Read the Transcript Below the Bio
John Gray is the author of the most well-known and trusted relationship book of all time, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. USA Today listed his book as one of the top 10 most influential books of the last quarter century. In hardcover, it was the #1 bestselling book of the 1990s. Dr. Gray’s books are translated into approximately 45 languages in more than 100 countries and continues to be a bestseller.
Dr. Gray has written over 20 books. His most recent book is Beyond Mars and Venus. His Mars/Venus book series has forever changed the way men and women view their relationships.
John helps men and women better understand and respect their differences in both personal and professional relationships. His approach combines specific communication techniques with healthy, nutritional choices that create the brain and body chemistry for lasting health, happiness and romance.
His many books, blogs and free online workshops at MarsVenus.com provide practical insights to improve relationships at all stages of life and love. An advocate of health and optimal brain function, he also provides natural solutions for overcoming depression, anxiety, and stress to support increased energy, libido, hormonal balance, and better sleep.
He has appeared repeatedly on Oprah, as well as on The Dr. Oz Show, TODAY, CBS This Morning, Good Morning America, and others. He has been profiled in Time, Forbes, USA Today, and People. He was also the subject of a three-hour special hosted by Barbara Walters.
John Gray lives in Northern California with his wife, Bonnie. They have been happily married for over 30 years and have three grown daughters and four grandchildren. He is an avid follower of his own health and relationship advice.
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TRANSCRIPT:
This is auto-generated and may have mistakes. Please listen to the interview for accuracy.
Reena Jadhav: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another great episode of the healthier podcast. I’m Reena and today we are talking about love and relationships and its impact on health because I firmly believe that a significant part of our health has a direct connection to the health of our relationships. And you know who we have, what a treat. We’ve got John Gray, who was the author of the most well known and trusted relationship of all time. Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus. John, welcome.
John Gray: Hi. It’s a pleasure to be here with you. Delightful.
Reena Jadhav: Alright, so I’m going to give you some background on John that you may or may not be aware of today. His book is listed as one of the top most influential books in the last quarter century. It was a number one bestselling book at the 19 nineties, been translated into all kinds of languages, 45 languages, hundred countries. He’s written over 20 books and his most recent book beyond Mars and Venus has forever changed the way men and women see relationships. Now. What is amazing is it not only John has appeared of course on Oprah and the doctor show and the today show, cbs this morning, Good Morning America, and pretty much every other show you can think of, including a three hour special host hosted by Barbara Walters. He has a background with Maha Rishi Yogi, which some of you know I’m a huge proponent of yoga, so I’m super excited that we’re going to dive a little bit more into his amazingly new and exciting meditation technique which takes into account gender something that has not been done in the past. So let’s dive right in. John, what is the relationship between health and relationships? Because you’ve talked so much about relationships and in different Ted talks, you talk about hormones and men. Well, what have you found in terms of what is a direct connect between how healthy our relationship is versus how healthy we are?
John Gray: Well, first of all, thank you again for having me on your show and letting me talk about health. Sometimes I have to just focus on relationships because people know me for that, but the number one, I won’t say the number one, one of maybe three factors that massively contributes to our wellness or health or physical health is the quality of our relationships, the quality of what we put in our body and the quality of our relationship with the universe, so that would be more of a spiritual relationship and sometimes people have miraculous healings when they begin to open up to realizing they’re not alone in the universe. Sometimes it’s the detoxification of the body and sometimes it’s the opening of the heart that can cause these amazing healings. Those are three categories and maybe we’ll talk a little bit about each, but mostly relationship because people know me for that and that is hormones we all know that affect the brain wave.
John Gray: Back in the sixties, that was in the sixties, we knew that you could take a little pill and you can go into an altered state, one little pill, and it has huge impact on the brain. Of course, we know that what we put in our body affects the mind body connection, and it turns out that it triggers brain chemicals and also hormones. Hormones affect our brain chemicals, so this is all later science. Back in the last decade or so, maybe the last two decades, we’ve learned that if your hormones are out of balance, all kinds of problems will result. Now, what we’re learning now and what my most recent work is about is how we relate to others affects our hormones. That’s something. It’s a new science. For example, if I am rushing to solve a problem, if there’s an emergency, for example, what will get produced in my body?
John Gray: If I’m a man or woman as a high amount of testosterone, and if I don’t have confidence that I can solve that problem, another hormone gets produced, which is cortisol. Cortisol, uh, allows us to get back into automatic conditioning. You literally have no blood flow to the prefrontal cortex where you had the ability to self reflect self correct and create something new. So a relationship is always a challenge to self. Correct. Anybody who’s been married, noting that because it’s stuff, much interpretation is, Oh, you made this argument that no, but you said that, but there’s a rigidity that will happen in terms of our reactivity in intimate relationships because so much is at stake. See if some stranger doesn’t like me, so what? But when the person I have given my heart to doesn’t like me, it has a bigger effect of danger.
John Gray: Well, dangerous stimulates cortisol. The stress hormone, when cortisol is triggered, blood flow stops to the front part of the brain and it’s only this front part of the brain where we can hear another point of view. So we tend to keep repeating these patterns over and over due to conditioning that went into us when we were little children and now taking that to the side, elevated cortisol, not feeling safe in a relationship. What is cortisol inhibits all of your healing functions. When your, when your cortisol levels are elevated, your digestion breaks desktops. You stopped making hydrochloric acid, which is necessary to get your b vitamins. It’s necessary to digest your foods is necessary to break down your proteins, to produce the amino acids to make your brain function well so the immune system stops when you’re experiencing elevated cortisol, which is they can measure your white blood cell count goes down, your immune system function slows down, and your ability to detoxify goes down.
John Gray: All because elevated cortisol levels are there and there’s an irony and here’s the person you feel most in love with. Why are they the most dangerous? Because you’re open to them. See, the world is not such a dangerous place to me if I don’t care that much about what they say or things, but when you have a sexual intimate relationship with someone, you’ve opened yourself up to becoming spiritually one with them. They’re your soul mate. They connect with you and when they go through their stuff, we have to learn to deal with that because it will throw us in the cortisol response and affect our health and there’s ways to find our balance again and that’s what we need. Good relationship skills.
Reena Jadhav: Now, men and women handle stress differently. Share with our viewers and our audience what are those different ways? Because I don’t think people even understand that there’s actually a very different way and how a woman responds to stress and how a man responds to stress because that will hopefully help them identify when they see those symptoms to say, John did say, you know, this is a symptom I need to look out for. So I now know that my cortisol is taking.
John Gray: Okay, so what we haven’t in the body is a various stress responses and for simplicity we might say little stress response and then big stress response. Okay, so little danger, big danger, and to a certain extent little danger is adrenaline and big danger is cortisol and cortisol is the most destructive to your health. Literally causes also degeneration of brain cells. I mean it. Chronic cortisol, little Cortisol is no problem. You can run faster, you can solve her problem, you can ask for help, you can, you know, help your help solve problems in your life, give you the energy to do it, but then you’re supposed to be able to relax again. A chronic cortisol is not good and what causes chronic cortisol is when we can’t solve problems, we don’t feel we can get the support. We need a and B, even with little stress, little stress produces adrenaline.
John Gray: If we cannot get rid of the adrenaline used it up, then what happens is your body will start producing cortisol and cortisol has all the helped challenging effect. Now remember, some people have low cortisol because they’re burned out adrenal gland, but it’s, it’s an it’s a functioning adrenal gland that can give rise to all kinds of fatigue and low energy and so forth and maybe they do a test and they have low cortisol, but actually it’s because they’ve been having high cortisol for so long that ended up with the low cortisol response and they will still have even with the low cortisol response, this hormonal imbalance that will occur. So the stress responses for men under a little stress is detachment woman. No, she’s talking to a husband or boyfriend, whoever, and she gives a little feedback and says, you know, when you said da da da da, I felt a bit offended and are I, you know, I feel like I’m doing a lot more than you or something like that.
John Gray: Amanda immediately detach. You could feel it. He pulls back because that’s a little stress. He has to consider something he didn’t think was wrong with him and he has to defend himself to a certain extent. Or his tendency is, you know, we all have deep down inside a need to feel right and need to feel lovable, feel good, so whenever possible we want to explain ourselves kind of a natural thing. So as soon as he has this little stress, the woman I’ve given my heart to seems to be not happy with. He will detach now biologically what’s happening in that moment as he’s trying to figure out what it should say or do or if it’s correct or how it can make it up, whatever, but when he experiences that, that little bit of adrenaline he will detach and what’s happening in his body is that female hormone, estrogen or progesterone, depending upon which a Pi will start going down and the testosterone will start going up.
John Gray: So testosterone is a hormone that men need 30 to 50 times than when, and this is biologically true. We know that when men have low testosterone, high estrogen, they’re angry. Most people don’t know that. They always say testosterone causes anger, and in a sense it’s a precursor because with testosterone goes up, it’s a man wants to solve a problem. There’s danger. Let me solve the problem, gives you a faster reaction. Time gets you more focused, and most importantly, testosterone helps you to detach from fear. See, if you’re going to go save somebody in a building that’s on fire, you can’t be afraid. You’ve got to push the spheres aside because spheres says, stop. You’re going to go into battle. They’re going to find an animal or run away. You have to be able to push those feelings to the side in order to see your mind can go into conditioned responses that you’ve been trained to do.
John Gray: So this is a man’s first stress response. If he’s not peaceful and centered in the moment, then what happens? He goes a little out of balance. A little out of balance means that conditioning has to come in. His testosterone goes up, and that’s his first response, which is detachment. Now, at that point, if he continues talking, she feels disconnected, so she’s going to ask him lots of questions that talk. Now what he’s going to do when he asked if he talks to the person he cares about his testosterone will start going down, his estrogen will go up. Intimacy is estrogen, so sharing, connecting, and all of that. That’s that’s our female side. We have a male and female side, so his estrogen goes up, which pushes his testosterone down even further, so let me. The key here is that when, when men are depressed or irritable, their testosterone is down.
John Gray: When men are defensive, their testosterone goes up, then goes down. So it’s all about testosterone. For men, men are from Mars. I talked about cave time men out of their cave sometimes, literally that’s the forget their problems to detach. It’s kind of what Buddha taught, which is what meditation was, was empty the mind and forget. It was primarily taught to men to boost their testosterone. Because when men don’t feel successful, their testosterone goes down for say, for women, women need to feel successful. For Testosterone, it’s just that women don’t need as much testosterone and women are under moderate stress. What occurs for them is their hormones go out of balance. If they’re in the first part of their cycle, after the period to ambulation, their estrogen levels will go down. If they’re in moderate stress, if they’re in the second part of their cycle, after ovulation, if they’re under moderate stress, their progesterone levels will go down.
John Gray: So an imbalance of these hormones causes is a symptom of adrenaline and her body. Now, what can help her find balance? Just as men need to pull away to detach, women need to connect more. That’s why when there’s conflict between men and women, women often want to engage. They want to ask more questions and want to pursue the talk about this. I’m not saying men can’t do that either. It’s just men do that when they get to the higher level of stress, and we’re going to get to that. This is still at low level stress. You know what’s going on? Did you have a good day? She wants to enlist conversation because it turns out that when women experience adrenaline, if they talk about how they feel, estrogen levels or progesterone levels will increase. So this is like the magic for women. It’s talking, so we have something called talk therapy.
John Gray: I’m not as a therapist for many years women would come in my office and if I’m a good listener and I asked questions, I’m genuinely interested and I’m very empathetic. They leave happy and this was like I didn’t solve their problems. Their life hasn’t changed. That’s all we want John, We just want to listen to us starting with our loved ones, which is our husband, and that’s kind of right where the problem starts. You know, sometimes all we want is somebody to listen to us. Exactly this is the intimacy that allows women to experience the high estrogen levels that they particularly need higher than what they’re experiencing and it’s a crisis today because when women are independent and when they’re doing things like making money, not saying women shouldn’t be independent, not saying women shouldn’t be educated or you know all that, that’s their male side, but when they do too much of that and they don’t nurture their female side at the same time, then the masculine increases.
John Gray: The feminine goes down and this is biologically and that women’s estrogen levels, progesterone levels go out of balance. Cortisol levels or adrenaline levels, adrenal, adrenal production all gets imbalanced, so you see so many women getting their hormones tested and taking hormones and doing these things, and you’re not. In my book beyond Mars, Venus, I give all the cautions for it. Taking hormones is better if you could make them. Now, if you can’t make them, then sometimes it’s an. It’s a blessing to be able to take medicines and so forth, but with this new knowledge of good nutrition, along with good meditation or spirituality or prayer, whatever it is, along with gender insight and how to stimulate the right hormones. In many cases, your body can come right back into balance and experienced the right balance of hormones if you’re a woman, but it’s very common for women to symptom of being more on your male side.
John Gray: That’s, I got to do this. I gotta do this. I got to do this. That’s testosterone. Too much of that lowers estrogen. When estrogen levels are low, you’re not able to feel and love. You’re not able to feel appreciation for what you have. You’re not able to feel gratitude and acceptance that life and my husband or my boyfriend is not perfect, but good enough. See, there’s a whole dynamic of I’m not perfect, but I’m good enough and I deserve to be loved the way I am. I’m quite a catch and that is not perfect. That is just simply self esteem and every woman, when her estrogen levels go down too far, when they’re out of balance, she loses her ability temporarily to appreciate what a man in her life provides for her. It’s just simply, are you happy today? It’s the same life. Some days we wake up and we’re happy with our lives and some days we’re not, and typically if you’re married, a lot of that I’m not happy with my life.
John Gray: Gets focused on the person who in the past gave you the greatest happiness, which is your husband, your boyfriend, and then he’s like, what happened? What would happen is, you know on a biological level, she’s not perfect clearly, but hormonal imbalance is so, so key to being in love and when you’re in love, feeling love, feeling happiness, feeling safe. That’s a key thing for women, which is a big part of my message for men is how to provide safety for women. Safety allows women to feel. I can depend on you, but a woman feels I can depend on you, particularly for the 10 days after her period. Her estrogen levels will double, but for women’s fulfillment, women’s estrogen levels after a period needed to be about 10 times higher than a man’s and it for five days prior to her ambulation. They need to double to become 20 times more than a man’s, and if she does it, she loses her romantic feelings and then she gets upset with him for not being romantic enough because he used to make her feel so good, but that’s when they didn’t have all their little.
John Gray: Let me say it differently because in the beginning of a relationship, you get automatic hormones because you get automatic dopamine. Dopamine is the newness, so when there’s newness, you got a lot of good hormones. If you’re a woman, your estrogen levels are all excited and everything has testosterone is really high. He’s there for you. Your serotonin levels are off the chart because you feel that he you don’t have any history of being disappointed or not being successful in providing the happiness you think you should be able to provide. So in the beginning you get this wonderful brew of hormones that keeps your brain chemicals, that helps your hormones, but once once familiarity sense in, you know you’re used to your partner, you don’t get free dopamine and once you have disappointments, you don’t get free Serotonin and without those brain chemicals you don’t get the right production of hormones.
John Gray: And so it’s easier to experience the stress response. And so you know, it gets complicated because we have such higher expectations and relationships. Men and women have come together more than ever before. Women on their male side, men on there more feminine side that more emotions and more wish. You know, often women go, what do you mean? Men are more in touch with their female side. Well, have you ever noticed that modern men, they care about your sexual fulfillment. This is a big deal. In prior generations, women did sex primarily a lot. The majority out of obligation. It was just your duty as a woman. You can see this historical records and sex was for men. Your majority of men today their greatest fulfillment and sex is your happiness as a woman. That’s what it is. Now some women say, well, why does it need to do this and this and this because he just doesn’t know, but when I teach classes on sex, I used to do that for many, many years, enlightened sexuality conversation, and it was always, what are your greatest experiences?
John Gray: Men and they had always talked about, I gave her this experience, this experience, this experience, because what we understand when it comes to gender, what stimulates testosterone the most and men and for women is success. For men, testosterone is the antidote to stress, and so when men feel successful, their stress levels will go down, but and feeling successful, if he has to face a lot of stress and challenges and indecision and make decisions too much, then he runs out of testosterone. He needs his cave time. That means to disconnect from anything. Connection is intimacy. Connection is estrogen. You can’t rebuild your testosterone and the presence of estrogen stimulating context, so that’s why men will sit and watch a football game. They’ll go meditate and that passed. That’s what meditation was. It was men’s ability to rebuild their testosterone, empty the mind, forget your problems, so men make this, make this silly mistake with women. They say, why don’t you just forget it? Don’t worry about it. It’s not a big deal. Just relax, watch TV.
Reena Jadhav: You might as well bury that relationship at that point. Well, you don’t. You. You’re right that it sounds complex, but it’s not listening to you. What it comes down to is it’s really hormones. When you’re dating someone, new hormones come together and create this feeling of love, which is really a perfect balance of hormones. Then you get into real life and those hormones start to fade away because real life gets in the way in terms of whether it’s challenges or issues or failures or bills or whatever it is. And the next thing you know, you have a couple that’s fighting a lot and thinking they’re not loved. Whereas it’s really not that they’re not in love. It’s just that that perfect storm of hormones has dissipated. So let’s, let’s talk about what is your advice to a couple that’s fighting and not aggressive fighting, but let’s just say there they’ve started fighting about, you know, let’s pick a topic, um, builds.
Reena Jadhav: She spends too much. He says, you shouldn’t be spending this much control what you spend on or you should get permission from him and whatever that is right to they’re fighting on these bills. What should be the ground rules, John, for fighting in a way that’s going to keep the hormones balanced and not take you to a place where you cannot come back from. Because often fighting, I feel sets the groundwork for going into a space that you really can’t come back from that beginning of the end of the relationship because of how you fight. So dove a little bit about what are the ground rules be for fighting
John Gray: again, fighting is now, remember we talked about our stress responses, which is a little stress. Fighting is big stress and big stress causes men. So for men, when he’s arguing he’s he basically, she’s upset about something and by the way about the money thing, sometimes it’s a woman who’s telling the management spend so much that’s not a gender thing. That’s just historical family issues and it could be the woman who says, why do you spend money there? And it could be the mango. Why’d you spend money there? So, but the gender about that is typically the woman has some kind of emotional response under moderate stress. Okay? There, there have a difference of a point of view, right? That’s a moderate stress. Now how are we going to get through this? How am I going to get what I want? And you get what you want and we’re kind of that.
John Gray: There’s a little tension there. So at that point you could look at some of the brain function and women. There’s eight times more blood flow to the emotional part of the brain. Women will start to have an emotional tone that men misinterpret. Misinterpret that tone, because men only experienced the emotional tone within themselves under big stress, under a little stress. Men have a disconnect. They have a detached tone. Remember this, we’ll say 80 to 90 percent of our communication is tone of voice. Tone of voice says at all. And that’s why people say, how do I say this? How do I say this? There’s ways to say things better, but you can say things to perfect way, but with the wrong tone of voice. Because if your tone of voice, as you know, I hate you, you’re not going to get me what I want.
John Gray: I’ll try this out. Just our have years of resentment. Why should I even bother? That tone of voice is not loving. Okay? So let’s just no tone of voice. So what happens is misinterpretation of tone of voice, because under moderate stress, meaning a woman’s, it’s not really a big deal. I’m not trying to control you or whatever. She’s going to have a more emotional tone of voice for a man under moderate stress, which means this is not a big deal. We don’t have to worry about, let’s see how we can work this out. He’s kind of a very detached tone of voice. Now women will misinterpret that as well because women detach when it’s a big problem. Okay. When you say when we get emotional with little problems, but when it’s really big she goes, okay, I don’t trust this person or I’m done with them.
John Gray: I’m out of here. She’s cold as ice, she’s hot. When she’s in a little stress cold as ice when it’s fixed her. So Jen under a little stress are cold as ice. Then under big stress they become emotional and they become very hot. And that’s your angry man that you’re argumentative, man. That’s when he’s getting mad at you. And a woman is Kinda like freaking out the catching and looking at you. So. So you have little stress, big stress. So if in my own reality, as a man, emotions only negative emotions, anger, fear, defensiveness, hurt. When when these strong emotions increase, it’s only because I’m seeing the situation as a lion. Tiger or bear is a big problem. But for women they only detach when the problem is a lion tiger. And bear for her, there’s a disconnect. Or estrogen goes down and she says, I can’t get support from this guy, so I have to do it all myself.
John Gray: That’s she detaches from depending on him for support. He is now dangerous. So she’s going to pull back. So when she has a big problem, she detaches. So in Amandy catches, she panics because oh my gosh, he’s pulling away. What did I do? What did I say? Does he not love me? Is he planning to leave me? Is there somebody else? Because quite often that’s what she’s going through. If she gets all the way up to high stress, which is detachment. So this is like a phenomenal insight, which is how we’re constantly misinterpreting each other. So you asked what are the ground rules? When you have an argument and fight, as soon as you’re in a defense reaction, you’ll have to call a time out. That means you just slow it down. It’s simply we had. We went through many stages of this I can recognize very clearly for me and my marriage, my defensive reaction.
John Gray: My wife would get it in a tone of voice. Now I finally got clear about my tone of voice, what would cause her to get triggered? Because if I. my voice has too much focus and detachment and determination, her body would just defend. When a woman can’t appreciate what a man says, then suddenly he feels even more threatened. When a woman doesn’t feel a man could empathize with her point of view. It’s like, okay, we’re on the same side here. We’re going to get through this thing together. I want to understand your point of view because we’re a team and I want you to get what you want as it and the tone of voice ironically should be something like this. Remember me? I’m the guy who’s that who nailed before you and pledge my life to you and without a question or doubt if you were in danger, I would risk my life for you and I will die for you, and if you talked to every man in my seminars, they will all say I will die for her.
John Gray: That’s who men are. We were the soldiers. We go right into battle. We know we’re gonna die. We do it to protect our family. I’m not saying that women don’t have a male side would die for their children as well, but you have to remember this is the guy and he asked to remember that, but what happens is men’s heart closes when they get into that high stress level, not the low stress. They detach, but it’s not like they go into this way out of balance, defensive, argumentative place. So here’s some techniques that my wife and I developed. One is when we will be having a difference of opinion and you have to have a difference of opinion. Absolutely. The first thing is men have to know if there’s an emotional tone in her voice that makes it difficult for you to hear her one, don’t speak, ask more questions, don’t speak.
John Gray: Anything you say at that point is going to interfere with her coming back to a place of appreciating what you say when you say it to women, it’s like a priority. This is where we think we’re all just the same. You don’t recognize the important priorities. It’s like some people need more vitamin D, so people being more vitamin C, you know, women have certain emotional needs that are more important than men and for women. The most important need they have in our context of our life today. It changes our modern world. Women are way on their male side. They need help to come back to their female side, the come back to their female side, they need to feel safe. Safety produces the female hormones. The being able to provide safety, solving the problem, being the champion, being the hero, being the one that provides that support increases testosterone.
John Gray: So men, you’ve got to provide safety for her and men don’t know that job, although that’s what we’ve done throughout history. Now we have to provide a kind of emotional safety, which doesn’t mean becoming a motion ourselves. It means becoming compassionate and empathetic, which is staying in a heartfelt place, not talking about me, but listening to her and trying to go into her world, her experience, just the her still as a good person, and that’s what literally it’s like sex. The man goes into the woman. The woman doesn’t go into the man, but so what happens is she needs to open up. He needs to make the safety for her to open up an enter, enter her to understand her perspective, to understand, to go inside. Most people don’t realize that being a good listener is the most masculine thing you can do. And women always, you know, I’ll listen to what you’re feeling.
John Gray: No women don’t listen to what he’s feeling until you feel heard, because you can’t hear what he’s going through until you feel heard. Because if you’re under stress response, the most powerful thing to come back into balance is to talk about what you feel inside, which can be horrendously hard for a man if he hears you doing is blaming him. There’s techniques for that. So here’s one. First of all, the context is she gets to open up first, not me. It’s not about me because anything I say, see, I’m not stupid. I know that if she’s not feeling safe, she cannot open up and appreciate my point of view and this discussion of differences. So I need to step one. She gets to go first. Same thing in sex. Orgasm. Women should have the orgasm first. Otherwise, if he has his, he’s done. I mean there’s a reality.
John Gray: Here is biological reality. We need to bring into the emotional level of a relationship is she has the permission, the support to be heard first. Not that he shouldn’t be heard, is that she needs to feel safety to express what’s going on inside and she needs. He needs to learn how to listen to that, but it’s not just him. She has to learn some skills and here’s a view, okay, there’s lots of big science here, but a simple one if a woman could do this is if you’re upset with your partner and you want to talk, you can simply say, hold on, I just want you to listen to me for the next 10 minutes and not saying anything because you have to tell them what you want. Men Don’t know this. See, they don’t know that. You can’t expect them to hear me talk once and know it.
John Gray: You have to know what you need to be responsible to get it, so you say to hold on, just hear me out. Let me work through my feelings before we try to solve this problem. I’m getting triggered and this is what a beautiful. If you really want a to send you 100 percent, try saying this, I’m getting triggered inside and it’s not a big deal. Everyone is. I want to tell you what’s going on inside of me, which will immediately create an adrenaline response than a man. When you say, we need to talk, oh, my instinct.
Reena Jadhav: It’s instant defensive like, oh my God, I don’t want to talk about this.
John Gray: That’s right.
Reena Jadhav: Please not talk about this.
John Gray: And women need to know. That’s every man that’s every particularly having sex. Okay, so that’s what makes us more vulnerable. So the second step is if you say to him the opposite of what you think would work, but the opposite of what you believe will work, which is you say this, this is not a big deal. I just need you to listen to me and then we can figure out what to do about it.
John Gray: Set the stage so you’re not gonna. Have as much of a defensive reaction and if it’s something you want, if what you want in your feelings is like, I need you to be more affection. I need more hugs anymore. Romance, I need you to be more organized. I need you to remember, I need you to call me if what your need at that moment is him to change his behavior. You need to say to him, this is not a big deal. I’m not asking you to change in any way. I just want you to understand what’s going on and I trust that you’ll make adjustments, so say it’s say love is is this is accepting you as you are and trusting that if you have the proper information over time, you’ll make adjustments. Nobody’s just going to give up and change right away.
John Gray: They want to be themselves. You’ll lose all the passion. If you’re not authentic, it’s like women want. They think it’d be so simple. Just change your behavior. Everything will be better. Men, you know, we think we. They just change how you feel. Let it go. Don’t be upset about things. Stop being so needy. Stop asking for help. Why? I talked so much. Just be happy. Can’t you just be happy with me.
Reena Jadhav: That’s exactly it.
John Gray: You can’t just suddenly tell her to change how she feels. It’s her job to change how she feels. It’s his job to graduate justice behaviors and be a better partner. Every person wants to be better when they feel loved, that support it. So our objective and relationships is our power is to provide the love that our partners need the most. And now look then to kind of go, well, what?
John Gray: What is the love that men need the most the most? Well, we go back to our biological discussion. What women need most is the feeling of conversations, behaviors, interactions that stimulate more female hormones. Men need conversations, behaviors. They stimulate more male hormones. Well, it turns out that whenever you appreciate someone for something, Oh, you did this for me. Thank you so much. Oh, you blew it, but it’s okay. It’s all right. You do so many other good things that balances out. That’s called acceptance. The appreciation. Look what you did for me and then, oh, he’s here. Look what he can do for me. That’s called trust. All of those behaviors, those responses increase testosterone in men. So like in my marriage, not that my wife was always in a good mood and always positive, but always when I would come home or she would come home, she greeted me as if we had no problems and life was wonderful.
John Gray: It’s literally women are the embodiment of love and appreciation and acceptance of imperfection and trust that things can always get better. This is what women is your super power. It’s in your purse. You just have to pull out that wallet and find it in there. You need to look around in there. You find your superpower, and it’s this feminine lob that can appreciate what you can receive because women femininity is all about receiving. Is the vagina, is the opening of the heart. It’s come inside, come inside, but you don’t want just anybody coming inside. So you find someone special that you could accept that’s coming inside you. Appreciate you’re delighted by it and you’re open to it. That’s now. You can have that all the time. We’re not, we’re flawed human beings, but you can find moments when it’s most important. And for men, the most important times is to coming and goings, particularly the cummings.
John Gray: Every more I would give my wife for hugs a day. By the way, my wife has passed, so I’m just mentioned that, um, we’ve been there 33 years and she recently passed of cancer. Uh, so the, so sorry to hear that, but we, we, we had rituals that we did and four times a day minimum where we get up, when I see her first I look for her and give her a hug and she would always respond and to hug. And the hugs would be at least at three to six second couples. Just these quick hugs. Hugging is one of the most powerful things to have women come back from testosterone land to estrogen land. It produces the oxytocin, and people now know about oxytocin. The bonding hormone helps you to feel love, but actually is estrogen, which is love. Oxytocin brings you, lowers testosterone and increases estrogen.
John Gray: So that’s the function of oxytocin. Physical affection produces the oxytocin. Also talking about your feelings produces oxytocin is connection. Oxytocin is connection which lowers testosterone, raises estrogen, which is why under stressful situations men disconnect because at the rebuild their testosterone. But women go, oh, give me some connection here. So you might notice your husband’s in a bad mood. You don’t go to touch him, you know, going back, you know, but if a woman feels safe and she starts to feel emotionally upset, you gently go and give her a hug and she’ll just melt into you. If she has enough estrogen in your body, that’s the melting as the yielding. It’s to open the heart. And again, I’m not saying you should be just one side, but that’s the stress reducing side for women is making sure that their estrogen levels go up, they feel safe.
John Gray: So the second point you asked about arguments, what do you do to avoid argument? You have to have this context. You have to understand the differences. The second thing is I have to know my job is to provide safety for her at anytime I’m angry, irritable, judgmental, mad thinking, negative thoughts about her, she feels and it’s not safe. All she can then do is go into her programs that are going to get triggered. I can’t trust men. They’re not going to be there for me. He doesn’t really love me. I don’t deserve to be loved, and she’ll either go into on that. He’s the wrong person for me. All of this stuff gets triggered. It’s not even us. It’s conditioning from thousands and thousands of years of dysfunctional life. People were like, monkeys, you know, it’s still today when couples are fighting, if you stand back and look at yourself are so petty.
John Gray: That’s just conditioning. It’s this part of the brain, this prefrontal cortex. We’re able to self reflect and learn something new and apply something new. So for me, when my wife would say this part of our techniques we use to use, if I started to get the slightest bit defensive, she just said, you’re being mean. And that worked for us. Some people doesn’t work for because I never want to be mean to my wife. Never, you know? So it was like no defense response, but maybe I’m some guy who was like violent to a woman at some point and then she says, you’re being mean. He’ll go, he’ll be defensive about that. I’m a sweet soul, so it didn’t. I didn’t get defensive. I just wanted to know because she says you’re being mean. And it’s literally what she would do is just walk out of the room you’re being made. I found out all I can be nicer.
John Gray: She would catch it. As soon as she noticed her triggers, she just said, you’re being mean. Then what you used to do. That was her way. And that worked for us. Couples, they’d have their, their words. A woman can say, you know, I’m being triggered. It could be something like that, but you always want to do. You don’t want to say you’re a stopped talking to me that way. Now you’re giving a man in order. Nobody does. You don’t like getting orders either, but clearly men do not like getting orders. It just triggers more of a response that they’re powerless, that they, that they’re not like cool guys or whatever. So for me, that understanding of hormones helped me so much with defensiveness because once I understood hormones, every man wants to be testosterone, man, okay, we want to be stud. We want to feel testosterone, we want to feel love for being men. It’s inside of a man. And to have that, you have to have normal, healthy testosterone. Your 35 year olds are like dropping their drooping at 15 minutes.
Reena Jadhav: What happens at 50? Right? So, so what can someone do to boost their testosterone if they’re a man? And then vice versa, what can women do to make sure that they’ve got enough estrogen without relying on each other to boost for them?
John Gray: Nicely said. Let me finish the other point because you asked about arguments if complex. Okay? So what I had to know, and I teach this, the men, every time men, you’re angry, you’re becoming a girl. There is a stigma. Don’t be a girl. If a guy that’s a good one, you’re becoming a girl. Your estrogen levels are going up and if you talk at that time, your estrogen levels will go even higher and your testosterone will go down. Just to know that helped me realize, and the key to it was not so much the girl thing, but the thing was is that I want to be a loving human being. I want to be strong, centered, grounded, and lovable. I want to be the man. And when I’m the man, my testosterone levels need to be about 30 to 50 times more than hers. A woman cannot be turned on to a man who doesn’t have 30 to 50 times more testosterone.
John Gray: I want my wife, to disarm me want to be with me? I need to have testosterone. Otherwise women start to feel unsafe and they start to close down their estrogen or they start to overgive and they feel like they’re the mother. He’s like a child, he’s like a baby, he’s in secure. How can I love that in a passionate, sexy way? Just was couples lose all that. And that’s the most powerful way to get the balance hormones as well. We’ll get to your answer is we’re getting to what you just said. But so for me, anger is an immediate symptom. I becoming totally out of balance. And if I talk it’s only gonna make it worse. So what I would do when I noticed my trigger is after a while, that last 10 years, she never even had to say, you’re being mean. I would notice it inside and I would just go, I just put my hand up and say, I hear you.
John Gray: I need some time it, I hear you. I need some time, and she knows what that means. He needs time to rebuild his testosterone. So you asked the question, what can men do to rebuild their test draws, sort of women with their female hormones. There’s a lot of things you can do and there’s things you can do without your partner and that’s what you have to know at this moment. Let’s say I’m doing something wonderful for my wife and we’re connecting. That’s building my testosterone and that’s building here estrogen, but as soon as there’s any conflict, I have to step one. Stop looking to her to balance my hormones, step without resentment and say, now it’s time for me to do it myself. That step to stop trying to change her. Whenever you’re trying to change your partner anyway, you will always get less. That’s step one.
John Gray: How do you as a person try to change your partner? Could it be angry at them? Is it. Is it being passive aggressive with them? Is it giving them advise? Is it withholding glove? Is it not having sex? People have to find their many, many different ways. We try to manipulate our partner to get what we want and these are all out of date monkey behaviors, dysfunctional behaviors that don’t work. They used to work a long time ago. You have to remember a long time ago, a scary person had everybody follow them and you know, so there’s a manipulation is the world we came from. It’s not the world of love. Love is to embrace person as they are. So step one, don’t try to change them. Then what can you do? You have to. Step two is rebalance your hormones without depending on your partner.
John Gray: So if I was an argument, my wife, I say, I hear you, I need some time. I would go off and I would do something to rebuild my testosterone, which basically it’s going to be a little different for every man. For me. I’m a master meditator, so I could just go meditate and detach, but you have to do it with the intent. I’m going to temporarily forget what just happened. I’m gonna raise my testosterone. I’m doing something I’m good at. Anytime I meant does something on his own that he’s good at. It can be driving your car, it could be going to the play tennis with a friend. Anything that you what you’re good at are going back to work and solve a problem with the intention. Intention is everything. I’m going to, I’m going to temporarily forget what just happened because I was defensive and anytime I go back there, I’ll be defensive again so I temporarily forget it.
John Gray: Do something to raise my testosterone, which opens my heart. Member for men is your heart can only open when your chest up and goes up to 30 to 50 times more than a woman. So when your testosterone comes up, your heart opens at that point, then I’m going to reflect on what happened that shut me down. Okay, what happened that triggered me and I’m going to be a hundred percent accountable at that point to look at how did I contribute to that? How can I learn from that? What I want to do about that? And then I’m not going to go back right away and talk about it. I’m going to have it inside myself. It’s still very delicate and I’m going to go back and I’m going to demonstrate more love for her and understanding, demonstrating more love. I mentioned the love needs for men, testosterone, appreciation, acknowledgement, trusting, accepting, finding that part inside of you, giving it as much as you can for women, what she needs most from a man as demonstrations of caring consideration, understanding empathy, compassion and respect is respect.
John Gray: And appreciation is something she needs more than that. She needs to be honored. When a woman is honored, then she does feel appreciated. But the appreciation, if you’re just going on and look what I can do it, look what I do, it’s it raises testosterone. Look what I need do this for me, is, is honoring her. She’s, she’s the most important person in your life. You prioritize her over others and sometimes over yourself. Sacrifice. Sometimes that’s what you have to do. Not all the time you have to take care of yourself too. But that went, when you behave that way towards a woman, her estrogen levels soar, her trust levels increased. She’s able to give you the appreciation, she’s able to give you the acceptance. She’s able to give you the trust and otherwise not able to do it. Then if you want customers, you’ve got to work hard for it.
John Gray: You’ve got to do something to get the response is that free relationships are not free. Love until both needs are. When both needs are met, then it’s like having a big bank account and you can give your money away for free. And that’s unconditional love. That’s what we hope to get to in a relationship. That’s what I was able to find with my wife for years. Just unconditional love and and one of the symptoms of that, which is very sweet. It was hard for her to say she’s sorry about things because she had such a painful childhood. Her mother always making her wrong and I just basically a honey, you never have to apologize to me. Never say you’re sorry to me. It’s if you want, fine. There’s never a condition that’s gonna. Hold me back from loving you and I remember after 23 years we had a conversation.
John Gray: I said to her, honey, how do you rate me as a husband of a guy wanted to be rated? She said, she said, as a father to our three children, you’re the unimaginable. A plus the very best I can imagine as a husband, you’re not perfect, but you given me the greatest gift any woman could ever want. I said, what’s that? And she said, I know that I can say and do things that will really upset you, and when it does, you stop talking. You go to your cave, you do some magic and you always come back to me with more love and that’s the key. That’s called growing in love. So if we had a little argument or whatever, I didn’t go back and with a big apology and let’s work it through whatever. She didn’t demand that of me either that can, that can sort of bring back the trauma of what just happened.
John Gray: What you do is you come back and you have waste. I come back being affectionate. I might clean the kitchen. I might plan a day, I might bring some flowers. I gave her, certainly come back with hugs and stroke her hair and said, I love you so much sweetie, and that is enough, so there’s no pressure on me that I have to go, oh gosh, I was so bad. I really blew it. I shouldn’t have got angry like that. Sometimes I would say that sometimes I wouldn’t. That wasn’t a requirement because nobody wants to say I’m sorry and have somebody look at you and go, yeah, yeah, it does.
Reena Jadhav: What’s interesting is you know what you’re sharing sounds like it should be doable and it should be something that we all should do, but John, you and I know the truth, which is it requires a lot of work and self awareness and then the strength to fight our natural instincts to become into evolve into this perfect person. In this relationship you’re talking about, not everyone can do that. Not everyone’s interested in doing that either. So, so here’s a question for you. How can someone figure out if they are in a bad relationship or a relationship which isn’t really going to resolve itself, where the fights are getting much worse and it doesn’t seem well, it doesn’t seem like things might get better, however, maybe they’re wrong. So what are some of the ways that both the met or a woman can start to question and say, is this something that we can work out and build into a growing loving relationship? Or is this something that I really have to read? Either I want to be in this very toxic relationship that I’m in for a variety of reasons. I mean, you know how it is. It could be kids, it could be social pressure as it could be a variety of things. It’s a relationship, right? I don’t want to come home or I’m physically ill when I think about this person because those have, again, health manifestations, it’s, you know, you can just feel miserable and not end up with some kind of a chronic illness.
John Gray: We’re bringing it back to how it is so, so key. I mean when, when you’re not feeling nurtured in a relationship, alerts or relationship is hell or heaven. There’s nothing more painful than the being in a relationship that’s dysfunctional where you’re giving your heart and you don’t feel as reciprocal. That’s what causes trauma and the body that causes disease and sickness and today with so much toxicity and so many challenges in relationships. Now you have the perfect group for sickness because you can’t detoxify all this toxicity if you’re stressed and what causes great stress. Whether you’re in relationships or not, people tend to be very stressed today, but being in a relationship where you’re stuck, it’s like being in a jail sentence and you’re not being fulfilled so it can actually be way more painful than being single and having a stressful life because your heart, you keep trying to open your heart and getting knocked down.
John Gray: But what I’ve seen as a marriage counselor is you. When your heart is hurting, you can’t know whether they’re right for you or wrong for you. Many people, they in order to leave a dysfunctional relationship because they feel it’s their partner’s fault and part of it is they don’t realize how they contribute to it. So that’s when people, and I do a women only course in women all walk out realizing that they have brought out the worst in their partner. I do men only and they all get that. They have brought out the worst of their partner. So there’s a lot of. When you start understanding how you contribute to the problems in your relationship, and the first thing I got to was number one is we try to change our partner and every dysfunctional relationship. We’re trying to change our partner in some way rather than loving them.
John Gray: And we have to understand that if you try to change your partner, even if it looks really sweet and loving, like you’re trying to help a child or you’re trying to help them think clearly or bs, logical or whatever it might be, a, you’re trying to change them. That is not love. So we walk around thinking, I’m so loving. I give all this love, but get a man. They want divorce where they say, look, I do all these wonderful things for is never enough to make her happy. Why is she happy? I said, because you’re not doing any of this stuff to make women happy. You’re like this big negative force. And women will say, look, I give and give and give, and it gives me nothing. I say, well, you’re giving them all the wrong stuff and you’re not giving to yourself. You have to be responsible for your happiness.
John Gray: So there’s a dance where you can’t really know who’s your soul mate, who’s. You’re not who you should spend your life with until you open your heart with forgiveness and acceptance at 100 percent. Accountability. Then you might choose to leave, to enter a relationship from an open heart. You should leave a relationship from an open heart because not all relationships are meant to stay. I’ve been married to Bonnie, worked for 33 years, was married to her and until she passed. And um, I was married before for two or three years, two years, and I was a young guy, didn’t understand relationships, but I ended the relationship from a place of love. My heart was open. We’d worked through these issues together. My heart was open. I realized, you know, she’s not the right woman for me. And it was really true if some people just aren’t the right one up for us.
John Gray: It was kind of August because I wanted children and she didn’t. And I married her telling her I didn’t want kids. But once I had a good job and making some money, I want to get it grew inside of me. And she never had children. So it was, it was, it was writing on the wall so to speak. But when your heart is open, you kind of see, do I want to be with this person or not? But not gathering evidence to now justify he’s a terrible person. She’s a horrible wife and therefore I’m going to leave her. You will tend to repeat those same patterns. So first step to know whether you’re going to lead someone to find your heart open again, so you stopped trying to change them back off and start focusing on, I have to learn how to be happy air regardless of my partner.
John Gray: It’s kind of like being separated and sometimes I encourage couples to separate to find your own happiness again because you’re constantly blaming your partner for your own unhappiness and particularly during separation. I prefer to recommend to people that they have sexual relationships as well because ultimately every couple of this argument, fighting isn’t having great sex. Great sex is one of the antidotes to everything for hormonal balance. You know, you talk about hormonal balance. Sex is pure. When a man has an erection is testosterone 50 times higher, it’s shooting up there. It’s going. He’s getting his search. For women to be orgasmic, it has to be 20 times more estrogen than a man. This is like these are massive hormone balancers. The mixed love and sex together, and so when couples start arguing, they start closing down, they lose their sexual interest in each other, becomes more functional.
John Gray: It’s no longer this passionate appearance of the divine and to me, sex is one of the highest ways to experience the divine. You meditate to connect with the divine. You bring it down to the world through service, through love, through sharing, through honoring other people, but when you can bring it into sex and feel love and sex, you bring it into your body and you know there was a book back in the nineties where they were actually helping couples heal heart disease simply by teaching them how to have sex. Again. One of the healthiest things for the heart is to be having sex with somebody you love and if you can have sex with a person you love, you separate. Be Single for awhile. Open your heart and you get the newness. You know newness will always stimulate the right hormones, but don’t get a divorce.
John Gray: Then rec reflect, do I really want to be with my partner? And literally, I don’t know the exact statistics on this, but in California for example, you can’t just get a divorced. You have to separate officially in six months later you can get your divorce, and that’s because so many people after separating, we’ll come back together and love each other and they typically go, okay, I, I’m, I’m, I’m unhappy and it’s not my partner’s fault. I’ve got to figure out what to do, and you’re out there and you’re, you. You start growing within yourself, so you’re finding your own source of happiness inside that step to come back the hormonal balance. Step three is now going give more love. So in my marriage, when I would shut down, I would go do something to make me feel good again. Then I would reflect on how I contributed to her unhappiness and then I would make it up to her.
John Gray: And the same thing for women. Go make it up to your partner. You see how you contributed to their unhappiness. Go do something wonderful. Gives them that precisely the love that they need. That step three is now you’ve just taken time to love yourself, to open up now from that place of fullness, full bank account. Go give more love to this person that you were mad at. Now you’re going to go give more love, and once they’re getting the love they need, they will start to give it back. That’s the way the world works. When you put it out, it comes back. If you give exactly what they need, not what you think they should need. Then if you don’t get it back, then you started asking for more, but you ask for more from a place of fullness is no longer a demand. You have to do this for me to be happy because more of a preference.
John Gray: So this is not a big deal, but when you do this, you know, some examples go, you know, I used to be late for dinner. My wife would say, John, I was really upset. I just want to talk to you for 10 minutes. Don’t say anything. I just want you to hear ideal and it’s not a big deal. Just take it in when you’re late. I feel like why bother? Make you a meal, you know, when you don’t call. I think maybe something bad has happened, you know, and, and, and, and when you’re giving a talk to other people and you don’t call me when you’re late, I feel like other people are more important than me, so this hurts a lot inside and I kind of feel like I didn’t want to cook for you at all and I made it a really special meal for you and you were late and so you didn’t get to enjoy it and I don’t want you to say anything. Just thinking about it, know that that’s who I am. I’m sensitive, I’m delicate. I just want to love and connect you and then walk out of the room. Let him just think about it. You don’t have to.
Reena Jadhav: Communication is really important.
John Gray: Communication is without demanding a response,
Reena Jadhav: The right way of communicating and I don’t think we are born with that skill. Certainly not trained with that skill. So we sort of stumble into creating our own pattern of communication is what I’ve realized.
John Gray: I didn’t know that we stumbled into it. I think we’re programmed from childhood.
John Gray: This is, there’s so much psychology clients about that and there is one part of it, sometimes rebels against the programming, so there’s also a not that programming programming is just reacting to a programming rather than this part of the brain that actually looks at your actions and sees, oh, I didn’t get the result I wanted. Let me add, let me analyze, let me reflect reflection on how did I contribute to that, look at how they contributed to it, but then you also have to look at your own side and when you look at how somebody else contributed to it, you can also look at that with compassion. They don’t know what they’re doing, so you know there’s a way of looking at this that we just haven’t been taught and it’s not possible to look at things that way. When you’re experiencing stress responses, just remember under stress responses, Cortisol, particularly blood flow stops to the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which is the only part of our brain which has DNA, which is exclusively human.
John Gray: The other DNA in our brain is monkeys and lizards, you know, really emotional. So we got this part of the brain that allows us to sort of balance all this stuff. We have to, we have to recognize our weaknesses, human beings. We’re going to be triggered, we’re going to have reactions, and the more you’re with a loving partner, the more it’s going to happen. So you have to take the time out, you have to take the responsibility, open your heart again and go give more, love, more support, and then you will get more back. That’s how you get more in a relationship.
Reena Jadhav: And is there ever a time when you just have to walk away and if so, what would those signs be like when? How would someone know? And this actually a question came in from a friend who wants to know, how do you know when it’s time to actually call it quits?
John Gray: Well, once again you do it when your heart is open and if you ask her how did you know that was the person for you say it’s the same answer comes from your heart. It’s not a complicated answer, but you have to be clean of all your resentment and victim that stuff. You get clean them out because you know I didn’t get clean about it is you get I contributed to the problems and now I’ve made my adjustments and I’m not getting what I need and I guess we’re just, we just don’t fit right together. And even before you leave you separate, you, you. The real task is let’s divorce but not really divorced. Let’s be single. Let’s set it up and live that and see what it’s like and then see if why you’re being single. You Miss Your partner or you don’t Miss Your partner or your partner, misses you or they don’t miss you. And so many people after they separate, we’ll come back together and unfortunately they often have the same problems again because nobody taught them the skills of how to make it work.
Reena Jadhav: So true. So true. Or go to a relationship event. You know, you said you host a lot of these workshops. I, I’m a big proponent of just like we go to class to learn stuff, go to a class to learn how to have a great relationship, and that is again, there’s some stigma around it. I think men really have a hard time agreeing to go to a class, a real relationship workshop. Why is that John, and how can a woman get a man to agree to, yes, you honey, let’s go see John Gray and get our relationship issues resolved.
John Gray: I get that question a lot
John Gray: The answer to that is actually an introduction of my book. Men are from Mars, which is just how do I get them to read this book and I want to say there’s a lot of men that women wouldn’t read the book, but more so women who said, you know, how do I get him to read this book? When you, when you had a book and say to somebody or seminar and you say, let’s go do this. There’s a feeling inside and sometimes it’s expressed, but sometimes it’s just in the tone of voice, which is you really need this. You need this. That’s human nature.
Reena Jadhav: defensiveness, right? That’s the Oh, all I’m going to get, all I’m going to hear is how I’m wrong to be all about me having to change and you’re going to sit there and gloat as to how everything I’ve done is wrong and I’m not gonna put myself through that and pay for it.
John Gray: But you just, you just hit it right on the nail that. Exactly. Uh, and, and I have to say many seminars do that. Okay. They do that many books on relationships and do that because they don’t have the understanding of how men and women are different. They’re just simply written often by, are taught by therapists like me who primarily have women in the office. Not a percent of the people go to therapy are women. So you, you think if you just do this for her and her and her, then they will get better. But there’s a guy over there too and he has needs as well. So we have to understand that we recognize this whole blame thing and change men. But understanding. So in my seminars is about understanding, but Amanda doesn’t know that. So there’ll be resistance to it. So here’s what you do.
John Gray: You ask, what do you say that I really want to. I read this book by this guy. I’m realizing I make so many mistakes and relationships and I’m going to go to a seminar. I would love for you to come. It would feel very supportive to me, but it’s for me, not you. I just get, you know, I don’t want you to feel like you have to be there, but I would love for you to be there. You’re like, I’ll feel more secure. It’s like uncomfortable for me to go alone, but this is something I really need because I recognize I don’t understand that and I need to understand how to give you more love and support. So you kind of. And whatever your words, you come up with you all own the problems in the relationship yourself and you’re going to get help. And I’m going to go anyway. But it’d be really nice if you were there. I would love it. So there’s no demand request
Reena Jadhav: and that’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful way of putting it because what it does is it takes away that pressure from the man feeling like it’s my fault because you’re now saying, let’s let me go do what I can do, and now I think the man goes, Hey, wait. I want to help too, because at the end of the day, if they’re in the relationship, there’s there because they loved you and so you’re showing them the way of saying, Hey, let’s let’s improve ourselves and figure out how to have a more loving relationship.
John Gray: There was an addition to that which is then if it doesn’t go, you go and you come back and why you’re so happy. You had such a good time. It was really fun and you actually demonstrate that you’re a bit more loving now and then you’re going to go again and every man regrets not being able to provide happiness to his partner. He’s going to want to feel like, well, I don’t want to miss out. I want to be there. Whether you know you had so much fun. It was really fun. I met these people and talk with them and share with them is this one guy did an exercise but throwing a little. Another one guy just did an exercise with. It was just so wonderful and the deepest thing inside of a man who’s attached to his wife as he wants to be her for her, he wants to be there.
Reena Jadhav: What a brilliant idea. See, I didn’t think of it that way. Like, hey, and then go. If he’s not going to go, you go.
John Gray: That is so key because what happens when men are just as a general concept, what you just said, when when men are in their cave, sometimes they can’t get out. They just don’t feel good about themselves. They don’t have testosterone enough. The brain goes, if I just withdrawal, my testosterone will go up, but the testosterone won’t go up unless you do something you’re good at, so you pull away, you’re in your cave and for some reason your testosterone’s not coming back up. Women will sit around and wait for you to be loving and interested and they feel guilty. Going out and doing something fun because if a woman was in her cave and I went out and had something fun, she goes, oh, he’s having fun without me. He doesn’t love me at all. He’s not like caring for me at all. We’re not that way as men.
John Gray: If I’m in my cave and and I’m like a Downer for a little while, what she needs to do is not let that bring her down and said, okay, well I see you’re busy. You know, hanging out by yourself. I’m going to go spend time with my girlfriend. I’m going to go shopping. I’m going to go on a trip. Go see some theory, some entertainment or something, and they come back and talk about what a fun time you have. Because see, when women don’t know is that whenever you’re happy, if a man is bonded to you, he takes credit for it. His testosterone starts to come up, will actually pull them out of the gate. If you ignore him, indicate don’t be as mother, don’t take care of them. Go out and do something independent of him to be happy and fulfill that will actually pull them out more so the best way to help them as not as not trying to help him. Men need your field. They’re the providers on a deep level. You testosterone goes up when you go look what I did and your estrogen goes up when you go, look what my partner did for me.
Reena Jadhav: That’s such great advice there. So before we wrap up, this has been such a great conversation. I have to ask about your Maharishi experience and more importantly about the meditation experience as well as the meditation that you teach them. So tell us a little bit about that.
John Gray: Well, you know, I did tm for many, many years. I was his personal assistant, live with them around the world. We traveled for nine years and that was my life and I became a master meditator, and meditation was primarily in India. It was primarily taught to men because it actually is about emptying the mind. Okay. Repeating something, a mantra over and over and over, quieting the mind and relaxing into that space. And for many women, when you do that, not all, but for many women when you do that, you actually just get more stressed out because you’re thinking about this and thinking about this and thinking about this, and margie had a genius, which is he explained to people that, well, don’t try to concentrate on the whatever you’re meditating on, but relax and just go with the flow. If you have thoughts, come back, come back, come back.
John Gray: And that was actually bringing into meditation, more of a feeling. So I’m more relaxed. Part of it, the feminine part of is it relaxed. The masculine part is intensity. So early years of meditation taught in the world. We’re about intensity to forget everything, and then he brought the idea of bringing a little more femininity into it. What I’ve done is recognizing that as spiritual beings, we have full access to both masculine and feminine sides of us. So meditation for both men and women needs to be a focus. That’s the masculine and a flow. That’s the feminine Non Advanced Yoga practice that was always called the foundation of the higher state, which was Samadhi. Samadhi is full absorption, but you would get there by focusing and relaxing at the same time. There was a god, Anna and dion go with the flow. You know how everybody talks about being in the flow.
John Gray: You’re in the flow right now. I’m in the flow right now. Everything is just moving along like that. That was very rare in the past. People couldn’t do this. They’d have to read from scripts. They couldn’t just source the information and the moment being focused and letting it flow, so we’re kind of in a meditation now, but the key is to go deeper and more profoundly into this so you always have access to being in the flow and for women or men, but particularly it’s the women are really good at this is learning. I call it fingertip meditation, which is you just simply, if you do it right now, you’ll feel it because we’re so connected. Just put your hands up like this, and they do that on tv too, but the point of it is when your hands go up your fingertips, what happens is blood will start to go down and fingertips is how we touch the world and so we’re most sensitive there and so what happens is when blood starts to go down, then you start to feel a little tingling in your fingertips and okay, there we are. You’re starting to feel it, right?
John Gray: So then what happens? It’s so easy to do this when you had a nice conversation with somebody is you. That’s the meditation. First of all, as you continue to feel that energy with the intent and the intent is to bring in more healing. So now we’re going to add to it. What we’re feeling now is the flow of what the Chinese would call cheap energy. Once you can feel it, you can direct it. And that’s the secret of this meditation, which is as we’re feeling it, you now sort of Lincoln mental link to it, which is, you know, I can just go like that and my fingertips turn on and now the energy starts to flow through my whole body. And the meditation is to allow the all the channels in the body to open up. And you do this with a little intent. Now, if you have a relationship with a higher power, it tends to be more profound. It could be a great spirit of God. It could be to my wife and heaven, whatever, something higher than this physical realm you call on it, and my higher potential. So the little prayer or something like this. As you feel the fingertips, your God, my heart is open to you. Please come. And what that means is come into my awareness.
John Gray: Please come and right now, heal my body, heal my heart, heal my mind and my spirit. And so many people didn’t have a broken spirit that had such dreams. So we’ll just stick with that one here. My spirit to bring back that inspiration, to open my heart, to trust again, to believe in myself again, heal my heart, heal my spirit, heal my body, and just feel the energy flowing into your body.
John Gray: Now what you can do is you can listen to music. You could be in a guided meditation, but the key to it is in a meditative practice, you’re also feeling the energy which you feel right now. Right? Is that I started circling again circles. The advanced stage. I have 33 stages of this circling is is the throat Chakra. The energy comes all the way up to there, so circling. His energy’s going out. Energy is coming back. So for people who don’t start goal circle pulls in more. That’s your great success and your abundance in your life as people who can circle the energy, it creates a vortex to pull in more energy into your lives. So circling is beautiful, and then you pull an energy with your third eye. You pull it down, and then with your Crown Chakra opens, as the energy fills up this circle of cocoon.
John Gray: So then it goes down into. And let it come up and just let this circle be around you, around you, and pulling you in more energy. And as you’re listening to music or a guided visualization, you’re feeling the energy flow and it’s just enjoyment. It’s so refreshing. Anyway, that’s. That’s a meditation which brings the Yin Energy, the feminine energy, which is flow along with intention. See, the key to it is feeling, feeling the sensation. It starts with the fingertips and you’ll see Jesus would put his hands like this. What he was doing is pulling energy down and pulling energy up is that masculine and feminine energy coming together and then sending it blessing through his thumb. So that was what he was doing. Nobody knew this. Nobody understand this then. And why didn’t you get? Because people couldn’t feel. They couldn’t feel the energy in those days. I’ll lead, the masters would, but you’re a master.
John Gray: Most people can do this if they’re just taught. Buddha would do this, and again, it was circling the energy it was bringing. It was sending energy out with little finger pulling energy in here. It was now exchanging energy with the universe. Letting it come and go out, that’s a third finger, fourth finger, pulling it in and circling, so sustaining the flow, and then this is the circle and he would just circle and from the place of holding the circle, you then pull in divine energy and then there’s other things you do with it. You can send it out, you can bless others with you can the with it and but it’s not the full healing. You have to remember, spirit is one thing, relationships is another, and then we come back to toxicity and poisoning and you know you as a physical reality we have to respect which is why it’s so important for people to understand the fundamentals of wellness and health in terms of what we eat.
John Gray: I’m big believer in the supplements. You know, my website, I, I teach simple things. Sometimes you know the vitamin C every four hours you’ll never get sick and people don’t know that for hours, but vitamins say humans are the beings on the planet except for bats that don’t make vitamin C an animal. If they get sick, they might do 200 times more. Vitamin C 200 times more, they can yet we don’t have the gene to do it. So it’s like such a simple, cheap solution. Everybody should be doing vitamin C
Reena Jadhav: and what Vitamin C do you take and how do you take. Do you take an orange juice or do you actually take a little fuzzy pill?
John Gray: Oh, a 50 pills are good. That guy did those who started. That was brilliant. He even showed that his brain grew more than other people. As he got older, his brain got bigger cause vitamin C is super antioxidant, but you have to keep it in your body every four hours to six hours.
John Gray: You lose it, so you have to sustain it. That’s the one thing I’ll do regular. I do, uh, for me, I do like Soma, vitamin C, light bulbs, Somo. For those that don’t know, it’s becomes fat soluble so you don’t lose it right away that way. I do it twice a day and it’s in my system all the time. Uh, I do a thousand, a thousand milligrams twice a day, vitamin C then the other one, which is everybody relationship needs. If you have arguments or fights are, that’s the worst thing for the brain because your cortisol goes up at that time and that causes brain degeneration and imbalance in brain function and the number one men role to assist you and balancing the brain. So power is lithium. Lithium is known as for that. People think it’s a drug. It’s not. It’s just a and it cures bipolar.
John Gray: Bipolar is just extremes. Okay? Most geniuses have those extremes. If you’re really smart. That’s just normal. Okay? Our Diet doesn’t give you enough lithium to produce that many brain chemicals. Lithium is like the master balancer of the Yin and Yang and your brain and balances the absorption of calcium and magnesium and the brain to produce dopamine and Serotonin. And what happens is lithium is high and beats. That’s why in Russia where you get no sunshine and people will be depressed. They borsch because it’s deep.
John Gray: You know, this is like super food. The psycho as these spas, these natural spas, they have lithium, uh, and people who are depressed, anxious, couldn’t sleep, spending a few hours in the spa which has lithium in it, and you’d sleep while your depression, your anxiety, which temporarily go away.
John Gray: So that’s how they created the drug lithium and they just took, they took it out of the ground lithium carbonate and they gave it to people, but they didn’t get that effect. Then what they did is they gave him a huge amount, 500 times the dose that your brain needs and it would have an effect because it wasn’t getting into the brain across the blood brain barrier and it has to be a natural foods for minerals to cross the blood brain barrier. So just taking out of the ground, it didn’t cross the barrier. You didn’t get the benefit of your brain. Then Dr Hans Nieper discovered, well, let’s just mimic nature and let’s get something called a mother’s milk, a oratic acid and bond it to the minerals. And oratic acid is a carrier to carry the lithium into the brain, the magnesium into the brain, the calcium into the brain, into the brain.
John Gray: These are all necessary for the neurons to function right. And he bonded these different minerals to erratic acid to become lithium, orotate, calcium orotate, magnesium, orotate and zinc, or very important minerals for functioning of the brain. Every neuron needs them. So with low doses of this just a little bit, you know, a tiny, tiny bit like four and a half milligrams of Lithium Orotate, you know, 20 milligrams of calcium orotate. What you do is you feed the brain what you’re not getting in your diet. And why are we not getting in our diet. I’m sure you’ve talked about the food today is empty, but also when you eat carbohydrates, the processed carbohydrates and they give you a buzz. Anything that makes you feel really happy and motivated or drugs deplete your lithium apps. So then that’s. So you get the high will always be followed by the law and all kinds of dysfunctions.
John Gray: But you can actually take every day. I’ve been doing it for 25 years, taking a little bit of lithium, Orotate, a little bit of calcium orotate, magnesium Orotate, and I explained how the right doses of that at my website for people if they want to be interested in doing that. And the interesting thing about it, it’s not a drug has no side effects nontoxic and it’s over the counter. You just can’t find it in health food stores. You got to get it online and you don’t feel any different. Users don’t feel anxious, you just don’t feel you feel normal. It’s the most normal thing. You know, if you take a low dose lsd or low dose Payoti, low dose drugs, they make you feel really good, but you’re not you. I mean you’re literally an altered state. This, you’re just, you, you’re normal and it’s just so wonderful to be high on normal and that’s what minerals can provide along with a good diet.
John Gray: There’s no one thing, but minerals is a big thing for us. You know, our society today with so much sugar that immediately. So that’s more of the nutritional side of it. I’m a big believer and then the relationship side of it, and of course the spiritual side of it, which is the energy of the divine force and to know we’re not alone in the universe because one of the biggest sources of stress is it field that were not needed. We’re disconnected. We’re not loved, we’re not good enough, and that’s where spirituality comes in because we connect with spirit. Spirit has the wisdom inside of it, our spirit here that were here in this world for a reason. We’re on a mission. Every single person is needed in some way for this world to be a better place, and this world is grace. Everything that happens to you, whether you know it or not, is happening to teach you a lesson to grow. That’s the reality. If you’re coming from a place of accountability, if you’re not, that’s not your reality. You’re just bouncing around, but this chaotic universe,
Reena Jadhav: it’s so much more beautiful when you recognize that everything that’s happening is coming from a place of grace
John Gray: and that’s your group. That’s your beauty and that is your success, right there is when you can look back at your life. This is another. It’s not discipline. Looking back at your life and realizing I could not be in the place I’m in today, had that not happened, had that not happened, had that not happened and that’s part of my journey and we’re all in this world on a journey, a healing journey, a growing journey, and the universe is here to provide for us and every single thing, if you’re tuned in is there as a gift and it’s not always what you want to happen either, but it’s you learned from it and you adjust for it and we all have our different destinies and so forth, and some people do not achieve theirs because they don’t have the support to come back to opening their heart. It’s all about keeping our heart open and that’s where our health and our happiness and our destiny unfolds.
Reena Jadhav: Well. Such incredible information, John. Thank you so much so much for gracing us today for sharing your brilliant insights or wisdom. I loved doing this meditation. I feel like I slept for an hour. It’s amazing. It’s so relaxing. I love this. Thank you so much for everything that you do and for the rest of you, remember, this is also a video interview with your wife. You’re listening to this on a podcast. You can check it out on healthbootcamps as a video interview. There’s going to be stuff in the show notes, including links to John’s of course, supplements and books and courses, and anything else that might be of interest to you and for me, the biggest takeaway for me in this very enlightening conversation is that the older we get, the more sex we need, so I’m going to make a note of that and with that said, I’m wishing you all and incredibly loving, joyful day in life ahead. Stay tuned to the next podcast and I will see you soon. John. Thank you so much.
John Gray: Such a pleasure. Thank you.
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