The Mind Body Code
Tami Simon speaks with Mario Martinez , a licensed clinical neuropsychologist specializing in the emerging fields of contemplative psychology and psycho-neuroimmunology. He is the author of The Man from Autumn as well as the Sounds True audio learning program The Mind-Body Code. In this interview, Mario discusses his theory of biocognition and how we can use the power of mind to affect our wellness and fulfillment. (36 minutes)
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Tami Simon: Today I speak with Mario Martinez. Mario is licensed clinical neuropsychologist specializing in the emerging fields of contemplative psychology and psychoneural immunology. He’s the author of “The Man from Autumn”as well as the Sounds True audio program, “The Mind-Body Code: How the Mind Wounds and Heals the Body.” I spoke with Mario about his theory of biocognition, which views individuals as part of an inseparable, holistic, living field of mind-body historical culture and how we can use the power of the mind to affect our wellness and fulfillment.
Tami Simon: Mario, you’ve been here with Sounds True recording an audio learning series on the mind-body code, and you teach something called biocognition. Now this is a big word. What is biocognition?
Mario Martinez: I had to invent the word because I was looking at things in a holistic way. Medicine and science breaks things down into mind, body, psychosomatic, not psychosomatic, so I was trying to figure out a word that would bring together mind, body, spirit, and the cultural history. So I came up with the word biocognition. Biocognition basically looks at how our mind and our body and our spirit develop within a culture; because what happens is that we think that things are happening without the cultural ammunitions that we’re getting from day one. And the culture will kill you before the genes do. It’s that powerful.
So, basically, it’s a term to describe a process of how we develop as individuals within a culture and the culture is the one that shapes you, even more than your biology, even more than your genes.
Tami Simon: Let’s just break the word down. Bio, that’s biology, our physical self, and then cognition is how we think about things.
Mario Martinez: How we process, the belief systems. In biology you can include the feelings and sensations; in cognition you can include thoughts but also spirit, because spirit is a transcendental thought that you have. And then the culture is kind of implicit in there. The culture is basically the shaper of our reality.
One of my mentors was George Solomon. He was the one who invented the word psychoimmunology back at UCLA, when he found that the immune system responds to psychological processes. Of course they almost laughed him out of UCLA. So he called it psychoimmunology.
Then Bob Ader (Ater?), later comes up and he finds that not only psychology, but the nervous system affects the immune system, so he called it psycho/neuroimmunology. So it’s like a Frankenstein effect. They’re putting one piece after another.
Then they find that the heart responds to the immune system with the thoughts so they start calling it psycho neuro cardio. So one day I called George Solomon and I said, “I have a word,” and he said, “How long is it?” And I said, “It’s biocognition,” so biocognition brings psychoimmunology together with medical anthropology, mystical theology, because psychoimmunology studies how thoughts and emotions affect the immune system, the nervous system, the endocrine system, but it does it void of a culture. No culture.
Medical anthropology looks at the conception of illnesses, the interventions of the illness without looking at the biology, without looking at the psychoimmunology. So they both come together in biocognition. You’re looking at mind, body, culture. And then, of course spirit, I look at good, mystical theology, both Eastern—I like Tibetan Buddhist psychology the best as far as what I do–and also Western contemplative psychology, which is very powerful also from the mystics like Teresa of Avila and others. There’s a body of work right now in contemplative psychology. It’s very impressive.
Tami Simon: Okay, now how did you come to this? What’s your background?
Mario Martinez: I’m a clinical psychologist and I came about this out of frustration. I was doing some very good therapy, I thought. They were getting it, they were understanding it. They could regurgitate it back to me, but they weren’t getting better. They knew everything that needed to be known. There was the intellectual, and I was even doing some experiential things, relaxation and so forth. But not realizing that symbols are the thing that the biology responds to. So if you know something intellectually and you say, “I’m going to be a good person, or I’m going to have a good relationship.” You may not be aware of the language that you were taught by your culture. In biocognition what I found was that going across cultures–to me it was educational to go across cultures, because we get very ethnocentric, and we think that our culture is the reality. It’s only one reality.
So I found that I was looking at how people can be wounded emotionally. And the good news is that you can only be wounded three ways, and basically shame, abandonment and betrayal. So those wounds are usually inflicted by people who are important in your life. People who either have an authority over you or you need them for survival like father, mother and so forth. And those wounds are taught in the process of exchanging intimacy and love. So therefore we wrap the wounds around the love, so if you are learning intimacy or the connection with mother, father through shaming you cannot have love without shame, so you look for shame to be spoken fluently in the relationships. And each of them has an immunological response. So that’s how people get sick and that’s how people perpetuate their reality and think, “Well, I’m just not a lucky person. Every time I go into a relationship it’s the same thing: it’s abusive or it’s this or that.
Tami Simon: Okay, let’s slow down for a moment here. So these three ways that we can be wounded—so you’re saying that all humans regardless of culture all over the world—can only be wounded in these three ways. So how did you come to that conclusion?
Mario Martinez: Yes, because in every culture I challenge people to come up with a fourth one and they couldn’t. And I saw how the initial language of all cultures that I’ve studied, both Eastern and Western and African is basically a language that revolves around these three wounds, when you’re wounded. And it’s not what you tell the child, it’s how you interact with the child. So, you might say, “I want you to be an honest person,” and any time that child is honest you shame them. Well, what they’re learning is shame related to honesty, rather than being honest. That’s an intellectual thing we think we’re teaching, but we’re not. That’s the implicit language—that’s the language the biology picks up. So then honesty for you is a shaming emotion and you’re not going to practice honestly, you’re going to practice with shame. You’re going to teach honesty with shame. So if you want your partner to be honest you’ll teach your partner with shame and you don’t realize that your partner is being shamed.
The other thing, too, is from psychoimmunology—there’s a model of stress that comes from Hans Sailey(?) back in the 50s and that’s all they study: cortisol, stress; no cortisol no stress. And that’s nice, but it’s not sufficient. So the latest work in psychoimmunology is looking at, for example, what does shame do to the immune system? And they found that it doesn’t do anything to the cortisol. So if you use the stress model you’re saying shame doesn’t do anything. No big deal. No stress.
When they look at proinflammatory products, which are the things that cause the inflammation, that goes up significantly when you’re shamed. And that’s what causes cardiovascular illnesses, rheumatoid arthritis, and many other illnesses. So my work is language has to be inseparable from wellness. In whatever we do, whatever language we use.
Tami Simon: Okay, but let’s still track back. You were talking about is how we change through symbols. So what’s the connection between the three different kinds of wounding and symbols—the way the body responds to symbols.
Mario Martinez: Okay, if you look at language, language is basically a description of a symbol and of imagery, so language is kind of like the map, and the symbols and the imagery are the territory. The biology responds to the symbols and the imagery, not the language, because the language is the map. So for example, if you shame someone with the word, you say, “Here you go again.” That’s a word, but that word is basically inciting a symbol that’s associated with shame. So here’s a word, a symbol that’s crossing biology, so it has to be biosymbolic. Every thing that we exchange has a biological component. We’re biological beings. Every communication, everything we do has to have biology. So therefore, it can’t be anything other than biosymbolic.
Tami Simon: So you’re saying that associated with shame, abandonment, and betrayal are different chemical and biological responses when we have experienced those traumas. Our bodies have responded to that in certain kinds of ways. So how does a body respond to shame, and is that different in different cultures? Because you’re saying that the culture piece is so important.
Mario Martinez: That’s a great question. It’s archetypal, it’s universal, and the culture will give it the flavor of how to shame you. So, for example, if you’re a Masai warrior they’ll shame you because you didn’t kill the lion at fourteen. And in Nashville, you’re not playing the guitar very well. But the immune system responds the same way and the culture dictates the flavor of how to shame you but the immune system responds the same way to shame.
Tami Simon: Across the world.
Mario Martinez: Across the world.
Tami Simon: And how does the immune system respond to shame?
Mario Martinez: The inflammatory. Here’s the fascinating thing. Inflammatory products are necessary to cause inflammation around the wound or around an infection to protect and to encapsulate that infection so then the immune system can come in and fight. Well, interestingly, the immune system is responding as if you’re actually being wounded, because it secretes the proinflammatories. So the immune system doesn’t’ know the difference between symbolic and biosymbolic. It’s biosymbolic. So if you are living in a world of shame, in a world that you speak shame fluently, you’re going to trigger, most likely illnesses like cardiovascular, even cancer because it has an immunological deficiency.
And what George Solomon found is that before, it was thought that you have genetics and your genetics will determine everything, and there’s nothing you can do about genetics. So he took something that is very genetic. He took rheumatoid arthritis. You have to have the rheumatoid factor for arthritis to present itself. So he started looking at siblings and twins, various genetic, who both had the rheumatoid factor. One developed the rheumatoid arthritis, the other one didn’t. And there was one set of siblings that pretty much represented the whole picture. And both of them severely sexually abused by their father. They were in their forties. One had crippling rheumatoid arthritis, the other one was an athlete and very healthy and he asked them—here’s the biosymbol—”Is your dad still alive,” he asked the one with rheumatoid arthritis. “Oh yes,” the one with rheumatoid arthritis replied, “He’s still alive.””
“And do you see him?”
“Yes, I do, I see him twice a week, and every time I see him and I remember what he did to me, my symptoms get really bad and I go to the doctor and the doctor says, ‘Oh, it’s just stress when you see your dad, because he’s sick.’ ”
And the other one, he asked her, “What’s your relationship with your dad?” And she said, “I can’t wait for the S.O.B. to die so I can spit on his grave.” Then that’s called righteous anger.
Tami Simon: So that’s good for our immune system. All right, I like it.
Mario Martinez: But you don’t spin in the anger, you think about your dad, you get angry, you let it go. You don’t live in anger. She wasn’t an angry . So then he thought, “Hmmn, psychology has something to do with the immune system, so I’m going to call it psychoimmunology.” But any paradigm shift, the first thing you get is disdain. They thought, “Hah! You must be so naïve. How can the immune system be related to psychological processes?” And then the research came out more and more, and basically it is related.
Tami Simon: So basically what you’re positing here is that biocognition is in some way a next flowering of psychoneuroimmunology.
Mario Martinez: It’s a unifying theory. It brings psychoimmunology, mystical theology and medical anthropology together.
Tami Simon: That’s very ambitious, Mario.
Mario Martinez: It is, I know, sometimes I feel like a megalomaniac. But who else is going to do it? Somebody’s got to do it.
Tami Simon: Okay, so I want to go back now. How does my biology, my immune system respond to abandonment?
Mario Martinez: Ah, okay, the way to identify these wounds is they have even a temperature, and they of course—a child doesn’t know the word abandonment, they don’t know the word shame, but they know how it feels. Shame feels hot, you feel very hot and you feel a humiliation and a sense of shrinking. You have been humiliated, put into a position that you feel like you want to disappear. So it’s hot and it’s humiliating, embarrassing. Those are the components.
When you go to abandonment you feel cold and you feel isolated and you feel very fearful that you’re not going to see the loved one again. So it’s a cold emotion with the sense of isolation, aloneness. A child doesn’t know isolation, but they know aloneness–where’s everybody?
In the betrayal is an emotion that’s hot, and it’s anger. And you can see it very early. For example if you were a four-year-old and you tell them, “I’ll give you this little toy if you smile.” And the child smiles. Okay do it again, and the child smiles and the third one you say, “No, I’m not going to give it to you.” The child gets angry because it’s been tricked and they get red. So you see it’s very early, and the immune system has different ways of responding.
Shame is the one that’s been studied the most. Abandonment has more of a cortisol response because it’s a fear: fight or flight. It’s very primitive. It’s a survival kind of emotion. It’s very powerful because . . . you’ll know if you’re in a wound when you overreact the situation.
Let’s say you’re meeting somebody for lunch and that person’s fifteen minutes late, and you begin to feel this overwhelming emotion that’s not commensurate with the person being late. You’re dumping all your abandonment history into that moment. So then you respond with abandonment.
Tami Simon: So it’s possible that people will respond to all three of these. It’s not like I’m the shame type. All three wounds are welcome here.
Mario Martinez: In my case I have all three. I come from a Catholic background, so I had a PhD in shame at nine. But, yes, you can have all three, but there’s a saving one that’s the one that you are responding to the most.
Tami Simon: Is part of this theory that this wounding happened early in life?
Mario Martinez: Yes, very early in life.
Tami Simon: So we can’t necessarily track it in our mind. So how do we discover which of these wounding patterns is running out life?
Mario Martinez: Well one of the techniques that I use, which was in the series, is you have to go into deep relaxation. None of these things can be accessed intellectually. You have to go into brain waves that are receptive to the new information and also so the nervous system doesn’t protect you with rationalization and all the things that we’ve built. So you go into deep relaxations. So if you wanted to work with abandonment, what happens then is you begin to ask yourself, “When did I first feel this kind of cold feeling of being alone?” And you’ll start getting images. You’ll get sensations of coldness. And all of a sudden you realize you get the sense that you were four years old and mommy was going to pick you up from kindergarten and everyone was waiting and where’s mommy? Right there.
Or, you had an alcoholic father who wasn’t emotionally available. It’s an abandonment, but it’s an emotional abandonment. The other one’s a physical abandonment and so forth. Or an intellectual abandonment like “Mommy look what I did in school. Look 2 plus 2 equals 4.” “Oh, that’s nice.” An intellectual abandonment. So that’s the wound, and then we have a healing field that you learn to identify, because the healing field for abandonment is commitment. And the psychoimmunology changes. The biology changes from disempowered to empowered.
Tami Simon: How is the healing field commitment?
Mario Martinez: If you have been disempowered by a wound, abandonment, the re-empowering process is commitment. Commitment of consciousness, a commitment to yourself about something. So at the lunch example, your friend is late; you’re feeling that abandonment, the coldness and then anger, later, and you are building up all this language from so many years. First thing you do, you have to embody, know what is going into your body. Breathe, what is a commitment that I’m making to myself right now? The commitment that I’m going to make right now is I’m going to let this person know that next time they’re late, I’m going to either leave or start eating. And that commitment replaces the disempowerment that you got, and it changes the biochemistry. And then you start acting and living in commitment. But then, since we coauthor that, you have to look at how many people do I speak abandonment fluently with? And you have to start changing the relationships.
Tami Simon: What’s the healing field for shame?
Mario Martinez: For shame it’s honor.
Tami Simon: Okay what does that mean?
Mario Martinez: If you’re shamed you go into an honor consciousness. What would be the honorable thing that I need to do here right now?
An example would be, you’re at a corporate meeting. You come in, your work isn’t complete, and the CEO says, “Here you go again. Messing up.” And all of a sudden you see this overwhelming feeling, and what you want to do usually is respond with shame. So you stop, you embody it and once you learn how to do it you can do it very quickly.
Tami Simon: So what’s embody – you feel it where it is in your body?
Mario Martinez: How it’s manifest in your body. And then, what is the honorable thing for me to do here. The honorable thing would be for example: “The work is not complete. I’ll take care of it. I’ll get it done. But I’m not going to allow you talk to me this way.” Boundaries. You regain the boundaries that were taken away from you many, many years ago. And then you put a mirror in people’s faces to let them know what they’re doing to you. How they’re treating you.
If the person just says to you, “Well I’m sorry that you really didn’t have this ready.” It’s not of shaming. You could say, “You’re absolutely right. I’ll get it done by three o’clock.” Honor. When you practice it you’ll see it. Immediately it re-empowers you.
Tami Simon: And then the healing field for betrayal?
Mario Martinez: For betrayal it’s loyalty. Say, you have been betrayed by your partner. The thing that you will do is respond with betrayal language. I’m going to betray you, I’m not worthy—all the interpretations that we make. So what is the loyalty thing we have to do here? It’s loyalty to myself. To be loyal to myself, what are the boundaries that I need to set? Either that this relationship is over or that I set some boundaries so that we both have to be loyal to those boundaries, or loyalty to something beyond the moment that caused the betrayal.
And you’ll see that when you go into that consciousness of loyalty you get very creative, because you also have history of loyalty, you also have history of commitments, and you have history of honor. I teach people to go back to times when they were honorable so they can have this psychoimmunology of what honor feels like. And usually when you do it you find that the wounds are very localized. The healing fields are more systemic. It’s like a current, like a flow because it’s more exalted emotions. They have all kinds of changes—even the chemistry of your brain changes.
Tami Simon: So what you’re saying is when we introduce these healing fields we identify our core wounds, the chemistry of our body, our health, actually changes. So could you talk me through how, for example, does the chemistry of the body change with each of these healing fields?
Mario Martinez: So let’s take shame. You’re not aware that you’re speaking shame fluently. You shame people. They shame you back. You don’t know that you’re secreting a lot of proinflammatory products on a daily basis. And then that will interact with your genetic predisposition–let’s say for rheumatoid arthritis, and you start having symptoms and you go to a doctor and they’ll give you this and they’ll give you that, nothing related to a biosymbolic, because they’re treating the symptom.
Once you learn what you’re doing and you begin to speak honor and you begin to see the relationships they’re speaking shame and modifying them, proinflammatory products are reduced. Symptoms of arthritis improve. So we don’t know the damage we do to ourselves though the bioinflammation that we exchange. So as you begin to change that you begin to change the biochemistry that you’re secreting on a daily basis.
I have patients who have had terrible pain from the arthritis and they start with these changes, they do the techniques, and the pain begins to subside and even the inflammation begins to subside because they’re no longer producing the things that lead to the exacerbation of the problem.
Tami Simon: Now you have become interested in the lives of people who have lived to be 100, centenarians, and what we can learn from them. How does that relate to these three core traumas, and how did you get interested in this topic, anyway?
Mario Martinez: Because I thought I want to be around for a long time, but with quality of life. So where do I go? Go to the experts, not the doctors, the centenarians. Centenarians don’t go to doctors, and when you ask them what do your doctors say about this? ”I don’t know, they’re all dead.” So centenarians are people that I can teach them very little. They know more than I do.
Tami Simon: So how did you find these people, how many did you talk to?
Mario Martinez: I first looked at it from the research in centenarianism. By the way, it’s the fastest-growing segment of the population right now—75,000 right now. So I studied the American centenarians; the Ocabamba in Ecuador; the Tarahumaras, who are not centenarians, they’re runners, and they believe that as you grow older you become a better runner. And Harvard did a study and they found that runners in their 60s had better cardiovascular systems than runners in their 20s. Totally flips medicine upside-down
The Okinawans, the centenarians of the Caucasus and they all had very defined personality styles and cultures that went across the different cultures. One example: all centenarians are negotiators. They negotiate life. They get depressed, “What do I do with this depression?” Number one.
Number two they are all slightly underweight, even though some of them–a little bit are overweight–but you don’t have obese centenarians, You don’t have atheist centenarians. They’re not religious but they’re spiritual. Also the culture that they live in supports that growing older is a good thing and you are a source of knowledge. They don’t believe or even understand the term middle age. Middle age is a killer. I’ll tell you about it in a minute. They don’t believe in retirement. Retire from what I love? See the implication is that they do what they love.
There was a major study that was done on predicting heart attacks and after they factored out the smoking and all these other things they asked two questions: Do you love your work? And do you love yourself? If you say no to those two it’s worse than smoking. They love their work, and Ellen Langer did some studies on middle age and she looked at the people, and this is what got my attention: people who look significantly older than their age and people who looked younger. And she found that the common factor was that people who looked younger believed that middle age starts fifteen years later. So middle age starts at 75, and when you get to 75 it starts at 80, so you trick the immune system every time you’re moving along.
Tami Simon: Now is there any relationship between the wounds we were talking about—betrayal, abandonment, and shame—and the resolution of those wounds and living to 100.
Mario Martinez: Yes, yes, they intuitively do what I teach. Some of these people have had pretty difficult lives. They’ve been in concentration camps, but what they do is they don’t spin on the wound, and since they’re negotiators, they intuitively bring out honor, bring out commitment, bring out the healing fields without even knowing what they’re doing.
So there’s one that I interviewed who had been from Estonia and had been in a labor camp. The Nazis took over Estonia and he’d been in the camp for three years. And he said, “You know one of the most interesting things that happened was my mother was very upset with me because I couldn’t write her. And later when I got out I said, ‘Mom, I couldn’t write you because I was in a concentration camp,’ ” Humor, you see, not covering it up. He was really responding with honor and commitment. He didn’t say, “Mom, look at what I went through.” He didn’t victimize himself.
So the joy is a component of centenarianism. They don’t gloss over it. He went through his pain and everything, but he saw the humor. He said, “Well I’m out now, why am I going to complain if I’m out?” That kind of recovery is very powerful—if it’s real recovery–pseudorecovery would be Pollyanna. It doesn’t work. Intention doesn’t work. It has to be integrated. So I saw that in them and I saw these people recover really well. They forgive very easily. Not forgiving kills. When you’re around them you want to grow old because they’re so exciting to be around.
Tami Simon: You said something interesting. Intention doesn’t work. There’s a lot of talk about the power of intention. Healing through intention. Now you’re saying intention doesn’t work?
Mario Martinez: No, it doesn’t work by itself because it’s only a thought about something. There is something about imagery with emotions that helps healing at a distance—Larry Dossey’s work—but the intention that says, “I’m going to be very wealthy and I’m going to think about wealth,” isn’t going to go anywhere. It requires action and it requires cleaning the wounds first. Because if you don’t clean the wounds the money will come to you and you’ll sabotage it within two weeks.
Tami Simon: And that these wounds are functioning often at an unconscious level and our intention is often something that is happening just with the conscious part of our mind? So the unconscious is sabotaging whatever is intentional.
Mario Martinez: Yes, people that win the lottery keep it on the average of 18 months in the US. They can’t handle it. Joy is a very dangerous emotion. You have to be real careful with joy.
Tami Simon: What do you mean by that?
Mario Martinez: Well, because we have boundaries with abundance, and if it comes, it shakes you up and if you’re not ready to handle it—if your worthiness is not ready to handle it, it turns into a stress reaction.
Tami Simon: So that idea that there’s a boundary to our joy, I’ve heard it referred to as the threshold of our happiness. You can’t really go beyond your threshold of happiness. Now I want to bust that open. I want to increase my threshold of happiness. What is your recommendation?
Mario Martinez: Oh, no, you can. First is to know that joy is dangerous. But you have joy as a very powerful fluid or fuel and then the worthiness is that gate to it. If worthiness is very good, it opens up, and if worthiness is bad it shuts it down. So what do you do, again you embody it. The theory is very consistent. You could do an experiment. You could say, “I make this amount of money, a year. I’m going to do some imagery that I make 50 times what I’m making.” But then you do the imagery–all the money you could give to people, all the wonderful things you could do. And you do that imagery for five minutes—check your body–and the killjoy will be there. You’re body’s getting tense because it’s a new boundary and it causes turbulence. So you breathe into it, allow it to happen and go back and forth, back and forth.
Tami Simon: Back and forth between?
Mario Martinez: Between doing the imagery of how much you want to make, and how the body’s responding to it negatively. Your breathing will change. And then secondarily, you then look at the wound that stops you from moving faster. And then things start happening. Then intention works because it’s followed by joyful action.
So my thinking is that your wishes work at the speed of your beliefs and at the strength of your joyful action. That’s the key. So a lot of these ideas that intention alone will do it are fairly naïve because they don’t look at the wounds, and they don’t look at how the brain processes things. That the brain has limits and we have to teach it to expand those limits–to accept it without creating stress for you.
Tami Simon: So you’re saying joy is dangerous because if this joy enters my system I might just collapse underneath it. What’s the danger?
Mario Martinez: The danger is that it’s identified biochemically as a stress reaction. So you have cortisol and all kinds of things coming out. The brain, when you do functional MRIs, the brain shifts the attention.
Tami Simon: I know what you’re talking about–some wonderful things have been happening for me in the past year and I’ve been more stressed out than ever. And it’s been hard to explain. I don’t get it. It should be the year of my life and I’m hysterical.
Mario Martinez: What I do, is whenever anything good happens to me I do an expansion of the boundaries of abundance. I do a meditation and allow my worthiness to catch up.
Tami Simon: How do you allow your worthiness to catch up? That’s wonderful image—do I deserve this great person, this flow of success, but how do you address that core worthiness issue?
Mario Martinez: Not intellectually but by the actual mind-body processing. Say something really good happens. You’re all excited and you’re getting nervous. The central nervous system’s going on; cortisol’s going on, adrenalin now you sit and allow that to happen. You embody. You say what’s going on in my body? And once it begins to subside a little bit, allow yourself to ask yourself: “What wounds do I have that stop me from this worthiness.” And you get to a point where you say, “No wounds.” And you expand the boundaries. But in the work we all have to do it. I certainly have to do it quite a bit on mine.
Tami Simon: You believe people can do this on their own—not working directly with a therapist, psychologist, witness of some kind? This is deep work.
Mario Martinez: It is deep work, and I think it’s best done with a professional because it enhances. But if the professional doesn’t understand this then it’s very difficult to do. So I suggest that it’s done with a spiritual director, a psychologist, a shaman, a physician or whatever you consider to be , but that person has to have some knowledge of mind- body in order to be enhanced.
Tami Simon: And do you train people in this work in biocognition so they can lead other people through these processes?
Mario Martinez: Yes, we work with physicians, psychologists, and lately we’ve been getting a lot of executive coaches, so they can apply it to corporations, Or people who just want to use it for their relationships.
Tami Simon: Mario, thank you. This is incredibly rich how you’ve put together all these different fields into a map of biocognition.
Mario Martinez: Thank you, well, we’ve coauthored biocognition together, thank you.
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You may know that your mind influences your health, but what’s influencing your mind? Unless you answer this question, teaches Dr. Mario Martinez, you may be missing a key component on the journey to health and personal excellence. On The Mind-Body Code, the founder of Biocognitive Theory presents this audio curriculum about the dynamic interplay between our thoughts, our bodies, and our cultural history, and how to unlock this powerful doorway to wellness and fulfillment. Six CDs teach listeners how to balance the five portals of wellness, how to conquer the fear of success, the effects of cultural beliefs on the immune system, the cultural elements of longevity, and how to decode the body’s “biosymbols”.
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