How can we come into wholeness with our body, mind and spirit? This is what we explore on todays episode of Intimacy with the world podcast.

Dr. Mario Martines says that he realised that any good science comes from frustration. He realised that psychology wasn’t going to explain everything, nor neuroscience, nor neuro-immunology nor anthropology - it had to be a convergence of disciplines, like a meta-paradigm to explain the complexity of who we are

We begin by speaking about how we humans always want to classify and put everything into defined boxes or categories, and just cant handle uncertainty. Mario says:

“Uncertainty is my best friend - I navigate uncertainty with chaos as my guide”

His speciality is bringing culture mind and body together, and he says that the brain is cultured and the immune system is cultured

We even speak about what a humanbeing actually is, which brings us to epigenetics, the importance of language, and how it defines our world, and the functioning of our brain and our immune system. We speak about the bio-symbols of culture and the bio-informational field, and how the same thing can mean different things in different cultures - like the menopause f.e.

THis brings us to psycho-immunology: How thoughts and emotions affect the nervous- immune- and endocrine system, and how Shame, f.e. causes inflammation in the body.

We speak about the meaning of words for menopause in different cultures like Japan and South America with the words “konenki” which translates as second spring, or “bochorno” which translates as shame.

We speak about Fibromyalgia and other auto-immune diseases, and how we can reprogram our body and mind

We touch upon how our immune system is actually a bio-ethical system, it loves meaning, purpose and pro-social behaviours like love, kindness, honour and gratitude.

Mario tells us about the difference between hedonic and eudaemonic behaviours.

Hedonism turns out not to be so healthy - it is bad for the immune system. And addiction is extreme hedonism.

Aristotle said that hedonism is not enough for a fulfilled life

Eudemonic implies meaning, purpose and finding pleasure in meaning and purpose

People who are eudemonic have better CTA markers (immune-response) than people who are hedonic.

So pleasure without meaning and purpose is not good for us

A human being needs to feel meaning and purpose to thrive and be healthy.

While exploring archetypes we even get around to speak about Steve Jobs, and how we need to know how to balance several of these archetypes according to different circumstances

You cant just live in one archetype, this is why Maslow said, you cant just live like a hammer, then you will just see nails everywhere

The Self is a conglomerate, it is a hologram that is in constant flow.

We have multiple archetypes to handle multiple situations - so there is no self as the Buddha pointed out. It is a process rather than an entity.

We explore how meaning and purpose have to be imbued with a sense of belonging, a sense of joy and of companionship. And what can we do when we actually don’t feel any meaning or purpose?

Mario suggests starting with these question to get to the roots of meaning and purpose:

Who am I?

What am I doing here?

Who cares?

And how you will build an incredilbe ressiience if you have these 3 questions sorted in a deep way.

We also talk about the universal ways that centenarians think and feel, and waht we can learn from them about longevity and living a joyfull life.

Dr. Marios website is: https://www.biocognitiveculture.com where you can find his books and other offerings.

My website is: www.duritaholm.com