Welcome to Dr. Warrick's podcast channel. Warrick is a practicing cardiologist and author with a passion for improving care by helping patients understand their heart health through education. Warrick believes educated patients get the best health care. Discover and understand the latest approaches and technology in heart care and how this might apply to you or someone you love. Hi, my name is Dr. Warrick Bishop and welcome to my podcast and videocast station. Today I thought I'd share with you my own journey and the reason I'd like to share with you is because at the end of the day I set out in the Healthy Heart Network to help people live as well as possible for as long as possible. Well in the last year or so I undertook a couple of... podcast interviews with a James Z. G. Buckley, who's a world-renowned expert in meditation and hypnosis and founder of Inner Fire Health and Mastery of the Mind Institute. If you're interested, go back and have a listen to the podcast 181. 82 and 83, where I chat with James about meditation and hypnosis. Well, what I'd like to share with you is that in follow on to that, I really made the effort to embrace some of the concepts around meditation to explore it for myself. And look, what I want to do is come back to you and invite you to be open. to the process yourself. When I spoke with James, or prior to speaking with James, I have to say I thought of myself as the last person in the world who would ever meditate. I literally would have described myself as the proverbial Jack Russell in the back of a Holden on a hot day in a supermarket car park, literally jumping around from window to window, barking at people. Not particularly calm anyway with james's guidance and with the information i found through the inner health hive inner fire health website that james runs and if you want to look that up you can either contact us directly through the healthy heart network platform or go to inner fire or one word hyphen health and you'll find james there with james's guidance I started to do some regular meditation. I even took on a 21-day meditation challenge that he suggested and promoted. And to be honest, I was overwhelmed with the results and the sense of wellbeing and my own awareness of my inner peace. and my ability to relate to the external world so I mean I don't want to sound like I'm beating you over the head to go and do this but I was really very surprised there's no doubt that meditation is linked to all sorts of things it does reduce stress and anxiety and I've felt that in my own life and in my own consulting rooms I think it does improve energy levels and certainly brings component of happiness because you start to calm down and feel more settled in your mind the consequence of that of course is that it will lower your blood pressure and regulate your heart rate and there's nice evidence to suggest it even boosts your immune immune system and certainly for me and my partner we've been meditating together we get better sleep as well so Some really valuable stuff. But even beyond that, there's interesting research that tells us that by moving into these meditative states, which are really parasympathetic driven, we start to promote healing processes within the body and we can drive nearly a thousand different DNA based or genetic based processes simply by this. process of meditation and changing the chemistry within our body to facilitate healing and regenerate dna so it's a very very interesting space how do you do it well i couldn't do it by myself i've used some guided meditation i've found it extremely easy to do and i tried most days to do 10 minutes when i wake up 10 minutes when I'm going to sleep. And I made a resolution at Christmas time, and now we're about Easter, that I'd try and find 10 minutes in the middle of the day just to calm my thoughts and be as fresh as possible for my patients through the course of the day. One of the breathing techniques that I use during the course of the day is a box breathing or triangular breathing. And this very sort of breathing is actually used by the military for their soldiers to keep them focused. It's used by sporting organizations to help their athletes keep focused. And it just brings a bit of stability and calm to the mind. I haven't got much more to say that this is not meant to be an infomercial. This is not any more than sharing with you that I was skeptical of the potential role of meditation. My own awakening was that I'd spent years and years looking after my body, making sure that I exercised well and I ate well and slept well and maintained a healthy weight. early experience with meditation opened my eyes to a realization that I just hadn't been looking after my mind. I'd been looking after my body and doing everything right there, but I hadn't figured that I needed to look after my mind. Anyway, I hope I've given you something to think about. If you are interested and want to know more about meditation, you can contact us through our website. Or you can look up innerfire-health or look up James Z. G. Buckley and explore that yourself. But there's lots of other people who do meditation as well. Anyway, give it some thought. In fact, meditate on it. I'm going to wish you the very best. If you have any queries or questions, drop us a note. As always, I hope you live as well as possible for as long as possible. Take care. And bye for now.