44: Dr. Meredith Sagan Notices Significant Change in Family Structure in 2018: Youths are the Canary in the Coalmine Warning
“You deserve results…It’s not your fault if you’re not getting better. There’s a hope for you. Keep searching, keep looking, never give up the answers… We are all working on this for you. And we will deliver answer soon.” -Dr. Meredith Sagan
An alarming issue has emerged in 2019! Dr. Meredith Sagan, the Founder of MindAlign Institute, has come across this human problem in her 20 years of research on human intelligence. And the rate to where we’re going in this artificial world is rapidly ravaging us since 2018.
A medical doctor and a holistic psychiatrist by profession, Dr. Meredith Sagan is a woman of varied career. She went in a child fellowship to residential treatment, behavioral health and a private practice. She has travelled around the world for many years to learn about human intelligence and the root causes of human problems. Join her in her quest as she shares with you her research and how her MindAlign method can help you with the struggles you are battling with right now.
Nobody knows how fast our world would change and what changes to expect. However, we know that our story us humans is colored with both brightness and darkness. Facing the dark side alone guarantees defeat. But Dr. Sagan’s words above echo a hope for many. So today’s episode especially highlights the trend that our world is in right now, especially at the start of 2018. Learn what causes the disorientation we experience, the many consequences that comes along with it and how this can be reversed. Also, find out how the MindAlign Method works and how to stay empowered when all your resources get exhausted. Take part in this enlightening conversation and pick rare insights along the way.
Highlights:
03:29 A Woman of Varied Careers
06:12 Living in an Artificial World- The 2018 Massive Role Reversal
11:31 Social Media and Disorientation
19:20 The Family Structure in a ‘No Rules’ Era
24:31 Healing by Letting the Stigma Go
30:29 20 Years of Study on Mindfulness
34:42 The MindAlign Method
37:05 How to Stay Empowered When Resources Get Exhausted
The search for healing continues as we move forward in our story. Join the quest today with our host, @TFRSolution and our guest @MeredithSaganMD in another episode on #artificialworld #MindAlign #mindfulness #connections #hope Share on X
Connect With Meredith
Website: https://drsagan.com/
Email: drsagan@mindaligninstitute.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MeredithSaganMDMPH
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MeredithSaganMD
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQyeW-tAo_mqeAbggg4CQDg/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/meredithsaganmdmph/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meredith-sagan-md-mph-b14552ab/
Connect with MindAlign Institute:
Website: https://www.mindaligninstitute.com/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/MindAlignInstitute
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX4Wt7Gjx5VZ1gL2F0oyFIA
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/MindAlignInstitute
Quotes:
04:56 “In the past, we never had to take into consideration, to understand what we do as humans, what makes us human, what we love as humans. It was never really relevant, because we just lived as humans do; being human and doing what humans do.” -Dr. Meredith Sagan
13:26 “I think that technology is like money, or it’s like a gun, you can use it for the best benevolence of humanity, or you can use it to hurt people…I do believe that we have to know who we are first, as humans; how we are separate from technology before we can wisely use it.” -Dr. Meredith Sagan
15:55 “Well, that’s the thing we have to know for ourselves, what’s real and what’s fake.” -Dr. Meredith Sagan
18:06 “All of these things grow from knowing yourself.” -Dr. Meredith Sagan
19:32 “Before we get to the end, we just kind of have to know, ‘Hey, where am I today?’ As humans, we thrive when we know our part.” -Dr. Meredith Sagan
18:18 “You can, through mindfulness, observe your emotional reactions, your physical ones, and actually achieve self-mastery over your physiologic mind-body emotional responses.” -Dr. Meredith Sagan
24:56 “But what I learned over time is that experience is how I learned, not conversations, not words, but experience.” -Dr. Meredith Sagan
26:11 “Wouldn’t it be a wonderful new world, if we came together as collectives and communities and share techniques and ways of working through our collective issues, as opposed to pretending like they didn’t happen?” -Dr. Meredith Sagan
33:22 “The first thing is anchoring in our own truth. When you know what’s true for you, and you know, what’s real for you and not real …-That is your navigation system.” -Dr. Meredith Sagan
35:39 “So in a world where we don’t have rules like we used to at one time, the only rule that you can know that will never fail, ‘you are your rules for yourself.’” -Dr. Meredith Sagan
39:08 “Don’t go off your medicine before you have something new to replace it that’s really working.” -Dr. Meredith Sagan
43:11 “You deserve results…It’s not your fault if you’re not getting better. There’s a hope for you. Keep searching, keep looking,never give up their answers… We are all working on this for you. And we will deliver answer soon.” -Dr. Meredith Sagan
Got ideas? Perhaps a future podcast? Schedule time with Jeff here: https://meetme.so/jeffjones
Transcriptions
This episode of Families Navigating Addiction and Recovery is sponsored by The Family Recovery Solution where we recognize that families are the biggest stakeholder in this addiction crisis. And we see that families can be a stronger part of the solution in their own family, in their communities, and in our world. We know that addiction in the family is not the fault of the family. We know that family engagement increases the potential of change happening sooner and positive outcomes lasting longer, as well as navigating healing connections in the family now and well into the future. So we’ve created an online platform for families to safely navigate this journey at their pace. Check out www.thefamilyrecoverysolution.com
JEFF: So welcome everyone, on today’s episode of Families Navigating Addiction and Recovery. I have with me today a guest that I am just getting to know, Dr. Meredith Sagan who, oh my gosh, I’ve started to have conversation with her and one of the hardest things is how do we focus a topic. This woman is a psychiatrist. Not only is – she’s what I would call an out of the box psychiatrist. She has developed a mind align method but she has done so much more than that, that she will tell us some about. And I realize one of the biggest challenges I’m going to have in talking with Meredith is how to keep the conversation focused. And so the topic that we decided here is about shining light on the structure of families, the composition, the container of what families look like, feel like and how they’ve changed over time. And she brings quite a bit to that. And so we will start with that as a focus topic. But welcome Meredith.
MEREDITH: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on your show. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here with you and your audience.
JEFF: Yeah, great. And so in starting, what I would like to do is to give you an opportunity to you to introduce yourself so people listening have a sense of who you are, like, you know, maybe behind some of the titles or some of the things we’re going to be talking about.
MEREDITH: Thank you. Well my name is Dr. Meredith Sagan. I am a holistic psychiatrist and I work with both children, adolescents and adults. I graduated from UCLA Semel Institute in 2001. and what I to do is a child fellowship and ever since that time I’ve worked in residential treatment, behavioral health. I’ve had a private practice. I’ve had a very wide and varied career. In this stage of my career, I’m also the founder of the Mind Align Institute, which is focused on the study and preservation of human intelligence. We are researching and setting what makes humans humanly intelligent. And we feel that the Mind Align Institute, it is a pressing issue of our times as we are beginning to live in an evermore increasingly artificial world. So –
JEFF: Wow. Yeah, that’s such a great – I am so touched with the focus on human intelligence and you know, putting something together that supports people to be intelligent to where they can thrive. No doubt we need more of that in our world.
MEREDITH: Well, thank you for acknowledging when I believe to be very important, which is something that in the past we never had to take into consideration to understand what we do as humans, what makes us human, what we let as humans. It was never really relevant because we just lived as humans do, being human and doing what humans do.
JEFF: Yeah.
MEREDITH: [inaudible] now in 2019, we live in a world that is actually more heavily weighted in which is artificial. We have artificial food, artificial media, artificial friends, Facebook friends. We have artificial body parts if we want them. We have artificial, almost anything that we want is actually now available artificially as opposed to humanly. So if we look at this juncture in human history, I believe that it is extremely important for us to research and study what is human, what makes us that and then to preserve it and educate our youth to give ourselves as humans a place in the world.
JEFF: Yeah.
MEREDITH: Yes.
JEFF: Wow. So before we jump into that, can you say a little bit as to what inspired you, like what’s behind your motivation and inspiration behind this?
MEREDITH: Well, thank you so much for asking that question because it is important why I decided to dedicate the Mind Align Institute to the study of human intelligence. Prior to 2016, I was seeing relatively, you know, what I always seen as a psychiatrist. Children who are coming in, youth who are coming in with mental health, drug addictions and you know, these types of issues that had some kind of a reason for it that I could identify within that framework is a western psychiatrist and you know, western trained psychiatrist. So I’d always been looking for genetics as a causative factor for addictions and mental illness, trauma, sexual abuse, physical abuse is a huge one. Just unstable childhood, you know, having emotional distress, abandonment issues being adopted. We have a lot of markers witnessing, domestic violence is another one. Even genetics in terms of conduct disorder behavior.
JEFF: Right.
MEREDITH: So these were all things as a psychiatrist, I always do it in my intake I know what to look for. I always found something. I’m very much into root causes. I love finding the root cause because then I know that I can fix what’s on the surface, which is the presenting problem.
JEFF: Yeah.
MEREDITH: So when I began to look for, so I had always been able to find a root cause. It was rooted in what I knew as a western psychiatrist.
JEFF: Sure.
MEREDITH: In 2016, the landscape really began to change with the brain chemistry of the youth that I was seeing. was seeing a lot more trauma for one, but really the severity that I was seeing, I was diagnosing way more Bipolar II, ADHD, PTSD that the combination of them, I was like, oh, I was thinking my gosh, society’s going off the rails. Our youth is just coming in with trauma and addictions. But in 2019, well in 2018 things got worse. And then just recently what I started to see was brain chemistry changes with no grounding in why I should be seeing the change.
JEFF: Right. So the normal factors like what I consider as like factors that contribute to addiction or increased the vulnerability, like trauma, mental health stuff, the gene, it’s like those weren’t a part of the addiction that you were seeing in 2019.
MEREDITH: Correct. It started in 2018 about a year ago, it has been growing more, so then in 2019 is just undeniable. It’s now May 2019, within these first months of 2019 is undeniable that the landscape is changing in terms of what I’m seeing is a psychiatrist that there are new elements that I need to take into consideration in terms of the brain chemistry, what’s leading to brain chemistry and stability with our youth.
JEFF: And so yeah, the next obvious question is how do you connect the dots and start to make meaning of what you’re seeing?
MEREDITH: Wonderful question. The big picture is that I think that we’re disoriented, we’d become disoriented as to where we fit. And we’re seeing that in the modern family, we’re seeing a massive role reversal, which it’s fine. It’s our times, we’re in 2019 but we just don’t know how it works. When women are in the primary earning and men are in the secondary spot. We just have never been here before. Our kids are disoriented. They don’t know what’s real and what’s not real. Everything on social media looks real, but it’s not real.
JEFF: Yeah.
MEREDITH: Millions are replacing physical DVDs, physical books, physical instruments. Everything that was formerly physical, which rooted and grounded in what’s real and where we sit in time and space is now becoming, it’s becoming more accessible on a screen –
JEFF: Yeah.
MEREDITH: – than in our day to day life in physical form. So the weight is now on the other side. I think for the first time in 2019 is on the weight and what’s artificial as opposed to what’s human. And I believe that we are seeing breakdowns in brain chemistry because of it.
JEFF: Oh my gosh, that’s kind of overwhelming to me. And so it’s like the, I mean, one of the things I’m hearing is that the technology that has been expanding and exploding and getting better, and there’s so many different things that we can do with technology. There’s also, and I think a lot of us know this, there’s a dark side to it. So, you know, the dark side that I hear you talking about is we’re disoriented, we’re disconnected and simply the methods that we have to connect online aren’t a substitute for human connection.
MEREDITH: Right. Right. And that’s what we’re still exploring. These are things that it’s happened so fast. Really 2016 I don’t, I’m not an expert yet about this, I’m actually in the midst of my research phase. I’m in the midst of getting crowd funding develop to help get bigger funding for the institute so that we can really research these topics. But from what I observed, there was a big change in brain chemistry in 2016. And it did happen to correlate with, I wish I knew, but it was deep learning. There was a new type of deep learning that artificial intelligence assimilated and started to bring into our social media use in our daily net surfing. So there was a technology correlate with brain chemistry shifts that I was observing in 2016, I would love to see the correlation between the national statistics for suicides, homicides, drug overdoses, and you know, mental health statistics basically for 2016 and how it’s looked between 2016 and 2019.
JEFF: Yeah.
MEREDITH: Clinically, I did see something and what you were saying, I just wanted to get back to, you know, the overwhelm at the topic. I at first felt that way when I first discovered it. And then I felt a real sense of elation and excitement because we, by now just kind of seeing it for what it is now and just taking a step back and saying: “Wow, it makes sense.”
JEFF: Right.
MEREDITH: This happens fast from 2016 to 2019, we’re still in an old framework looking at the psychological roots for things when the roots of the 2019 disorders might be, hey, maybe we’re disoriented, maybe we’re losing our connection with our humanness. Maybe by anchoring there we can orient ourselves get our structures back together and then utilize technology for our benefit. I think that technology is like money or it’s like a gun. You can use it for the best, the [inaudible] of humanity or you can use it to hurt people.
JEFF: Right.
MEREDITH: We, as the creators of technology, we want to use it to help people, to uplift people and to forge humanity. I really believe we can do that. But first I do believe that we have to know who we are first as humans. When we are separate from technology before we can wisely use it. And so that is why I set up the Institute for Human Intelligence to explore that, to agree with mass consensus. What do we do as human and makes us uniquely human and not artificial. Ground that, anchor it in our archives of us –
JEFF: Yeah.
MEREDITH: – and let’s proceed with what’s artificial. That’s all.
JEFF: Yeah. So I love what you’re saying because I mean essentially what I’m trying to do and am doing with families is creating an online space for people. And the thing that I love about the online space is that families have been shamed and blamed and stigmatized for many years with addiction. And so they don’t want to reach out for help. However, the online platform and really giving people, empowering them to incrementally reveal more and more of themselves. Gives people choice in how they do that. So I love that you kind of talk about the positive benefit of online technology and the dark side. And one of the things that I’m hearing with this mind align institute and method is how can people kind of get to a place where they can best navigate between connection that serves them and connection that is like fake, like –
MEREDITH: Exactly. Well that’s a thing, we have to know for ourselves what’s real and what’s fake. So in order to do that, I do believe that there are people who are vastly intelligent in what makes humans humanly intelligent. You being one of them. You are one of the, you know people who are out there creating online space to explore this topic. We’re all looking for solutions together. So the mind align institute is actually serving as a hub for likeminded people to gather, to talk about this concern or this question.
JEFF: Right.
MEREDITH: Just gathering likeminded others like yourself, myself, other people who think it’s an interesting topic or relevant, all of us coalescing our information, putting it under one umbrella roof where we can do the research, we can discuss it with each other. It’s like what you’ve done with it for your family’s around addictions.
JEFF: Right.
MEREDITH: This topic is looking at like, hey, where do we anchor into what makes us human? And there’s no mass consensus of what makes us human. There are no topics for that yet.
JEFF: Right. So that’s the research that you’re doing?
MEREDITH: Yes.
JEFF: Yeah.
MEREDITH: That’s the research. I’m putting together people, research, statistics, anyone who I believe is a good fit for this work, wants to contribute to creating that body of knowledge of what makes us human.
JEFF: Yeah.
MEREDITH: Explore what it is, and then work on it together. In the mind align method, not only do I have a 25 step process that teaches people how to work with themselves physically, mentally, emotionally, energetically, and spiritually, but also then once they’re in that inner alignment with themselves, know anchored in their own self as human, now they can come and build from there, from that centerdness,
JEFF: Right, I get it. Yeah.
MEREDITH: In the relationship category, we begin to study who am I in a relationship independent from anyone else.
JEFF: Right.
MEREDITH: Who am I at work? Who am I in relationship with a partner? Who am I as a parent? Who am I as a community leader? Who am I as a global leader? But all of these things grow from knowing yourself.
JEFF: Right. Yeah.
MEREDITH: In the mind align institute, we are collecting likeminded others that want to contribute their knowledge, their information, their ideas to anchoring and rooting us into what’s human.
JEFF: Yeah.
MEREDITH: We are just at the beginning of the technology era according to most. We’re going to zoom ahead into this artificial world, which is incredibly exhilarating and exciting. On one hand, we love it. It’s a great time to be alive. I’m just saying before we launched the ship, let’s just batten down the hatches and make sure we have all our supplies to stay well on the journey and happy.
JEFF: What a wonderful vision. Boy, I’m raising my hand here. One of the questions that I have is, can you talk a little bit about specifically the structure of the family and you know, perhaps relating this to the structure of the family and what you’ve seen as far as changes and potential criteria for decision making in how families can start to make changes that increase their protective factors and you know, create conditions that are inhospitable for addiction to thrive and grow and continue generation after generation.
MEREDITH: Well, I can’t answer the very last part of that question because the first thing that we need to talk about is just knowing where we’re at.
JEFF: Right.
MEREDITH: Before we move to the end, we just kind of have to know, hey, where am I today? As humans, we thrive when we know our parts. For example, before the podcast today, you and I got together. We talked it out. You knew your part. I knew mine and now we’re making something happen. This is so much fun. So is fundamental for human security, for stable brain chemistry. So you have to understand that stress leads to brain chemistry instability. And what’s stressful for human, oh and brain chemistry instability leads to addictions. So if you look at stress as a root causative factor for family discorded addictions, we have to know a root cause of stress. What causes stress is not knowing our part. If I don’t know my part. Say that I’m married and I don’t know my part as a woman. Am I supposed to bring in the money? Am I supposed to be at home with the kids? Am I supposed to do both? And if so, how do I make it work? Am I hurting my kids? And if the man is in a position where he’s not making as much money as the woman, say for example, he earns two thirds less, well, should we hire a nanny? Is that more expensive? Should you stay at home?
JEFF: Right.
MEREDITH: People know their place. And then because parents are overwhelmed by just not knowing their place within the family structure itself, because we have no rules anymore. We have no rules. No one is telling us our place, zero.
JEFF: Right.
MEREDITH: [inaudible] one now, it’s completely free well, which is wonderful. But on the other hand, we don’t know our rules. So the husband doesn’t know his rules. The wife doesn’t know his rules. Pretty soon it’s just confusion. We’ll you said you’d do it. No. You said you’d do it, but wait, that was your job. People don’t know –
JEFF: Right.
MEREDITH: – what their rules are. [inaudible] translates into kids, parents are overwhelmed. So then parents put their kids on social media, videos, you know, every parent, I’ve done it too. Like, you know, you’re somewhere you need a babysitter fast. But sometimes parents put their kids on videos is a way to parent –
JEFF: Right.
MEREDITH: – [inaudible] parenting skills because there’s nowhere to learn how to parent in this modern era.
JEFF: Yeah.
MEREDITH: It makes sense to me.
JEFF: Yeah – yeah.
MEREDITH: You don’t know your own place. How do you know your kid’s place? How do you know how to parent? Now social media and the kids grew up disoriented, so it’s a disorienting experience.
JEFF: So one of the things I think of Meredith, when you say we don’t have rules, we don’t know the rules anymore. I think of family rules, family roles in, you know, families with addiction. There’s unspoken rules that happen and it isn’t like they’re consciously chosen. It’s just like they’re unconsciously acted out as a way to cope with the disruption of addiction. But, and I kind of, I’m just curious like, wow, I wonder how the no rules that you mentioned impacts the unconscious family rules that just show up.
MEREDITH: Well, this is what the method that I created was about. You know, all we need is education. You know, because what we know to the mindfulness movement is that by using self observation, mindfulness, self observed, you can actually start to undo patterns of your past. You can observe yourself and your reaction to your environment. You can observe how you react and you can make a new choice not to do that anymore, if you have enough practice. You can, through mindfulness, you can observe your emotional reactions, your physical ones.
JEFF: Yeah.
MEREDITH: You actually achieve self mastery over your physiologic mind, body, emotional responses. It’s possible now.
JEFF: Oh, you just framed my whole program right there.
MEREDITH: Exactly.
JEFF: Mindfulness, seeing what else’s going on, going from this small kind of myopic focus on a problem, expanding and looking at everything around it, the context, what’s contributing and then learning skills and practicing them over and over because just education alone, that’s not enough. Because I can’t tell you how many, you know, wonderful seminars I went to and I really, really wanted to make change. And if I don’t come home and really have a way to integrate it and practice it and have people, like minded people who can support me in the change and I can talk to or debrief with and say, this went well and this didn’t go well. It’s like I’m not going to change just from a good seminar or reading a good book
MEREDITH: That doesn’t work. We now know that that type of conceptual learning is ineffective. I myself had that same issue when I was growing up. I would read so many books on personal, on self help personal growth. And I thought to myself, am I the only person on the planet who can’t actually do what these books are telling you to do?
JEFF: Yeah.
MEREDITH: I thought there’s something wrong with me. But what I learned over time is that experience is how I learned. Not conversations, not words, but experience. And that’s another, you know, just being here with you right now, although our podcast is audio only.
JEFF: Right.
MEREDITH: You and I, we are visual with each other –
JEFF: Right.
MEREDITH: – because we are actually going off of what we see, what we feel, how we connect in order to create a reciprocity that only humans can do. And from there, we start to become more conscious. We become more elevated. We have – it’s a nice circuit that develops when we use our human intelligence. And going back to what you were saying about the big problem with families, I think that the stigma is just got to go. Everybody’s acting like it’s their own personal problem. Like: “Ooh, did you hear that my daughter’s having problem? Oh, did you hear?” It’s time, at least in my opinion, to actually maybe come together as mental health practitioners and get the big picture and say: “Gosh, gosh, everybody experiences self judgment and criticism. Everybody gets reactive and argues. Everybody puts down their kids and they..” We’re all in this together and we’re learning and growing how not to, and so we need to be patient with ourselves on that journey. Knowing that your mindfulness, we can transform and change, but when in a wonderful new world. If we came together as collectives and communities and share techniques and ways of working through our collective issues as opposed to pretending like they didn’t happen.
JEFF: [laughing] Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean it’s like we’re preaching to the choir. I mean, I hear what you’re saying and –
MEREDITH: Yeah.
JEFF: – I love the fact that how you’re approaching it from the standpoint of really looking at the research and doing more research to understand, you know, what are the pieces that are going to be the most effective
MEREDITH: Hhmmm in reaching. Yes.
JEFF: To support people, you know, to make change. I love the, you know, your comment, we like this stigma thing. We just need to get over it. You know, and I kind of, I mean, and because that’s what I’m trying to do with the online thing. Hey, you can take this at your own pace here. You know, and I don’t know of any other process like that. I mean, it’s not like a Facebook group where, you know, you can click on someone else’s name and go: “Oh, they went to this high school or whatever.” You know? So do you have some ideas on how we can get over the stigma?
MEREDITH: Oh, thank you for asking. That was exactly where I was going. Exactly where I was going. And that’s human intelligence that you’re formulating the question, I’m getting your world, I’m already responding before you even ask it when you ask it, my answers ready to go. That’s humanly intelligent. That’s called connection, reciprocity. That’s what we do when we’re together. You see?
JEFF: Right.
MEREDITH: So we use that to make us great as humans together. And we also have things as humans that we all had together that aren’t so great that we’re all working on together. So the answer to that on how to get rid of the stigma is seeing the big picture of getting that a lot of what we do, how we are is actually, now I’m not saying that it’s not our fault and that we shouldn’t own it and handle it and change it, but what I am saying is that we’ve been so conditioned in a way by just doing what people do. We take things very personally. We think that our self judgments, our self prisons are personal, it’s personal. Everybody does it.
JEFF: Right. Yeah.
MEREDITH: It’s our methological mechanism of being human. We get these emotions that boil up and vent out and then dump on people and afterwards we feel bad. That’s just what humans do and we’re all learning how to get in control of it.
JEFF: Yeah.
MEREDITH: We get really tense and stressed and get all wound up and take it out on each other. Road rage or whatever is what we do when physically we’re not relaxing. So really to me this is just a matter of education, how to work with yourself. Physically how to stay relax. How to calm your emotions down. How to quiet your mind. How to stay nonreactive in your center of gravity and listening to your own inner guidance and truth, so you can be in your best position to work with your own self as you observe your own follies and trials and tribulations as you walk through life. Oops, just road rage. What happens to me. Okay, go to my website where I have support [inaudible].
JEFF: And like the other thing, and I’m, you know, thinking mainly of, you know, family members with addiction, but it applies to all humans with stress. And that is when our nervous system gets activated it’s like then our blood flow, we have less blood flow and you know this more than I do the technical stuff of it. But there’s less blood flow to the Cortex, the part of the brain that can look at the context and look at these impersonal patterns and what are the factors that contribute. And with that blood flow to the Cortex, we can make best decisions, but when we’re activated and we’re all stressed out, it’s like the blood flow goes to the limbic or the primitive brain and it’s like we act on emotions and we take it personal like just like what you’re saying.
MEREDITH: Correct. And when you look at the mind align method that I developed, I started in 1992 with my first trip to –
JEFF: Oh my god Meredith.
MEREDITH: Yeah. In ’92 I traveled around the world and I was living in India for many months. I was in Asia for many months. I was an African for many months. And over almost 20 years of study in mindfulness with mind align method, everything is designed in there to help you master your emotional reactivity.
JEFF: Yeah.
MEREDITH: That’s what I learned. That was the takeaway from 20 years of study and –
JEFF: Right. Right.
MEREDITH: – [inaudible] so many years of being a psychiatrist is that we have a nervous system, we do. It’s peripheral, it’s called a peripheral nervous system. Our central nervous system is our head. Our peripherals and our limbs and when we get a stimulus, it causes a reaction. And if we don’t know what to do with that reaction, we’re lost in the wilderness, disoriented. We don’t know what to do. The first step to getting a control at anything and everything is just using the self observation, knowing how to deal with our reactions, calming yourself down, and then moving from a place of mindfulness and then you’ll know what your part is in whatever you’re in.
JEFF: Yeah.
MEREDITH: If it’s in your marriage or in your friendship or in your professional relationship because your inner –
JEFF: Right.
MEREDITH: – guidance will tell you [inaudible] my part. The way of doing things.
JEFF: Yeah. I just so love what you’re talking about, because I mean in the area I’m in with addiction and families often times and what a lot of families want and can get help from is someone who will walk them through a process, hold their hand, guide them through the whole thing. Just tell me what to do here. Just tell me what to do. And so like a coach or a guy can get people out of a situation, but it really doesn’t help that person understand how they can best navigate that situation when it comes up again. And what you just described there is in some ways a learnable process that every human can learn and practice to where they can use their own inner wisdom –
MEREDITH: Correct.
JEFF: – to make decisions that are most important for them, for their family, for their loved one kind of thing as opposed – it’s kind of like the, you know, the cliche statement about, you know, give a man a fish and he eats for a day and teach a man to fish and he, you know da da da da.
MEREDITH: [inaudible] That’s the answer to your bigger picture question two is how do we present this in the future, all of these big problems. The first thing is anchoring in our own truth. When you know what’s true for you and you know what’s real for you and not real and you know what’s right for you and not right. When you’re anchored in your own truth, that is your navigation system, that is your new rules, those are your rules for you.
JEFF: Yeah. Yeah.
MEREDITH: So society does become relatively ruleless, not lawless because we certainly have a law at work. There are just no rules within that line of order of the new way of doing relationship essentially.
JEFF: Right.
MEREDITH: So in a society where there are no rules within anything. Even I heard the other day, public schools have phones in the classroom, accessible to students here in Los Angeles. I don’t know about anywhere else or else parents will sue if they don’t take the phones away, okay? Yeah. So in a world where we don’t have rules like we used to at one time, the only rule that you can know that will never fail you are your rules for yourself.
JEFF: Yeah.
MEREDITH: Like what you don’t like. All of those things that make you you. However, how do you know your own rules? Well, you got to go inside and find them. So that’s the mind align method, we literally broken it down into five modules. We have five physical lessons, five emotional, five mental, five energetic, five spiritual, and we put them all together into a sequence and it’s not a conceptual education.
JEFF: Right.
MEREDITH: [inaudible] It’s experiential. So what we do is we teach you how to go inside and get so calm and relaxed inside as your eyes are open. And then it will create a situation where you have a reaction and then you get to use your mindfulness to feel that reaction in the present moment and work with it. So –
JEFF: And to bring it down yourself.
MEREDITH: You bring it down yourself to control your reactivity. We have three things with us. We already have our technology designs. We are going to be connected globally. We’ll have groups who want to learn this and who will all be working on it together. How to overcome our human problems together as a collective.
JEFF: Yeah.
MEREDITH: Be wise as we come together and work.
JEFF: Yeah. Wow. I love what you’re saying. And I could talk and talk and talk with you for quite a while about this. And you know, the one burning question that I have before I go to how can people learn more about the mind align method and your information. But that question is specifically, well, it could be as general as, you know, people who are active – live in an activated state, not the baseline that, you know, Stephen Porges created where the body’s calm, warm, relaxed, and it comes back to that after activation. But the baseline that’s gone up and up and up because someone has lived in a stressful environment for months or years kind of thing and their baseline is so close to, you know, one little thing happens and they snap kind of thing. I’m wondering with people like that, how do they see that? How do they use education? How can they be empowered or inspired to make change themself when the resources inside of them are so exhausted?
MEREDITH: Yes, that is a great question, which I see extremely frequently. So, the first thing that I would say to that is to give people hope that hey, your feelings make sense of where you feel chronically stressed. It’s not your fault, it’s the environment you’re in. You know whatever’s happened you didn’t know and so you got yourself there, but there is a way out. And the first step out for many people is actually stabilizing brain chemistry. What I have seen time and time again is that when I try to teach personal growth techniques, self healing techniques that essentially people cannot progress forward unless the brain chemistry is stable –
JEFF: Aha.
MEREDITH: – like into a smooth lake. Your boat is going to get from point A to point B most efficiently if the water is calm. If you’re trying to sail through a massive storm of a tsunami –
JEFF: Right. Great metaphor.
MEREDITH: – impossibly you would get lost. So the key is to stabilize brain chemistry. But for that the key is to have a doctor who really is able to read the client, their individual needs. There’s a lot of miss prescribing out there. When prescribing is good and accurate and like a laser precision, it’s unbelievable what can happen in just week, one week [inaudible] prescribe.
JEFF: Right. Yeah – yeah.
MEREDITH: The brain stabilizes, it’s such a beautiful thing to see and then right away people can start learning and growing how to work with themselves to become nonreactive to what?
JEFF: Right.
MEREDITH: Most of their problems are not personally, even though they are incredibly personal, is part of a bigger issue and people start to grow towards that hope and that vision of like: “Hey, maybe I’m not so bad after all. Maybe there is hope for me.” And having that inspiration do the work to move forward and then eventually if people can balance on their own naturally, they can get off the medicine. But I always say, don’t go off your medicine before you have something new to replace it that’s really working and that something new could take a few years to learn.
JEFF: Yeah. Wow. Thank you. Thank you very much. And I really appreciate what you were saying about stabilizing brain chemistry and I’m also aware, or at least let me just kind of put my own bias out there is that the medical model a lot of times can be seen as the do all end all as the only way to do that. And you know, people can get on medication after medication after medication and not every psychiatrist I would have this kind of conversation with and I’m sure you know this. And so I want to acknowledge there’s challenge to do what you just said and I’m curious like do you work with people online or if you don’t, can you give people, you know, maybe a few pointers as to how they can best assess the doctor that they’re working with or the what’s being recommended to them or.
MEREDITH: Yeah.
JEFF: Yeah. I’m asking some really hard questions.
MEREDITH: Oh, for me, these are questions I am so thrilled that are being asked. I’m so happy about this and absolutely I provide consulting services online. There are considered to be nonmedical services because I’m not diagnosing or prescribing. But absolutely people can bring their problems to me, let me know what’s going on and then I can sort it through it. I am, this is what I do, I’m in residential treatment. And the reason why I’m there is because I have to have that skill of laser like precision to figure out the big picture fast –
JEFF: Right. Yeah.
MEREDITH: – and then help people get well fast. If we don’t get the job done in 30 days, you know, there’s gonna be problems. That means brain chemistry unstable on a week, bottom line, and then people are progressing. This is at my main facility in Los Angeles where I’ve been a part of the fabric of this creation since it was birthed. So anyway, that’s why I have that skill set. I’m happy to bring that to people and I do so through a consultant service and maybe you can share with people my website and yes, I do have a wide variety of.
JEFF: Yeah, so the website there will be show notes, in this whole interview will be transcribed and the show notes are on my website and all that. But if could say how you want people to get ahold of you, I know you have a couple of different websites may be more. Can you talk a little bit about contacting you?
MEREDITH: Yes. They can reach me at doctorsagan@mindaligninstitute.com. That’s a long email address. Maybe I’ll make a shorter one for everybody. Make it easy for people, but right now that is the website address. I am moving away from medication management into the bigger picture of giving this information to the public. So I will be going more into this, so I will not be available online to diagnose and prescribe. However, what I can do is give you the big picture of what you’re dealing with. What I think is going on. Help you to know if you’re in a good treatment center, where a good one is. If you’re with a good psychiatrist, these are things that I can help you navigate to know where you are on your journey to mental wellness. Also be able to deconstruct the root causes, what you can work on, give you support and help.
JEFF: Wow. Wow. Thank you so much. So Meredith, in our conversation, was there anything that I didn’t ask about that you wanted to share before we end?
MEREDITH: Let me see. I think that the biggest thing that I like to, I can’t say that it was anything specifically to you Jeff, but I would say that I would like to leave your community with one thing before I go wishes to know A, my apologies for anywhere where a psychiatrist is not understood you or helps you to the degree that you would like to be. You know, you were saying about the medical model right now, it’s just antiquated and doctors are as upset as anybody. We all want it to be cut up, so please don’t get frustrated with your mental health provider. How you’ll know if they’re good or not is if you’re getting results. And if you’re not getting results, do change. Don’t stay with someone just because you think they’re nicer, things are good. Do find someone new. You deserve results. And I just really want people to know that it’s not your fault if you’re not getting better. There’s always hope for you. Keep searching, keep looking, never give up. There are answers and people like myself and Jeff and all the people, the mental health practitioners out there who truly care, we are all working on this for you and we will deliver answers soon.
JEFF: Wow. Thank you. Thank you very much, Meredith.
MEREDITH: You’re welcome.