How a 7 Day Meditation Retreat Rewired Stress, Belief, & Healing Part 1

What happens when you sit at 4 a.m. and breathe yourself into stillness for five and a half hours? We follow that question into Joe Dispenza’s retreat world, where heart-brain coherence, deliberate breathwork, and intention-setting collide with stories of recovery, time dilation, and a surprising lack of stress after the fact. We’re candid about how a structured seven-day schedule can change your baseline more than any single mystical moment.

We start with the backstory—Joe’s accident, the visualization that reshaped his path—and then ground the conversation in research on meditation’s effects on gray matter, the amygdala, and emotional regulation. From there, we walk through the retreat mechanics: guided sessions, kaleidoscope focus, and pineal gland work timed to melatonin’s pre-dawn peak. Whether you’re curious about the quantum field framing or you just want practical tools, we translate big ideas into clear steps you can test: morning body scans, loving-kindness for compassion, and a simple daily hour that shifts your nervous system out of high-beta churn.

Along the way, we share hard-won stories—ICU resolve, sound-bath visions, and coherence healing circles that feel like focused compassion in action. We also look at growing collaborations with researchers, control groups, and odd signals like random number generators that seem to “notice” heightened coherence. You don’t have to chase fireworks to benefit; becoming the person who can relax into “the nothing” and choose a future feeling is often enough to change your day—and, over time, your life.

If this episode helps you breathe easier or think differently about practice, tap follow, share it with a friend who needs calm, and leave us a quick review so more curious minds can find the show.

Referenced in this episode:

https://sourcethefilm.org/

Email us at info@thewomenareplotting.com, and find us on all the socials. Be safe and be excellent to each other.

Chapters

• 0:00 Intention And Energy
• 1:00 Welcome
• 1:25 Joe Dispenza’s Healing Origin Story
• 3:58 How Meditation Changes the Brain
• 4:42 How Meditation Benefits Our Mental Health
• 6:05 How Many Americans Have Tried Meditation
• 6:55 Everyday Practices That Should Count As Meditation
• 8:17 Inside The Advanced Retreat Structure
• 9:09 The 4 A.M. Five-Hour Meditation
• 10:23 Time Dilation & Meditating With a Kaleidoscope
• 12:06 Breathwork And The Pineal Gland
• 13:41 Etty's Mystical Experience
• 16:38 Quantum Field Framing And “The Nothing”
• 18:31 Studies, Controls & Healings
• 21:37 Sound Baths & Mystical Experiences
• 22:31 What the Bleep Do We Know?
• 24:01 Jane's Health Crisis & The Power of Her Mind
• 26:59 Manifest Today, Before a Crisis
• 28:47 Etty's Journey to Dr. Joe
• 31:08 Marco Island Retreat, November 2024
• 31:51 Dr. Joe's Coherence Health
• 35:29 Dr. Ellen Langer's Studies
• 37:31 Random Number Generator & The Baby Chick & Robot Experiment
• 39:58 Closing

Transcript

[00:00:00] Etienne: Well that's what he says actually. He's like, I don't want people just coming to me because they're dying. Like, Like, we 

[00:00:05] Heidi: Yeah, let's avoid 

[00:00:06] Etienne: to come to me who just wanna make their life better, who just wanna be happy, wanna have less stress. You wanna have a better job and a better relationship with it. Whatever it is, he's saying, you can have any of those things if you put that frequency out there. So once you hit that spot where you've like, okay, now I'm in the nothing and now I'm gonna put out there what I want. What is it that I want? And that just focusing on what I want creates that frequency and it puts it out into the world.

[00:00:30] Etienne: And then he wants you also then to open up your heart. So, your mind is the electricity that you're sending out into the field and your heart is the magnet that's bringing it to you. So it'll manifest in the 3D world eventually, however it's going to come. You have no idea when or how it's gonna get to you, but if you do it enough and you put it out there, it'll come back to you. Or you're just so fucking happy, you don't really care anymore. Whatever it was, you're like, ah, I don't have stress no more.

[00:01:00] Etienne: Welcome listeners. This is The Women Are Plotting. I'm Etienne Rose Olivier and I'm here with my friends and co-hosts, Heidi Willis and Jane Gari.

[00:01:15] Etienne: On today's episode, we're gonna be talking about Dr. Joe Dispenza and his meditation retreats, because I just came back from a retreat just this past Friday. 

[00:01:25] Etienne: And my fun fact for today is really about Dr. Joe Dispenza himself. And there's a well-known story about him that involved a serious back injury that he sustained in 1986.

[00:01:37] Etienne: During a triathlon, he was turning a corner and was hit by some kind of a truck or SUV going 55 miles an hour. He broke six vertebrae in his back. And, the recommendation by the doctors were that he was, they were saying that he needed to get steel rods in his back to fix him.

[00:01:55] Etienne: And he just knew that that was going to mean a lifetime of pain and possibly not having full capacity over his body. So he believes in the body's ability to heal itself, and he aimed to connect with his inner intelligence. So he dedicated hours every day visualizing that his spine was healing and he wanted to become healthy again.

[00:02:17] Etienne: So he focused on creating a clear and uninterrupted mental image of his desired outcome. He reportedly struggled at first to maintain focus during his meditations, but he persevered, ultimately experiencing a breakthrough. So he shifted his mental energy from dwelling on the past trauma to envisioning a future state of complete healing.

[00:02:41] Etienne: So the results were after six weeks of this dedicated practice, he started experiencing significant changes in his body. Within nine and a half weeks, he was back on his feet and he was able to walk again. And a few weeks after that, which was like 11 to 12 weeks after the accident, he was reportedly back at work and even back in training according to his blog.

[00:03:02] Etienne: So his journey led him to investigate the mind body connection further, becoming a speaker and author on topics such as neuroscience, epigenetics, and quantum physics, and how they relate to healing and personal transformation. And he shares those insights in his books like You Are The Placebo is one of his famous books, and Becoming Supernatural was his last book that he wrote.

[00:03:26] Etienne: And he shares these experiences and his meditation practices in his retreats. So he has like these seven day retreats that I went on. And there's also advanced follow-up retreats that are four to seven days depending on where you go. But yeah, that's my interesting fact for today. I know that Jane was gonna share her interesting fact today. Probably not fun fact, so interesting fact, but maybe

[00:03:50] Jane: facts. Well, I mean, I find it fun, just because I'm still a novice in my meditation practice, but I'm always curious about what it does to the brain. 

[00:03:59] Jane: And so, my fun fact is that meditation can actually increase gray matter in your brain, in areas related to learning, memory and emotional regulation. And then it decreases though, gray matter in the amygdala, which is the brain's stress center. And I always just found that, when you were talking about the mind body connections, right? Like if you're really being intentional about a meditation practice, there are so many scientific studies that show that it has a physical impact on your brain's health. That fact was from a Harvard study. There are been many studies that prove this, but I always like to see that it's not, some people think that it's all woo woo, but no this is, this is science.

[00:04:39] Etienne: Yeah. Science. What about you, Heidi? What

[00:04:42] Heidi: Yeah. I, I found so many interesting, 'cause there's been studies that say that it reduces the likelihood of Alzheimer's and it just has all these good health benefits, right? Like, helps with stress, helps with mind body connection and also appears to increase your compassion. So mindful.com says, while we may espouse compassionate attitudes we can also suffer when we see others suffering, which can create a state of paralysis or withdrawal. Many well-designed studies have shown that practicing loving kindness meditation for others increases our willingness to take action to relieve suffering. Appears to do this by lessening the amygdala activity in the presence of suffering, but also activating circuits in the brain that are connected to good feelings and love. So yeah, I love that. 

[00:05:37] Etienne: Yeah, I've done loving kindness meditations before. Yeah, it does, make you feel more connected and more wanting to help others in your environment or people that you come across, even just strangers, you know, just like holding the door open for somebody. Something simple as that can make a difference. Or, somebody, you drop something who has like a walker, so they can't exactly pick something up easy. You know

[00:05:57] Heidi: Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:05:59] Etienne: Things like that. If you're just aware of what's going on in your 

[00:06:01] Heidi: mm-hmm. 

[00:06:01] Etienne: You can just do helpful little things all the time for people. 

[00:06:05] Heidi: Yeah. Another, fact that I had seen somewhere was that I was kind of surprised. Only 14% of Americans say they've tried meditating, which seems so low. Like more people need to meditate. I think we'd have a kinder society. Right. 

[00:06:25] Etienne: God. I mean, I was, yeah, 14. Yeah, that does seem really low. 

[00:06:28] Jane: Well, especially since we have, uh, you know,

[00:06:31] Heidi: that's just trying it, that's not

[00:06:33] Etienne: Yeah, that doesn't mean they do it on everyday basis. I wonder how small the percentage is for a daily basis. 

[00:06:37] Jane: I think more people engage in meditative practices than would, and maybe they don't label it that. Like I know that there's a lot of people who, like, I think prayer is a form of meditation. I think if you're like, you know, walking in the woods or hiking and that could be like a moving meditation and people

[00:06:55] Etienne: like they should count fishing as meditation. When men are just sitting there, just sitting there. They're not talking to each other. They're just zoned out. Just sitting there with, what do you think they're probably like, 

[00:07:05] Heidi: Well, who knows? Maybe they're thinking about porn and stuff like that.

[00:07:09] Jane: No, I know dudes who go fishing who seriously, they're just like, they're just zoned out and they're just appreciating the stillness of the lake. And I think that's entirely a meditative practice, but they just wouldn't call it that because it may be just, I think maybe the label of it. So, I'm gonna give like an honorary, like 20 points to that 14%. Like, I don't know.

[00:07:29] Etienne: you like the fishing is the meditation. 

[00:07:47] Etienne: I used to think the same thing about when I would do my triathlon training. So when I go on the really long bike rides or the really long runs or jogs, I'm not really running, I was jogging. I wasn't going very fast. But like my mind is just, it's focused on the moment. It's in the moment. It's not thinking about my problems outside of what I'm doing. It's just right here, right now. And that's mainly what I wanted to do with my meditations when I first started meditating until I found Dr. Joe Dispenza's meditations, 'cause his are all guided.

[00:08:01] Etienne: I mean, you can purchase the music that he uses from his meditations or just find it on Spotify. But if you do his regular meditations, they're all guided and it's good because it keeps you thinking of what he's trying to do with your body and your mind. So yeah, I mean, I was telling you guys earlier and I'm saying no, no, we should wait till he start the recording.

[00:08:20] Etienne: So the retreat that I just went to is the advanced retreat and it's supposed to be the second level. The first level is actually you can go online to his website and buy the Progressive Online retreat. They used to have them in person, but he just decided not to do those anymore, just to make it a recording and you can just buy the recording. And then once you've listened to that entire recording, you can then sign up for an advanced retreat in person, when they have them across the country and they have some in other parts of the world. But on these retreats, you are basically meditating, six of the seven days.

[00:08:51] Etienne: You don't actually meditate the first day or the first evening, but you do meditate all the rest of the time that you're there. And they did say that they've counted up how many hours it ends up being over this seven or six days, really, you're meditating 35 hours over six days. It ends up being like three times a day we're meditating. 

[00:09:11] Etienne: And one of those meditations is multi-hour. This time it was actually five and a half hours of one meditation. Yeah. That was on the second to the last morning. So we have to get there at 4:00 AM and be there ready to meditate at 4:00 AM And , yeah, no getting up. You can't go to the bathroom. If you get up and leave the room, you will not be allowed back in. I don't think anybody gets up. I mean, maybe somebody does, but

[00:09:31] Jane: no. That would be like my worst. Uh.

[00:09:34] Etienne: Well, you're getting up before you're supposed to really be awake. You would think. Now think about it, when was the last time you had a drink? You didn't, if you knew you were gonna be meditating for hours that morning, you're not gonna have a drink before you start.

[00:09:44] Etienne: Right? So I actually hadn't had anything to drink, so I was so dehydrated since like 5:00 PM the day before. So I had gone almost 12 hours with no liquid of any kind and no food. So I didn't have to go to the bathroom in either capacity. I didn't have to urinate or defecate. Not until later everything was way put off because we didn't finish till nine 30 in the morning and then we went to go straight to breakfast. So even then, I still didn't have to pee for hours. 

[00:10:13] Jane: Wait, you meditated from 4:00 AM until 9:30 AM

[00:10:17] Etienne: mm-hmm. Yes. 

[00:10:19] Heidi: So, so did you have an experience?

[00:10:21] Etienne: I, I, well.

[00:10:23] Heidi: Um. 

[00:10:23] Etienne: I did not know that time when you hear of the word time or phrase time dilation, I always thought that meant that time is expanding always. But I guess it can also mean that time is shrinking. So both times, 'cause this was my second time, I did a retreat both times that I did this exact meditation, I thought that if you asked me how long I thought I'd been meditating, I would've told you, uh, maybe two hours. Like it didn't seem that long. It didn't seem like five and a half hours. I'm telling you. I mean, there was times, like in the very, I don't know, maybe in the first 20 or 30 minutes, I felt like my body was fighting me. It just didn't wanna feel comfortable. It didn't wanna be like, it didn't wanna listen to what I was trying to do.

[00:11:05] Heidi: down? 

[00:11:05] Etienne: You're sitting, you're mostly sitting. But you do go through sitting, laying down. Sitting, laying down, you basically are kind of going back and forth, but you're mo more than not, you're sitting I think, I'm not sure because I don't remember everything, you know what I mean?

[00:11:22] Etienne: And most of the time we had our eyes closed, but there were times he actually wanted you to have your eyes open. And we're looking at images on a screen, which were a kaleidoscope image, where it just kept changing with different colors and images, and we also focused on molecules that he wanted us to try to release from our pineal gland. So his meditations in general start out with you focus on your heart and you want your heart to be open and calm. And then you move from your heart to focusing on your brain. Like you're sending the energy that you put in your heart up to your brain. And then once you've got your brain energized, then you wanna try to sync up. So they have the same exact energy. So they're going at the same energy waves with each other. 

[00:12:06] Etienne: And then once you finish that, he then does this, we do the specific breathing where we're taking our muscles, starting at your perineum. So you start with your perineum, and as you take a slow breath in, you're tightening your perineum, you're tightening your lower abdomen, your upper abdomen, you're bringing your shoulders down, you're tightening your chest. And your spine is completely straight. And then right at the very end for the last couple seconds, he wants you to arch back.

[00:12:32] Etienne: And what we're doing is we're taking a spinal fluid and we're making it move faster through our cerebral spinal column. So I guess normally if you're just a normal person going through your day, a full like revolution of your cerebral spinal fluid through the entire system of your spinal cord and your brain takes 12 to 24 hours. So it doesn't take, it takes a long time, but he's moving it very, very quickly. So with this method, we're basically shooting the fluid up through to our third ventricle, and we're trying to touch the pineal gland, which is at the very top of your third ventricle. And in the third ventricle that pineal can release melatonin and serotonin depending on what time of day we're at. So the reason why that meditation has to start at 4:00 AM is because that's the time of day between one and 4:00 AM is where your melatonin is at it's highest level. So he was trying to invite us to have a mystical experience, so making our body release chemicals into it, that would make us have a metaphysical experience. Uh. 

[00:13:35] Jane: And did you?

[00:13:36] Etienne: I did not either time. It's fine. I did not, 

[00:13:45] Etienne: I had an interesting experience when he first introduced the kaleidoscope. We did a smaller meditation of the kaleidoscope two days before. Just so people who've never, because I guess it's like 60% of the people who go to the retreats, this is their first time at a retreat, so they don't know what to expect. So he has to introduce what he wants us to do. Basically he tries to introduce it ahead of time so we can get used to the idea and then we actually try to do it. So he showed us the kaleidoscope images and that was a short meditation. Uh, but I would say short, I don't know, 45 minutes to an hour. Maybe it was even 30 minutes. I have no idea. But during that one I actually did, it was kind of insane because I did, it wasn't when I was looking at the kaleidoscope, but it was when I laid down at the end that the sounds around me of the people, just little tiny sounds, I started believing that I was having an experience of my past lives, of how I had died. And I know that sounds really weird, like I think I might have died on a boat sometime, like, because I had this image of me laying on a boat and I was hearing like a bell on a boat. I was hearing that and I don't think I was really hearing, but that's what I was experiencing.

[00:14:50] Etienne: And I just kept, but they weren't scaring me. So I was having these images or these experiences, but it didn't scare me. I was just really interesting. And it was also, I think during that meditation where I felt like I was having this excruciating pain also by laying down in my right knee. Like just straight up, like it felt like somebody was stabbing me in the knee and it only maybe happened for like five minutes, but it didn't scare me.

[00:15:13] Etienne: I was like, well, there's no reason for me to have pain there, so I'm not really worried about it. I was just like. Why is that happening and what does that feel like and why? You know, like I, and then it went away and it was just completely gone. So I have no idea why that happened, but I had experiences like that. But not during that really long meditation. I did not have a mystical experience, unfortunately. But I do think it's coming in the future.

[00:15:34] Etienne: Like I believe that I will have one eventually, but I didn't finish explaining how he does his meditation. So we do like the heart and the mind, and then we get the breathing, we get the cerebral spinal fluid going, so we can hopefully stimulate the pineal gland, get it to release chemicals. And he also says that those chemicals, the serotonin, the melatonin, they're only a few molecules away from DMT.

[00:15:55] Heidi: Mm-hmm. 

[00:15:56] Etienne: And a few other chemicals that actually can create metaphysical experiences. Oh, and Valium is also another chemical that can be released. So every time I do that breath, even if I did it right now in front of you guys, I get this overwhelming feeling of calm. Like I just feel so, like maybe I just did get a Valium. I don't know what Valium feels like 'cause I've never had a benzodiazepine in my life, but I imagine that it would feel like this. Like you just feel so, like your stress is just gone and you don't care what's gonna happen or what's about to happen. You're just completely okay with everything. And so after the breath and the fluid goes through your body and you've touched your pineal gland hopefully. And you do the breath a few times, like at least four or five times.

[00:16:38] Etienne: Then you go into the main meditation, which generally is he wants you to experience nothing he wants you to focus on just nothing. The nothing around us. And how he explains it is that, like, this is where the quantum physics basically comes into things. There's a video that he played for us. David Tong talks about the quantum field and how he showed a computer simulation of what it would be like in a vacuum. So he showed like a box and he said, in this vacuum, if we removed everything that's physical out of this box, this is what it would look like. And it basically, you can go to the video and it's actually 24 minutes and 46 seconds on this video. Is that actual computerized simulation of what it would be. And you can see all of these wave things happening. What they're saying is the current theory of quantum physics is that everything, there's just a field. Fields of waves.

[00:17:31] Etienne: And what we see, what you and I, the 3D world that we're looking at all the time with our eyes open, we're also waves, but we're going at such a slow rate. We're at the slowest rate that that energy and frequency can actually vibrate. And it looks like we're solid, but we're not actually solid. But like the rest of the 99.99% of the world that we don't see, that's just energy and waves and frequency. So that's what he wants us to tap into. So we do all this, beginning part of the heart and the mind, and then activating the pineal gland which actually he says, takes your mind out of your body and puts it in your brain. So you're removing all of the trauma that we store in our body and we put it into our mind so that we can then expand our mind basically.

[00:18:16] Etienne: If you know anything about like Buddhism or meditation and there's just so many religions over the years that have talked about chakras, the energy fields. He takes all of the religious connotation out of it and just makes it science and quantum physics basically. 

[00:18:31] Etienne: And they started doing actual scientific studies. So they got scientists from UCSD involved in his work starting in, I think it was February of 2020. What they've found out from using all these people as test subjects and they even have controls 'cause they use people who are also at these resorts. Usually it's like, I come there with my partner, but my partner's not actually doing any meditations. He's just gonna hang out at the pool and drink and hang out, not do anything like no meditation. He's just having a vacation while I am attending the event. He would be the control. So they did have controls for these experiments.

[00:19:06] Etienne: There's an entire movie called The Source it's Within You, that you can find online. And, we'll put a link obviously in the show notes, but, I purchased that a while ago and I re-watched it again today to take notes from there. So I literally like wrote stuff word for word down from that into my little notebook to talk about it today. But yeah, they've proven things that have changed in these people, like basically the energy field, like we all have energy fields and any kind of disease that we have, it's just that person's energy field is just a little off. So he's taking us to a place where we can actually tap into the perfect energy field so we can heal ourselves, basically. And there's people who have healed themselves of cancer, like breast cancer. A woman talked about having spinal cancer. A guy who had multiple myeloma who only had months to live, he went to an event and was completely healed. He went to get a scan two weeks after his event, and there was no more cancer in his body.

[00:20:01] Heidi: Yep. 

[00:20:01] Jane: Whoa. 

[00:20:02] Etienne: Yeah. He got a bone marrow biopsy and a yeah. Zero, no more cancer. And this guy was a neurologist himself. 

[00:20:07] Heidi: I've been a big proponent of the power of the mind for a long time, because I've done hypnosis and self hypnosis for many, many years. Jane has been there since the beginning when I first started going to a hypnotherapist. And yeah, I was on painkillers for my back and, I still have a difficulty with my back on occasion. It was out for a month this year to remind me

[00:20:33] Etienne: Oh, that's right.

[00:20:34] Heidi: But it has helped me have a decently normal life, just being able to go to that space where you can turn down the pain and I got so good that I was able to turn down anxiety and depression. And it's crazy. So you don't have to go to a Joe Dispenza retreat, you can do this on your own.

[00:20:57] Etienne: Yeah, you can. I literally get a book from the library. That's where I first got his

[00:21:01] Heidi: Yeah, yeah. So meditation is any kind of work in that realm. I read a article about this kid who had a brain tumor and he just, every night he visualized going to the room where the tumor lived and taking a whack at it, like every night, taking a whack at it. And over time he killed this brain tumor, this inoperable. Like he was dying, like it was killing him. And the doctors were shocked to find that it was gone. He killed it himself just with visualization.

[00:21:37] Heidi: So, yeah. And I've had so many mystical experiences during meditation. Like the sound bath that I went to just yesterday, I was seeing sacred geometry. It was like I was on ayahuasca during the entire hour I was in the sound bath meditation. It was incredible. So, yeah. So I'm having, maybe you need to come with me to a sound bath. 'cause you would have some mystical experiences

[00:22:05] Etienne: we, we are gonna make a trip out to you, so we have to definitely yes. 

[00:22:10] Heidi: Yeah. We'll have to plan it for when there's several. Because, she only does the full moon and New Moon sound baths, every two

[00:22:17] Etienne: we have to yeah, 

[00:22:19] Heidi: But she has the Tuesday noon ones every Tuesday. So we'd have to kind of try and plan it around a full moon or a new moon. That would be awesome. Then you guys can experience two in one week.

[00:22:29] Etienne: That'd be so cool.

[00:22:31] Jane: I mean, they're healing frequencies, right? That just goes back to what you were saying, Etienne about the fields and that type of thing. I remember years ago, I can't remember what year this film came out, but my husband and I were watching this movie I guess you'd call it a documentary, it's called What the Bleep? Do We Know?

[00:22:50] Etienne: Yeah, he's on there. Dr. Joe, just, that's where he started getting famous, was from that movie.

[00:22:55] Heidi: Yeah. Love that movie. 

[00:22:56] Jane: I just remember that film kind of crystallizing some things that I had like just suspected, right? Because like my experiences with religion and meditative practices have been like I'm in a cafeteria. Just be like, I'll take a little, this, this makes sense to me. I'm gonna take a little of this. You know? And I felt like that film just kind of put everything like on the plate that I was like, yeah, this stuff goes together. And I remember them talking about some of the aspects of quantum physics where particles changing their behavior because they seem to be aware that they're being observed, right? Whether it behaves as like a particle or a wave. And I just

[00:23:34] Etienne: Wow. You got it.

[00:23:36] Jane: Yeah. I was like, wow. So I saw this movie years ago. I do own it. And I feel like, we've been talking about watching it with our daughter because now she's old enough where we can have this philosophical conversation about it. But I remember feeling like in moments of extreme duress of saying to myself, okay, I believe these things in theory and now that I am being tested about it, can I deliver? Right? 

[00:24:01] Jane: And, I won't go too deep into this, but just as a point of reference, years ago, I almost died from a severe stomach bleed. And while I was in the ICU, they sent a chaplain to me. I like talking like

[00:24:12] Etienne: my god. 

[00:24:12] Jane: like rite Yeah. And I was like, wait, what is happening? And I remember saying very clearly, I was like, I thank you for being here with me and if you would pray with me while I sit here in a very prayerful, meditative state and just hold my hand and send me that energy, I would really appreciate that. But I'm letting you know I'm not dying today. I'm like, I have a child and I need to be here for her and I feel very strongly that I'm going to be okay. And I remember thinking like, okay, Jane. Do you believe this or not? Because, that would be the time to like show up in a way that you put your money where your mouth is.

[00:24:48] Jane: And I just remember very calmly telling everybody like, I'm a mom, I have to get out of here. Can I leave today? I have to go home. And they were like, um, sweetheart, no, you're not going home. And I'm like, well, soon. I just remember, like, I just sat there, I had nothing else to do with the hospital. I just sat there and meditated on, seriously I envisioned, the ulcers in my stomach, all the holes. They were like, you have four holes in your stomach. And I was just like, I gotta close that shit. I just remember just sitting there just like laying there in the hospital and just closing my eyes and just inviting like, I would say it like, I was just calling all angels. I'm like, I need your help. I'm like, if we could just kind of like go in there, let's just kind of like close everything up. I'm like, I gotta get back to my daughter.

[00:25:35] Jane: And then I would just sit there and feel these waves of light just flowing over my body. And there was like a sound to it. It was kind of like an electrical humming kind of sound. And that's all I did for hours, for four days. What else was I gonna do? You know? But I do remember thinking like, okay, that's real. That, that's, that's real. And they were just like telling me

[00:25:57] Etienne: Were they amazed at how quickly you got outta the hospital? 

[00:26:00] Jane: I mean they 

[00:26:00] Etienne: I don't know if four days was fast or not for 

[00:26:02] Jane: eh, they just kept telling me how lucky I was. And I was just like, yeah,

[00:26:06] Etienne: I mean, they sent you the chaplain, they thought you were, you're gonna have a heavenly discharge.

[00:26:12] Jane: Well, I mean, I lost 40% of my blood. That was like a, you know, it was a bad time, but then I was fine and they kept saying like, oh, well, for the rest of your life you're gonna have to do X, Y, Z. And I was like, yeah, we'll see about that. Like all these meds that I was gonna have to be on that, on any of those things. But, I do think that because I do have some chronic stuff that I still need to work on, that it's a good reminder to me that I was like, okay, you were in a situation where it was just like, it's time to manifest, right? Like, and I was like, does it always have to be life threatening? Could we just do this on a regular basis so that, um, health and wellbeing are just kind of like, a normal state, right? Of

[00:26:52] Etienne: Well that's what he says actually. He's like, I don't want people just coming to me because they're dying. Like, Like, we 

[00:26:58] Heidi: Yeah, let's avoid 

[00:26:59] Etienne: to come to me who just wanna make their life better, who just wanna be happy, wanna have less stress. You wanna have a better job and a better relationship with it. Whatever it is, he's saying, you can have any of those things if you put that frequency out there. So once you hit that spot where you've like, okay, now I'm in the nothing and now I'm gonna put out there what I want. What is it that I want? And that just focusing on what I want creates that frequency and it puts it out into the world.

[00:27:22] Etienne: And then he wants you also then to open up your heart. So, your mind is the electricity that you're sending out into the field and your heart is the magnet that's bringing it to you. So it'll manifest in the 3D world eventually, however it's going to come. You have no idea when or how it's gonna get to you, but if you do it enough and you put it out there, it'll come back to you. Or you're just so fucking happy, you don't really care anymore. Whatever it was, you're like, ah, I don't have stress no more. Literally, that was the first thing I noticed when I started doing the meditations was my stress level. 'Cause I'm was doing at least an hour a day. My stress levels were like going into nothing. I just don't experience stress anymore like I used to. I used to always have something to be stressed about, something, you know, like, my house isn't clean enough, or when do I have to go to work again? Or, I just am worried I'm gonna take care of a kid where maybe they're dying or I'm not gonna catch it in time.

[00:28:15] Etienne: It's like just I could find anything to be stressed about, literally anything. And it doesn't happen to me anymore. It really just doesn't, even when I allow myself to procrastinate on some things and let them get to the wire of like, okay, now you only have a couple hours to do this, you better get your shit going. You know? It's like, I'm still not really that stressed. 'cause it doesn't really matter when it gets down 

[00:28:34] Heidi: Mm-hmm. 

[00:28:35] Etienne: What matters in the world. 

[00:28:36] Jane: So is this a daily practice then that you, are you waking up and this is like, walk us through, well I guess like walk us through the rest of the retreat and then how does that carry over into like everyday practice?

[00:28:47] Etienne: I first found out about Dr. Joe a year ago July. So it's been over a year now that I've known about him. And I heard him on a podcast, I heard him on Soul Boom, Rainn Wilson's podcast, I love that podcast. I'm gonna give a shout out to that.

[00:29:01] Etienne: But, I heard Dr. Joe on there, and that's when I got two of his books from the library and just started reading them. And then I realized, no, I just have to buy these, I have to have these books for myself. So I did the eBooks and then I started doing the meditation. So I I went on his website and purchased the meditations, one of his books talks about the meditations you're supposed to do. And this is, instead of the breathing work, it used to be you would visualize parts of your body from your feet all the way up to your head, and the meditation was just that for like an hour of you, visualizing your entire body in all of its tiny little parts.

[00:29:32] Heidi: Know what's wild? I remember doing this as a kid.

[00:29:36] Etienne: Did you? 

[00:29:37] Heidi: Yeah. Our teachers did, it had us all laying down and we started at our toes and we were like tensing them and relaxing 'em, tensing 'em, relaxing them, and then just going from like body part to body part. Okay, now now's your foot. Now it's your ankles. And yeah, like they were teaching us meditation back then. It's

[00:29:55] Etienne: Yeah. And supposedly as you're doing that, you're changing your brainwaves. So you're going from the stressed, high beta brainwaves down to the slowest, most peaceful brainwave you can have, I believe is your gamma, the gamma wavelength.

[00:30:08] Etienne: I did that meditation until I went to the retreat, basically. 'cause I don't think I progressed to anything else. Before then, I was doing that solidly for a an hour every day. And the best time basically is to do it as soon as you get up in the morning, if you can do it then.

[00:30:23] Etienne: I mean he doesn't really care, but he says it's best to do it right away just to start your day off right. And, also 'cause your melatonin's higher than but not as high as one to four in the morning. I'm not, not getting up between one and four in the morning on purpose, but maybe. I've been thinking about it because I do have a pineal gland meditation that is specifically to try to get a mystical experience. And I think if I did get up at 4:00 AM when I'm not working, and do it, that I could have that mystical experience quickly.

[00:30:52] Etienne: But I did sign up for that retreat as soon as I could. I went online and saw there was one coming up last year, it was November, at Marco Island in Florida. I signed myself up and my ex-boyfriend. And it was there that we started doing all of the meditations. 

[00:31:12] Etienne: And so you basically start your day with the meditation. Not the first day, 'cause I, again, that just is like basically a talk that he gives in the evening. And, you start your real meditations on day two and that day you come to the ballroom of whatever hotel that you're at, and you do a meditation right away. Then he talks for a few hours and you'll have like a break and then he'll come back and talk again. Then we'll do another meditation, then we have lunch, then we'll come back, he'll talk again. Then we'll do another meditation, and then we'll break for tea or whatever. And then we'll come back, he'll talk again. So it's basically a lot of talking. But meditating, you do meditate three times a day, except on the last couple of days.

[00:31:51] Etienne: He works in, instead of a meditation, you're doing a coherence healing. So they have it set up where, four to eight people are around somebody who's on the floor laying between you. And you are taking your energy and he takes you through a quick meditation to get your heart and your brain, and then you're in the void that nothing void. And then you're bringing your energy from your heart into your hands, and then you're basically turning it towards the people in the middle and healing them and trying to synch your energy with the other healers in 

[00:32:24] Heidi: It's like

[00:32:25] Jane: That sounds like reiki. Exactly. I was gonna say, it's just not calling it that, but it's the 

[00:32:30] Heidi: It's energy healing. Yeah.

[00:32:32] Etienne: So they've had crazy yeah, like the guy who two weeks later had zero cancer in his body, who had multiple myeloma, to go from that to no cancer. Just incredible. They said once they can get up to 30, I think they said 35 or 38% of people experiencing an eight to a complete 10 outta 10, no more symptoms whatsoever of what they were experiencing prior to like whatever their disease or illness was. Then they can start taking the healing into actual children's hospitals around the country, 'cause they've been in contact with different children's hospitals. Yeah. So that's really where they wanna take this to.

[00:33:11] Etienne: They do coherence healings over Zoom or over the phone in groups. There's actual groups that are approved by Dr. Joe that you can sign up for and see if you can become a member of, and you have to say you will do a certain number of healings per week, or I think it's one to two healings per week or even more. I did look up that before. Yeah. So there's some groups where it's just, you only have to say you'll do at least one per week up to two or three per week of healings. And I think they take about an hour each. but supposedly, like once you become a part of that, a group like that, that's like the best thing that happens to you that week is participating in healing. And I gotta say the healings were very, they're very emotional. And you feel this crazy energy in your body and the energy of the other people.

[00:33:52] Etienne: Every time the person who is healed or trying to be healed in your group, at the end, the looks on their faces are usually just like, they're just so stunned about how they're feeling. 'cause maybe not everybody there is actually there for the event. I think there's some children that they have, they bring in who are allowed to come in.

[00:34:10] Etienne: Like one lady brought her autistic child to a previous retreat and they were from Canada. So I think they flew from Canada to like Oregon or something, to come to a retreat. And this child had such horrible autistic symptoms that she was describing where he was hitting his brother. He would never let his mom touch him. He didn't really talk. He was way behind developmentally for speaking and he couldn't write, he couldn't read. He did the healings. They did all, I think four heal, no three healings. There's three healings per retreat.

[00:34:42] Etienne: And, the change was astronomical. Like he wanted his mom to tell him, how do I say I love you in French? 'Cause he's from the French side of the Canadian country. So his mom's first language was French. And, he asked her one day, like, mom, how do you say I love you in French? And she told him, and he just held it inside of him. And he waited till he was leaving for school. And he turned around and he was like, mom, Je t'aime, and that she would let him hug him. And, he was reading and writing, he just completely was healed basically from the energy that these people could give him.

[00:35:15] Etienne: That's incredible. So he wasn't actually doing any meditations himself. He was just sitting there and receiving it. This is just, yeah. If I had enough money to go to every single retreat, I literally would probably go like every single time they had them. Honestly, it's such an incredible experience.

[00:35:29] Heidi: yeah. And, while you were talking about everything about the retreat and everything, it brought to mind a podcast I saw not too long ago, and I believe it was with Ellen Langer, she's a doctor. She did studies. I'm hoping it's her. I'm looking really quickly. Um, She did studies. So, she was awesome. She's like, this is gonna look little woo woo. But she had people go into a room and meditate for like an hour.

[00:35:58] Etienne: Mm-hmm. 

[00:35:59] Heidi: And then she had people come in and take tests in this room. And then she had people take tests in a totally separate room that didn't have the meditators beforehand. And these people didn't know that there was meditators before in this room.

[00:36:13] Etienne: Oh 

[00:36:13] Heidi: This is replicable. Like she's continuously done this. The people who went into the room that had meditators beforehand, always did better on the tests every time.

[00:36:22] Etienne: Hmm. 

[00:36:23] Heidi: So. It kind of proves that they're raising the energy somehow in the room for these people that are coming in after. So it's like, okay. It's almost like the goodness that comes outta meditation is contagious. Like, it can be 

[00:36:37] Jane: Well, you're raising the frequency, like you're literally raising the vibrational waves in that space.

[00:36:44] Etienne: So they 

[00:36:45] Heidi: pretty sure it's, it's Dr. Ellen Langer

[00:36:47] Etienne: I just found her. Yeah, she's like, supposedly they call her the professor of mindfulness or

[00:36:52] Heidi: Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:36:53] Etienne: She might've done a study where she took these men who were in their seventies and eighties and put them in environment, telling them that they were going to be in their twenties again. So he, they put like, they put, put him in their, in like posters were all like old time posters, but looked brand new for them. Told them to play football. They did all the measurements on them afterwards and they'd all like gone back in time like in their mind and their body. They'd gained like some of their height back. 'Cause you know, we shrink as we get older and they had gained it back. They literally were like going back in time with their bodies because they were completely immersed in that environment from when they were in their twenties.

[00:37:31] Etienne: But something I wanted to tell you to do. They had a random number generator in the room while we're doing these healings. And, it's supposed to go from zero to 1 0, 1 0, just randomly when we're doing the healings, that random number generator just goes 1, 1, 1, 1, 1. It doesn't stop doing one. It just throws ones the whole time.

[00:37:47] Heidi: Wow. That's wild. Huh? What do they say about that? What? How do they explain that? Or what do they say? You're affecting the computer.

[00:37:56] Etienne: Yeah. Just like 

[00:37:57] Heidi: Messing, messing with the matrix.

[00:37:59] Etienne: They showed us a study, and I think you can find it on YouTube, where there was a random robot in the middle of this enclosure and they took baby chicks and they hatched baby chicks in that space with the robot who had random, his randomized program where he was just supposed to go randomly, throughout this box. Okay. But they hatched baby chicks next to this robot. So the baby chicks imprinted on the robot and then they moved the baby chicks to just right outside of that space. And instead of just going random, that robot started only going in the one third area closest to the chicks and never left that spot again. 

[00:38:35] Heidi: Oh my goodness. So not only did they imprint on the robot, the 

[00:38:40] Etienne: The robot imprint Mm-hmm.

[00:38:42] Heidi: That gives me hope, in AI, maybe AI will imprint on us and end up liking humanity and being like, oh, little 

[00:38:53] Etienne: to meditate so.

[00:38:55] Heidi: Yeah. 

[00:38:55] Jane: that's the alignment problem. But there actually have already talked about how like AI, they give it these simulated, like giving chatbots who seem stressed out. I don't know how this is. Yeah, no, I'm being, I'm being very

[00:39:10] Etienne: We're

[00:39:11] Jane: Um, yeah.

[00:39:13] Heidi: AI is stressed out over us. They're 

[00:39:14] Jane: Yeah. They're, they're just like, ugh.

[00:39:16] Heidi: ladies.

[00:39:17] Jane: These people and their problems, asking me all these questions and they're showing signs of stress 

[00:39:22] Heidi: keep lying to you and, and I'm sorry.

[00:39:25] Etienne: Oh my God. 

[00:39:26] Jane: and then they give them simulated mindfulness exercises and it seems to help. And I'm like, I don't know that that's a, that's a topic for another time because it's like, is that

[00:39:37] Heidi: Oh, mindfulness for AI.

[00:39:39] Etienne: Mindfulness for AI. That's crazy.

[00:39:41] Jane: Yeah. 

[00:39:42] Heidi: They need their own Joe Dispenza.

[00:39:44] Etienne: Oh my God.

[00:39:48] Jane: Um.

[00:39:49] Heidi: Oh my God.

[00:39:51] Etienne: This is the end of part one of our discussion of Dr. Joe Dispenza's meditation retreat. Tune in next week for part two.

[00:39:58] Heidi: That's our show you've been listening to, the Women are Plotting. If you have a story you'd like to share or have any comments, we'd love to hear from you. Email us at info@thewomenareplotting.com and of course you can find us on all the socials. Thanks, and until next time, be safe and be excellent to each other.