66: Mauro Zappaterra on Mindfulness, Expanding Consciousness & the Mysticism of Cerebrospinal Fluid

Website

Cerebrospinal fluid
Yogananda
Kundalini
UCLA
University of Padova
Polarity Therapy – New Mexico
Craniosacral – Colorado
Awakening Awareness – YouTube
Default Mode Network
I Am That
Aldous Huxley
Nobel Prize – Entanglement
Double-slit experiment
Stan Grof
David Bohm – Implicate order

Giancarlo: [00:00:00] Hello. Hi, welcome to this new episode of the Mango TV podcast. Today I’m so excited to have Mauro Zappaterra. Mauro M. D., Ph. D., earned his degrees from Harvard Medical School and specializes in physical medicine and rehabilitation, focusing on human performance, awareness, and pain reduction. Practicing mindfulness since 1998, he has studied chronic pain patients since 2018.

As director of multidisciplinary care at [00:01:00] Sinovation Medical Group, he integrates new research on cerebrospinal fluid and pain management. Dr. Zappaterra has authored numerous scientific papers and books, including I Am, All one, all love, and close your eyes, what do you see? Co written with his son, emphasizing awareness and imagination.

He’s alpha the book, A is for awareness, and programs like Awakening Awareness reflect his dedication to mindfulness, healing, and expanding consciousness. Thank you very much for your time, Doctor. Thank you for inviting me. It’s an honor. And you know, to be totally fair, I asked Chargipiti to summarize your bio, but I, I think that is not clear to what extent you are the, you know, world expert on the cerebrospinal fluid.

And then I asked Chargipiti what, what spiritual practice use The spine and the spinal of fluid as a, as an integral part of [00:02:00] their, of their teaching. And it went, they went like through a long list, like in yoga, yoga anda the kundalini energy, the qi in Taoism, the ATI in Tibetan tantra, the trio life in Shamanic and Native America, and Egyptian and Jewish and Christian mysticism.

And then at the end it says, modern spirituality, Mora. No way. I swear. So, you know, that’s, you know, tells our listener a little bit to what extent you are the expert on that. But, you know, as I always say, before we jump into your, you know, what you’re known for, I’d love a little bit you know, like a, a biographical context.

How did you get to, you know, to where you are? So did you grow up in Italy? 

Mauro: No, my father moved when he met my mother, he actually met my mother in Tripoli, Libya. He was he graduated from college and went to Tripoli, Libya for his first [00:03:00] first job. And they met at a bookstore, I believe is the, is the story.

And and then they they went back to Italy, got married in Ferrara. Next to Bologna. And then my, my father was a geologists last paleontologist. And so he was sent around the world. I think he worked, his first job was for Agip. And he worked around, he was sent around the world and he, I think he got an opportunity to study a master’s degree at at Tulane university in Louisiana.

So that’s where my brother was born in Louisiana. And then he got moved and he started working for Chevron in San Francisco. And so we moved and I was born in Berkeley, California. 

Giancarlo: And it’s just a coincidence that, you know, the, well, it was in Libya for the oil. 

Mauro: Yes. 

Giancarlo: Wow. I see. I see. And so you were born in the States.

Yeah. So, so you just have an Italian surname. I mean, do you speak Italian? 

Mauro: Si, parlo un po italiano. Fabrizio parla 

Giancarlo: bene. [00:04:00] Benissimo. And, and and so, so you grew up, where did you grow up? 

Mauro: I grew up in in Northern California. 

Giancarlo: Northern California. 

Mauro: And then all our relatives were still in Italy. And so almost every two years we went to Italy for to visit relatives and to have a little, you know, summer vacation.

So that’s where I maintained a little bit of the Italian. And then I studied, In Padova, my junior year of university, I studied at Università di Padova, where I studied not only, I studied the sciences, I studied the molecular biology genetics there which was amazing. But I also got, you know, when you’re studying in Italy, it’s good to study a little bit of the Italian literature and, and history and, and art history, because we were there in Padova, and Padova was just a, just a beautiful city right next to Venice.

Of 

Giancarlo: course, of course. And, and what, what drew you to science? Just just the, the, the, the, the family conversation at home. Your father little, being a jealous [00:05:00] is a little bit of a science. Not really, to be 

Mauro: honest with you. No, . He was pushing me towards economics. I remember having conversations with him of, you know, studying at the London at the London School of Economics and, and and, and things like that.

And there was always, you know, since I was a child, I’ve, you know, I’ve, I’ve sort of told these stories before, but since I was a child, I was always interested in the human body. And human development and how we become what we become physically. And then also the, the power of the mind, the power of intention.

Do you remember what sparkled that interest? It was really an internal, like an internal, just internal drive of, you know, who, who am I? How, you know, how does this, like, I’m, I’m, I’m throwing a football or, you know, playing soccer or whatever it might be. And, and, you know, how does it, how, how does it know to function?

Right. I, I, I’d sit there almost thinking sometimes like I’m sending an, you know, I’m sending an [00:06:00] informational signal to my hand and my finger can move, right? Like just thinking about that is, it’s, it’s, it’s just the most. It’s the most amazing thing in the world to me. And, and so the, you know, it sort of sparked other things.

My mother was always interested in in herbs. She was always interested. She was doing, you know, whenever we had a headache, she would do acupressure on our feet or massage. And so there was this bit of a, you know, there’s a bit of a spin towards more of the. natural healing modalities. She studied acupressure.

She studied Shiatsu. She actually ended up becoming a respiratory therapist and You know, it was always sort of asking us, you know, about, well, you know, if you’re feeling, or you have a sore throat or, you know, any sort of ailment of, of, you know, what, what may be happening in the body. So that was probably the orientation of, you know, the first sort of questions or, or, or [00:07:00] sparks of orienting towards the body or orienting towards natural energy systems that, that may be present.

But there’s, there was also some sort of internal. You know, internal questioning there of, of, of, of the mind and the body and development. And, you know, once I looked at like an embryo or looked at an egg, you know, I think the first time I sort of ate an egg. Asked, you know, how does this egg become a become a chicken or you know, how does this egg become a a Frog or a fish, you know, they Let salmon lay their eggs in the river and then all of a sudden something happens, right?

There’s something that happens and Whatever that something is triggers a a a biological response that then all of a sudden you have a fish swimming in the, in, in the river who knows how to swim, you know, can use the muscles [00:08:00] properly. It’s just incredible. So all those things led me to to kind of be interested in, in science.

And that’s, I think why I chose You know, at that time I was going, I started UCLA, University of California, Los Angeles in 1993 and believe it or not, you know, that’s when the study of molecular biology and genetics was was sort of really emerging at the university system. And, you know, the, the, the, the major, I was, I was looking, you know, trying to figure out what major to, to become.

And it was, you know, when I, when I entered, I believe it was like biology and chemistry and stuff. And then, When I was there, you know, molecular cell and developmental biology popped up as a major and it became a major because it became such a such a large field to, to, [00:09:00] to study and investigate that it became a major at UCLA.

And, you know, so if you think of just those words together, you know, molecular, cell, and developmental. So you’re going from the molecule to the cell to the development of the, of the, of the species. And that was the major. Right. So and, and I honestly found that when I was in, when I was in Italy, because I was like, you know, do I do, do I do genetics?

And I wasn’t so, I wasn’t so interested in like just focusing so much on, on genetics, the way that the, the major was, was, was very genetics, manipulating genes and, and, and things like that. I was more interested in that, that developmental, the, the, the, the sort of from the micro to the macro, and then the process that, that, that, that, that, that.

Occurs and then how all these things kind of come together to make not only a cell, but then an organ and then not only an organ, but an organism and then not only an organism, [00:10:00] but now we’re interacting relationally with other other organisms, right? Regardless of what organism you are, you’re still monitoring the environment to some degree.

You’re getting information in you’re putting information out and you’re having. You know, your, your, your, your relational organism and how does that work? And that’s where, to me at least, that’s where the, you know, that’s where the mind attention awareness comes in and the practice of understanding our true nature and, and breaking down all, then breaking down all the boundaries of our individualization, for 

Giancarlo: instance.

Yeah. Yeah, more, more, more. How do we go forward rather than where we come from? 

Mauro: Exactly. 

Giancarlo: And, and, but so there was Padova first and then UCLA. 

Mauro: Padova was my third year at UCLA. It was an exchange. Yep. 

Giancarlo: I see. 

Mauro: And that’s really where you know, the university system in Italy is. Very different oral exams, you know, so imagine doing a [00:11:00] biochemistry oral exam, where They’re asking you, and, and you know, I absolutely loved it, and at that time they had, it was, it was called, you know, Public oral exams, so, I was assigned a date, and my date was four days into the exam period, And you were able to go and listen to the other students.

To the others, yep. And it was amazing. And I did that, right? Because I had no idea what to expect. What are they going to ask me in bio, you know? And it was a dialogue. It was a dialogue about biochemistry. And, you know, and I did it in Italian. And it was the most challenging, most brilliant experience that I had.

But, you know, being able to go to The, the, the, the exams of the other people really gave me a sense of what kind of questions they ask and how to focus my studying and things like that. So that was brilliant. And I feel like what that started doing for me, to be honest with you, is it started giving me [00:12:00] a language around science, a language around.

Biochemistry, right? When you think about biochemistry, you don’t think about a conversation you think about formula. Exactly. You think about formulas on a wall and that’s really how it is in the United States, to be honest with you is, is, you know, it’s sort of like, Oh, I can draw this, but I can’t. I can’t speak it or I can’t, I don’t really understand the theory about it, but I’ve memorized the pathway for instance, where I felt like in Italy, they really wanted, they really wanted me to understand the theory behind it.

Right. Like, like what, like, like, like what, what, like what is the enzyme? And why do you think like, they just asked me to expand by knowledge of, well, I know, you know, the reaction, but tell us, you know, a little bit more about why you think this reaction is actually occurring or. How it evolved and why it evolved the way it did and, and that kind of got them the sense of, you know, my understanding of biochemistry.

So it gave me this language around science [00:13:00] that I never had, and I’m not sure I would have, I would have developed. And, you know, back in 1998, and it might have changed now, but, you know, I had a lot of really good friends in Italy and good scientists. And I always joked, you know, the best laboratory. is, you know, half, half people European because they know all the theory, but don’t know how to do, you know, don’t know how to do ever anything in the lab, and then all the, all the Americans who know how to do everything in the lab, but don’t know why they’re doing it, for instance.

Giancarlo (2): Interesting. 

Mauro: Right? So I would know, you know, so I knew how to splice a gene out of a bacteria and clone it into another bacteria and propagate that bacteria. Where, but I didn’t know, you know, why, like why I was splicing the gene or what I was doing to splice the gene or anything like that, you know, sort of like add A plus B and you get C.

And then you put C into D and you’re like, great. And then you get the product. And if you get the product, you get an A. And if you, you know, there’s no [00:14:00] understanding of the theory behind it, where in Italy, it was really about, about the theory about, 

Giancarlo (2): and 

Mauro: then, and then expanding on that. So it started giving me a language around science and I came back and was.

You know, really transformed in terms of that scientific wanting to know, wanting to really express science as a, as a, as a language, as opposed to something just in textbooks or, or you know, on the board on a whiteboard or something like that. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. It’s nice to hear a good, you know, Italian story for a change, because I’m so used to hear about Italian in you know, how, how provincial and how, you know, it’s like.

Second tier science. It’s good to hear that it impacted you positively, but so would you, would you say that American science is more reductionist than, than Italian, or? 

Mauro: I don’t know if that’s, you know, to me, it, unfortunately, the way that grants [00:15:00] are funded, and this is now international. Is a reductionist perspective, right?

So when I started getting interested in the cerebrospinal fluid, trust me, this was a, this was a internal, this was an internal struggle. This was a suffering that I had. This was a struggle that I, that I had with my, with my peers and yet had to sort of suck it up because, you know, I was looking at the cerebrospinal fluid and I wanted to study the cerebrospinal fluid as a whole.

And all the questions I was getting were what’s the molecule in the cerebrospinal fluid? The one molecule, yeah. What is the one molecule? And can we get rid of that one molecule? Yeah. You know, so that’s what I had to do to, you know, to sort of get the check off to finish my PhD. Now, was it incredible? Yes, because I had, I still maintained this holistic perspective of the cerebrospinal fluid in terms of what it was able to do and being able to characterize it.

And, [00:16:00] and and, and, you know, in terms of the preliminary studies that we did, and then the future studies that just came out of that were more holistic, but because we didn’t know so much about it when I started investigating it. It was very reductionist. It was very, you know, what are the, you know, what are the, what are the molecules in it?

What is the one molecule that’s changing the most? Is there one molecule that’s really affecting? And let’s find all, you know, that one molecule, and let’s manipulate that one molecule. So, unfortunately, that’s how it is, because The, the funding is more geared toward, you know, I, I found this one molecule and, and this is what we’re going to do.

We’re going to increase its supply, we’re going to decrease its supply, we’re going to change how it’s, and then we’re going to study all the downstream effects of it. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. Because ultimately they want to create a drug that affects that one molecule. Okay. So you finish your CLA and then you did you know, you did medicine because you become an MD.

So that’s another [00:17:00] five years of study. 

Mauro: So, the MD PhD program is, you finish your two years of medical school, and then you do a PhD. And at Harvard, some schools, you might take three years to do a PhD. At Harvard, they just say, you know, you need to do a PhD. You need to do a solid PhD. We don’t we don’t skimp on this.

You know, we don’t say you’re an MD PhD program and you go into the lab for two years, and just because you’re in the lab, you get your PhD and stuff like that. There’s some, some universities that do that. Harvard essentially said, you know, look, you got to do a PhD. So you finish two years of medical school, which is all the theoretical part.

You take your boards and then you go off and you do your PhD. And that could take anything there. You know, there’s people who did, did a PhD. It took eight years. 

Giancarlo: Because you have to discover something, right? You have 

Mauro: to discover something. Yeah. You’ve got to come up with your original research. It’s got to mostly be, you know, your, your direction something that you propose, you know, a hypothesis.

And so I took five years to do my PhD. And then after that, you come back [00:18:00] and you finish your last two years of medical school. And that’s where it’s all the practical, you’re back in the clinic. And hopefully, what they’re hoping is that the research time that you did helps inform your clinical decision making, and then helps inform your, the specialty that you choose, for instance.

So maybe you’re doing neuroscience and you go into, you know, neurosurgery or neurology or whatever it might be. And so, yeah, so I finished medical school and then I was doing my, my, my science my PhD. 

Giancarlo: And that’s really weird. Why, why, how, how did you decide to investigate the cerebral spinal fluid? 

Mauro: Yeah, so that, you know, that’s a very sort of Divinely orchestrated you know, when you look back at it, look, at the end of the day, yeah, I was very, I was very stressed.

I was not content. There was that aspect of [00:19:00] knowing I wanted to go to medical school, knowing I wanted to investigate these these patterns of, of biology and development. And, you know, I was thinking at that time that I was you know, I was going to be in a cancer lab because cancer is sort of where development or, you know, cellular processes go wrong.

And that’s very interesting, right, just in terms of, like, my psychology at that point. And I was in a cancer lab and, you know, unconsciously I probably would have done okay, but that’s where I met my now wife. Who is, is an incredible being and, you know, she just noticed, she’s like, you know, you have all this passion for science, you have all this passion for development, you have all this passion to understand the natural healing world, you know, but you’re not happy doing what you’re doing right now.

And what do you think that was?

Speaker 5: I think there was something. [00:20:00] 

Mauro: The rote repetition of it, or looking at disease 

Giancarlo: in the wrong way, in the wrong way, in the same terms. Yes. 

Mauro: Yes. You know, I’m studying a cancer cell as opposed to a healthy cell. 

Giancarlo: Exactly. And outside of the environment, outside of the person. I mean, this idea of putting this thing in a Petri dish and try to understand when you’re like separated for, you know, it’s like the, it’s so reductionist.

Mauro: So I wanted to spend more time with people. And you know, and I even debated multiple times dropping out of the PhD because it was like, I want to be more relational. What are the ways that I can be relational and still be in a PhD program? I can still do this hardcore science, but actually be relational with people and humans.

And yeah, there’s other people in the lab that are doing it, but you know, everybody’s so busy with their own experiments and stuff that I was really interested in, in, in, you know, talking to the. Talking to the [00:21:00] person and getting the human experience of whatever it is that they’re going through whatever life has thrown at you Right.

What is your experience? What are you doing to to to change that or to be okay with it or to to live in in acceptance? With it or whatever it is that you’re going through at the time And so, you know, even the new the new england journal of medicine did a did a did a piece on me on on you know on a on a Pete on a class that we had that was learning about dying, you know, and I had a I Again, you were you were assigned a patient and I just became really good friends with this patient and we shared numerous stories together and we shared numerous books and you know, then she ended up passing away and I ended up going to her funeral and she you know, and and and and learning about Her, her, her, her, her family and her kids and, and, you know, and the story was written up on, in the New England Journal of [00:22:00] Medicine on, on, on, on this experience and this class of teaching medical students how to be with, with people who are dying.

So there was this, I felt like I was separated from the human experience. I was separated from this desire to connect and that was, that was difficult and it’s, you know. I mean, my wife, I was depressed at the end of the day, and my, you know, my then, my now wife saw it, and she said, you know, let’s do something, let’s change something, and I said, you know, I can’t change, like, I can’t change, she’s like, yes you can, you know, you almost have to, otherwise this is going to be miserable, you know, and, and, so I, you know, I listened to her, I, I listened to her and I felt like there was some, you know, there was truth in it, and I went to my advisor and I thought it couldn’t have been done, but I said, you know, I need to take some time [00:23:00] off.

I’m not, you know, something’s not right. I might drop out of the program. And, you know, before making any sort of decision like that I’m gonna go with my wife. We’re gonna And she was always interested in natural healing as well. So she was thinking of doing like a degree in, in, in naturopathy.

And, you know, she was just sort of searching around. And she found a place in Santa Fe, New Mexico. That was, it was the New Mexico School of, of, of Healing Arts. And they just, they had this program, it was a polarity therapy program. And I thought that, honestly, I thought that I was just going to take some time off and reflect, and I was going to go and support her, she wanted to do this.

And she said, you’re doing this with me. And I said, I’m not, I’m not doing this with me, I’ve been in school for so long, right? Like, this is a great time for me to just, like, chill out and not doing anything. And I honestly said, I said, you know, maybe I’ll, like, umpire some baseball games and, you know, make a few [00:24:00] dollars.

She said, no, you’re doing, you know, you’re doing this with me. And. I, you know, I was like, what, you know, what is it? And she, she said, it’s polarity therapy. It’s a, it’s a holistic healing modality. It integrates nutrition and movement and thought. And, and, and, and I was, you know, in healing touch. And I said, well, you know, those are all things that I’m interested in.

And I could see that being applicable to relationships. And, and there was this opportunity where you could do a four week class. And if you liked it, then you could stay on for The four month class, for instance, and so she said, just do me. Can we do the four week class together? And I said, okay, I’ll do the four week class and then we’ll, we’ll decide.

And we ended up doing the four week class and even after that, you know, it, it was, it was incredible. But I still didn’t really want to do much. I still really felt like, you know, I’ll just chill out. And she [00:25:00] said, we’re doing the whole class together. And I said, okay. And it was sort of like, you know, I feel like she felt something and It was the best decision that we’ve ever, you know, that we’ve ever made.

It, it, it opened my world. I was a skeptic, you know, you could imagine somebody talking about energy healing and although I was open to it, I wanted to understand the science behind it, for instance, what is, you know, what is really going on. And recognizing when we do have the science behind things and when we don’t.

And when the human experience is guiding certain things. And you know, so we did it and it was, it was amazing. And during some of these classes, you know, you’re around many different types of people. And I just sort of surrendered to it, to be honest with you. And said, you know what? I’m going to learn it the best I can.[00:26:00] 

And if you think about it, right, just from a, kind of like to break it down, you know, if you’re looking at movement you know, how you’re moving your body or exercises that you can sort of change the energy or get, get the energy flowing in your body. If you’re looking at nutrition, Right? What you’re putting in your body, if you’re looking at your thought processes or gratitude or, you know, where you’re where you’re thinking is going and you’re looking at what sort of toxins are coming into us from the world around us just by living in the world that we live, right?

This is to me, that sort of becomes the basis of then human health. And, and that’s where I was, that’s where I was going towards, right, is, is this is the basis of human health, regardless of what chronic. issues you have, or even if you suffer a brain injury or, you know, a spinal cord injury, we still have to look at how can we get somebody to move?

How can we get somebody to [00:27:00] eat? Or, you know, what nutrition are we thinking about in terms of supplementing the building blocks of their cell? And then what’s their thought process, right? What’s their thinking, where are they placing their attention? That’s helping direct their. Quality of life in a way because if you are, you know, even if you’re paralyzed, but you your attention goes towards Despair and doom.

Well, that’s what, you know, that’s essentially what the energy is going to, is, is, is, is going to, is going to bring and it’s going to happen. So that became very, and I felt I knew based on my own system, right? That where, where I, where I, where I, where I could place my attention was very powerful. And just going through the PhD program, for instance, you know, the amount of sort of anxiety that I had or learning how to cope with anxiety or learning how to.

For instance, you know, cope with depression was very powerful in terms of looking at, looking at my attention, looking at my awareness. [00:28:00] And, during some of these classes, we would do a modality that was called craniosacral, and I didn’t know anything about this. And but I was open to it, skeptically.

So I was like, you know, so there was always this, if you could imagine sort of like an sort of a, there was always a, a questioner. Number one, what is this, right? Regardless of what you’re calling it from a language perspective, right? You can name it anything, but what is this for me? And then, right, what is it doing?

Is it doing? Do I notice anything? Right? Or, or, or, is, is, what’s the, what’s the impact of it? Or is it causing me to just be relaxed? And that was fine too because then I, then I really started investigating the nervous system and the autonomic nervous system and the stress and, and, and, you know, responses and things like that.

But essentially all it was, was, you know, we shared a [00:29:00] partner and we held each other’s cranium. And so that was it. And you felt what was what was what was going on. And 

Giancarlo (2): the 

Mauro: brilliance of this is that prior to actually making contact with the human being. So imagine that if every good buddy sort of goes to this training, and this is what Kami, you know, my wife, that’s her name, you know, we say.

If people ask us like, you know, what do you recommend for marital counseling, it’s sort of like, oh, well, you got to go through this like really intense, energetic you know, healing modality together because what are we, what are, what are we learning? Well, like some of the most basic fundamentals of what we were learning prior to even making that relational contact was center, centering yourself, grounding yourself and becoming neutral.

Giancarlo: For 

Mauro: instance, yeah. presence, right? And that was so every single time. So just like what you did at the beginning, taking, you know, 20 seconds, 30 seconds, whatever [00:30:00] that might be. And that time changes depending on how, how much you’ve practiced or not, right? So at the beginning, it might take five minutes of just sitting in a chair, right prior to making contact with this human and be bringing, centering myself, grounding myself and becoming neutral.

And then making contact. Okay, so that’s sort of number one. And then when you make contact, then you’re not, there’s no intention. There’s no, I’m not trying to manipulate the bones or the tissues or anything. I’m just listening. Right. So even that of I’m reaching out, right? I find my own neutrality, my own presence.

And then I reach out and I make contact with absolutely no desire to change anything. I’m just listening. 

Giancarlo: No agenda, 

Mauro: no agenda. I’m simply listening. I’m listening with my hands. I’m listening with, with the, you know, the sensory organs in my hands. I’m listening with my heart. I’m listening with my mind. I’m listening with my whole self open [00:31:00] centered.

That was it, right? So I knew that when I was this, when I was getting the session that that’s what they were doing prior to making the, you know, the practitioner was doing prior to making contact with me. And that’s what I had to do. So you do this 4 to 5 times a day because we were getting so many sessions, right?

And, and, and, and again, these are, you know, these are energetic healing sessions. And so stuff is going to come up, you’re going to notice stuff, you know, and, and, and that’s another, that’s sort of another process in and of itself. But, right. So, thanks. I just started noticing, you know, this, this energy around, around my spine around my, my, my head.

And I just kind of started to investigate it. And that’s where it led me to learn more about the cerebrospinal fluid. And completely, you know, we finished the, the, the, the, the class and completely shift my whole attention towards [00:32:00] looking at normal development, normal, you know, how the brain, how the brain development and what this fluid is doing.

in the brain as opposed to looking more at the disease, right? So it was sort of like opposed to taking a cancer cell and studying it, which is very important, you know, don’t get me wrong. But I was, my, my, my interest then became, I really want to, this is a, this is an endogenous fluid that’s in the brain and I want to study what its role is in development.

And so he matched more my, my consciousness. While I was doing that, the brilliance of it is I had an incredible mentor, my PhD advisor who knew my entire story, my entire situation and allowed us I asked him, you know, it takes. two and a half years of multiple retreats. We were living in Boston at the time and [00:33:00] we, you know, we were there then interested in diving more deeply into this practice of craniosacral therapy.

And my wife wanted to learn it. And I, you know, I very specifically remember I was jogging in, I lived in, in, in, if anybody knows Jamaica Plain in Massachusetts, but there’s a cemetery in Jamaica Plain. It’s a beautiful cemetery. And, and I was, you know, I was running in the cemetery. And I was just having a conversation with myself and I was having a conversation with myself of me 20 years from that moment and somebody was asking me, you know, Hey, Dr.

Zapateri, you know, what do you do for your own for your own health and, and, and balancing your system? And I said, I do, you know, I get craniosacral sessions and in, as soon as it wasn’t even, it wasn’t even a thought it wasn’t like I, it wasn’t a, like it, it, it, it wasn’t. Like I didn’t have to think it just popped it just spontaneously came up and as soon as that [00:34:00] spontaneously came up a red tailed hawk Was flew about five feet over my head and I was like, this is that that’s a sign.

That’s a sign That you know as difficult as this may be maybe it extends my PhD time But I feel like my wife and I should go and you know investigate this a little bit more deeply And we were able to, so we traveled to Boulder and did a, you know, did a two year, did a two year training in, in, in biodynamic craniosacral therapy while I was doing my PhD on the cerebral spinal fluid.

So now, but, 

Giancarlo: But Maro, sorry to interrupt because I, I, I heard in one of your podcasts that in Santa Fe you felt this fluid pulsating and you didn’t understand what it was. 

Giancarlo (2): Yes. And 

Giancarlo: so, so you investigate and it’s not my heart, it’s not my breath. And you like, you really [00:35:00] did so much inquiry to understand it.

And then you realize that someone told you, maybe you heard that. 

Mauro: Yes. Yes. So the process then was I became very interested in this energy that I was feeling. That was pulsating. But 

Giancarlo: at the beginning you didn’t know what it was. 

Mauro: Absolutely not. 

Giancarlo: It was just like 

Mauro: a, like a heart pulsating. It was like, it was like it felt almost as if somebody was taking a, blanket and, and, and covering me with it.

But, but, but with a, with a rhythmic pulsation that felt like warm plasma, warm, like warm plasmic light, for instance. And again, you know, coming from a, you know, scientific slash, right. I was in the middle of my MD PhD. I was taking some time off, but I was [00:36:00] very, you know, there was, there was that, there was that inquiry.

What is this? And did it reproduce itself? Right? So a lot of different questions, right? Is it just something that I imagined? Is it something that I ate the next day? Right? So with anything, with anything scientifically, right, we got to, it’s sort of like you got to go and ask all the questions, right? Is it, is it, is it, is it this, is it this, is it this, what could it be?

What are the things that I know? Right. And then I started becoming so interested in it because it, it started, it had a familiarity, but I didn’t know what that familiarity was. It had a familiarity to it. And so what we did is I, I partnered up with somebody who was equally as interested and we took our entire lunch period, which was an hour and a half.

And we just swapped sessions and we knew that all we wanted to do is for 45 minutes. I hold your cranium, [00:37:00] and then for the other 45 minutes, you hold my cranium. And we just, that’s it. Like, there was absolutely no desire to do anything else, but we took that time to just be and feel this cra And, and what I started noticing is that it was, it was reproducible.

And, and there was a familiarity with it. And and it was resourcing. That was the other thing is that I didn’t find I didn’t have a, I didn’t have a resource. I was very you know, my mind would, would, would jump a lot of different places and, and, and be anxious and worry and things like that. And I didn’t really have a resource and it was very resourcing.

And so this pulsation, right? So again, going back and saying, well, what, what, you know, what are the things that I know, pulsate in the body. I know the heart pulsates. I know the, the the breathing pulsates. And so I correlated it. I put my hand on my carotid artery. I put my hand on my radial artery and I was like, it’s very different than that.

I, you know, [00:38:00] monitored my breathing very different than that. And so I had a sort of different pulsation. And because I’d gone through neuro anatomy classes and physiology classes and anatomy classes, right, I was trying to, and the previous You know, weeks of just bringing our awareness to our body and asking ourselves, you know, what do I feel?

Right. Because that was part of the, that was part of the center grounding neutral perspective is just noticing what you feel in your body, where it is and trying and bringing some sort of neutrality to it. But this was more of an inquiry of there’s a, there’s an energy here that seems to be. moving. It seems to be dynamic.

It seems to be pulsating. It seems to be. And for me, what was interesting is it always seemed to be coalescing. There was a coalescence that was occurring. And it was almost as if somebody would take like, would you, you know, those like snow [00:39:00] globes where, where if you shake it, it’s every, it’s, it’s sort of everywhere.

And then as it, as it calms down, it’s sort of All this stuff and that’s kind of what it felt is like I could the this substance whatever it was was everywhere it’s universal, but as There was this intention or focus on it what I started noticing is a sort of started rising up my body mostly located in the spine and coalescing in my in my brain And what do 

Giancarlo: you think, how do you explain that this release of energy or, you know, snow globe shaking is catalyzed by the hands of a total stranger?

Mauro: Oh, it’s not. For me it was. For me it was. I don’t know how it, I mean, it could be catalyzed by. Almost anything that we do and that’s where you know, that’s where sort of my my future [00:40:00] work has has has gone because that for me For whatever reason that was the that was a trigger and that’s where that’s where if you look at any of the things I do with like awakening awareness, which which you can find on YouTube for free is You know, what?

What did I need first? Well It was sort of like that became this, these sessions became like a, like, like, like a resource. So at first, my nervous system was so wired that there was no ability to sense this at all. There was no ability. Maybe, 

Giancarlo: maybe that’s the mechanism that, you know, the holding your head, it creates a sense of safety.

Mauro: Exactly. 

Giancarlo: That allow the vulnerability. Exactly. That might, you know, like some, some people would say that it, it, it reduced the activity in the brain. It reduced the default mode network. 

Mauro: Exactly. 

Giancarlo: And then, and then, and then [00:41:00] allow the perception of this, of this fluid. 

Mauro: Exactly. And that’s exactly what happened, and that’s why when you, if you listen to the, to the to the awakening awareness, the number one session is finding a resource.

We’ve got to find a resource that we can bring our attention to, that we can start to feel safer, that we can start to regulate our nervous system, because I, I think you’re spot on. And then, right, what started happening is, After there was these, you know, sort of like the session started and then this sort of energy happened and then this felt sense came and it was very reproducible.

Then what could happen is then I could, for instance, be laying in bed and trigger that same, I could connect with it. There was a connection all of a sudden and there was a relationship that was developing. And that to me then started becoming really interesting. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. Right. 

Mauro: And so. That’s why you said, 

Giancarlo: that’s why, that’s why your wife, [00:42:00] that’s why you guys thought that that would be a good practice for couple therapy.

Mauro: Yeah. 

Giancarlo: No, but you know, I know we’re laughing, but it’s actually very serious. This idea that, you know, couple, they, they take advantage of the fact that, you know, they supposedly trust each other and live together. And so this idea that they would allow each other to be vulnerable because they trust each other.

And out of this vulnerability can come this ability to, to, to, to, to feel the subtle energy, to, you know, to calm the, the monkey mind and allow this, this, you know, this, this, this awareness and this, and this nervous system modulation to happen. 

Mauro: Exactly, exactly. And so, you know, so we were doing this, we did this for five months in, in New Mexico, and then we did it for another two and a half years in Boulder.

And, You [00:43:00] know, for me, it really became understanding it then even from a, from a, from looking at it from a scientific perspective of asking myself, you know, where do I, when I feel this energy coalescing, where do I feel it, can I localize it in space and time and the best place anatomically very much felt sense was I felt it in the third ventricle of my, of my brain.

In the middle of the brain, and so that’s when I went back to the teacher and I said, you know, this is so then I brought my experience back to my, my teacher and I said, you know, this is what I’m feeling and I’m feeling this pulsation here and that’s where he says, Oh, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re feeling the cerebrospinal fluid and.

I go the what? And that’s when that’s when then I went home and I started looking at PubMed and you know, that’s the sort of NIH repository of published research and started looking at what we knew about the cerebrospinal fluid and, and [00:44:00] really recognizing that. You know, we don’t know anything. We don’t really know anything about this, about this fluid.

We think it’s a buoyancy. We think that, you know, it might give some electrolytes, maybe a couple nutrients here and there, but mostly we think of it as providing buoyancy and a shock absorber to the brain. And so that’s where that’s where then the first kind of aha moment was, you know, was that, wow, maybe I can actually study brain development.

Maybe I could actually study this, this fluid and understand it. 

Giancarlo: Because the reason why we don’t know anything is because when you do the anatomy, you can’t find it because it is absorbed by the body. Exactly. 

Mauro: Exactly. It was very difficult to find historically. And, and so, you know, not many people, not many people thought about it.

And then another thing too, not necessarily going to the reductionist, but just looking at the whole system as a whole. Is when you’re looking at brain development, right? When you think of brain, what do you think [00:45:00] about? What do you think about the tissue? And so another thing that, but just because being in the lab, but what is the tissue growing in?

Well, the tissue is growing in fluid. There’s extracellular matrix fluid. There’s intracellular fluid. There’s cerebrospinal fluid, right? And when I have to grow, like when I take a, when I take a cell out of a, out of its environment, I need to put it In a petri dish and I need to put fluid, I need to put fluid on that cell, right?

So, but what do we see when we, you know, when I look at, when you look at anatomy, you don’t see what’s not there, you see what, what, what is there and what we see, what is there are the cells. Right. So when I’m looking through it, I look through the fluid into the cells. And so all the studies of developmental brain biology and everything like that was really focused on the cells because that, you know, those, those could be easily manipulated and things like that.

But I had to grow every single tissue or cell culture or anything [00:46:00] like that I had to do was in a fluid. Right. So I have to add fluid. I couldn’t go on vacation for long periods of time because I needed to change the fluid so that the cells would continue growing and, and develop making thing and things like that.

Right. So when I, when, when this was a shift, you know, I remember sending the email. of this idea to my advisor at the time. And then I left to go get a cup of coffee. And, and I come back, and, you know, he was super excited because he was like, yes, this, like, this makes perfect sense. We’ve been looking at the cells all this time.

Let’s look at the fluid. Let’s look at how this fluid actually is helping to inform the cells to develop and how all this, all this fluid is actually super important in brain development. And, And you know, and survival. And so that sort of, you know, that triggered the, that, that, that then triggered the PhD, but it was in combination with his allowance of us being able to go to debt, to, to Boulder, to continue studying it right.

Where I had to get something, [00:47:00] I can’t remember the numbers, like 150 sessions from professional craniosacral therapist and I had to give 150 sessions, you know, over two years and we were connecting with these people and we were bringing the sense of, of center ground neutral to, you know, four or five sessions a day that we were that we were giving and doing it with my with my partner at the time, right?

So we were, it was just, it was just this incredible growth and, and, and, and brilliance. And then seeing the connection, right? I’d be able to like, look at the cerebrospinal fluid through a, through a, through a microscope and yet have that felt sense of connecting with my own cerebrospinal fluid through a session.

Right. And, and, and so that was sort of the, that was again, that, that bridge of the relational aspect of it that was, that was missing at the beginning and then allowed me to really continue going into into the, the, and [00:48:00] finishing the, the PhD, but, you know, at all this time, so there’s that self inquiry and, you know, I can’t leave this, I can’t leave this part out because when, when we started doing these practices, it Then other things started sort of opening up, let’s say, or revealing themselves.

Right, so, my wife and I became very interested in, we’d always sort of had a mindfulness or meditation practice, but then we became very interested, you know, we’d wake up at 4. 30 in the morning together, we’d have an hour and a half of meditation together we’d do, you know, we’d do prayer beads, we’d do the mala, we’d do you know, we’d even, we’d even you know, do like prayer with sage and, and, and, and create little.

Things with that and just really went into a personal inquiry and and and you know Who am I and this was this was in conjunction with[00:49:00] 

I was meeting my wife in Cambridge and I was Waiting for her and there’s this bookstore in Cambridge called seven stars and it’s a sort of spiritual bookstore in Cambridge and I’d walk in And I was always interested in, you know, I kind of walk in, but as soon as I walked in this as soon as I walked in this book, it was a yellow book.

It was just sitting on the, sitting on the, it was actually on the shelf. And there’s just this strong attraction to this yellow book. And all it said is, I am that, that’s it. And I’m like, that sounds, you know, something about this. And it was, I am that by Nisargadatta Maharaj. And I picked it up, I flipped through the page and I, I said, I need this book.

You know, I don’t know why I, you know, I hardly had any hard, I had, I hardly had any time to read any other book except for all the scientific papers and textbooks I was reading. And I picked up this book and, you know, I go, you [00:50:00] know, we meet and I go, I just found this book. It looks incredible. And I start flipping through the pages, right, at night, I’d like, you know, let me, let me try reading three or four pages.

And when I read the first few pages, I would start, I would get a stomachache, like my stomach would actually start hurting. And it was because that what I, what, what, what, what my sense of it now was because I knew that there was a, there was a truth to that, that I was not, that I was not ready to accept.

And, and it was, it was, I, you know, I would, I would literally go to bed with, with, you know, with stomach pains, but I was like, there’s something, there’s some message in here that I need to read. And, you know, I don’t exactly know the, the, the, the, the, the, the exact number of months, but it was something like, you know, it took me four months to get through 60 pages.

And then, but, but because [00:51:00] 

Giancarlo: it was, there was, it was undermining or jeopardizing the old PhD or 

Mauro: No? Yes. Well, just jeopardizing 

Giancarlo: the, 

Mauro: the Western, Western view, the, the sense of who I was, you know, the, the identification with. A Harvard medical student, you know, the identification with anything that was, that I was identifying with 

Giancarlo: separate from this mind at large or cosmic consciousness that the book was talking about.

Exactly. 

Mauro: And, and this practice that, that we were actually gravitating towards. Right? Of, of, of, of, even, even meditation of, of prayer of, of, of you know sort of more surrender. So that was in combination, right? So here I am, right? And in that book, it’s very, so I like very simple things. And in that book, it was very simple.

Essentially, he says, [00:52:00] focus on the I am. Repeat it to yourself and let everything else go and I said this is like Okay, even if I there’s something there’s something here and I don’t want to believe it, but it’s such a simple practice That let me, let me just do it. Let me do it. That’s it. Right? Like, what else, what else do I have to lose?

And he just says, you know, and he said, and, and, and, and he tells his stories himself. That’s what my guru told me, and I did it. Right? You just trust. And so, what I started doing then, Is, I started combining, there was this combination of, so I’d read the book and then, you know, again I said, I don’t know how many pages the book is, it might be 400 pages, but it took me 3 months or 4 months to get through 60 pages and then 2 weeks to get through the rest of the book.

And, and you know, some, some incredible, and this sense of every [00:53:00] single night, every single moment, every single time that I felt a bit of stress or anxiety arise, I would go to I Am. That was it. It was just, I am, I am. When I would fall asleep, I’d have a really hard time falling asleep. Sometimes during my, during my PhD.

And as soon as I brought in this, this, I am, I am, I am, I am. It’s like, 

Giancarlo: it was like just a mantra, like a mantra. It was just a mantra. 

Mauro: That was it. And it was just like you know, that was it in a passive disregard for anything else and that was it and then what I felt what I felt right while I was while I was doing this was I then felt that coalescing starting to happen right the coalescing that was starting to happen and it was starting to coalesce again in My third ventricle, and I started feeling then the same, it was almost like by, by that repetition this, this, [00:54:00] this, this awareness, this activation happened, this opening, this connection reoccurred.

And, and it was like, Oh,

okay. So then, so then the next sort of, you know, not sort of realization was for me was, Oh, this is, this is the, I am. 

Giancarlo: But so you, you think that all, all mystical experience are associated with this coalescent of the fluid in the central ventricle? 

Speaker 5: I

mean, I don’t, I, I can’t say all, 

Mauro: but

I don’t know, you know, I’d love for people to investigate it for themselves. But you know, I could just say like, [00:55:00] even right now when I’m, when I’m, when I’m explaining this, the sense of

just pure, pure, pure beauty. 

Giancarlo: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And goose bump. And yeah, 

Mauro: it’s a, it’s a, you know 

Giancarlo: but is it possible that this fluid getting to this ventricle reduce the activity in the brain? Like, you know, Aldous Huxley was saying that You know, basically in the psychedelic experience, I don’t know how much you know about the neuropsychopharmacology around tryptamines, but, you know, what they’ve shown with the fMRI, with the functioning magnetic resonance imagery, you know, everybody thought, Oh, The tryptamines, the DMT, the psilocybin, the LSD, they increase, they increase the activity in the brain.

But when they saw actually is that it reduces the activity in the brain, it reduced the blood supply in three key areas of the brain that they call the deformal network. And that makes sense. You know, others obviously call the brain as a red, you know, reducing [00:56:00] valves. So, It’s actually by reducing the activity, by reducing our interpretation of reality, that we can have a mystical experience.

That then the brain is free from the cultural condition in the biography, all the story, all the thing we think, you know, all the thing we think we are. And so, you know, that would be if, if, if there’s any chance that this fluid actually contribute to this reduction of the activity, then it would be a good sync with with the psychedelic.

Mauro: Yeah. And that’s, you know we’re trying to get research to look at non invasive ways of measuring that. The movement of the fluid and the pressures from the fluid when they look at sleep. So what has sort of exploded over the last 10 years, which is incredible because it’s really brought the cerebrospinal fluid into [00:57:00] everybody’s awareness now or consciousness.

from a purely, you know, forget about it from any spiritual perspective, but just from a scientific perspective is now they’ve actually seen almost exactly what, what, what, what you said is that during sleep, there’s a pulsation of this fluid through the brain tissue itself. So at first, We thought that this fluid was separated from the brain tissue, but in the felt sense of a lot of practitioners, we knew that there was, there was a meshing of this fluid.

It’s very difficult to say, oh, it’s only in the ventricles or, you know, and so, but the way that all the textbooks described it was, it’s in the ventricles, it goes outside the brain, and it bathes the outside of the brain, it bathes the inside of the spinal cord and the spinal canal and things like that.

But then what they, what they found is during sleep, There’s a pulsation of this fluid that your neuronal [00:58:00] activity actually decreases That decrease in neuronal activity causes a reduction of blood In the brain. So there’s like a flushing out of the blood in the brain. And then with that flushing out of the blood in the brain, there’s this pulsation of fluid through the brain tissue itself.

And scientifically, what that’s doing is it’s cleaning out the toxins that build up in the brain tissue itself and bringing them out. So they’re calling it the glymphatic system as opposed to lymphatic system, which is present in the rest of the body. But it’s sort of a, a fluid system that’s that’s extracellular that goes into the brain tissue itself that removes the toxins and it’s a, it’s a, it’s a pulsation with a relative, there’s a, there’s a, there’s a relative slowing in neuronal activity, there’s a decrease in blood supply and then this pulsation of, of, [00:59:00] of fluid.

And now we know that, you know, that this fluid now can go through the brain. Tissue itself, so it’s no longer just contained within the ventricles and there are studies that have shown that for instance Parasympathetic activity so parasympathetic activity so rest and digest starts to there’s more fluid that starts getting into the into the tissue, into the spinal cord and into the brain.

Now there’s people looking at, you know, how can we actually get this fluid to flow, to get into the brain, right? And so just like what you said, right? Could it actually be that we, we, we, we, we need to calm the nervous system or, or rest it, or, you know, create this, this parasympathetic activity or, or start working on.

Activities that, that balance the parasympathetic and the sympathetic activity. That’s gonna be future research that’s gonna really come out in terms of you [01:00:00] know, looking at your hypothesis and looking at at, at other hypotheses because purely from a neurodegenerative perspective now that hypothesis is, you know, if we don’t get that fluid to go through the brain, that now all the toxins are building up and so.

That’s the, the toxin buildup is then what causes things like neurodegeneration and Alzheimer’s and even things like depression. And, and so we’re looking at ways of activating this fluid, not only for, not only for health, because if you imagine that there’s a fluid system in your body, you want the fluid to be flowing.

You want it to be regenerated, just like any river, you know, just like any fluid system, you want it to be moving, but also for things like brain injury, right? If there’s an area of your brain that might be scarred or, or, or, or, or stroke that we start getting, you know, that we start really activating the fluid.

So there’s a lot of people looking at different ways of, of, of activating that fluid and how to. you know, how to, how to [01:01:00] increase the cleansed cleanliness of the brain. But I say, right, not only are we doing that, right? If this fluid has any capacity to transmit information, which we know it has the ability to transmit information, it has molecules in it, it has hormones in it, it has electrolytes in it.

We know that it. You know, from developmental studies that we’ve done, we know that it has proteins, those singular proteins, but multifactorial proteins that completely change during day to day from development to development, informing the brain. You know, we know that it transmits information and now just asking and opening ourselves of like what, besides the information that we’re used to communicating about, what other information could this fluid actually transmit?

Or could that felt sense of the fluid help transmit? And, and so that’s what I’m asking, you know, that’s what I’m sort of asking people to, to, to open up to is, look, if you don’t want to think about anything else, [01:02:00] bring your attention to this fluid, breathe, we know that breathing can change the, the, the, the, this, this fluid and the pulsations of the fluid and brings it into that third ventricle, you know, that We’re activating the glymphatic system and so that, you know, at the, at the end of the day, if you’re breathing and you’re learning how to control your breathing, you’re going to start to learn how to control your autonomic nervous system.

If that’s at the end of the day, and just simply bring awareness to this fluid. If you want to have a different relationship with it, right, just ask, just bring your awareness to this fluid and say hello. 

Giancarlo: But let me ask you, because all this is fascinating and you mentioned the autonomous nervous system and the vagus nerve, you know, when people was asking, Oh, but this yogi, how do they get into the state just by chanting and breathing?

And then you discover that the vagus nerve is everywhere on your throat, on your lungs, right? So it’s not, it’s nice to see when spirituality and science start to, to, you know, to come to combine. [01:03:00] And that’s definitely interesting. But. Let me take a step back on a much more on the macro level, you know, why from, from a, for a more like, you know, spiritual, pragmatic, pragmatic approach you know, science and parapsychology and quantum physics, quantum mechanics.

I mean, there is a lot of talk now, finally. You know, what the East has been saying for century, this idea of you know, what, what, what the Nobel prize in 2022 was giving for this molecular entanglement. And then, you know, in the, I think in the 80s and the 90s, there was this double slit experiment, this idea that, you know we affect.

The, the, the, on a, on a super, we affect the structure of reality on the subatomic level that in this all, this all scientific idea of separation and duality might not be the full picture, you know, Stan Grof Suggest that we are going [01:04:00] through the third major paradigm shift, you know, the first one being, of course, Copernicus versus Plotimy on the heliocentric.

And then in chemistry, Flogiston versus Lavoisier. And now he says that the big third paradigm shift is this idea that consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of the brain, but it might be primordial, is a building block of reality. And, and so from there, we go to the to the Eastern theory of, of, of having a cosmic consciousness you know, Carl Jung call it collective unconscious, and Aldous Huxley called mind at large, and David Bohm calls it the implicate order, and John Eccles call it the dualistic interaction, and, and Penrose call it the orchestrated objective reduction, and recently Bernardo Kastrup called the idealism.

But why does it matter? Why, in terms of how this view that there is a mind at large, there is a [01:05:00] consciousness that we can connect to by feeling the fluid, by breathing, by praying, by fasting, by psychedelic, by dancing, by whatever method. Why do we care? What, how, how is this idea that we can connect with something bigger than us?

How can it affect this planet? How does, how will it affect like social dynamics? I know you know the philosophy of mind, but 

Mauro: no, very simple in my, and this is my, this is my philosophy, right? Is by doing all those practices. What happens in my opinion, is that there is an understanding of who we truly are, of the connection with the totality of the universe.

If we were, what, what, even, even here, right? We’re interacting on a certain level. All those, [01:06:00] even those words that I use, that’s a manifestation, that’s a, it’s an objectification of pure totality of, of, of ultimate totality, whatever you want to call it, whether you want to call it divine, cosmic consciousness, whatever you want to call it, we’re still interacting, right?

So I see your hair, your hair is like this, whatever it might be, the number of, the number of analogies that this, that people have used is, you know it’s the same as a wave forming from an ocean. For instance, are you, are you identified with the wave or are you identified with the ocean? If I’m identified with the, with the wave, I see you as a big wave, a small wave, a wave I can surf, a wave with this, a wave with that, right?

And now I’ve just differentiated five different waves from each other as opposed to all being ocean. Okay, if I was to look at space, and I like, you know, I, I, I like the analogy that’s used in space, right? Right now we’re still, we’re, we’re in a room. Do we orient to [01:07:00] the space or do we orient to the walls?

Because the way that we define a city or or even our own home is based on the walls. But the space was never changed. If the walls come down, the space never changed, but now you don’t have a home, right? But we orient to that. So what we are orienting to as a species, as a whole, is the, is, is the walls.

It’s the it’s it’s the waves of the ocean. It’s not the ocean. It’s not even and I would take it one step further It’s not even the water molecule in the ocean It’s not even the oxygen in the water molecule or the electron in the water molecule that’s creating the ocean Okay By by doing these practices that you suggest regardless of what that’s why it’s sort of like, you know Regardless of what it’s called Or what it’s named.

We’re bringing our, we’re, we’re, we’re bringing this awareness of, of connecting back to who we truly are. When we, if we did [01:08:00] that, if all, if we, if, if, if we all related from that, we would realize that Language is no longer necessary that 

Giancarlo: frontier 

Mauro: that every every single problem disagreement war is just a story it’s just a story it’s an it’s an objectification right and your wealth my wealth you know how much money do you have in your bank that’s just another wave that’s just another wave that’s coming back and so now right so Now we, we, we drop all that and we relate, right?

So this is a practice that I do daily when I go to the supermarket, when I coach my kids soccer game, whatever it might be, right? Is connect with, connect with this, connect with that self, connect with the, the non self in essence, connect with [01:09:00] the true nature, connect with cosmic consciousness, and relate as best I can in this manifested world from that unmanifested potential.

And then where do the, where do the arguments and disagreements come? And I can guarantee you, you know, I can guarantee you that if we had a room of people and we all, and we all were connected with cosmic consciousness simultaneously, that all we, all we would do is look at each other directly into our eyes and recognize that we are seeing ourselves.

That we are seeing pure reality, pure cosmic consciousness. And then like a joy or a love would emanate to be like a euphoric happiness. 

Giancarlo: Yeah, and a sense of connection 

Mauro: sense of connection and what we would probably do the [01:10:00] first The first spark would probably be to reach out and touch each other and yeah, and and and hold each other like hug each other.

Speaker: Yeah, 

Mauro: in a in a grand collective, but knowing that I’m, I’m just Being in that relationship with myself with the with the totality of the universe. It’s the wave Seeing the other wave and then going down into the water that’s connecting us and and relating on that Because when the wave breaks the water just goes back into the ocean and so that to me is you know, if you’re looking for if you’re looking for For happiness if you talk about prayer the ultimate prayer is Is, is, for me, is asking myself, who am I, and connecting with my [01:11:00] true nature, and doing that at all points of Your life.

Every single moment. Who am I? Who am I? My true nature. Rest in that pure potentiality, in that totality, in that, in that toti potency. Source. And emanate. And then, and then create the way, but know that there’s no separation. But it’s not. You know, you talk about duality, it’s not different, it is from a manifested perspective of come, but the substance is the same.

Giancarlo (2): Yeah. 

Mauro: And so, that then, there’s a joy, there’s a love, there’s a pure, if we’re to describe it, Again, that, I am, right? The way that I kind of describe the I am in a pictorial sense is like, let’s say, you know, there was water that was condensing [01:12:00] on the, on a, on a, on a surface, and as soon as you got enough water condensing on the surface, a droplet was about to form.

The I am would be like that first formation of that droplet coming from this plane of Water that was forming the first formation as soon as that now that droplet is that’s that’s sort of the I am right to me Is knowing thyself and therefore how am I then coming into this world? manifesting as the I am Boom, interacting with your I am from the place of pure potentiality.

And at the end of the day, like, I think that that’s, I honestly think that that’s the answer. 

Giancarlo: Beautiful. Amazing. And I feel that thanks to scientists like you that are, you know, creating a bridge. Because when people hear about, [01:13:00] you know, Eastern practice, Eastern mysticism, new age stuff, it’s very easy for people to like, you know, raise their eyebrow and lose, lose interest.

But, you know, when, when, when scientists like you and the neuropsychopharmacology with psychedelics, like they start showing. What’s really happening in the brain with the cerebral flow fluid or the full moon network. Then there is an understanding that there is a state of bliss that will help relating to other, having that sense of being the ocean and transcending the sense of diversity and conflict.

And, you know, we feel that, you know, we, I spend a lot of time in Ibiza. We have a lot of ceremonies and not just with psychedelics, but also you know, with, with, with, you know, embody spirituality, somatic practices, and sometimes, you know, really out of your comfort zone, which require a sense of, of, of trust of the [01:14:00] collective.

Then you feel it, you feel in the air how everybody’s so connected and, and, and it’s like, you know, and tears and love. And then of course the right music and it’s, it’s, it’s, you know, I think in that moment we are all, In total coalescent of the cerebral fluid in the, in the ventricle. And unfortunately it’s not permanent, but we know we, you know, I have now empirically a sense of feeling this cosmic brotherhood.

And, and, and by thanks to people like you with their PhD and their Harvard saying, saying that, you know, it, it becomes more credible and we are very grateful for the work you’re doing. And 

Mauro: yeah. Yeah, no, thank you. I mean, just think of the resonance, right? Just think of if somebody, you know, the, you know, and, and we’re looking at creating machines or creating technology that can measure [01:15:00] the.

Vibration, you know, because I can measure your frequency in that state, right? So imagine having a, you know, imagine even just having a just monitoring, right? What’s the free? What? What is the frequency of all those individuals collectively in that moment? Of your cells, right? How are they resonating?

Because exactly what you said, whether it’s through movement or this, you know, this medication or, or you know, this medicine or, or, or that, you know, or, or, or the music or, you know, that, that, or the fasting or there’s retreat or the dark. All that is changing the frequency. And so if we are these energy beings, you know, we’ve got to look at the frequency, how, what, what those practices due to our frequency holistically, but even from the, you know, from the, from the middle of your, from the middle of your brain, the middle of your spine, 99 percent water, right?

How that’s being affected by these practices, by this movement, by the [01:16:00] change in nutrition, just like what you said. And then yeah. How that then spreads throughout your whole body, all the water molecules in your body, all the cells in your body. And now that now there’s a, there’s a frequency vibration and that, then, you know, you’re sort of in resonance with, right?

So you’re resonance with others and, and, and through the practice that you’re doing. And, and, and it’s not, it’s not personal. It’s, it’s universal. It’s transpersonal. It’s transpersonal. It’s universal. You’re right. And so, and that’s the, that’s the energy, right? 

Giancarlo (2): Yeah, 

Mauro: the color red doesn’t look at the color orange and, and, and, and judge it.

Right. It just says, Oh, you’re part of me. Exactly. Exactly. Oh, you know, it just shifted the, the, the, the waveform just shifted a little bit. It’s the same wave. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a good metaphor. Yeah. 

Mauro: So 

Giancarlo: listen, Mauro. Thank you very much. But so where are you based now? [01:17:00] You’re in Los Angeles. 

Mauro: Yes. 

Giancarlo: And you guys come travel to Europe sometimes?

Yeah, I mean, we 

Mauro: were just there. We did a, we did three week, we did two weeks in Silva di Val Gardena with my kids. We first traveled. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. 

Mauro: Cause we have, we have three kids. We have an 11, eight and a two year old. So it was the first time we were, we were planning to do it in 2020 for my father’s 85th birthday, but COVID hit right when we were going to March, 2020 COVID.

So everything shut down in Italy. And so then we, my wife and I decided to have another child and so we did and she’s now three and so we traveled and and, and and that was great. So, we love Lon I mean, we love London. We were just there. I was with Fab, you know, a few Nice. In August and, and and so we’re gonna come back.

There’s a lot of you know, I was just asked the what is it? The, the psychedelic society out there. They just asked me to give, it was one of the big ones. They asked me to give In London, 

Giancarlo: outside London? 

Mauro: Yeah. 

Giancarlo: Breaking convention? No. 

Mauro: No. And [01:18:00] there’s another one, but there’s a lot of things going on in London right now.

So I may I was just asked by two London based companies, big ones that to give to give like a, like a. When 

Giancarlo: is that? 

Mauro: I don’t know. We’re just setting it up. But but first they wanted me to give an online thing. And then if that went well, then we do something in person. And you know, we love, we love London.

So we’ve been there a couple of times. 

Giancarlo: So next time you cross the Atlantic, you need to have a pit stop in Ibiza. 

Mauro: I know. Right. So I’ve never been there. 

Giancarlo: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that where you’re, 

Mauro: is that where you’re based? 

Giancarlo: Yes. 

Mauro: Okay. 

Giancarlo: We are here. And you know, with or without children, we’ll take care of you.

And I know I have a bunch of friends that curate talks and I’m sure that I can. I can, you know, we can use you, but also we want you to relax and have fun. And, you know, we have a glorious regenerative agriculture movement now. So there is so many super healthy farm to [01:19:00] table restaurant and, and, and the sea is amazing all year round.

I don’t know if you like to swim in the cold. 

Mauro: Oh, we love it. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. Yeah. So it was great to meet you, even if, you know, digitally, I’d love to meet you in person and I’d love to meet Kami and thank you for taking, say, say her, thank you for taking you to Santa Fe. 

Mauro: She knows who we know, you know, 

Giancarlo: the intuition of the ladies.

Okay. Thank you very much. We’ll see you in Europe. Thank you for your time Mauro. Ciao. [01:20:00] Ciao.