Activate Your Body's Natural Repair System With Dr. Mark Atkinson

Your body possesses an incredible, built-in healing system, but its strength naturally declines as you age. In this conversation, host Zach Gurick sits down with integrative functional medicine specialist Dr. Mark Atkinson to explore how stem cell mobilization can reactivate your body’s innate ability to recover. You’ll discover the five fundamental pillars of health optimization and learn how to train your mind to overcome your inner critic. Dr. Atkinson shares how plant-based extracts support tissue and vascular repair, helping you bounce back from injuries and manage chronic conditions. It’s time to bridge the gap between your lifespan and your healthspan so you can live a vibrant, purposeful life. Don’t let low energy dictate your daily routine when you have the power to mobilize your own cellular defense.

The information presented in Fully Alive is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before making changes to your health regimen. Guests’ opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host, production team, or sponsors.

—

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Activate Your Body’s Natural Repair System With Dr. Mark Atkinson

The Journey From Medicine To Human Potential

Welcome back to the show, where we are unlocking the secrets to your healthier, happier, and longer life. We are diving into one of the most exciting frontiers in health and longevity, which really isn’t just treating disease, but it’s helping the body to repair itself from within. At the center of that conversation are stem cells. We are diving in today to a fascinating and rapidly evolving area of science. How to naturally support your body’s own regenerative capacity. I am joined by Dr. Mark Atkinson, who is an integrative functional medicine practitioner.

He’s an author of five books, and he’s a medical adviser to an amazing company called Stemregen. He spent decades researching, practicing himself, and now teaching health optimization, human potential, and the science of happiness. His latest work with Stemregen is focused on something that sounds almost futuristic but is very real. Mobilizing your body’s own stem cells to support repair, recovery, and potentially even slow the aspects of aging.

In this conversation, we unpack everything from health optimization, human potential, and happiness to what stem cell mobilization actually means, how it differs from traditional stem cell therapies, what the research says, and why this could actually be impactful for your healthspan. If you have ever wondered how your body heals, how to enhance that process, and have the health and energy you need to live fully, this is a conversation you will not want to miss. Let us dive into our conversation with Dr. Mark Atkinson.

Dr. Atkinson, thank you so much for joining us. You are just a wealth of experience, knowledge, and expertise in so many areas that I think are so intriguing and interesting to our audience and to me personally. I am really excited for this conversation. We can go in all different directions and just try to soak up as much wisdom from you as possible in the next 45 minutes or so. Thanks for being here.

Thank you for inviting me, Zach. It is always a privilege to be able to spend some time talking about things that really matter. I am very happy to go in any direction that will be most helpful.

Let us just start with some of your background. You have done so many amazing things, and you are really a thought leader and an industry leader in so many ways. You founded the Human Potential Institute, you have written five books, and you are really living out and practicing what you preach in terms of human potential. I would love to hear how you ended up where you are. What led you down this path, and what were some of those catalysts or triggers that opened you up and led you to where you are now?

I am very happy to share that. I think the first thing is I have always been naturally curious and have had this desire to go a little bit deeper and to know what is true. That has been with me since I was a child and really has carried me forward and has been a constant thread. It is just a desire to know what is true and what is a little bit deeper. I realized when I was sixteen that I wanted to be a medical doctor and move into medicine. I was also really interested in nutrition and meditation. When I was in med school, I was meditating, and that was not typical for a med student.

I was also really interested in what would be called a more traditional medical system. I was reading a lot about Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, and Tibetan medicine. Something about them intuitively appealed to this more holistically oriented approach. I became really interested in equally what was going on in the human body as much as what goes on in the human mind. I was reading philosophers, I was reading alternative medicines as well as learning about pharmacology, physiology, the usual things that doctors do. A lot of my peers and colleagues at that time could have predicted that I would end up doing what I now do.

When I emerged from medical school and spent some time in the National Health Service, whilst meditating one evening, I just suddenly had this deep, clear insight that I was to step out of the conventional allopathic medical world and step into what at that time was called integrative medicine. Integrative medicine at that time was in an early stage here in the United Kingdom. It really is just taking a big picture, holistic approach, asking what amongst allopathic medicine and complementary alternative medicine is most relevant and helpful to the individual, and wherever possible addressing the root causes of disease. That just very intuitively appealed to me.

I set up an integrative medical clinic in central London. I ended up doing a lot of education work. I appeared a lot on TV at the time and was just educating people about how to take great care of themselves. I then went on to teach a lot of practitioners this approach. As I got deeper into understanding health, we tend to start with physical health, of course, because that has been more objective and easier to deal with in many ways. Mirroring my own inner journey and development, I became really interested in what goes on in our mind and our heart and in our psychological world.

I actually ended up really specializing in what is called mind-body medicine. It is the interface between how we can use the mind to create health and happiness and move the body towards healing and recovery, and then conversely how we can work with the body to improve the functioning of the mind. My first book was called The Mind Body Bible: Your Personalised Prescription for Total Health, which really brought everything together. That was like maybe twenty years ago. Since that time, I have really been in three worlds.

I have been in the world of integrative functional medicine and health optimization what we can do as humans to really enhance the functioning of all domains of our health. I say that physical, cognitive, emotional, and mental health are in balance because a lot of people are very imbalanced. I know I was. I had over-focused on maybe the physical and cognitive to the detriment of emotional and mental health, and we really want to be addressing all.

Of course, they are all interrelated, and also human potential development as well, because what I realized is it does not matter what we are faced with in life, whether it is a health challenge or a life situation. These can be opportunities for insight and transformation and growth. That was absolutely apparent in my own personal world. I started to see health challenges in a different light. It was much less about fixing it using medications, which is the usual allopathic approach, and much more about inquiring into the root causes, addressing them whilst also inquiring into what the lesson is and how I can change and transform the way I show up and my lifestyle in response to this.

Those three areas really have shaped my entire professional career, and I am predominantly an educator. I educate practitioners and coaches. I mentor them as well. I am a consultant to a company called Stemregen, which is really doing some pioneering work, and I believe they are going to really help a lot of people, doctors particularly, understand how the body heals. If you ask that question to a lot of doctors, they will not really be able to tell you, and I think we are very close to understanding that now. I know we are going to touch on that today.

True health optimization isn’t about using drugs to fix symptoms. It’s about finding the lessons in your physical challenges.

I love your story and your journey. Obviously, you are a very curious person, as you said, and just looking for that deeper meaning, and that just continues to drive you to uncover new truths as you go. Can we talk a little bit about health optimization? How do you see that? What are some practical things? When you are working with somebody, where do you start?

The Five Pillars Of Optimal Health

I normally start with asking someone why they care about their health because if you do not care about your health, chances are you are not going to make any significant changes. It really starts with having a positive vision for how you want your health and your life to be in whatever timeframe is most relevant. It could be 10 years out, 30 years out, 5 years out, one year out. It really starts with a positive vision as to what health looks like, feels like, and, really importantly, why it is important. Why does it matter to you to maintain and enjoy a good level of health? That is the first place to start.

The second place I tend to start with my patients is what are you most fearful of as it relates to your health? Because we can have the attractive field of vision, but we can also be in touch with our fears, which can actually also fuel motivation as well. We want both. We look to our parents, to people around us, and say, “My greatest fear is Alzheimer’s disease. My greatest fear is being in pain. My greatest fear is being dependent on others.”

There is something, if done in a very conscious and kind way, that can really bring about a very significant internal shift when we are clear about what I am really fearful about as it relates to my health and what I want my health to be. That sets us up for motivation and then gets us committed. Once we are committed, then there are essentially what I call the five fundamental pillars of optimal health. It really starts with the mind, which covers mindset, emotions, happiness, and stress. There is eating, of course, the nutrition that we have.

There is sleep and recovery. There is move, which is all about movement and exercise. There is connect, which is about connection, relationships, etc. I tend to say to people, get clear about your vision first. Take an honest look at the five pillars of optimal health. Do an honest assessment of where you are in each of the pillars, and then start with the one that, if you incrementally improved, will give you the biggest positive gain. Those are the fundamental principles.

That is super helpful. I love when there is something concrete and five pillars that are easy. Mind, eat, sleep, move, connect. Those are really the foundational, like you are saying.

They are just the starting place, really. What tends to happen for us is we tend to be disproportionately strong in one but not in the other. What I find is the reason I put mind first is, in my world, it really is the most important because the mind is the instrument built into this body-mind system that allows us to experience life and navigate life. If we have not learned how to train and develop our mind, most of us have a mind that uses us rather than us using it. Its conditioning, its programming, is in charge of our habits and behaviors.

When you know how to consciously work with your mind, and the most common practice for that, of course, is mindfulness, where you are able to access present-moment awareness, from that place, then you can decide whether you want to believe your thoughts and stories or not. There is choice there, right? We are creatures of habit. I often say it starts with the mind. You have to learn how to use your mind. I would love to share with your audiences some fundamental tips for that because that is really where I think most people struggle.

You’ve got to know how to work with your stress, regulate your nervous system, and, really importantly, nurture and deepen your level of happiness. We are privileged to be on this planet to have the life that we have. Sometimes it is so easy to get caught up in the pursuit of success and this and that, and actually being able to cultivate happiness daily and really allow ourselves to enjoy the fact that we are living, that we are here, to appreciate the things we do have, to focus less on what we do not have.

These really are the fundamentals. That is why the mind comes up front. If you dial that in and you are in charge of your mind, then you are much more likely to eat better, to sleep more deeply. You need to take care of your body because you care about your body. If you are regulated and your mind is working well, then it is so much easier to connect with others, to connect with nature, to connect with life.

If you don’t care about your health, you won’t make lasting changes. Start by asking yourself why your vitality actually matters.

Really stemming from that mindset, that makes a ton of sense. As you said, start with that vision of why, and then starting with the mind really will feed all of those other areas.

Taming The Inner Critic For Mindset Success

Most people, and I had to start with this, we have to be able to take care of the inner critic. The inner critic is the part of the mind, we will call it the subpersonality, whose function is to criticize, but really it criticizes to keep us safe. That is why it is there. I think taking care of the inner critic is very important. The way I teach it to my patients is when you hear the inner critic come up, smile on the inside, and just say to it silently, “I see you, and I accept you.” You just bring acceptance to it. The amazing thing is when you accept these different parts of ourselves, the whole body-mind system relaxes.

What happens is we access a deeper level of our nature that we could call presence. That comes in, and you just feel so much more present and calm and available. A lot of people struggle with their inner critic. “I see you, I accept you.” It is a very easy, beautiful thing. If you do it consistently, then it just takes out the intensity of the inner critic. As we learn how to be kinder and more accepting of ourselves, then that happens for the way we relate to others and to life as well. We become less judgmental and just more kind and accepting and appreciative.

I love that. It really starts with us, and then we can radiate that out. You just wrote a book about happiness. Is this outlined in the book?

Cultivating True Happiness Daily

Some time ago, it was published. It is called True Happiness. It really reflected my own journey into the world of happiness. It is not a selfish pursuit because happier people are healthier people. They have a natural tendency to be kind, generous, supportive, community-oriented, and they elevate the people around them. The world needs happier, more contented people. It is also really good for our health as well. I often think happiness is over there. Health is over here. Let us bring them all together.

The other thing with happiness is really, the best practice I think is just starting your day with a couple of appreciations, things that you genuinely appreciate in your life, and allowing yourself to feel gratitude and appreciation. Particularly if someone has a mind filter of what is missing, what is wrong, etc., which is sometimes easy to get caught up in. In True Happiness, I offer many ways of supporting happiness.

To be honest with you, one of them is to get the body healthy and well because if your hormones are out of balance, you got stress in your nervous system, your blood sugar is up and down, you got a liver issue or whatever it might be, your journey to happiness is going to be so much more challenging because the way we feel is profoundly influenced by what is happening in our biology in our bodies. As a mind-body medicine-trained doctor, you always work with both together in parallel. That is the real key.

I imagine a visit with you as a physician or as a primary care doctor is very different from what we normally experience. I have not had many doctor’s visits where they are asking me or talking about taking care of the inner critic and connecting all these dots. I love that you are taking a very holistic approach to the whole person here and how important that is.

What you will find with a lot of doctors is the way they practice reflects how they live. It just reflects the journey they have been on. Many doctors in the integrative functional medicine world have faced their own health challenges. From the inside out, they learned what it is like to be a person who was struggling with a particular disease or issue, whatever it might be. They did not necessarily find the solution within the allopathic medical world.

They then started looking a bit deeper. Often what they will tell you is it really came back in some parts to the fundamentals of you have to have a healthy lifestyle in place. You have to take good care of yourself. You got to be doing work that you are excited about, that is aligned with your values, right? Purpose and meaning, this is just so important. For me, what I share as I teach and I work with patients is just a reflection really of what I have learned from my own experiences. It really is oriented towards, “We got this incredible opportunity to live life, you got your body-mind there, we got to do what we can do so it functions well so you can live your life fully.”

Health is ultimately the greatest resource. When we have energy, energy equates to possibility. We know what it is like when our energy is low. It is really hard to do much. To live life fully, we need a lot of energy and capacity in our body and our mind. That is why looking after our health and managing our energy, optimizing our hormones, exercising our body, finding a balance between strength and aerobic fitness, learning to train our mind, working on intimacy in our relationships, connecting to things that inspire us as we look to the week ahead and to the day ahead, there are little things, big things we look forward to.

I just feel over time, as we go down the health wormhole, you’ll eventually get to this very holistic, integral way of looking at health. The nice thing about it is the more you do it, the more you attend to it, the better you feel. If you are tracking your data, you are tracking your biomarkers, you can see the improvement. We want to build positive momentum. That is really the key.

You are speaking our language. The name of our show is Fully Alive. It is like really living fully like you just talked about. To do that, we need to be healthy, like you said, to have the energy to really enjoy and suck the juice out of life as much as possible.

You have to work at it. That is the thing. When people are stuck in their habits, and they feel a bit disconnected, the world gets smaller and more contracted. The thing is, that is why we start with. Why does your health matter? What is your vision? If you do not connect to that, then you can wake up in the morning, you feel tired, and you allow the tiredness to dictate what you do during the day and your mood and your tone. Whereas if you are connected to your vision and your value of health is in the top three, then despite being tired, and there are appropriate times where you must rest, you will get up, you will do your yoga, or you will go for an early morning walk, wherever it might be, go for a swim or something.

You do it and then it is like you are out there going, “Thank God I did it because I feel so much better now.” That is someone who is consciously choosing to nurture their health and getting the benefits of it. Exercise begets hydration. If someone exercises, they are much more likely to hydrate. As you go a little bit deeper with hydration, you realize it is not just about the water I drink. You need to drink clean water, but if I sweat through exercise or it is hot or humid, I need to add minerals and electrolytes.

I always say you start with the fundamentals, so those five pillars, but then you optimize, and you go a little bit deeper. That is the next level around optimization and providing the body with what it needs to heal and repair itself because anyone who has been in this field a long time is just in awe of the human body. It is a miracle. It is a mystery. It will never be truly understood. We can conceptualize and just be in awe of it.

Our job is to give the body everything it needs to take great care of ourselves, to repair and to regenerate. Really, a lot of my teaching work is now around teaching practitioners how to support their patients’ bodies in recovering and healing. What does it need? How can we mobilize the body’s own repair system? How can we address the constraints to repair, particularly stress, particularly low energy, inflammation, those kinds of things?

Let us get into that. You are doing some amazing work now with Stemregen. I would love to learn about that work that you are doing, that company, and the amazing things that they have been working on now for almost a couple of decades.

Understanding Stem Cell Mobilization

They have. I was really excited to come across Stemregen and Christian Drapeau, its founder. I first came across him a couple of years ago, and as I listened to him, I thought he was actually onto something because he is describing, and I have never heard this described before, what the human repair system actually is and how it works. Typically, if you talk to a health practitioner and say, “The body has a healing intelligence,” they will say it has a healing intelligence, but not necessarily be able to describe exactly what that means, what it is. They will involve the immune system, etc. What he has actually found is that stem cells inside the body are stem cells.

They exist both locally in our skin, in our gut, and in our muscles. When the skin is damaged and needs replacement, same for muscles, those stem cells then change and transform into the cell that is required to replace it. What he discovered was that there is an entire system of stem cells, which he was proposing are the body’s repair system, and they are resident inside our bones, the bone marrow. When we are young, as a child, the circulating level of these stem cells is really very high, which is why children recover so quickly. If they cut the skin, it is like 24 hours later, it is gone.

When we are in our 50s, 60s, 70s, it takes much longer to recover. Why is that? What is happening there? It turns out that the body’s repair system, these stem cells, the number that circulates in our blood decreases very significantly as we move into adulthood. As we age, both the number decreases, and their functioning decreases. What he discovered was that there are some botanicals, plant-based extracts, that will actually, when ingested, mobilize the stem cells from the bone marrow into the blood circulation and essentially shift the body into repair mode. The efficiency of that typically gets less and less as we age.

When you take Stemregen Release, which is their core product range, and I have deep-dived into all the research on their ingredients, it is like, no, you can actually mobilize your body’s own repair system, making it available to the tissues that need replacement and repair, and you can do it by taking this plant-based supplement. For me, it is the first time I have partnered with a natural product company and promoted a product because it is the first product that I have come across where I think, “This can make a huge difference to a lot of people.”

Your inner critic only wants to keep you safe. Next time it speaks, say, ‘I see you and I accept you’ to quiet the mental chatter.

They have done trials on people with chronic heart failure and on people with Parkinson’s. I have seen the case studies of people writing in sharing the positive impact that it had on their healing and their recovery. I took it for chronic tendinopathy. I used to run, and I would get my patellar tendon inflamed, the ligament, my kneecap. Within three months of taking Stemregen Release, it was all gone. It was all recovered.

I feel, along with Stemregen and Christian Drapeau, its founder, some responsibility to bring this to the world in a way which is, it feels like if people are struggling to recover and heal and repair from something, there are always things you can do to support the repair process, from managing your stress to giving it good nutrition, getting quality sleep, and also you can mobilize your body’s own repair system as well using these plant-based extracts.

Let me just recap a little bit. The stem cell exhaustion is what you were describing, which is one of the twelve hallmarks of aging. As we age, as you mentioned, the amount of stem cells and their function decreases. We have significantly fewer of those stem cells within our bodies, but it sounds like they are locked into our bone marrow, and we need to mobilize them. Why does not the body naturally mobilize those? How does the plant extract that is in Stemregen actually trigger that mobilization?

The body will mobilize them if there is a significant injury, inflammation, or infection, or if you intensely exercise. What it does is release instructions that get carried in the bloodstream to the bone marrow. It alters the retention signals in the bone marrow. They get released and made available for repair. The efficiency of that decreases significantly as we get older. One of the reasons for that is that, as we get older, the majority of our bone marrow goes from producing these stem cells, particularly of the red blood cell and immune cell lineage, and that gets replaced with adipose or fat, and that becomes quite inflamed.

What happens is that when inflammation is around, the signaling cues that tell the body we need your stem cells over here, they become impaired. As circulation gets worse as some people progress, that also affects it as well. Basically, we have got all these things acting against the body’s own repair system working effectively. What they found is that this combination of plant ingredients can mobilize multiple different types of stem cells. Some of which facilitate tissue repair, some of which support vascular repair, that is, the blood vessel system as well. Typically, two hours after taking it, you get a spike in stem cells. They then will locate the affected area that is injured.

Anytime tissue is injured, it basically creates a GPS signal saying, “Over here, come here.” It will lock in. What we now know about stem cells is they coordinate the repair response in that local area, and actually they reprogram the cells in the affected area to shift it out of inflammation into healing and repair. Most people, when they think of stem cells, they think of exogenous stem cells, stem cells injected into the body. This is different.

This is simply using your preexisting stem cells that, as we age, are much less responsive to the cues of injury, and mobilizing them instead. The classic thing is when people start taking it, they will say, “It used to be I exercise hard, it takes me 3 or 4 days to recover, I have muscle soreness.” What the classic says is, “Within 24 hours, I just felt so much better. It is just like because the body is just repairing itself so much more efficiently.”

You mentioned a couple of things like chronic heart failure, Parkinson’s, some of the clinical studies, and things that were measured and tested on things like that. Can you tell us a little bit about some of those studies that have been done?

Reversing Irreversible Conditions Through Clinical Research

There are always a couple of caveats when you hear a study: who sponsored it? This was sponsored by Stemregen. What an independent observer would say is, “That could be biased.” Understood. What they did was they basically were inspired by consistent case studies that gave the signal this was worth investigating. The initial pilot study was on ten people with heart failure who had been diagnosed with heart failure. The intervention was 6 months of Stemregen Release accelerator protocol. It is two capsules three times a day, and at six months, they had a significant improvement in symptoms.

They had done what is called an echocardiogram of their heart. One of the diagnoses, in order to diagnose this heart failure based on symptoms, etc., you also have to assess how well the heart contracts, and that has improved significantly. All of those ten no longer met the criteria for heart failure. That was really quite incredible, and they are now extending that trial and recruiting more people as well. The working hypothesis is that if you have chronic heart failure, your heart is not working efficiently or effectively. The stem cells come into your system, and they basically shift the healing system into repair mode, and then it activates the repair cells within the heart itself.

That was really very special. There was also a trial with Parkinson’s. People with Parkinson’s, on average they had it for about three and a half years. Parkinson’s is a chronic neurodegenerative disease. What they found is that after six months, again on the same protocol, significant improvement in symptoms like rigidity, bradykinesia, slow movements, improvement in sleep quality, depression, etc. You cannot say Stemregen Release caused the improvements because there was no placebo group and it was not a randomized controlled trial.

Happier people are healthier people. Cultivating daily gratitude isn’t selfish; it actually elevates everyone around you.

What we can say is that, in this cohort of people who took the supplement, they demonstrated a very significant benefit, and there was no other intervention during that period of time. What it does is create a hypothesis. Maybe these two conditions that are classically thought of as being irreversible are not. One way to support someone with either of these conditions is to mobilize their own stem cells. There is enough confidence in what we are seeing there to now progress to larger trials.

Your own story of tendinopathy, and I am sure you hear many stories of people with some inflamed tendon or things like that. It’s very common. It is something that you can just take for a few months. If you have an injury like that, it would encourage stem cells to heal.

I would say that is currently probably the most popular reason for using it, which is musculoskeletal-related injury or orthopedic injury, recovery from fracture or a torn ligament, whatever it is. People will use it to expedite and accelerate the healing response. They would typically use the accelerated protocol because that is more intensive, 2 or 3 times a day. Really, what that does is it mobilizes tens of millions of stem cells into the blood circulation, and it keeps them around. The instructions for the body to heal remain there, and most people would take it for at least a month or two.

I have also, in our previous conversations, talked a little bit about a lot of surgeons or other stem cell physicians that are using stem cells that will add Stemregen before the procedure and then a little bit after the procedure to enhance those or speed up the healing process.

That is exactly right. When you have an intravenous infusion or injection of stem cells, of course, you are suddenly introducing to the body hundreds of millions of stem cells, and it really acts as a catalyst for the body’s healing repair response. The advantage in taking the Stemregen Release before and after is that, before it starts mobilizing at a much lower level but primes the body to respond well to the injection, and then after the injection, when continued, it continues to mobilize the body’s own supply of stem cells thereafter.

It is a very nice combination, and a lot of people are starting to use it whilst also addressing hydration, making sure the body has got the right minerals. If there is a lot of inflammation, it is very important to address the inflammation component of it because when a joint is heavily inflamed, or there is a lot of inflammation in the blood system, it can be hard for the stem cells to locate where they need to go. Stemregen also has a product called Stemregen Signal that helps to reduce inflammation. We often say take that upfront if you can.

If there are blood circulation issues, obviously, in order for the stem cells to work, they have to be able to actually arrive physically at the affected cells. If there are blood circulation constraints or restrictions, then that needs to be improved. That is why we have Stemregen Mobilize. We say if there is inflammation and/or impaired circulation, you take Stemregen Signal and Mobilize upfront for a week. You introduce the Stemregen Release because by that time the inflammation has come down, the blood circulation has improved, and then the stem cells can get to the affected area. That is the rationale.

That makes a lot of sense. That is super exciting. They have been at this for now, seventeen years, I think, that it has been around.

He did his original research, I think, around seventeen years ago. He has done an amazing job at raising people’s awareness around this. Of course, like many people who are sharing a novel insight that was not accepted by the mainstream in the early days, got a lot of pushback. That is why we have things like clinical trials, which are just some more objective evidence to say, “Listen, this is not just a theoretical construct.”

“Here are the case studies we have. Here is what the trials show.” Everyone has a right to see those trials and then to make their own choice as to what they do. It is very important, when people, particularly if they are struggling to recover from an injury, have a chronic illness, they need to know typically there is a whole bunch of things they can do to support the body’s own healing response, and they have a right to understand that and to know that.

Thanks for sharing that with us. I would love to maybe just shift gears for a few minutes. As we near the end of our time, you are the founder of the Human Potential Institute. That is one of your areas of expertise and how you have trained thousands of people. Working with a company like Stemregen and then also just thinking about all the breakthroughs that are happening, and as you think about human potential, what excites you the most? Maybe tell us a little bit about the Human Potential Institute, but also just as you think about the future utilizing products like Stemregen and others, what is on the horizon and what excites you the most as you think about the next 5, 10, and 15 years?

Aligning Technology With Inner Development

I’ll do it in reverse a little bit. The thing that excites me most is the availability of information resources for people to really radically make a difference to the quality of their life. It used to be that if you wanted to develop yourself and grow and evolve, you would have to work hard to find the right resources. It is now just available to you. The reason I went into the field of human potential development was that I came to appreciate that there appears to be what is called intellect or this self-actualization impulse within all of us, which is that there is a flow of energy that is designed to help us grow and evolve and learn and unfold our potential.

It is almost like life is evolving through us. We are part of life, so that makes sense. What I came to realize is that when you align with life and its challenges and you open up to learning and allowing impact to teach you, it changes everything. You start to see, every day with those challenges that at the time do not feel so great, I can, as a result of it, learn something about myself. When I set up the Human Potential Institute, it was with the view of teaching coaches how to coach through a human potential framework, which is how to help people manage their mind, work with their interior world skillfully, and support internal development through the process of inner work in orientation of what is possible for them.

A lot of people, when they look to the future, talk about what they think they should be doing. What I came to understand is if you ever really want to know the truth of something, you go to your heart. That makes sense. If you want to get the heart of something, you really want to go a little bit deep. You ask the heart. In our coaching methodology, we say to people, “What is the outcome you want 3 months from now?” They go, “XYZ.” They basically tell me what they think they want. We will just invite them to breathe more gently into the center of their heart and digress there. From there, without going back up to your head, allow the answer to come up. What is it you really want?

Nine times out of ten, the thing that comes up is not what they thought they wanted. It turns out what people really want is freedom, joy, love, peace, connection. It is normally a variant of that. In human potential coaching, we coach to the head-based outcome, which is, “I want to get fit, lean, healthy, and reduce my body fat percentage. I want to achieve XYZ.” We will coach that, not a problem. We will also coach to and honor the deeper need and want, whatever that is for them, and we will build a program around that, and that has been really transformational. I would say that the future is exciting in many ways.

We are going to have all of these technologies available to us that are going to allow us to extend our lifespan and expand our healthspan. We will see people living for longer for sure, and what I want to see is the healthspan-lifespan gap closed. Most people will spend 10 or 15 years in relatively poor health towards the end of their lives. I want to see that compressed, and I think with supplements and technology we are going to do that. I also think as these technologies become available to us, we must use them more wisely. To become wiser and more conscious is really about inner work and inner development.

I would like people to train their minds more, engage more in meditation and yoga, spend more time in nature, learn how to work with their nervous system, work more on their happiness, etc., so that their wisdom and their consciousness can keep pace with the way technology is going. For me, the next 5 or 10 years are exciting because I think greater health is available to more people.

What I would say at the same time is also work on your happiness and your mind and your relationships because ultimately what we come to learn is it is really all about relationships. The quality of our relationships with self, with others, with life. If we pursue health, never let it be at the expense of your relationships. That is what I teach. I remind myself and teach my students. Never lose sight of the things that really matter. It tends to be that what really matters is our relationships. There you go.

I would love to just hear, maybe just for a couple of minutes, what practices do you follow? What does a day in your life look like? How do you make sure that you are tending to these five pillars and the other components that we have talked about?

The first thing is self-care, and my health is one of my top three values. As I look at my day, my week, it is just naturally oriented towards how I will move. I have got a stand-up desk. I will use that. When will I exercise? To protect that exercise time is really important. If it is scheduled, then I get to exercise. Healthy nutrition is super important, sleep, time with my wife, my children, etc. Over the years, there has been a deeper movement towards more simplicity. What I mean by that is, where am I creating unnecessary busyness and distraction, and what is that getting in the way of me doing what is even more important?

Movement towards simplicity, more spaciousness, and that is not over-scheduling, building in breaks, recovery, and fun time. What I found is that as I have built more spaciousness, my mind becomes a lot more creative. I am a lot more productive, a lot more efficient as well. I have a yoga practice. One of the teachers I follow, Sadhguru, I have trained with Isha Yoga. That has been a game-changer for me. My day starts with that. I would say the most important practice throughout the day is what I call, and I’ll finish on this, the practice of being above the line.

It is my favorite thing in the world to teach. I did a two-year project with Google Cloud where I taught a thousand of their sales leaders three fundamental practices, and this was the first one I taught them. It was a two-year project, and what they found at the end of it was that it transformed the way many of them communicated, collaborated together, and actually also resulted in better performance as well. This was the practice I taught them. It is the practice of centering. Basically, what I say is that in any given moment we are either above or below the line.

When we’re below the line, we’re really caught up in our head. Our thinking, our stories, our problems, our worries, etc. It is a very familiar place to a lot of us. We know what it is like when in the presence of someone who is caught up in their head. They are not really there. We are above the line. If we are above the line, we are present, we are engaged, we are open, and we are connected. The way we shift from below the line to above the line is through the practice of centering. I will just guide your listeners through this, and this will be my offering. This is the practice of centering, so we can have fun with this.

Aging slows down our healing because our stem cells get locked away. We can naturally trigger their release to speed up recovery.

The first thing is to not try to make anything happen, so it is good to do it with a light spirit and to just really enjoy the experience. The first thing we do is we allow our eyes to soften. We hold a lot of tension in and around our eyes. We allow our eyes to soften, and as we look straight ahead, without thinking, we just tune into the space all around us. You will notice that there are objects in the room, but there is a lot of space there as well. You just tune into the space, soft eyes. As we allow the eyes to be soft, we allow our mouth to be open slightly, soft tongue. Soft eyes, soft tongue. As we allow our tongue to be soft, what we start to see is that the mind goes quiet.

The soft tongue stops what is called sub-vocalization, which is essentially internal mental chat. Soft eyes, soft tongue, and now breathe down into your lower belly. If it helps, you can place a hand there as you count down from 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. You just settle into your lower belly, abdomen, soft eyes, soft tongue, and you rest here. From here, you look. What most people will notice is that immediately they are in the present moment. The mind is quieter, much more grounded, present, and stable. The mind is just available. You are curious about what is here. What I say to people is, from here, live.

From here, do your work. When you need to go to your conceptual conditioned mind to think on stuff, plan, reflect, access your memory, go back up to the front of the head to have a good old think. Make sure you come back down again, because then when we’re here, we do not have to try and be in the present moment. We are in the present moment. From here, we are so much more present and engaged and connected. A lot of my work is teaching people how to access their center, connect into presence, and to live more fully from here. That is a practice I have taught many thousands of people, and it has been such a blessing for many people.

Thank you for walking us through that. Now, hopefully you are teaching thousands of us, more of us, even today, on how to practice that and live from there, as you said. Thank you. Dr. Atkinson, how can people connect with you? I know you have five different books. Stemregen is easy to find, Stemregen.co. There are different protocols. There are all kinds of research. The studies that you mentioned are outlined on their website as well. Can you tell us a little bit where we can find you? What should we do next if we want to take steps?

You go to Stemregen.co. All of the information about the pilot studies and the products is on there. If you are a healthcare practitioner, you can join the healthcare practitioner program. There are a lot more presentations in there from me, so you can learn a lot more about stem cells. Personally, my website is DrMarkAtkinson.com. You can contact me through there. I do not do any more one-to-one work anymore. Most of my work now is teaching, education, and mentoring. These are my books. True Happiness is the most recent one.

The original one, The Mind Body Bible, and there is also Holistic Health Secrets for Women as well, so you can check those out. I have done a whole bunch of podcasts, so people can listen to that, but you will hear the same kind of theme. Ultimately, it is. What can we do as human beings every day to take good care of ourselves, to take good care of the present moment? To do that, we need to be taking good care of our health, working with our mind, regulating our state, and then it changes everything. Life is to be lived and to be lived fully, but we have to work at it every single day.

There you go. Thank you so much, Dr. Atkinson. This has been such a fun conversation. We have covered so many very interesting topics, and you have given us so much to work with. Thank you so much for your time, for the great work that you are doing, the way that you are impacting people’s lives and helping thousands around the world to really live fully. It has been a joy. Thank you so much.

My pleasure. Thank you.

—

What a fascinating conversation. We covered so many different areas. Dr. Atkinson obviously has a wealth of knowledge, expertise, and experience. We are lucky to learn from such an amazing person who has really explored and deeply researched and learned in so many different areas. We talked about the five pillars. Mind, eat, sleep, move, connect. Really, the most important of those that he talked a lot about was the mind and your mindset, understanding why your health is important to you. I love some of the quotes that he said, taking care of the inner critic and just mentioning, “I see you, and I accept you,” accepting ourselves in that way.

He said happier people are healthier people, and they elevate the world around them, and what a beautiful vision that is. The other things that we mentioned, we also did a deep dive into Stemregen and mobilizing our own stem cells to heal so that the body’s natural processes can be enhanced for healing. We talked about some of the studies that have been done on chronic heart failure and Parkinson’s and other just healing tendons and things like that, so check out Stemregen.co for a lot more information there.

His website is DrMarkAtkinson.com, and you can find his books everywhere books are sold. Do a little deeper dive, follow up with Dr. Atkinson. He has also recorded many other podcast interviews as well, so just a wealth of knowledge and resources there. I love that at the end, where he led us through the practice of being above the line and that centering practice, really getting us to a place where we can live from a place of presence and awareness that way. Thanks so much for tuning in to the show. We’ll see you back here next time. Have a great day.