The Dr. Mary Louder Show
Tune into The Dr. Mary Louder Show, where Mary Louder, DO and her distinguished guests explore a range of topics, from emerging healthcare challenges to groundbreaking concepts, all designed to ignite transformative "aha" moments and reshape your perspective on wellness. Don't miss an episode—subscribe now to embark on a journey that redefines what you know about health and invites you to think, "Why haven't I seen it this way before?"
The Dr. Mary Louder Show
From Affirmations to Algorithms: The Digital Evolution of Self-Help & Soul Work
Welcome to From Affirmations to Algorithms—a series within the Dr. Mary Louder Show where medicine meets meaning, and transformation gets real.
This series traces the soulful evolution of self-help, personal growth, and energy healing in the digital age. Join Dr. Louder as she is in conversation with Dr. Dawn Eidelman, who is the current executive director of the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology.
From cassette tapes and Louise Hay to AI wellness tools, trauma-informed coaching, and energy psychology apps—we explore how healing has moved online, and what that means for our nervous systems, our souls, and our search for wholeness.
We separate the sacred from the hype and ask deeper questions:
- What tools truly help us heal—and which ones distract us from the work?
- How do we stay grounded as transformation becomes more digitized?
- And what does soul-centered healing look like in a tech-driven world?
Whether you’re a lifelong seeker, a practitioner, or someone simply feeling called to something deeper—this space is for you.
So grab your journal. Or your headphones.
Let’s press play on something that actually matters.
If you're interested in Dawn's work, you can learn more here: https://frompassiontolaunch.com/
If you'd like to learn more about ACEP (the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology) you can find their website here: https://www.energypsych.org/.
Hi, I'm Dr Mary Louder, osteopathic physician, reluctant shaman and lover of both the mystical and the medical. Welcome to my podcast. Today we're going to be talking about how self help became digital, from cassette tapes and affirmation cards to online summits, somatic apps and energy psychology platforms. We're witnessing a revolution in how people access healing and transformation. Today's guest is someone who's helped shape the very landscape of online consciousness education. Dr Dawn Eidelman is a distinguished leader in entrepreneurship, education and executive innovation. Most recently, she has served as the chief education officer at The Shift Network, where she led program design, faculty development, customer experience and new business growth, including launching a certification and immersion program that helped double the company's revenue from 2019 to 2023. Before that, Dawn co-founded Mosaic Education, one of the world's largest education management organizations, earning national awards for leadership and impact. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature. She speaks multiple languages and brings a rare blend of academic insight, strategic leadership and a deep soul, centered purpose. Today, she serves as the executive director of the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology, where there she continues her mission of empowering, transformative education and healing worldwide. It's a true pleasure to welcome someone who's both visionary and deeply grounded. Together, we're tracing the arc of soul work in the digital age and what got us here, what's changed, what still needs protecting as we move into this new frontier of tech-infused transformation. This is From Affirmations to Algorithms, a soulful look at how the digital world transformed healing, learning and self help. Welcome to the podcast, and welcome Dr. Dawn Eidelman. Welcome, Dawn. It's just lovely to have you here on our podcast. We've had a wind up to get, to get together. It's taken us a few times, but it has been well worth the wait to have you as a special guest. So thank you and welcome.
Dawn Eidelman:Thank you, Mary, thanks for having me. Yes.
Mary Louder:So our topic today in the podcast, I'm going to read it right off so I get it correct, is From Affirmations to Algorithms, the digital evolution of self help and soul work. The tagline to that is going to be "a soulful look at how the digital world transformed healing, learning and self help." So that's that's where we're going today. Now, both you and I, we breathe, we live transformation. I'm all about transformation, as I don't, I don't think I'm wired any other way, just the wiring, and I think you're very similar to that as well. So let's start with what first drew you into, maybe the self help consciousness, education space, because you've been in that space for quite some time. So share with us.
Dawn Eidelman:Really, my entire career. And I would say, I mean, there are so many things, but I would say one of the first epiphanic moments that really set me on a particular course was when I was a teenager and I saw the play, the--Thornton Wilder's Our Town. And in the last act, when Emily comes back from the grave, she's died in childbirth, and she is not ready to say goodbye yet, she wants to go back and just see everybody one more time. And the stage manager says, Pick a day that is really unimportant to you. It's very, very difficult. She says, Okay, I picked my eighth birthday. And you know this, it's done so that it's everyone, every town, every character is very archetypal. So she crosses the stage from the, the, the hillside graves, where she's sitting in a chair next to her mother in law, who has passed on, and walks to the kitchen where her mother is busily making breakfast and hollering up the stairs for the kids to get ready for school. And you know, her mother, of course, can't see her because she's passed on. She's in spirit form, but she comes up close to her mom's face and just marvels at her youth and beauty and how remarkable it is that next door, in the, the house sleeping, is the man that she'll marry, George. And--she's just overwhelmed by the beauty of clocks ticking and bacon and eggs in the morning and her mother's beauty, and also just kind of taken aback by how her mom is just in a rush to get things done. She's not aware of the miraculous that's all around, the beauty that is all around. And she she can't take it. It's it's too much, too much beauty for her to be able to sustain it. So she tells the stage manager, take me back. And she asks him, are there any, any humans who know what it is to be alive every, every minute. And he says, poets and prophets, they do. Some of the time. And as a 15-year-old, I thought, poets and prophets, they do some of the time. I'm going to study those people and what they saw and what they understood, and that just sort of set me on--
Mary Louder:Wow.
Dawn Eidelman:For philosophy and literature. I'm trained as a comparative literature professor. I realized when someone pointed out to me that the novels that I tended to teach were narratives of awakening.
Mary Louder:Oh, my goodness.
Dawn Eidelman:And I was just really all along, just sort of drawn to the Divine that I sense in human genius. So my learning has really been tied to how humans throughout history, across cultures, have seen things and tried to give voice to that to other humans, sometimes with no one in their present moment who could really relate. Sometimes they had to be vindicated posthumously before people really got what they were trying to say. And then we live in this time where we can find each other. At all corners of the globe. We can find like minded people. And it's really it's an extraordinary time to be an awakened spirit, having a human experience and trying to be awake and aware and loving and appreciative and gratitude, as many moments as possible.
Mary Louder:Wow, that's not the answer I expected, but that is an amazing story. So at 15, I mean, and we have to say you're pretty much that you just defined yourself as an old soul, to be quite honestly, you know, and to say that quite honestly, you really--to come in and want to find the poets and the prophets. I would say, interestingly, I wasn't too dissimilar at that age being exposed to Advanced Placement English and reading and that type of thing, and in certain plays and In in eras. I was always drawn to certain time, you know, places in time. And poetry, not so much because I didn't get it. And I didn't get it because I, very simply, I was, I had a concussion injury when I was in high school, and I had difficulty in some learning, but didn't know why that was, but I just couldn't figure out why. It didn't make sense. Beside that point, though I always knew at some point it would be prophets, poetry and writing that would draw me and that and then into narrative, part of medicine. So, and so, I've always maintained that people have stories. They they aren't their stories, but they have stories, and if you listen to them, they'll tell you what's wrong with them. It's not much different than prophets and poets, is it?
Dawn Eidelman:No, no. It's just another, another iteration of that.
Mary Louder:Yeah. Yeah. And then interestingly, you know, if you look at some of the shamanic stuff, especially with the Celts, there's the bards, the storytellers, and that's really where I identify. And I actually was, my book will be coming out soon, and I wrote in there I was, I was actually bard certified. I meant board certified, but I left that in there. So you know, all that to say, you know, here we are rich in story and rich in, you know, steeped in a different type of tradition, because we've got traditional medicine, traditional self help, things like that that we're going to talk about. But really the tradition you're coming from is, is really, you know, really, would be tied in to, like a bard, not any different whatsoever.
Dawn Eidelman:And, you know, the common thread there too, that I know we share is I'm an interdisciplinary scholar, so Comparative Literature is history and languages and literature. So I love and really grew up with global consciousness. I grew up as an expat kid in a French speaking country in West Africa. I didn't know French the first day of school, but by the end of kindergarten, you know, was really beginning to be fluent. But it also had an impact on my work many years later as an educator, that experience of feeling conspicuous and dumb because, you know, I was the only white kid in the class, and really had no clue. And I, just as a child, was aware of this sort of dawning understanding over the months of, oh, I, I'm getting it. Say a word, I'll tell you what is in French. You know, it was like the superpower that I was developing, and so much of that, you know, I had an early awareness of how so many opportunities open up to you because of learning, because of mastering, something new.
Mary Louder:Curiosity.
Dawn Eidelman:Right. And it just it makes the world much more open and accessible. And--kids learn languages when they have to learn the language to communicate.
Mary Louder:Yes, a comparative literature is really essentially holistic literature. Mm, hmm, and now you're dealing with holistic therapists and energy work and things like that. And that's really kind of carried through your education. Because bring, you know, bring me through a little bit of your career where you, because it's, you know, you--so it was professor, but then you went into--
Dawn Eidelman:Right. Education entrepreneurship. That was an interesting leap that was around 1994, no 96, I was a tenure track professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. 200 PhDs for this one little job. Had to move for it. Had a commuter marriage for a couple of years. I loved the teaching. Love teaching graduate students. My field is 19th century French and Russian, you know, the golden age, but the woman question and how it was promulgated in Russia by men who didn't consider Russian women sufficiently educated, and they borrowed liberally from the author that I wrote about George Sand, knowing that she was a woman using a pseudonym. So that world--now I had little kids and this commuter marriage, so I took a leave of absence for a year, and simultaneously, I was really getting into metaphysical books. So one of the books that I was reading, and this is one of those fun stories where, you know, I'm in my 30s, but staying up in the wee hours not being able to put this book down, because it was so incredibly compelling. It was James Redfield's the Celestine Prophecy, which, you know, well, it's not the best written book you've ever had, but it is--the ideas, to me, were so interesting. And particularly the panoramic journey through the history of paradigm shifts and world culture has, I had taught a world literature survey course, and it just really resonated with me, and I just thought many strands came together that year, where I had the opportunity to create a curriculum and scale it, and it was a tabula rasa, and I, you know, I just stepped up and thought, I don't know what this looks like yet, but It's something I cannot not do. I feel so drawn to this opportunity and it's it's what I'm interested in. It's where my heart is. I'm educating my own children. I have to believe that other parents want a world of ideas for their child too. So, the paradigm shifts in history, learning the you know, everything from daily life and the impact of technology and on human life and literature, song, all of the the storytelling from different eras that reflected and refracted how to live life as humans. All of that became part of a business that I co founded that became wildly successful. And I learned a lot about business, a lot about entrepreneurship, a lot about curriculum design. I led an amazing team of interdisciplinary scholars in creating this curriculum, but where it got magical is when we had a critical mass of schools. Because it was very student-centered, the kids made it magical because it's designed to really invite them to immerse and engage and transform the classroom into a medieval village, or into classical Greece. I, you know, it was really based on how I had learned to teach foreign language in an immersive way. So a thread through it was really the esoteric traditions. I pushed that envelope as far as I could within the bounds of public education standards, because that's what kids are typically really interested in. They ask all the big why questions until we program it out of them. So it was really a mystery school type of curriculum for k-8 and there was nothing like it, especially in the k-5, and it transformed an institutional building of a new charter school into a world history tour of the ancient world in the first five weeks of school, with all student created work and the kids remembered. Because learning, you know, you talked about the right-brain experience and immersion, yeah, that emotional connection to building things and telling stories and teaching each other, they remembered it so well.
Mary Louder:Yes.
Dawn Eidelman:It was cultural literacy. So they were set up to do really well on the SAT years later, because they had really established this foundation of this culture. Then became this, then the Renaissance, looked back at the classical world, but it also was the the age of integrating art and science and studying human anatomy to be able to depict art in three dimensions, and sculpture and painting. 10 year olds totally get that, and they love it. And it, it's all been part of the same journey of also teaching teachers and school leaders to remember their calling. Why were you drawn to educate kids. But the thing I loved was when people would say, You mean, I get to do this? It's like, not only do you get to do this, but please do. You know, remember why you chose this profession. Bring your magic to this. Make learning come alive. Model, model, model what it is to be curious, what it is to investigate how you use your critical thinking to figure things out. Model that. Model good learning to be a phenomenal educator.
Mary Louder:Okay, that's amazing. Now, is this a school we would know?
Dawn Eidelman:So we, we established a company that managed charter schools in the US, and then we scaled globally to British academies, which is kind of their version of charter schools, and then private schools in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, India, because part of the value proposition was, we wanted to offer a $20,000 private school education, tuition free. It waspart of a strategy to close the poverty and opportunity gap, and then in parts of the world, we actually did charge that tuition for the same program for integrity, and because there were markets where they were hungry for really great private schools. We were bought out--the curriculum still exists in some schools in the US and in England, they they really ate it up and took it to the next level. So a number of British academies are still using it.
Mary Louder:Nice. That's just lovely. That's really a nice way to, you know, bring to fruition all of the education that you had without and bring it into an experiential learning environment, which you know when we talk about self help, self healing, enlightenment, really, that's an experiment of experience, and it's an experiment of learning. I mean, one of the--we're going to look kind of in sections, where we've got, like the Nightingale-Conant area, Louise Hay. I mean, Louise Hay, you know, she started her company Hay House when she was 60 years old.
Dawn Eidelman:Amazing.
Mary Louder:And she, you know, ended up, you know, having this massive publishing house and really bringing forward that concept of the experiment to the experience in education for self help, and there was a big explosion of that in the 70s. And, you know, when you're leading now, what you're doing now is the executive director of the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology. I mean, we do stand on the shoulders of some of that, and that's laying the groundwork. But now we even see an evolution into somatic and or energetic healing, which--I have felt as a physician we really move towards self-healing, rather than just self help. Mm, exactly, and the body has the inherent capacity to heal. And I think it's that experience now is finding in that connection back to self, so that we can work with the body's inherent capacity to heal. So when you look at where you're at in your present situation in in your profession, and where we kind of started in the 70s, where that explosion was, and people know about the self help revolution. You know, every--you turn around, every you know, every book, every store has got a book. You know, you can heal your life. You can Think and Grow Rich, you can, you know, Losing Weight and Feeling Great. That was a cassette my mother listened to. She would go into into her room and put that on and lay on her bed. And you would hear her doing that, you know. And as a kid, we were very curious about that. And she was very much on the forefront of, kids, if you think, right, you can live well, you know, we're like whatever, what's for dinner, you know. But, but share with me your experience coming through some of that now into where you're at currently.
Dawn Eidelman:Right, so as a kid in the 70s, now back in the States, in a little bit of culture shock upon re-entry, it definitely was here for that learning curve and that cultural moment, I think, where I really, really devoured this kind of material was in my professional life, just trying to navigate how to be the kind of leader that was also in alignment with a kind of human I wanted to be. So, you know, I was an academic, being a teacher was really always in alignment with who I am, then I became an accidental entrepreneur. Great. Learned all kinds of things about innovation and design--that, that was really kind of a natural adjunct to teaching. Becoming an executive and leading people and needing to accomplish big things quickly, that was a big learning curve. Because, you know, being a professor and guiding students, I had a lot of experience with mentoring and with engaging them to come come up with their best thinking. Some of that translated over but I was not satisfied with the resources available to me in bookstores on leadership. I was looking for a deeper level of guidance. How to--how to lead people by helping them be in their genius zone, do their best work, be aligned with their dharma. You know, things that I didn't really have a vocabulary for at the time. So it was really this body of work that, that drew me, you know, the work on Think and Grow Rich. In Abundance, we were really successful. So how do you not allow that to become an ego thing? How do you really stay in alignment with the mission of what you're accomplishing and make sure that you have that North Star for the organization so everyone else shares that value. How do you guide people in that way of empowering them? You know, what are the how? What is the language? Model the conversation for me. I hired a business coach early in the game to navigate difficult conversations where I needed to challenge some things, where I needed to talk to my board, you know, with these JP Morgan and Credit Suisse and all these attorneys and accountants, the only woman and the youngest person on the board, and this is in the 90s, and you know, I'm this--they wanted to make me the little curriculum gal. You know, who knows more about George Sand than anybody? But, you know, really kind of marginalizing my contribution to creating the intellectual property for this education company. The thing that everybody loved the most about this company. And I could see it 20 years down the road. I could see it fully formed, which was a blessing and a curse. And I could also see that we needed to get into online learning, that we needed to digitize everything that we had created. So we went through, you know, taking 40,000 pages of PDF lesson plans that were printed in binders for the teacher into this dynamic, storyboarded version of the curriculum for students' eyes on the smart board in the classroom or anywhere in the world on a computer program at the beginning of online learning. So, you know, I'm trying to figure out how to tell my business partners, we've gotta do this. I built a prototype, but I also studied who else was doin online learning, and I studied content I was interested in. So I did the Barbara Marx Hubbard, 2012 program, Agents of Conscious Evolution with The Shift Network in 2011. Loved her work, loved the calling to be there as an educational leader and meet leaders from other hubs of this awakening humanity for this next stage of our human evolution. So I was really kind of living in two worlds at that point. I had this really deep immersion into this leader that I wanted to become for the and are becoming. And I wanted to live that and be that, and greater good that was to me, just the logical progression of this historical journey through time, and then I'm really grounded in this prosaic reality of pushing the boulder up the hill, in that paradigm of being a young woman leader, trying to make my place at the table with these powerful men. try to integrate it into that world that was, you know, really kind of before business became a bit more enlightened. It's better, but we're still not there.
Mary Louder:Yeah, I just think of the bumper sticker Be the change you want to be in the world. So, and what you were doing was in what everybody does, is they kept being a seeker. So you were seeking out answers to the question that were really driven by your soul. And I think that's really where the self help comes through and comes from. You know, we do have a lot of self help that looks at the physical aspect, but the transformative aspect is really at the soul and the spiritual level. Because the body, you know, I love it. It's you know, it's you know, I call it often, the bag of bones we carry around, you know. And if we look at it truly, what we know in some of the quantum work regarding anatomy nowadays is, is that the fascia is what carries us around, and the bones happen to be a harder structure to support the fascia. And the energetics of our body, as it were, are really held in the fascia, or is really held in the fascia. And so thinking of that, and then, you know, where's the soul within that? It's within and without. I'm not exactly sure where it is, and that's above my pay grade, and that's okay, but, you know, and that's what drove people. I mean, I think, and I use my mom a little bit in a teasing way, Losing Weight and Feeling Great because that was she wanted to always be fit. And she says, I know if I can just get my thinking right. And yet, here was in her, her life, here was someone who overcame so many things, and also was a chain--well, she smoked a lot, and then she quit cold turkey. That had, that had to take a lot of willpower. So here you've got willpower, here you've got a desire for something else. And then that drove her into the self help world. Well, that wasn't--so that was some physical driven, but really what kept driving her was her soul. She wanted that feeling great part. And I think that's what you know, Louise Hay talked about with, you know, you know, Heal Your Life. That's one of her biggest books. And then that other work is the mirror work, where you look at yourself to heal your life, and you're not looking at your physical self in the mirror. You are, but what you're doing is, because the eyes are the windows of the soul, you're connecting to your soul.
Dawn Eidelman:So many things there, Mary, so one of the things that that I looked at in my master's thesis was a semiotic study of the eyes in Madame Bovary and The Awakening by Kate Chopin, precisely for that reason. And it's amazing how many passages in those novels reflected the appearance of the heroine's eyes and what was happening with her psychologically. But it became this really incredible tool to this character explication. And then on the other hand, you know, I love that you're invoking Louise Hay specifically, because, like many, many people, I also had some things I needed to heal. You know, my mother was a lovely woman who, when we lived in Africa, partied hard, really developed a problem with alcoholism when we came back to the US, and in the 70s, you know, that was I always wonder if she had been born in a different era, you know, how might her life have unfolded differently? But these tools were really helpful to me, because school, excelling academically, getting a full ride scholarship to college and then to grad school, my path was partially propelled by what I was moving away from and didn't want to perpetuate. And so I love Louise Hay for her radical vulnerability and telling her story as she did. I'm sure I'm not alone in having You Can Heal Your Life as sort of a go-to when something weird is happening physically, and I want to know what my body is telling me, what the affirmation is, what the underlying message is. It was such an incredible contribution to the field.
Mary Louder:I think it's seminal work. It's, I don't think it's, I--she, I think I have always gotten a sense she's challenged me to make it better, because she invited questions. And, you know, and, and in some sense in the ethers, I would say I've been challenged by her to make this better, but at the same time, it is so good and so profound. And, you know, she really set the stages in the 70s to then go into the 80s, and thinking chronologically, what happened there was Oprah. You know, you get a car, you get a car, you that's what we think of. But really normalizing mainstreaming spiritual talk, self help talk, and Oprah made--you know what I do know about her, of what she said is, her program and producers were kind of going this way, little sensationalism, confronting the the girlfriend or the boyfriend who cheated, or however that's supposed--that narrative's supposed to be. And she struggled with that. She didn't want to do that.
Dawn Eidelman:I have a story about that. My first husband and business partner in Mosaica, a father of my kids, was on the Oprah show. He was a refugee from the former Soviet Union who was very successful in the US, really personified the American dream. And when he was on the show in the 80s, it was that era when her producers were trying to create this sort of talk TV that was confrontational and, you know, salacious and really interesting, because it was provocative, but kind of propelled by setting up a confrontation. And the idea was, you know, was this immigrant from the former Soviet Union usurping jobs from other Americans? He was so funny. He just--well, first of all, before he took the assignment, they gave him one day to make up his mind. Because I think maybe at the time, people changed their minds about being on the show. He said, what means Opera Winfrey? And I said, do it. That's Oprah. Yeah, yes. So he's on the show, you know, she's kind of trying to set up this dispute with some other people who are entrepreneurs in their community. You know, also immigrants trying to make it here, and some, you know, multi-generational populations that are still struggling to make it. Is, is, is it that scarce, zero-sum limited pie where someone's win means someone else's loss, right? And you know, when she said, Are you taking jobs away from other Americans? He said, I don't think so. I'm an American. I'm married to an American. All my employees are Americans. I don't think I am. And so it didn't really work, but he did report that you could tell, even at the time that, that her heart was not in that approach, right? And the fact that she was able--her story is remarkable.
Mary Louder:Very remarkeable.
Dawn Eidelman:And you know, there is kind of at the soul level, Mary, one of the things that I care deeply, deeply about. I have a particular mission to serve gifted at-risk children who have so much to offer the world, but without the right mentorship and support, the world may never see the gifts that they came here to bring. Oprah is one of those people with her gifts fully brought. And imagine a world where we had a lot more. A lot more people with their native genius that is actualized, and especially when they can tell the story of what they've had to overcome to be there.
Mary Louder:Yeah, right. Every everybody has a story about that. And everybody, and this is really the planet where we learn resilience, where we grow, where we come to heal. I have not, I have not seen that to be different in any of our countries or continents ever. And that's a shared human experience, which I think is one of the roots of self compassion and deep, fierce love, that you can have. That common humanity. We've all had something, and so--
Dawn Eidelman:And people take so many forms. We're experiencing it right now. One of my best friends from high school, who's got so much going for her, just really everything was in Europe celebrating her son's engagement with his fiance in Norway, and they had to rush back to Los Angeles because their community was on fire. And her home in Altadena burned to the ground. They have been through so much the last few months, trying to rebuild and--with so many other people at the same time competing for resources and attention to try to rebuild their lives. And through it all, she's also aware of the people who don't have the resources to fend for themselves and to try to rebuild, and how overwhelming and there, you know, there are just different versions of it. Nobody, nobody escapes without--
Mary Louder:We don't.
Dawn Eidelman:Big challenges to grow,
Mary Louder:Yeah, and then we grow, and then it happens again. It just really is. It's a part of, really, our human experience. So I, you know. And you know, it's there, you say it's, you know, when it's over, it's going to be good. If it's not yet good, it's not over. So there's going to be some sense of resolve, some sense of transformation and learning that we can get. And I think that's part of the thing with the self help, because we've got, you know, we've come through like, just, you know, the World War Two, and then there was a, you know, the boom, the economic boom, and then housing was everywhere, and then education, and then we had the Vietnam era, and the, you know, the you know, sexual revolution. I was a, you know, I was certainly a child of the 60s, I was born in 1962, but I actually embraced the 60s as a very young kid, you know. And really, that whole era was, was something that I was--and even to this day, it's like, that's just a great era, but they everybody was looking for what? Self-actualization, growth, And so a lot of the self-help then goes back to spiritual transformation, you know, in looking at connecting really spiritually. roots. How are we going to connect to ourselves spiritually? Oprah brought some of that mainstream in the 80s. Louise Hay really opened us up to connect to ourselves. And then, you know, so that was a kind of a mass market and a mass marketing that occurred. You could throw a rock out the window and hit a self-help guru in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s. And then it got, it seemed to be like, how are we going to make this digitally? What, what's going to happen? And that's when you when did you join The Shift Network? What year was? 2018 2018 Okay, so if you look at just before that, you've got the digital awakening. The Shift Network was, Shift Network was growing, and share with us exactly what that is. I don't know how many of our listeners know exactly what that is.
Dawn Eidelman:It is an online program publishing platform, and has, you know, more than a dozen verticals of different wisdom modalities, everything from Tai Chi, Qigong, chakra healing, spiritual psychology, the Enneagram, you know, just an extraordinary array. One of the things that I did there, so I I led summits, courses, and then initiated a new business line that was in many ways based on teaching graduate seminars, and, you know, working with adults in professional development for the deep learning that was also rigorous academically, with a lot of assessments, check for understandings, experiential work with feedback. So, high ticket certifications, and that was, that was really kind of a game changer during the pandemic, because we had a lot more people with time and the availability, very captive audience, and a lot of people who wanted to go deeper to help navigate the uncertainty. So it was the perfect confluence of a challenging time with a great vehicle for be being able to navigate it with grace and be able to do some good for yourself the deepest levels with the things that you were most excited to go deep with and learn about.
Mary Louder:So it just makes me think about--this conversation makes me think about self-help in a different way. I think if we pop to that, we think just superficially. Losing Weight and Feeling Great, Think and Grow Rich. You know, large sums of money are coming to me easily, quickly. You know, think of that and self help. But true self-help is really about connection and transformation, isn't it?
Dawn Eidelman:Connection, transformation and owning your own agency, owning your own role as healer, to be able to call on that at will. And that's one of the things I love about energy, psychology and a modality that combines talk therapy with the meridians, because it also calls on the person practicing EFT to engage actively, but it's it's something then that they can do for themselves to regulate their nervous system.
Mary Louder:Yeah.
Dawn Eidelman:To me it's really remarkable, and I hope that this is something that we can do for schools, in crisis sites, for veterans who are suffering from PTSD. Just the fact that there is so much research behind EFT, specifically, but a whole panoply, as you know, of energy-psychology modalities, but that the transformation and how quickly and effectively it works, especially when the participant actively engages in the learning process and says their agency and owns it.
Mary Louder:You know, there's interesting studies. I literally have the textbook on spirituality and psychology. Literally, there's a textbook. It's thick. Oxford Press. Well, well presented. And the one of the editors of that is a neuropsychiatrist, neuro, neuro--correction, neuropsychologist, neuroscientist, and she did part of her training in psych wards. Like a resident. And her stories about that, and my experience with that, in looking at folks who were having mental health crises and invoking a concept of self-help by connection, by agency, by transformation, was rejected by the traditional medical standards. They must have a diagnosis, must have these tablets, must talk about their pain. And actually self help, and now what I would put in the self-awakening, self-healing category goes the other way towards resilience, you know, because if we start at Ground Zero, common humanity, we all have had something go on. You know, do we go into that pain, or do we go in and find those tools of resiliency, connection, agency and compassion, self-compassion, and from there, just begin to allow space for that pain to kind of unravel, you know, unpeel, as it were, where you've got a container that is built with those other characteristics that doesn't make it so scary.
Dawn Eidelman:I also think that--I studied Qigong with Chun Yi Lin in an online program, and loved the work, and it really healed my--I had a chronic cough. I realized, in retrospect, that my throat chakra was blocked during that era when I was trying to talk to my board members and convince them, and they were cutting me off mid-sentence, and I was trying to get my ideas out. So it was really the sort of energetic issue that I needed to heal, that, you know, lung X-rays, nothing revealed anything in the biology.
Mary Louder:You were normal! You were normal!
Dawn Eidelman:That's right. So what's the problem here? But Ching Yi Lin and spring forest Qigong really, really helped me learn how to deeply relax clear, energetic blocks and why I was really taken with his mission, which was to create a healer in every family. And when you think of the sweeping scope of human history and the medicine people in the villages, and you know that we're very age segregated. I think we need grandparents much closer with the rest of the family. You know, we suffer from a lot of that. Yeah, but I also went through--at the same time, one of my kids went through a very debilitating depression, scary, scary depression his senior year, and what I learned from that I you know, serendipitously, I was studying all of these things. Serendipitously, I was an expert educator. I knew how to help support him academically to graduate. And serendipitously, it turned out by slowing down to be with him and help him through his healing journey, I also realized that I had this low grade depression that I was operating through and over to get things done because I couldn't crash and burn. I had to keep it going. And I healed myself through that experience in learning how to support and help him. But I am so grateful that I had all of these tools and teachers available to me, and I'm so grateful that he is now an extraordinary adult who is amazing, who now tells his story and has a thriving business and has mental health days for his team members, because he knows what can happen if we hit the wall and crash.
Mary Louder:Yeah. So really, the self help came in a time, if we look at some of the parallels to medicine, when it was getting more technological base and it was paternalistic, and in comes people like Louise Hay, Oprah Winfrey, you know, others too. But those you know, of course, we've just highlighted those two, where they had big impacts, and that really then brought that soul piece back into healing. And then we get onto the digital aspect of where so much can be accessible, because of the pandemic, because of the explosion, because of where we were, how vulnerable we were, and we needed resilience. And I--we may not have even realized that we are reaching out to get tools of resilience, and now with energetic psychology, things that people call is tapping, EMDR, EFT, TFT, AIT, Self Compassion and Connection, different things that not only do they stand on the shoulders of one another, stand on the shoulders of traditional Chinese medicine. Stand on the shoulders of you can heal your life. Stand on the shoulders of you get a car, you get a car. You know, stand on the shoulders of all of that.
Dawn Eidelman:Stand on the shoulders of Ayurvedic medicine, the meridians, chakra healing.
Mary Louder:Exactly. And now looking at having like a textbook in spirituality and psychology, and really reading the story of the of the professor around that. It all, it was all about her awakening, and that and her life's work, she literally could sit next to us and do the same podcast and have very similar stories of the things that she went through and how it transformed her, and the absolute independent variable in in the research, and this is hard scientific research was a belief in, in faith, in the spirituality. It was not it was not isolated to a particular religion or belief system, but we would say higher power, God, love, and that created an independent risk factor that allowed for resiliency and protection, as it were, against both depression and anxiety and even some level of psychosis.
Dawn Eidelman:Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, Jung's Archetypal Psychology, Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces, having a higher sense of purpose does make you superhuman when you need to be and particularly when you are protecting a loved one, when it just it matters so deeply that you rise up and do the thing that you didn't think you had in you to do. When you accept that, when you go through those trials, when you enlist the helpers and guides along the way, when my son was going through this really, very life threatening experience, I built a team of the people I needed to navigate with. And I think, I do think you're right, the pandemic was a remarkable inflection point in the big macro cycle of world history, because it was a collective crisis that we all navigated together.
Mary Louder:Yes.
Dawn Eidelman:Sometimes messily, sometimes our better angels came to the fore. Sometimes we used our time wisely and well to do the things that, dreams deferred, that we reclaimed for ourselves, and in ways, we're also still picking up the pieces from some of the the challenge that that happened during that time. But it was a reminder that the human story is something that is common to each of us. You know you you have made this point before, and I love it. It is. It's so essential that it almost feels like, you know, it's--we all know this intellectually, but we are really so interdependent. It's so important for us, and I think the pandemic was a good illustration of that--interdependence, causality. We really were in this thing together, whether we wanted to be or not, but we do--when we rise together, we are so, so much more powerful, than when we're trying to climb the hill independently and figure it all out. And it is, it's extraordinary to be at a alive, at a time where we can learn so voraciously, voluminously from like-minded people and accelerate our learning curve.
Mary Louder:Yes, so great organizations that are around us now, The Shift Network, Sounds True. Mind Valley. What other ones come to mind for you?
Dawn Eidelman:Gaia.
Mary Louder:Yes. Gaia, yep. I--I would say, you know, because I was just thinking of, okay, how practical can we be for our listeners? The practics are, look at things. You want to check out credentials of people that are teaching. You want them to be vetted. You want the programs to be vetted. You want things to not cost an arm and a leg, and that's not meant to be a pun, but in self healing, you don't want to lose an arm and a leg, but we'll go there, right? And you also want things that may have a money back offering, because what you see in that is a level of integrity. What you see is a level of--yeah, it's just integrity, and I think that that's really important.
Dawn Eidelman:And to that, I would absolutely add ACEP, the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology, which is really a professional association, as you know, with professional development in the online learning that is research based, these are people with the credentials that, the graduate degrees and then some, the integration of these wisdom, ancient wisdom modalities, to stand on those shoulders and take us where we need to go next in navigating an unprecedented degree of accelerated change over the next few years that could be daunting and frightening and off putting, or it's something we can embrace with tools and colleagues and a mindset that welcomes the better aspects. It can be dystopic, it'd be--can be utopic, but it's not a binary. It is what we make of it. Technology has always been around as a tool. That's what it is. But we have tools now that are accelerating exponentially in their development, and it's a calling to us to rise up in a, in an exponential way to our greater humanity.
Mary Louder:Yes. The end. I literally have nothing to add to that, other than the credits, which we'll roll so but also, folks, we're going to have a in the podcast. We're going to have information about the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology, so you can get information on that. We'll have information about self-help. And I've got, after this section, stay tuned. Come on back, because it'll be our Gadgets, Gimmicks and Gotchas, and we're going to talk about the use of AI in self help. So stay tuned. That's, that's a separate segment from Dawn, but that is attached to this podcast. So I want to thank you very much for being here with us today. And really I thought it was going to be very tactical self help, and we really opened up the philosophical box, which was so much more fun and so much more enlightening and so much more where the world that where both you and I live, that it should. Wonderful. So thank you for illuminating us with all of your experience and what you've brought to the world. We look forward to much more things happening.
Dawn Eidelman:Thank you, Mary. I am humbled, honored, and it has been a pleasure. I really appreciate you.
Mary Louder:You're welcome. I appreciate you too. All right, thank you, folks for being with us. We'll see you next time, and whatever you do, do it well. Hi friends. Dr. Louder here, Gadgets, Gimmicks and Gotchas. We're going to pull back the wellness curtain and ask, is this truly helpful or just packaged hype. Today's
spotlight:AI generated wellness tools, apps, guidance, insight from artificial intelligence. Mood trackers, emotional support chatbots. These apps, they're claiming to be your pocket sized life coach or therapist. So let's dig in to this today in Gadgets, Gimmicks and Gotchas. The question is, can artificial intelligence actually support authentic healing, or are we outsourcing our inner work to something that doesn't even have a soul? It's a great question. Since the pandemic and what you've heard in our podcast today, the digital self help tools have exploded, and now, with artificial intelligence advancing faster than we can even shake a stick at we've got bots writing affirmations that are tailored to our moods. I've tried a few. I've got a GPT, chatGPT I put together, and I've journaled with it, and I've asked it questions, and it seems to mirror my words back to me because of how I programmed it, but it adds a soft glow of wisdom. And I'll be honest, it's got a hook to it. It sounded pretty profound. But was it deep? Was it authentic, or was it just an echo of something that I trained? And it was a chat--it was the chatGPT that I programmed and provided insight to to set the tone, to respond to my questions in a certain way, and when I prompted it correctly, I received back some pretty good insight. So I was wondering, did that come from an outside source, artificial intelligent where, where is that coming from, or did that actually come from inside of me, and now I was just merely aware of it? What I do know for sure is journaling, and if you use some artificial intelligence on journaling and a tool that way, we've got some good, good ideas. Accountability can occur, because there's daily journaling reminders, those are helpful. There's mood tracking, which can build self awareness. There's prompted insight that's good questions and that can open doors, and you can--things you can be curious about and hold curiosity, and it's accessible. It may be a good starting point. You might not be ready to see a therapist or a coach just yet. So for structure and support, these tools might be okay. But here's the gotcha. Artificial intelligence, in any way, shape or form, is not a therapist. It doesn't know your nervous system. It doesn't understand, maybe not only how to diagnose, but what doesn't, what doesn't need to be diagnosed. It can't co-regulate with you, but it can mirror back to you, that you and where you are in your regulation of your nervous system. But it can't say pause, that was like, really profound. It doesn't do something like that. A big challenge is that many apps are marketed as trauma-informed. To me, gotcha. That's a red flag. Artificial Intelligence loves productivity, churning something out, getting things done, fixing things, and something that is getting churned up is what happens with our emotions, rather than churning something out in terms of priority, because they optimize fixing or moving just getting on with it. Just a gentle reminder, you don't need to be fixed. You don't need to get on with it. You need to be seen, heard, and understood, because you're wired for love, belonging and connection. So while the affirmation may sound really poetic, if it's not embodied, if it's not coming from inside, it's really just mirroring, but not a mentor. So let's settle the score here. What do we know? For daily structure? Surface reflection? Helpful. For guiding deep, healing, emotional release, understanding, connection? It's a gotcha. So use these tools like training wheels. Bit of support as you're going your way, or learning to ride. They're not spiritual guides. They're not therapists. They're not coaches. Let them support your practice in a very practical way, but not replace it. And remember, your soul doesn't need a chatbot. It needs you. It needs you to be connected to you. That's the safest place to be. And from there, frankly, you can go anywhere. So, that's it on this rounds of Gadgets, Gimmicks and Gotchas. It's where we lovingly call out the wellness world, but yet we stay grounded in what's real. Hey, if you've got a gadget for me that you want me to evaluate, check out, tag me. DM me, send me, I don't know, send me smoke signals. Get it to me, and I'll take a look at that and get it on segment. So until next time, stay curious, stay wise, and keep listening to what your soul is whispering. It's a good thing. Well, if that wasn't the big digital dive with a deep, deep hearted soul, I don't know what is. Big thanks to my special guest, Dr. Dawn Eidelman, for joining me in this wonderful conversation. Her insight and her heart truly illuminate the path that we've walked and the one we're still creating together. As we all move forward in this technology infused age of healing and self help, remember this, not everything can be downloaded, scheduled, streamed, or even doomscrolled. Some things like presence, intuition and connection are not found on a screen, but rather by first being connected to yourself and then connecting to others. So if this episode stirred something in you, I'd like to hear from you about that and share it with others. Tag us, tag others and leave a review. If you're hungry for more soul-first conversations like this one, make sure you subscribe. Hit that button down below so you never miss an episode. Until next time. I'm Dr Mary Louder, reminding you that healing may be online for now, but it always begins from within. Be well and be wise, and keep listening to what your soul is whispering.
