless victim. We’re allowing
ourselves to step into the victim mentality.
Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl said, “When we
are no longer able to change a situation, we are
challenged to change ourselves.”
Changing ourselves means releasing any blame
or judgment we might feel toward others and
stepping into personal responsibility. This was
a really big one for me after Max died, because
everyone really kind of gave me the pity looks.
Like, I’d be in line at the bank and, “I’m so sorry!”
and maybe I was having a good day in that
moment.
So I had this constant choice of, do I match their
energy and show up broken? Or do I say, “Thank
you,” in a kind way, “I’m actually okay right now,”?
And not kind of show up crying or the way they
expected me to, because I realized I couldn’t
rewind time and undo the accident. But I’ve got
to decide every day, “Am I going to be puddled
today?” and there are days when I felt like being a
puddle. Or there were days when I would make a
list of three things and once I did the three things,
I would crawl back into bed and read a book or
something, but not every day.
There were some days that felt like normal or that
I chose to get up. My big thing, I would wake up
and I’d exercise first thing. Even if I didn’t really
feel like getting out of bed, I’m like, “I’m just gonna
get up and exercise, and take a shower and put
Resilience Roadmap Summit
on something cute. And if I then decide that I
can only do two more things, and I need to call
it a day, that’s fine. But at least I’m getting up.”
And 99% of the time, once I kind of got up and
exercised and showered, I kept going. It’s just that
starting energy and that decision not to fall into
victim.
Relationships, supportive and caring relationships
help enhance resilience. This means both
embracing helpful and supportive people and
also, releasing things that are not serving us
anymore. This was honestly the biggest surprise
to me. When Max died, I was really surprised at
some of the people that I really thought would be
able to show up and let’s be honest, as Andrea
Nakayama said, “I was suddenly everyone’s worst
nightmare,” because something that no one wants
to happen happened to me.
There’s this book, oh, gosh, The New York Times
editorial list, From Beirut to Jerusalem. I was in
New York for 911 and afterwards, I read that
book and it’s all about if you survive something
horrible, you have to kind of ascribe a story to it.
So when Beirut was being bombed, the people
who survived the bombing made up this story,
“Well, I was walking on the left side of the street
and that’s what kept me safe,” and the people that
died, they were on the right side of the street.
So suddenly, people had to vilify me because if I
was a good person, and something bad happened
to me, then they could be a good person and
something bad would happen to them. Or they
had to kind of create their own story to reconcile
what happened in their mind, and when they did
this, they needed me to show up in a certain way.
It was almost like they wrote a script and I was
supposed to play out my role, and sometimes the
role wasn’t a fit.
Like, I had one friend who would always
catastrophize and tried to get me upset, and

I started noticing it. I started noticing couple
things that every time we talked, she would worst
case scenario. When I was a journalist, I would
say people weren’t good source, meaning that
everything she catastrophized, it never unfolded
that way. So she was totally inaccurate.
So at a certain point, I realized I couldn’t allow
that kind of direction of conversation. So I started
cutting it off and this person really needed that
agenda. I realized there were a lot of aspects
at play, control and other things, but I let that
relationship go. And there were other people,
acquaintances that you liked, that just seemed to
know the right thing to say.
There was one woman who would just randomly
drop off gifts. I posted that I wanted to do
flowerbeds outside and make them pretty and
she showed up and did it for me. Just these lovely
people that show up in amazing ways and then
other relationships, we had hard conversations.
We had very vulnerable, very honest
conversations where people said, “You are living
my worst nightmare,” and when we were able to
talk about it, we were able to talk through it.
So it reminded me, when people complete an
addiction program and their former friends
were their drinking buddies, and it’s very hard to
recalibrate that relationship when you’ve shifted.
So, that’s one thing that surprised me but now
that I know that, I might have prepared differently
and better.
And the final thing is this idea of emotional
regulation. The ability to manage strong emotions
and impulses, and that can help you deal with
whatever comes your way with more balance,
clarity, and self-assurance. Rather than anger or
impatience, or frustration or anxiety. And what
I mean by that is, it’s very easy, especially when
something happens to be destabilized, to feel like
you’re reactive and not proactive.
Resilience Roadmap Summit
24
One of the things that I’ve taken to do is I pause,
I don’t respond right away. If an email upsets me,
if a text message upset with me, if something on
social media upsets me, I take a pause, I don’t
respond. Or if it’s very upsetting, what I’ll do is I’ll
draft a response that I don’t send, and then I’ll go
walk or think about it, or sleep on it, and come
back to it in the morning.
I can always kind of take the emotion and the
sting out of it, and realize, like, “Oh, okay, this
is the situation and this is what’s unclear,” and
present it in kind of a matter of fact way that
allows whoever I’m interacting with, to also show
up in a matter of fact way. This is another reason
that I really love essential oils because I think
that they really help you kind of breathe through
emotions.
The power of breath is amazing and there’s this
idea of layering; you can layer smell on top of
breathing, you can layer smell and movement,
and the more you kind of combine things, Keesha
Ewers talks about this, the more you layer on, the
more powerful it is.
The other thing that Rollin McCarty talked about
that I really thought was amazing was this idea
that stress is really emotions. Stress is really
anger, stress is really fear, stress is really grief and
that resilience is kind of energy and your inner
battery, and emotions have a powerful effect
on your inner battery and your resilience. So
he basically talks about not negative emotions,
but depleting emotions. So emotions like anger,
deplete your reserves, whereas emotions like joy,
raise your reserves.
I had a friend in middle school named Leslie, a
friend who used to sing, there’s this song, you
have to accent to it, the positive, [inaudible] the
negative, but that’s really what you want to do.
You want to schedule in things that bring you joy,
be it a phone call with a friend that always makes
 25
you laugh, humor that increases your joy. You can
subscribe to a joke of the day kind of thing.
Movement, dancing, sunshine, animals, anything
that makes you happy, you really want to
schedule and anything that depletes you, you
really want to start by being self-aware. Marci
Shimoff gets into how to do this and Alex Howard.
But oils are great for letting go, there are a lot
of strategies in this summit that are amazing for
letting go.
It’s cool because the sense of smell actually
links directly to the limbic lobe of your brain,
which stores and releases emotional trauma.
So, smelling oils can really help you breathe in,
breathe out, and release things like anger.
[30:00]
Anger, it can actually be a powerful emotion
because it can mobilize you into action and shift
you out of stuck but excessive anger can keep you
stuck in stress.
There’s some research that a five minute episode
of anger can impair your immune system for
more than six hours. And anger projected at
others, like the biggest emotions that I was
struggling with were kind of blame and judgment,
and I think they go hand in hand, shame and
guilt. So blame and judgment are projecting your
anger at others. Shame is kind of accepting other
people’s projection of anger. And guilt is really
turning that anger inward. And none of these are
particularly healthy for you.
So we talk, especially Alex Howard, really talks
about how to work through these things. Fear;
fear really keeps us stuck. Fear really prevents
us from accessing our like, brilliant mind and
problem solving skills. Fear kind of gets in the way
of resilience; it shuts us down. So we have some
strategies to help you work through that.
Resilience Roadmap Summit
Grief, I know a thing or two about grief. All of
the strategies that I’ve included in this summit,
I think have been incredibly helpful. The first
three that I mentioned, eating, sleeping, moving,
early on, when I was pretty paralyzed by shock
and overwhelm, sometimes less is more. So just
focusing on, “Oh, yeah, I need to sleep,” and every
time I got a good night’s sleep, I felt better the
next day. I had more energy, I had more resilience
to kind of take on challenges.
Eating, it’s very hard for me. Some people eat too
much and some people eat too little. When I am
deep in grief, it’s really hard for me to eat things.
So I just picked... there’s a local restaurant Bounty
Kitchen, and they’ve got this amazing Thai salad
and I’m like, “That’s what I will eat.” So I ate that
pretty much every day for a couple months.
Then movement, it’s so good to move your body,
to shake, to release things. Animals in the wild,
like if we talk about zebras, they don’t get ulcers.
It talks about how the lion chases the zebra, the
zebra survives and then they shake, they have
that kinetic impact to release their stress. My dogs
shake. Gregory Eckel talks about shaking and
Qigong, and other movement that just helps kind
of break up that stress, release that stress, and
kind of start moving those hormones out of your
system.
Then guilt; guilt turns blame inward or self-blame,
where you kind of attribute negative outcomes to
yourself. We talk a bit about guilt and self-limiting
beliefs. If you don’t know where you’re going, any
road will take you there. If you think that you can
only get so far, you’re not going to exceed your
own expectations of yourself. So Alex Howard,
again talks about how to kind of unravel this,
unpack it, and move past it.
Then shame; shame is the lowest vibration
emotion and it really makes you feel bad,
defective unworthy, “I’m not good enough. I’m

not smart enough. I’m not clever enough. There’s
something wrong with me.” We have Kim D’Ermo
and Amy Stark, both talking about how you really
can shift out of those helplessness, powerless
feelings and really kind of rise and live up to your
own expectations.
So I just wanted to end with this quote, it’s from
Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl, “Between the
stimulus and the response is a space. In that
space is our power to choose our response. In our
response lies our growth and our freedom.” And
the way I interpret that quote is that you really
can’t control the external circumstances. You can’t
control car accidents, the news, death, how other
people show up in relationships, but you have
complete control over how you respond to that.
And the more resilience you have, the more
capacity you have to show up in a way that you’re
really proud of. That you have those moments
where you think, “Gosh, that was a really
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challenging conversation and I’m really proud
of the way I handled myself. I’m really proud of
the way that unfolded.” So it’s my hope that this
summit and the tools that we’re sharing with you
will give you a greater sense of control over your
own response.
And strategies to enhance your own resilience, to
share resilience strategies with your family and
your friends. And I really hope that this summit
arms you with actionable tools, and that you
feel that it was a useful way to spend your time.
Thank you for spending your time with me and for
participating in this summit. Thank you.