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Jan. 24, 2019 - Dr. Oz Podcast
32:24
Healer to the Stars Reveals How to Emotionally Cleanse

Penelope Cruz, Gwyneth Paltrow and Usher all swear by this East-meets-West doctor and his latest book, "The Clarity Cleanse.” In this interview, Dr. Habib Sadeghi sits down with Dr. Oz to discuss how to recognize the emotional issues that hold us back, with strategies to increase our energy and help us reach our full potential.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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You know, we're so busy because we're juggling so much that we've forgotten what it is to be a human being.
We've created human doings, you know, to slow down enough to be able to be present and to allow the soul gazing to occur.
That's where the juice is.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
He is one of the country's most famous healers.
I had the honor of joining Dr. Habib Sadegi at the Brilliant Minds Conference in Sweden, a leadership summit convening the edgiest minds in music, tech, art, and medicine, with the universal mission of shaping the future by challenging the present in all of our respective fields.
From Usher to Gwyneth Paltrow, Bakasideki's spiritual influence has changed the way his patients understand the healing equation, beyond just physical examination, but embarking on emotional exploration as well.
You're a GP with a twist.
Not quite what most folks would expect from a doctor, a real doctor, because GPs are the first-line practitioners.
How did this all come about?
And what is the unique attraction of artists to you?
You know, you work with Gwyneth Paltrow, who has mentioned you to me.
You did a beautiful session with Usher.
I remember yesterday, which we'll come back to, but he was speaking to me yesterday about you as well.
You know, they find light in your wisdom that is brighter than most.
So I'd like to understand a bit more and introduce my viewers and audience to Habib Sudeikhi.
What a privilege.
First of all, thank you for really giving me this opportunity to be in your presence.
And from a place of humility, I think the message is really the message of every mystic.
Yes, I was trained as a family practitioner.
I have a master's in spiritual psychology with emphasis in consciousness, health and healing.
Which basically says that our consciousness precedes our phenotypic expression.
If we have particular thoughts, feelings, or emotions, sure enough, they will take a hold in our physiology.
I think that's as old as human civilization.
It's very short-sighted for a young lady to come in with urinary tract infections or urgency or frequency and not to really ask them, what's going on in your life?
What is it that you're working with?
And sure enough, you'll find out either the mother-in-law is coming to town or the husband is getting a new secretary.
So you realize that this age-old adage based on anthroposophical concept That our consciousness affects us, right?
It's important.
And there are certain people that they want and they're looking for a deeper level of healing.
And that's really what saved my life, you know?
And I didn't write a book, The Clarity Cleanse, or I didn't want to show up at Brilliant Minds.
You know, for myself, it's really, this is important and there's a need.
And that's really the essence.
So let me, if I can, push you a little bit on what it is that attracts artists to you.
And artists are uniquely able to see patterns in chaos.
And one of the things that has impressed me the most about this whole movement from STEM, you know, science, technology, engineering, math, to STEAM, which I actually wasn't even that aware of, but it's quite clearly growing on folks.
But the STEAM is the extra A letter for art.
It's there because a lot of people in industry and government and academia are recognizing if you don't insert art into the creative process, you throw away a huge opportunity to amplify the power of science and technology and engineering and math.
So people are coming to you as a scientist, as a doctor, and finding something in you.
You know, Usher yesterday spoke about the fact that desire was his disease, and he credited you with opening his eyes a little bit to this.
And I'd love to have some insight from you about how you see patients.
And you touched a tiny bit on the fact that the emotion plays a role, but you used the metaphor of soil quite a bit, the fertility of soil, the fact that the energy gives rise to matter, to existence.
Please walk us through what people are hearing from you.
I think perhaps Einstein said it more eloquently when he said that imagination is far more important than knowledge.
I think one of the things that has occurred, you know, medicine has become very reductionistic.
Look, you can ask me, hey, you know, Habib, what makes that bird fly?
I can grab the bird.
I can take part, all the feathers, study it, rip off the skin, study it, rip off the tendon, the ligament, the muscles, you know, eviscerate the organs, study it, go down to histology, dissect the entire spinal cord and the brain.
And at the end, you ask me, what makes that bird fly?
I wouldn't have an answer.
I wouldn't really know how the birds, what part of the brain, you know, where does the action potential get created?
How does that electrical activity...
How?
We don't know.
And artists, they feel very comfortable in that zone.
What the poet, another artist, John Keats, who actually was in medical school and he got TB and he dropped out and he became a poet.
Thank goodness...
And John Keats describes this quality as negative capability, which is the ability to sit with the mystery of not knowing.
And there is a sect of society that they feel very comfortable with this, and those are artists.
And that's perhaps the transition, which is, I think it's an evolutionary transition from STEM to Explain to everyone this metaphor, the soil, that is so prominent in the Clarity Cleanse.
Again, I can read pages and pages to the audience, but I think hearing it in your own voice would be more impactful.
Why is that such a difficult concept for physicians, traditional medicine to acknowledge?
I mean, everyone listening right now would say, yeah, I put a seed in the soil, the soil nurtures it, it grows.
Things happen that are energetic, but they give rise to a physical matter.
Trees come out of that seed.
Yes.
Why does that challenge us when we walk into our doctor's office?
And I'll speak as a physician.
If a patient comes in to me and says, I have heart disease, but it's because I had a heart divorce, I say, I don't know.
I mean, you know, maybe the divorce alerted you to the problems you were having, but it's really the cholesterol and the blood pressure.
By the way, that works for the diabetes and, well, I mean, true, true, true.
But that doesn't negate the possibility that the divorce contributed as well.
Something that our mothers would have acknowledged and embraced as a possibility.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And I think really every physician must look at this because we're at a stage that we cannot be reductionistic.
We cannot just treat the symptoms.
The whole idea of the soil is really the terrain, the physiological terrain.
From the time that a baby is born The way I look at it is we're pushed into this river, and there's upstream, our past, our biography, which dictates our biology now.
What occurs upstream, it affects us.
We have a lot more to talk about, but first, let's take a quick break.
Since we're talking about artists, I'm going to push you on something that I heard from John Taylor yesterday.
This is, of course, an iconic Duran Duran band member.
He said that he didn't need help feeling different from other people.
He got that okay.
Modern life encouraged that.
He had a challenge feeling connected to others.
He needed help being alike others.
And he thought that music greased the path.
One of the things that I've enjoyed about these last few days is you have a lot of top-notch scientists and artists at the same meeting talking about their worldview.
But there is a power of music in the arts in that regard.
What do you think about John Taylor's comment?
Why is Duran Duran's musical creations important to making us feel alike in a world that encourages us being dissimilar more often?
Yeah, I think for me, music plays a role perhaps the same way that water plays a role in the life of a fish.
We all swim in it.
The sound, the light, that's really what we get.
Now human beings, they have a tendency, as human beings, we have tendencies to create misunderstandings.
Misperceptions, misidentifications.
Look, the book, The Clarity Cleanse, I was very upfront.
I talked about my shortcomings.
I talked about, I had some challenges with testicular cancer.
You know, and I looked at it.
Years of dealing with sexual abuse and not having the language to talk about it.
It affected me.
It affected my physiology.
So these misunderstanding, misperceptions, misidentification, misuses of our energy, this is what creates the separation.
You know, I don't think it's the time that we go on stage with Usher That's the time that a renowned human being took his own life.
And then June 7th, an incredible famous designer, Katie Spick, took her life pretty much the same way.
What you really are touching is something which is very important.
What is really occurring?
What is the zeitgeist or the terrain or the soil of our culture that human beings are feeling disconnected, isolated and separated?
One of the side effects of the modern world is that human beings are having difficulty looking each other in the eyes.
And I'm here as a medical doctor to tell you that that's important.
See, it's so interesting you bring that up because yesterday I was talking to Usher about this very issue.
He stopped everything.
He looked at me and he said, we don't look each other in the eyes.
I thought, how ironic that I'm hearing physicians say this, artists say this.
We're beginning to hear political leaders say this.
Religious leaders have been saying it for a long time, but our mother said it first.
And much of our brain evolution occurred because we needed to be able to look each other, not just in the eyes, but in the face, and read each other.
We don't need the brains that we have to go hunting, right?
You can do that with a dime-sized piece of cortical tissue.
You need brains to do what you just said to do.
What has changed in human history that has disallowed us to believe in these connections?
Because if you went to a doctor and he said, listen, you're having hormone issues because you're not looking people in the eyes, they'd probably switch doctors.
Yeah, I agree with you.
I think what we're really getting to is that there is what I refer to as a cultural autism.
There is a cultural autism, and I think it's a side effect of a dysregulated way of living.
We're so busy because we're juggling so much that we've forgotten what it is to be a human being.
We've created human doings.
You know, to slow down enough to be able to be present and to allow the soul-gazing to occur.
That's where the juice is.
That's really the trinity of the third consciousness.
That's where the therapeutic third occurs.
We know that.
That's why, in my mind, you know, AI, artificial intelligence, is not going to be the cure-all.
It's not going to be the panacea that we want it to be.
Because the biggest part of being a physician and doctoring is having the level, the quality, the capacity of listening to be empty enough.
And that's why the cover of the book is the cover of the book.
It's an empty cup.
I was talking about the Clarity Cleanse, by the way, which is beautifully written and very honest, very authentic.
And I like, if you're comfortable with this, sharing with the audience a little bit about your personal history.
And if you don't mind, let's start with the burn that you suffered as a child, how you recovered or didn't from that, and how it ultimately led to a life-changing event when you're a young doctor or medical student that I think has colored a lot of your attitude towards how we take care of each other.
Yeah, absolutely.
When I was young, I fell into, usually in third world countries or Middle East, the way that they cook rice is they wash it first, as you may know, because you get rid of the starch.
And that's the difference between eating Chinese food, right, or Food in the Asian culture, it's sticky.
The starch allows that.
But when you wash it, it allows the elongation of each grain.
And so there was this, you know, the whole family was preparing for a wedding.
I slept in the kitchen and I literally fell into this boiling water.
And I got stuck by the time that my great-grandmother pulled me out.
She didn't know what to do.
She pulled off the t-shirt that I was wearing and the entire, my skin on the left side of my body got sloughed off.
And from that moment, whatever they did, it was painful because all my nerve endings were exposed.
I spent six months in a burn unit, but that was the easy part, really, you know, because I was on pain medications and all that.
When I was discharged, I had the beginning of a keloid and the left medial aspect of my arm, inside the arm, and we didn't have the financial resources to go to the United States or Europe for grafting.
So, you know, my parents, what they decided to do was to take me to a clinic every other day and three nurses would literally sit on me and they would extend and flex my arm in order to rehabilitate it.
And, I mean, it's just, talking about it, I'm breaking into a sweat because...
It was painful.
I would scream until voice would leave me.
It was like a silent movie.
Anyway, it created pain and suffering, but it saved my arm.
It became functional.
I think that was the crucible of what it is to suffer and what it is to be a physician and to want to prevent suffering.
You know, eventually this led into having certain experiences that I alluded to in terms of very complex sexual experiences with an older relative.
And I, you know, I came from a very religious background.
And I, you know, the God of my understanding was a punitive God.
And then during my adolescence and as a young adult, I didn't really have a healthy context for my sexuality.
And I think that was the upstream in my consciousness that contributed, if not caused directly, to testicular cancer.
And it's second year of medical school.
This was the time that Scott Hamilton nearly died.
You know, the skater, the gold medalist skater, and then Lance Armstrong nearly died.
He had a partial pneumonectomy and it spread to his lungs, to his brains, and with testicular cancer.
So it was really scary.
So by the time that I went to City of Hope and I was given a death sentence, I published all my medical records.
The things that they were recommending was retroperitoneal lymphadenectomy, which as you know, as a cardiothoracic surgeon, it's a 16-hour surgery that they lay you open.
And then radiation and a minimum of four cycles of cisplatinum chemotherapy.
I didn't do any of that.
I walked away.
Because for me, and I'm not advocating that for others, but for me, you know, as I worked my process and as I really tuned in and listened, that was not the right thing for me.
And that really made all the difference.
So while you're sitting here relatively healthy looking right now, what allowed you to do this?
The clarity cleanse.
That's why I wrote what I wrote.
It literally did that.
And I'll tell you, I remember, I write it all out.
The most traumatic thing was when I was giving this diagnosis, I felt uncontained.
You know, I couldn't go to my parents, because I felt like if I tell them, they were going to have a heart attack.
I went to medical school.
I went to the anatomy lab.
And I sat across from Gary.
And Gary, when he started medical school, he must have been, he was at least 45. He already had a PhD in clinical psychology.
And I just, I love spending time with Gary.
I told him what had occurred, that they just gave me 30% chance of survival.
He looked at me and he said, let's go have lunch.
And it was unbelievable.
And over a period of a brief conversation, he looked me in the eye and he said, listen, Habib, I don't know the God of your understanding, but the God of my understanding is.
And then he read...
This verse, he who hasn't loved hasn't known God, yet for God is love.
Listen to me.
I walked away.
If they had called me that when they were going to take not one, but both testicles, I was going to be okay.
And I couldn't really understand that.
Years later, I understood what He did for me.
He became the cup.
He contained me.
And that's really what it means to be a physician.
That's what it means to be a mature human being.
And that's what the Clarity Cleanse is about.
So speaking about emotional issues that many face, you've obviously faced twice in your life personal risk events.
And even with the birth of your two beautiful children, you've been told things about their prognosis that weren't very appealing for parents to hear.
here.
And it is interesting how you put all that into a very positive light.
There's a lot of forgiveness in you.
And you speak about having an inner cathedral that allows the light in, which is ultimately what the style, the architecture, the design of cathedrals were all about.
How is your ability to forgive and move past these challenges allowed you to commune with the divine more effectively?
It's really getting rid of that which separates us from each other.
I think the person, and I appreciate reciting this given what we share, which is the mystic poet Rumi.
Rumi has a poem, and I guess the translation based on what our beloved...
Our friend Coleman Barks translated is, out beyond ideas of right doing and wrong doing, there is a field.
We'll meet you there.
And I think so much of us, human beings, we get caught and we get polarized into this is good, this is bad, I'm this, I'm not that.
This could be, you know, based on our gender.
This could be our religious, our belief system, our political system.
And this is something that perhaps now politically we, you know, we see that now in the current zeitgeist.
But there is a unity.
There is a field, you know, that exists.
And I think that's really where healing is.
And as physicians, we know that.
We know the greatest way to create a vaccine is not to go in a sterile place.
The vaccine comes from the people that they actually go through the disease.
Those are the ones that they produce antibody.
And the vaccine, it could be a psycho-spiritual, it could be emotional vaccine.
And I talk about a lot of people that they come in and parents and the value, the value of allowing the kids to go through a certain level of suffering.
And I don't think it's an accident that the first noble truth is to live is to suffer.
To live is to suffer.
Because if we want our children to grow up as a mature adult and to have a certain level of psychospiritual vaccination, resiliency, then a certain level of suffering is really a mandate.
Otherwise, they get inflicted and infected with one of the worst diseases that has no cure, which is affluenza.
You give them a certain level of comfort, whether it's financial and so forth, you know, and that could be really when we look at the downstream effect of, you know, certain generations that they're currently, you know, they're stepping into adulthood, but they're weak.
They don't have that which is required.
To be able to create what I refer to in the Clarity Cleanse as EMS or Emotional Management System, which is really how you create a septic tank.
How do you do that?
You know, when you're given a bad news, what do you do?
Can you contain yourself?
Or, yeah, look, it happens to all of us.
We're driving down the street, someone cuts us off.
It's so easy to get flooded, and we don't know what to do with it.
So, you know, we say, f*** you!
We just, they're here, you know, there's a, fizzle it out.
Wow!
The mature person perhaps would say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I really, this really affected me.
I got flooded with emotions because I felt like I was going to die or I was going to go into an accident.
Let me pull over.
Let me have a sip of water.
Let me take a couple of deep breaths.
That's maturity.
And guess what?
No one is teaching us that.
I went through, look, you've done it.
You know, in medical school, we memorize a phone book every week.
We take a test, and it's over.
And then we go on to the next phone book.
By the time we graduate, 85% of what we studied is obsolete, right?
But no one teaches us what Wilfred Beyond did.
Incredible psychoanalysts talked about in containment and the value of seizure, the cut, these tiny cuts that they really are mandated level of psychospiritual acupuncture, you know, that we need.
You've created some of the love button movement.
How does that help address the tiny cuts?
And just to your point about affluenza, one of my favorite bits of advice I've ever gotten is when you give your kids something you didn't have when you were growing up, you take from them something you did have.
So we have an obligation almost to not only avoid helicopter parenting, but encourage the kids to go out there and just take chances.
Don't do foolish things.
Don't do things that will irreparably harm you.
But it's a great service for them to be able to fail honorably and authentically when they're young.
They figure out how to get back up again, which is why I love sports.
It's why art could actually be more effective.
But the love button movement, Lisa and I are wearing them around.
It's not just a style statement.
Before I get to that, let me just bring something forward, which is very scientific, and I'll be more than happy to forward you the actual article.
It was this beautiful article, and what they did was they looked at the epidemiological trends, I think from 1950s to perhaps 2017 or 2007, if memory serves me correctly.
They looked at some of the childhood diseases.
They looked at measles, mumps, chicken pox.
And you could see that the slope was negative.
You know, there's a drop, obviously, right?
Then they looked at some of the autoimmune diseases, right?
MS. They looked at Crohn's disease.
They looked at autoimmune-mediated hepatitis, right?
And guess what?
From the same time period, 1950s to 2017, I think, there was a positive slope.
Look, There is.
There is blessing in certain illnesses, right?
And if you pull that away, and if the body does not go through these childhood sickness and diseases, How can they create this robust immune system?
One of the greatest things that shifted and completely created a new outlook as a medical doctor for me was not a double-blinded, placebo-controlled study.
It was a documentary that I think came out in maybe 2000s or shortly after.
It's called Babies.
And they looked at four babies, one from sub-Sahara Africa, One from Mongolia, one from San Jose, California, and one from Tokyo.
And you could see these babies growing up.
It's a documentary, right?
My God, the sub-Sahara kid is crawling and sees the dog, grabs the bone, pulls it out of the mouth of the dog, puts it in his mouth.
You see the Mongolia, the kid, you know, the goat comes over, licks the baby in the face, and then you see the San Jose and Tokyo, the kids are literally living in a sterile environment.
Now, the downstream effect, look at that.
You see the sub-Sahara kid and Mongolian kid.
My God!
Unbelievable!
They grow and they have a robust immune system.
And then you see the kid from San Jose, California and Tokyo.
They have eczema.
They have airway reactive issues such as asthma.
They have food allergies.
I mean, we've lost that.
We've stopped doing what we were good at, which is called thinking.
We're not doing that.
Now, Love Button.
Love Button is about that.
Love Button is about creating an emotional management system.
And it's basically, the tagline is pause and love.
It's basically inviting human beings to go into the roomies field, out beyond ideas of right doings and wrong doings.
There's a field that we could be very centered, very loving, and we can basically make a decision.
Instead of reacting, we choose from a place of loving.
So we've taken this concept, training children, training prisoners.
I mean, it's just amazing.
Take going into prisoners and sit across and introduce them that you do understand that you can actually go through this process and process your emotional waste managements.
It's unbelievable.
They become tearful realizing that they don't have to carry this heavy backpack that's filled with judgments, these heavy rocks.
That human beings carry.
And we've lost that.
So in the clarity cleanse, and just to close, you take us through how to achieve this.
And having spoken to some of your more luminary patients, you know, Gwyneth Paltrow has talked a bit about the fact that she's found clarity in the moment.
Actually, I should very specifically use those words recently saying, you know, the key for him, the big change has been not just to be in the moment, which many speak of, but the clarity that comes from being there.
How do you teach that?
Share with us, if you don't mind, for a podcast audience, a little bit about the Clarity Cleanse's insights.
So the Clarity Cleanse, it has two aspects.
One aspect is literally the psycho-spiritual aspect of teaching, just teaching.
There are certain things such as purged emotional writing.
Just imagine that.
Imagine waking up every day and you take 12 minutes and you sit down, you create a cocoon, you create a space, a cup, where you could sit down and you really check in.
What are my thoughts?
What are my feelings?
What are my emotions?
And you find out, you take a survey of just like, look, you know, a patient comes to see us.
What do we do?
If they have pain, abdominal pain, what do we do?
We do an exam.
You touch their belly and you find out that the right lower quadrant is tender.
Great!
Now you know you've got a differential diagnosis.
What if human beings, they can actually do that for themselves?
And then they find out what are the misunderstanding, the judgments, and they go through compassionate self-forgiveness.
Why is it that only presidents are allowed to forgive people?
And I love it.
You know, under the Department of Justice, there's a Department of Pardon, or anyway, it's headed by a PhD JD, or at least it was a few years ago when I researched it.
And when you study the language that these presidents use, by the power invested in me as the President of the United States, I pardon, da-da-da-da-da-da, My God, what would that be like every time we take a shower?
We're under the shower and we say, you know, by the power that was invested in my creation, I forgive myself for.
Can you imagine that?
Can you imagine the human being that gets created from that?
That's per emotional writing.
The book talks about, again, there's a way of walking.
You're a scientist, you know that.
Human beings, you know, we're hunters and getters.
There is a way that you could walk.
You know, people come in and they say, look, I'm depressed, or I'm this, or I'm anxious.
I tell them, I tell you what, let's go for a walk.
And what I want you to do is I want you to actually look up above the horizon, what I refer to as chin-up.
Watch!
You walk them for 12 minutes.
The whole flow, the blood flow into the frontal cortex increases.
That shifts the dopamine!
That shifts the serotonin!
That changes everything!
You know, I have prescription pads.
I give medications.
I'm not going to throw away the baby with bathwater.
But I'm saying let's just be a little bit more fastidious and selective.
The second part of the book, it's what I refer to as IU diet or intentional unsaturation diet.
And it's based on brown rice, sardines, and apples.
And I go into, you know, the specific research of why that.
And basically what it does, it lowers the insulin resistance in the body, which I actually believe is the main contributor to several things, including the inflammation, which is really the root cause of a lot of problems.
So that's the clarity cleanse.
It's not a matter of teaching anything because, see, when I talked about the bird at the beginning, If we want to look at something in terms of how to do it, as you know, that's the realm of epistemology.
The science of how.
Human being...
It's in the realm of ontology.
It's the science of being.
See, I can't...
For you to really feel the temperature and to learn to swim sooner or later, you just got to be there.
You got to be in the water.
The Clarity Cleanse takes us step by step in a gentle manner into a place that we remember We remember, we become a member of the human race.
And this was a way for me to give back, honoring the line of energy of my brother, who was a cardiologist, you know, and he transitioned.
Halib, it's been a real blessing being with you.
I appreciate why so many adore your work.
I wish you the best, and I want folks out there to check it out, the Clarity Cleanse.
If you like sardines, especially as I do, there's lots more besides that that will attract you and clean you out.
Bless you.
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