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Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com, and this topic is a little different than our normally scheduled programming of physical health and wellness, but something I found absolutely fascinating. I recently read a book called Bodies of Light and today get to interview its author who pulls together fascinating historical data from various traditions around the world and the similarities that they have, as well as what we now know from things like quantum physics that kind of call into question the physical and spiritual nature of the body and what we understand about it now.
And Andrew Molnar has been on a conscious spiritual journey, as he explains for decades, initiated by a life threatening health crisis, and he has devoted his life to this area of research and now helps hundreds and thousands of people to do the same. I’ll link to his book and to his website in the show notes. He doesn’t have social media, which I highly respect. But we talk about the idea of how our bodies are made up of light and what this means on a physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual level.
So again, a little bit of a deviation from the norm and something I personally find super exciting and interesting, and I hope you will as well. So let’s jump in. Andrew, welcome. Thank you so much for being here.
Andrew: Thank you Katie, excited to be with you.
Katie: Well, I’m very excited for this conversation. I recently got the chance to read your book, which was incredible, and the topic I hope we get to dive deep on today is one that I have been personally fascinated by for the last couple of years and kind of on my own journey with, and you spoke to it so beautifully and I feel like united so many things that I had encountered in various ways, but not really kind of brought together under a full understanding yet.
And so we’re gonna get to go into, I hope a lot of that in a deep way today. Before we do, I have a feeling this might have actually influenced some of your work and might be a commonality we have. But from my research of you, you had also a kind of life-threatening crisis that led to a decades long spiritual journey. And I also had a health crisis that led to not just the work I did, but also had I guess would be actually a death experience, not near death experience, when giving birth to my third child and medically died for a couple minutes. And so I feel like we have an uncommon commonality, and I would love to hear your story with that and how it shaped the work you do now.
Andrew: Well, I certainly didn’t die having birth, but, that’s quite an experience. I’d love to hear more about it at some time. But yeah, about over 30 years ago when I was in college I was in a very competitive school and essentially experienced a great deal of stress. I thought I could handle it in the hubris of my youth but I was wrong.
And essentially I was hospitalized with severe pains in my abdomen. And was diagnosed with essentially pre ulcers that my ulcers were forming in my system. And I was, you know, 20 years old and I had never had any health problems before that. So it was a shock to my system. Thankfully, even though it was the early nineties, my doctor was wise enough to not go right to pharmaceuticals, but to recommend a change in lifestyle and basically, hey, maybe you need to take a relaxation course or some kind of a meditation class to change the way you’re living. And you know, I had grown up in a wonderful kind of moderate mainline church environment. My dad was a pastor and had a wonderful church growing up. So I had a bit of a good spiritual foundation, but this really rocked my world into a new way of understanding myself and how I wanted to live in the world.
Thankfully at my university there was a incredible tai chi and meditation class that I taught, that, I’m sorry, that I took. And the teacher was phenomenal. And I began a daily routine, both of Tai Chi and meditation. And within two weeks of me starting that, my pain completely disappeared, and I haven’t had that pain in the 30 plus years since then.
So it was, it was a tremendous beginning of a new kind of adult journey for me, a spiritual journey. And that led into curiosity about health and wellness, obviously your field but also kinda my spiritual wellbeing of what am I about in this world. I had a wonderful upbringing, like I said, with Christianity, but I felt like there was more to explore.
And so I looked into other religions. I dove deep into my own kind of ideas and values. And so this meditation, this ulcer experience that led to the meditation and the spiritual practices that led to my health ultimately then led to my awakening as the years went on into what is the greatest vision that I can embody as a human?
You know, once I have the health and wellness down for myself, what’s next? What is the ultimate we can attain? And that’s where this, where my book, began in this whole journey of what does science say about this? What do religious traditions, sacred traditions say about our greatest potential? And what I discovered was amazing.
Katie: Well, I love that, and that’s what I’m so excited to dive into today. I’ll link to it in the show notes, but you wrote a book that I recently got to read called Bodies of Light, and I love this because it was the perfect timing and it fused a lot of things that I had even been researching on the physical health side because you took it even into like a deeper realm that I had encountered. But on the physical health side, as a very brief recap, what I had realized over the past kind of decade is that we are first and foremost electromagnetic beings, even physically.
That everything biochemical is actually a downstream effect of the electromagnetism, not the other way around yet so much of health is trying to address the biochemical whether it be through pharmaceuticals or supplements or whatever it may be, when if we understand kind of a voltage first perspective, it’s a paradigm shift in how we think of light and sleep and food and signaling and electrolytes and all the electrical ways our body communicates. So I thought that was like very fascinating from a physical perspective. And it turns out it even goes deeper than that and like far more fascinating and amazing. So I’d love to, for you to explain and go deeper on your awakening and how science and history point to this idea that we are not just electromagnetic beings, but beings of light.
Andrew: Yeah. You know, quantum physics has been the real paradigm shift during the past a hundred years, and my, in my interaction with most people, they’re not aware of really the, these incredible mind blowing new ideas. That’s some of which are intuitive. You know, when you tell people certain things, they’re like, oh yeah, I kind of know that.
But some of which are very different. And so, like you said, really the discovery that ultimately everything including us is just light, is was something that blew my mind. Like, so the particles that we are are ultimately just light particles. And as quantum physicist David Bohm said about 50 years ago, they are essentially frozen light.
So we are frozen light. And that just blew my mind like, well, what, what does that mean? And Einstein, of course, himself and as well as many other quantum physicists affirm that, that we live in a sea, a field of quantum light. So what this sets the stage for is these spiritual beings, these masters, these humans many of whom that I’ve studied and learned over the past five or 6,000 years have attained a certain state where it seems like they have unfrozen the light that they are.
And vibrated in a space where they actually go into another dimension, space, whatever you wanna call it, they ascended into a different space than we are in our western logical left brain mind can fully comprehend. So that’s, that’s the, you know, the fundamental, I guess, thesis of my book is that our grandest vision, for us, the top of Maslow’s hierarchy, if you will, is to transfigure our beings.
To use this light being that we are to transfigure, transform and ascend in these bodies of light, that ultimately we are.
Katie: Yeah. And I would guess this is kind of simultaneously a little bit of a new concept for a lot of people and one that has like echoes of resonance from things that we’ve encountered or read in some tradition somewhere at some point. And in your book you discuss specifically two different types of ascension.
So you use that word ascension. Can you explain what those are and kinda maybe some examples or historical reference points for that?
Andrew: Absolutely. So a bit of a pre preface to all this. We’re talking about concepts that are a bit fully, you know, difficult to fully grasp in English language, right? Especially in this dimension. And so just a bit of caveat there. I’m gonna do my best as I did my book. Ascension is a word that I use.
Other people have used resurrection, although resurrection is one of those terms that’s been used in many different ways and so that can be a little confusing for people. Transfiguration is a bit of a precursor to ascension as I’ve discovered where we actually change our body, our physical body.
And so when I talk about ascension right up front, I make it clear that there are two kinds of ascension that I’m talking about. Other people may have different categorizations, but at least what I’ve found are the non-physical ascension. So essentially a part of our being, a part of a person’s being call it, the soul, the mind, whatever the spirit leaves their physical incarnation and travels into higher realms.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, actually, including the Muslim tradition, they talk about the seven heavens. Transversing, traveling into the seven heavens, but their physical body is not leaving anywhere, they’re, some part of them is going into the space and having miraculous, profound, life-changing experiences, not unlike what people today who have near death experiences experience.
So that’s the first kind, is the non-physical kind. The second kind is the even more mind blowing and profound one. And that is the full body ascension where now we know from many examples from history across religions. People attain such a level of mastery where they actually disappear from this realm and we’re assuming go into a higher realm, some of whom then come back as bodies of light and actually talk to people.
So Jesus, Mother Mary, Ronald Linga, many of the ones that I’ve talked about in my book, actually then come back in this body of light, if you will, and speak to people. So that’s the categorization I use in my book to, you know, to distinguish the two kinds, it seems that those who experience the second kind, the more profound kind, the precursor is the first kind.
So they’re having some kind of these heavenly ascents if you call, you know, some people call ’em heavenly ascents. They’re having those and then eventually at the end of their life, they experience this full body ascension.
Katie: Yeah. And you mentioned I mean Jesus and Mary is a couple of examples of that. Can you share some of the others you touched on as well? Because one thing I thought was so interesting is that this kind of crosses religious traditions. And so like, I think one of my theories I’ve had for a long time is when it comes to any controversial topic, but especially religion, as humans, it seems like we love to hyperfocus on our differences.
But one thing I’ve noticed in my last three years of kind of a deep dive into all the religious texts of any tradition that I could get my hands on to read is how similar they were and how really, like 95% of it, in my opinion, is the same thing. And we argue about the 5% that is different. And I guess I’ve kind of settled on the idea of the Vedas of like, there’s only one thing and we are all it, kind of as where I landed.
But I would love for you to share some examples so that no matter where someone might be coming from, there’s kind of like a relevance of tradition for them.
Andrew: Sure, It’s tough to know because I talk about dozens in my book. I’ll pick some of the key ones. So in the Judeo-Christian, the Judeo-Christian tradition, especially in the Jewish tradition let’s start with Enoch, Melchizedek and Elijah. Because while many of the people, the patriarchs, if we will, of the Old Testament, the Christian Old Testament experienced some kind of ascent, so, for example, Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, others, experienced the first kind of ascent, we know, at least from the writings and from tradition, that Enoch, Melchizedek and Elijah are the clear three from the Old Testament that experienced this full body end of life ascension. We’re told that the Enoch and Melchizedek essentially did not die.
You know, different ways of saying that, but I think the scripture says God took them. But they didn’t die. And the same with Elijah, that essentially in second, the book, 2 Kings, Elijah is walking with his friend Elisha, and all of a sudden this chariot of fire appears, takes Elijah up and he’s gone.
He disappears. And so that’s in the Judeo con, the Jewish context that essentially, and we can get into this later if you’d like, that leads to a really fascinating movement called merkabah mystics, which to me in all of my book is one of the most fascinating topics. A Jewish movement around Jesus’ time were based on these ascensions of Enoch, Melchizedek and Elijah. That’s a Jewish tradition. Obviously the Christian tradition Jesus is the central figure in his transfiguration, resurrection, ascension, which there’s different interpretations as you’ve read in my book. But this here’s a being who experienced something profound. So profound that it, you know, create, led to the creation of the Christian religion.
And that we believe has solid evidence in the shroud of Turin, which again, we can talk into a little bit more if you’d like, but that’s a fascinating real world evidence of this powerful light that we all are and can radiate. But there are other examples in the Christian tradition, and I don’t, I don’t need to go too far into them, but Mary Mag, Mary, mother Mary of Jesus actually also ascended at the end of her life.
It’s a part of the Catholic tradition. It’s called the Assumption of Mary or the Ascension of Mary. Again, it’s not really focused on a lot in Christianity, but she actually did also ascend. Paul had several powerful ascent experiences of the first kind of ascension. We don’t know about the second kind, but we know that he had power, powerful ascent experiences.
And Paul, many scholars believe is the foundation of the current Christian religion. And then Mary Magdalene’s another fascinating one from the Christian religion where again, what we know and what tradition tells us is that after Jesus has left this earth Mary Magdalene actually traveled to Southern France and there for several decades experienced ascensions every day and was witnessed to by a bishop called Maximus in the province of, in southern France.
And there’s actually a chapel in the mountains where she did this that Marie and I, my wife Marie and I visited, that is specifically honors her Ascensions. So people don’t, again, realize that this was within the Christian tradition as well. So that’s Christianity. In the Islam faith, Mohammed, who’s the center of the Islamic faith, he ascended in what scholars would say is the most powerful incident of his life. He was in Jerusalem and he literally ascended. Most scholars believe, Muslim scholars believe, physically ascended into this higher realm where he experienced the seven heavens, spoke to God and got a number of pieces of wisdom downloaded, if you will, including the foundation for the Sufi path, which is the most mystical path of Islam.
And I can go more into detail, but essentially then several Sufis over the years, following Mohammed, also experienced these heavenly ascents, Rumi being one of them, who’s now a famous, many people today read Rumi’s poems. Hinduism has several figures who’ve done this. Krishna, Ramalinga is my favorite.
He’s actually from the 19th century where he was essentially this spiritual master and he at the end of his life told his disciples, I’m gonna go into this, into a room. It was a windowless room, and I will, I’ll be leaving there, like leaving this dimension. So he walked into this room and closed the door, no windows and didn’t come out for four months.
And finally, at the end of four months the police broke in with his disciples and he wasn’t there. And they all attested the fact that he had just left, that he was no longer in this dimension. And then finally Buddhists, and I actually, I find the Buddhist paths, path of Ascension the most fascinating personally, and I talk a lot about, in my book, again, we have limited time, but essentially the core path of Buddhism that looks at this experience is called the Dzogchen tradition.
And the Dzogchen tradition believes in this concept called the rainbow body, which is essentially ascension. And if you believe their documents, they think that hundreds of thousands of Buddhists in the past 13 centuries have actually achieved some version of the rainbow body. We can talk more about that if you’d like, but that’s to me is the most fascinating and actually the most recent person to attain this, to fully disappear from this existence, is a man named Khenpo Acho, and he left in 1998.
So one of the other fascinating things, and I’ve been talking a lot here, but one of the other fascinating things that, so there’s a Catholic priest named Francis Tiso, who I really appreciated his work. He wrote a book called The Rainbow Body and Resurrection, and he detailed the comparison between Christian Resurrection or Ascent and Ascension with this rainbow body experience of the Buddhist.
To make a long story short, he believes, and that there’s evidence that there was cross pollination of these two traditions back in the seventh century. And that’s when the rainbow body phenomena in Buddhism really emerged, was from this, this dialogue that happened between the Syriac Christians who were very mystical, who believed in this idea of ascension with Buddhists, who eventually became the Dzogchen tradition.
Katie: That’s fascinating and I wanna make sure we do reserve time to get into the, like how a person can actually move toward elements of this path in the modern world. But I wanna just double click on a couple things you said, one being the shroud of Turin. I’d love to hear a little bit more about that.
Because I’ve read from your book and also just anecdotally of like the imprint that was left on that material and how it, like, science couldn’t fully explain it. Other than the explanation that I’m sure you can give us better than I could in summarize it, but can you go a little deeper on what it kind of tells us and represents about these concepts?
Andrew: Sure I spend a whole chapter of my book talking about this. Because to me it’s the most powerful physical evidence of this ascension phenomenon. So essentially the Shroud of Turin is this large tapestry that has the image of a man front and back on it. And for centuries, the Catholic Church has said this is the image of Jesus.
Obviously there are people that were questioning it over the years. So in the 1970s, the Catholic Church basically said to the top scientists in the world, so Los Alamos, NASA scientists, the top Italian scientist, take it and study it. Long story short, I talk about this in my book, but the long story short is they could not figure out how this image was made.
It was not made of any conventional method, dyes, pigments, photography, anything like that. But from studying it deeply, they concluded that essentially what created this image was some kind of high powered light radiation. So high powered that it, the actual, the actual source was around 34,000 nuclear plants.
The energy given out by 34,000 nuclear plants, which is a bit of a mind blowing number, but that’s actually the number that scientists through their calculations came up with. So here we have, there’s, there’s other evidence I’ve talked about in my book that we don’t have to go into now that likely connects that to Jesus.
But whether or not that was Jesus, the bottom line is some being, some person radiated this inordinate amount of light that created this image.
Katie: Yeah. That’s so, so fascinating to me. And the other one that stood out because of personal research lately is with Mary Magdalene. And I didn’t know until your work that she had experienced these events as well. I had just like growing up Catholic, that she was not someone we heard much about. We kind of got a very limited story about her, and so I had read a lot about her in the last couple of years and then had been following the work of Dr. Zach Bush, who I would love to interview again at some point, but he had an incredible kind of mystical experience in the caves in the south of France, in the Magdalene caves.
And it completely shifted the course of his life and his work and so much. And so I feel like she’s a kind of not talked about for as kind of a prominent as she could have been at the time figure in all this.
So I would love to just hear a little bit more about what you encountered about her kind of selfishly because this has been such a personal research path for me lately.
Andrew: Yeah, it is fascinating and I actually sense intuitively that one of the reasons that Mary Magdalene was ostracized was, you know, essentially denigrated in the church for so many centuries was because of this powerful, reputation, this powerful experience that she had that the church did not want people to know that.
But we now know from many of the texts that have been discovered, the Gnostic Gospels, Nag Hammadi library, essentially, that she was probably the most prominent person in the whole Jesus movement other than Jesus, obviously, likely she was his companion, if not his wife. And that the church actually now, I think it was just even 10 years ago, finally said that she was quote the apostles of the Apostles.
So the most important of the apostles was Mary Magdalene. Like you said, Katie, when I was growing up in the seventies and the eighties, I didn’t hear anything about that. But thankfully in part because of things like the Da Vinci Code and other, you know phenomena that have happened, we now have a very different view of her.
And so this understanding of her going to Southern France is a powerful one in that what I mentioned earlier that there was a book called The Golden Legend, which was written in the 13th century. It was a compendium of I think 135 texts or so that we know is very important because many copies of it were left even until modern day.
And so it was a very important text at the time, and that text talks in depth about Mary Magdalene’s Ascensions and that she would actually experience these every day. Now, we don’t know if at the end of her life she ascended. Some people believe so, some people don’t. Some people claim that there is a body of Mary Magdalene.
I don’t know. I’m skeptical. I intuitively sense that maybe she did actually leave this earth without dying. But there is no proof about that, final definitive proof. But like I said, there is a chapel at the top of the mountain above her caves. That is dedicated just to her ascensions, and it’s really powerful. You can see pictures on it, on the internet if you want to find it.
Katie: And of course I’ll link to your book in the show notes. I highly recommend, because there’s no way we could possibly go into everything in one podcast episode. So that’ll be there. I highly recommend it. Last thing I want to go a little bit deeper on before we move into the how can, how does this actually apply to us in today’s world is the idea of quantum physics and how this relates.
Because I feel like quantum physics is a term that people use, kind of like how they use the term epigenetics in the physical health world, where they don’t really fully understand it some of the time and it just gets tossed around a lot. And I feel like you pulled some of these pieces together so brilliantly as well.
So can you just walk us a little deeper into quantum physics and how it relates to some of these terms that kind of get misused a lot.
Andrew: Sure. It’s a big topic, obviously, and I’m not a quantum physicist. I’ve done a lot of reading about it. But It’s important to know, and I say this in the beginning of this chapter, that even quantum physicists don’t fully understand quantum physics. It’s one of those very strange topics that blows away our Newtonian old worldview of what, how the universe works.
But it’s been replicated so many times the experiments and the truth, the concepts of theories that we have some very powerful conclusions from quantum physics that now science accepts it’s facts. I basically go into four of those. Especially as they relate to Ascension. So I don’t know if you wanted me to quickly touch on all four or if there’s one specifically that you wanted me to hone in on.
Katie: Let’s briefly go through all four.
Andrew: Okay. All right. So the first is, I touched on a little bit briefly, but essentially via this idea that we are ultimately beings of light. That what makes us, comprises who we are, are particles of light. And that’s it. That’s who we are. And part of that is understanding that at the atomic level, we are more than 99% space.
So when we look at our hand and we look at our body, we think we’re these solid objects, but actually we are mostly space. And what is not space is this light energy, this frozen light energy. A little corollary with that is that there are some ideas out there, some scientists that believe that we as these beings of light, actually embody an inordinate incredible amount of energy.
So an author Pam Grout, who’s a bestseller, she wrote a book called E Squared. Basically uses Einstein’s E=mc2 equation to show that our bodies have a tremendous amount of light in them. I think she says 30 hydrogen bombs worth. And there’s more on this in my book, but so we are beings of what quantum physics tells us is we are beings that are made up of almost nothing like we are mostly space. And what is not space is light, frozen light that has incredible potential power within us.
So that’s the first truth that I look at in my, in my book. The second one is a bit of a mishmosh of the observer theory, which I’m not gonna get into, but with this idea of our thoughts and our emotions creating reality.
But the bottom line is we now know from many experiments that our observation of the world, our thoughts, our emotions creates the world and creates who we are as beings. And so you referenced this earlier. Both my wife Marie and I do holistic healing. And the fundamental idea of holistic healing is that actually most of our physical elements, if not all of them, begin in the non-physical level.
So mentally, spiritually, emotionally. And this is what quantum physics and all the experiments around it tells us is that we as powerful beings are creating our lives and our world, so we’re not victims. Which is so easy to become in our culture. We actually, in every moment, the thoughts we choose, the emotions we choose, we are creating our life and we’re rippling it out to the rest of the world and the universe really. Which gets to another of the, I think it’s the fourth one, but I’ll go to it right now because it relates, we now know from quantum physics that everything everywhere is connected.
So you and I are connected to everything in the universe. And so, you know, there are concepts like quantum entanglement and non-locality. Again, I go into those in my book, but the bottom line is we are all connected everywhere. There was that famous movie a couple of years ago that I think was that title, Everything Everywhere at Once, that was trying to communicate that.
But it’s, that’s one, another one of those mind blowing concepts that I fully can’t get my brain around, but quantum physics says yes, that is the truth. So that’s the third idea I talk about. It’s actually the fourth. But, and then the last idea I talk about is this idea of multi, that we live in a multidimensional universe.
So essentially we used to think that, you know, planets and stars and us and you know, animals was all there is, but now we know there is much more to the universe than we previously thought. So this idea of dark matter or dark energy I talked about in my book, not dark, in a bad way, dark in the invisible way, we now know science tells us that the vast majority of the universe is made up of matter energy, which is beyond our measurable, our equipment that we can measure. That’s why it’s called dark, it’s invisible. And likely that energy exists in other dimensions. Quantum physics has now proven that there are at least 11 dimensions in the universe.
Some physicists believe there are countless dimensions in the universe. Many believe increasingly that there are many parallel universes. Again, Katie, mind blowing for me, I can’t really get my arms around that and my head around that of what that actually means, but we know that. And so when spiritual traditions for thousands of years have said similar things of these, you know, traveling into higher dimensions, dimensions, traveling into the seven heavens, these kind of things, having these experiences in other dimensions, we now know scientifically that there is truth to that. So those are probably a little longer than you wanted, but the four key quantum ideas that, I use as a platform to launch them for the rest of my book.
Katie: Yeah. I feel like that was such a good summary and a perfect jumping in point to then the application of this in the modern world, because I feel like you’ve got to, like in the book, you touched on so many historic examples and the kind of historical backing for this, plus the modern quantum backing for this. Which brings the question of like, how can each of us to whatever degree walk this path after understanding all of those pieces. And kind of like, I love that purpose piece you talked about at the beginning, like our grandest vision. So how can each of us then begin to walk this path?
Andrew: So I touched on this in the last section, as you know, of my book. And really when you look at most of the traditions around ascension whether it’s the mystery schools or the mystical Christians or whatever it might be, the Sufis. There’s generally three steps to this path. The first step is a bit of a given for those of us who are already on the path, and that is you have to, you have to at least somewhat believe in the path and commit to it.
Like, okay, now none of us are perfect. You know, we all have our doubts, we all have our, you know, limiting beliefs. But at some level, saying, okay, this intuitively calls to me, this sounds intriguing. I’m gonna commit to trying to walk this path and doing my best on this path. So that’s the first step.
If you have, you have to make that commitment in life, which, you know, basically means at some level carving time out of your life for this as a focus. And then I go mostly into the second and the third pieces, which are, you know, a bit more complex. But the second is purification. So essentially purifying your life in all the different ways.
And the third is spiritual practices. So daily practices that we can do to help align ourselves with this higher energy and walk this inspirational path. So purification. Let’s talk briefly about that. There are several pieces of this. The first I call the holistic diet. And the holistic diet is essentially everything that we take into our field, into our bodies, into our minds, into our emotions, everything we take in, whether it’s our food, our friends that we spend time with, the news, media that we read, movies we watch, et cetera.
But also the sleep that we get and how we take care of ourselves. Essentially, what are we allowing into our field in our everyday life? That’s usually, for most people, that’s the easiest thing to look at and say, what can I do better out here to begin clearing the path of purification for this journey.
The flip side of this is the second piece, and that’s what I call the eight pitfalls, which is a bit of a jumping, it jumps from the, the Christian seven they call, I guess the venial sins or whatever it is. I don’t like the term, but you know, envy, gluttony, sloth, pride, lust, wrath, grief, and I add fear, essentially those things that if we do too much of them will derail us from the path. So again, there’s nothing wrong with sexuality. There’s nothing wrong with having some confidence. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying good food. But what these eight pitfalls say is be aware of if any of these are becoming an excess in your life. So that’s the second, you know hurdle or step on this path for purification.
The third step is looking very deeply and very honestly and gently, and that’s key, and nonjudgmentally at ourselves at our own belief systems that we have. You know, the things that were either inculcated in us as a child or that we chose to believe, or maybe even from a past life, but things that are holding us back that are disempowering us from really embodying the, our fullest potential.
So that’s, that’s the second piece. I can, again, spend lots of time on that. But that’s the third piece is what are the mental belief systems that we hold that are limiting us. The last part of this, I’m sorry, not the last part. The fourth part is looking at our emotional wellbeing, our emotional, you know, wellbeing.
What do we choose to experience emotionally? Are we choosing gratitude? Are we choosing love? Are we choosing peace? Are we choosing joy, actually proactively choosing those things? Or are we allowing our past patterns or the world’s negative energy of anger, fear sadness, any of those things, are we allowing those to dominate our lives? Of course, we all experience, you know, those kinds of emotions, naturally, sadness, anger, or whatever. The point is, doing our best to empathize with ourselves and to let those go in forgiveness and love and minimizing the time that we spend in those emotions. Because we now know scientifically through hundreds of hundreds of experiments that our emotional wellbeing and our physical health is dependent in part, some would say in large part, on our emotional feelings of gratitude, of joy, of love, being in those spaces.
Those create healthy proteins and other things in our bodies that change our DNA that I talk about in my book. So this emotional healing is also, so I think of like the, the third is the most, the mental, the belief systems, kind of our head. This is our heart. What are our emotions, our emotional wellbeing, the state of our wellbeing.
And finally I talk about transformation. And that is essentially the moment to moment process of transforming our belief systems that are limiting us or our feelings that are limiting us, into ones that are empowering and ones that are full of love and light. So how do we do that? It’s a process of every moment being aware of those things and then changing, constantly changing them into a positive frame of mind.
That’s a hard thing. I use the idea of weeding, like gardeners weed in their garden. Same thing. We have to do this mental and emotional weeding that every time something sprouts up that’s not necessarily supporting our highest good, we have to change that around. So that’s, in a very fast nutshell, the purification section.
The last thing I talked about was the spiritual practices. And I go into three in my book. Obviously there are lots of spiritual practices, but the ones that have been most powerful for me are some kind of spiritual movement. So I do Tai Chi, but other people feel called to do yoga. And this is literally where you are connecting with and facilitating the health, facilitating the healthy flow of spiritual energy in your body.
Chi, prana, whatever you wanna call it. But there’s this energy, which I believe is ultimately spiritual light, but this energy that comes through our bodies and some kind of spiritual movement helps us to become more focused and raise our vibration. Meditation, another obviously crucial one that I’ve seen for 30 some years in my life of calming the mind, steeling the mind, detaching from our thoughts.
Remembering that we are not our thoughts, we are not our emotions. We are ultimately these souls, these spirits, and that our thoughts or our emotions are tools of our souls. And meditation is the practice of how you get into the actual space of detaching from those thoughts, the monkey mind of thoughts or feelings that can hold us down.
And then some kind of prayer. I do, every day, I do mine in the morning where we actually are consciously creating our life. With divine energies, however you want to in your own belief system how that’s defined. And again, I go into much more detail about how, what prayer is. And it’s not beseeching, at least in my paradigm, it’s not beseeching, some Santa Claus in the sky. It’s actually a conscious co-creative process or the divine field.
Katie: I love that concept. And I would love to go a little deeper on some of the blocks. I love that understanding that like so much of our experience of life can come, even our physical health can come from that emotional and spiritual piece. That’s definitely been a lesson I’ve gotten to learn firsthand in my own healing journey and reversing Hashimoto’s and so many other things. But especially the idea that mental belief systems that are limiting us and how these can come into play in our life. And I know firsthand does seem to be the first step of that. Like being aware that those things exist and it’s not the only step, at least for me, it was not in removing them, there was actually like a learning curve and a process to that as well.
Can you talk about kind of what we can do to address those mental belief systems that might be kind of our roadblocks?
Andrew: Well, the first thing, like you said, was the, is the key is first becoming aware of it. And there are different categories, different people have different categories online. I think I have a link in my book, but generally the different areas that I resonate with most with our self-esteem, you know, how do I feel about myself?
Do I feel like I am worthy, valuable person? Personal power. Do I believe that I have power to create change in my life? Openness to change. Am I genuinely open to change or have I become calcified or fixed in the old ways, in my old habits? Basically having some kind of feeling about life’s purpose and meaning.
Having, what’s your overall attitude about life? For example, pessimism versus optimism. And then trust faith in some larger force beyond us. So those are the different categories that have helped me in my journey. So when I’m experiencing something negative, right, or I ask myself is this, I find myself believing something.
I ask myself first, is this true? And then I ask, how do I benefit from this belief? And or am I using this as an excuse to not do something? So, for example maybe the belief system of, oh, people are just out for themselves and people are only selfish. And so the world is, you know, just that that’s, you know, I can’t really make a difference because people are just in it for themselves.
So then asking, gonna go, going deeper on that, where did that, where did that belief system come from in my life? And then do I choose to change that system and essentially reverse that or create a higher, more empowered way of thinking. And so to use that example, one way you could take that is I choose to believe that most people are doing their best, most of the time and have good hearts.
And that’s how I will interact in the world, and that’s the belief system that I will fully embody. So that’s really the process, at least for the belief systems, is getting honest with yourself about those things that are holding you back and then really choosing again and again, it’s that mental weeding again, choosing a new, more empowered, loving, joyful belief system.
Katie: Well I feel like done a lot of these things already, but I would love to specifically address like why someone would want to focus on this path because it does seem like sometimes, especially when we use as examples like Jesus and Mary and Buddha and people like that, it can be easy to think of like, that’s them and I’m here and like it doesn’t seem as applicable to our daily life in the modern world. And definitely a lot of the things you have already explained to me point very directly to why we would want to at least embark on this path, even if it’s not one we attain in this lifetime. But from your perspective, why, what would be the benefits? Why would someone want to embark on this path?
Andrew: Well I first wanna just make it clear that we do have, we have gotten into a bit of a separation mindset in our world of like, oh, well, Jesus, Jesus and Buddha and all these beings, they’re up here, right? They’re different than me. And I think if you look at their actual teachings, what they’re saying is, no, actually you are the same as I am.
I mean, Jesus says you’ll do what I have done, even greater things. And you know, this concept is separation concept. So I come from, of a place of oneness that actually I am, we are all divine beings, divine sparks. And my favorite analogy in this is Michelangelo talks about his sculptures and how when he looked at a rock, an unformed piece of rock, he already saw in that rock his perfect sculpture, but what he had to do was chip away all the parts that were hiding that perfect sculpture. In the same way I believe that we are all perfect, beautiful divine beings, just like Jesus, just like Buddha, just like all these masters who’ve ascended. And we just have to do that work of chipping away those parts of us that are keeping us from attaining this incredible vision, this incredible, incredible state of being.
So why would you wanna do that? Lots of reasons. The first and foremost is it’s, to me, the most powerful and uplifting path there is. So I talk about the analogy in my book about a philanthropist who sets a very high goal of maybe eradicating a disease that may be hard, you know, impossible to do.
But he sets that goal. And in setting that goal, essentially the world makes progress and is a much better place because of that, whether or not it’s actually achieved. In the same way, when you have this very high vision of embodying our ascended selves, whether, like you said, we actually achieve it or not in this lifetime, there is a cascade of positive, you know, consequences of holding this as your highest vision.
So your health improves, you know, your relationships improve. You often enable latent spiritual abilities. I know that in my path, in my journey, I’ve gotten more telepathic. I can just kind of hear and sense what people, where people are coming from. I’ve sometime gotten a bit precognitive.
Like I can kinda sense when something’s gonna happen. And there are a number of these spiritual abilities that Hindus call them siddhis S-I-D-D-H-I. But essentially, as you walk this path, you also can enable these different latent abilities. But overall, the higher vision you set for your life, the more amazing your life is gonna be, no matter even if you achieve that vision.
So that’s the personal, if you will, selfish reason to follow this path. The more selfless reason touches on what I said earlier about the oneness and the connection that we all are. That when each, any of us, when each of us, Katie, when you, when I, when anybody chooses to walk this incredible path, however imperfect we are in walking the path, we are helping the collective. Because we are connected to everybody, when we, when our vibration rises, when we grow in love and power, that affects the whole world. It can’t, almost like a jello, it ripples out like jello. We know that from quantum physics, like, which, as I already alluded to, said that spiritual conditions for millennia have said the same thing. So you’re helping the world by walking this path.
And you know, the last thing I talked about in my book is why not? Why would you not do this? Why not get on with it If this is the actual end goal or the end point of this human existence, which I believe it is, why would you have to keep coming back in different lifetimes and you know, experiencing the sufferings dimension, let’s get on with it and let’s move along and in a way that’s loving and gentle and nonjudgmental to ourselves, but let’s get on with it and move into a higher space as fast as we can.
Katie: Yeah. I think again of that idea, like the kind of the Veda summed up of there’s only one thing and we are all it, which you talked about with quantum physics and everything being connected and the idea of we’re all simply light to begin with. As we get close to the end of our time, what would you say are any remaining things like important things that you want to make sure people know about this topic?
Andrew: I would say, it’s all related to this topic, but the most important thing I talk to clients about and people is just remembering the divine beings that we are. You know, I’ve touched on this, but we are at our core divine beings. We’re not sinful. We’re not awful. We do sometimes bad things, awful things, but we are divine beings.
We are spark, divine sparks, one with the divine energy. And that we are eternal beings. Eternal in quotes, who knows how long, but timeless in the sense that we are beyond this lifetime. So our souls continue on beyond this lifetime. And so there’s no need to fear death as people who have had near death experiences are, you know, clearly tell us.
When we, when we leave this place, we go on. So we are these incredible sparks or divine that are timeless. So that’s the first most important thing that I would say. The second thing is that, again, I’ve alluded this to it already, but we are connected to all that is. So we can never be fully lost. We can feel lost at times, but we can never be totally lost.
We are connected to the divine intelligence, we’re connected to all that is. And again, quantum physics has shown this, what spiritual and sacred traditions have said for years. In that way, since we’re connected, as I just said, we affect the whole, everything that we do. So that oneness is another huge part of this whole idea of ascension.
The third thing would be reminding folks to come from the inside out and not the outside in. So what that means is so often in our world, whether it’s what our parents or peers say, or what the media says, or social media, whatever, we often take our cues and base our actions and reactions on that which is outside of us instead of the opposite, which is saying, this is what I choose to experience in my life.
I choose to create a life full of unconditional love for myself and others. I choose to live a life of the greatest power I can, not power over others, but spiritual power of manifestation. That’s what I choose to create. I create a world of joy. And while I’m not ignoring that which is not that in a world, that’s not what I choose to create.
And so that’s every moment, living from the inside out of what my highest vision is instead of the outside in, is a real fundamental truth that I found the path.
Katie: That’s so beautiful and I will link in the show notes to the book of course, and also to your work. I love that you don’t have social media, but where can people find you if they want to keep learning from you and go deeper on this topic?
Andrew: You can find me at my website, embodyourlight.com. And you can also go to humanity’s team. They have a video workshop of my book. If you’re not a reader, which a lot of people aren’t these days, you could watch. Essentially I did a video workshop that is my book. But you don’t have to read it.
So that’s at humanity’s team. Just look at my name on humanity’s team.
Katie: Amazing. Well, I will put all those links in the show notes for anybody listening on the go. That’ll be at wellnessmama.com. Andrew, this has been such a fun topic for me personally. I think so fascinating in general. I really thoroughly enjoyed your book. I hope many people check it out. Thank you so much for your research, your time, and for all that you’ve shared with us today.
Andrew: Thank you Katie, and thank you for all you do in the world helping people, inspire people to live their highest health and wellbeing. I really appreciate it.
Katie: Well, thank you and thanks to all of you for listening and sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did, and I hope that you’ll join me again on the next episode of The Wellness Mama Podcast.
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