[00:00:01] Luke: What was the craziest thing you saw or heard or experienced in a plant medicine ceremony?

[00:00:09] Salim: The first thing that comes to mind is my first 5-MeO Bufo ceremony.

[00:00:18] Luke: That'll do it.

[00:00:19] Salim: That'll do it. And I went in with the intention to really viscerally feel what I call my core wound or my master program around my mom, my brother, and my sister, and my attachment to them, and thinking I need to support and provide and sacrifice for them. And this was two and a half years ago.

[00:00:38] So already well on my journey, knowing this is an educational simulation, knowing everything's a mirror, talking to clients about it. But when it came to my family, there was still-- I knew it analytically, but I didn't actually feel it. Did my first round and just fully got lost and bliss and everything and nothing, and just bouncing between timelines-- heavenly. Get out of it. Go into the second round.

[00:01:06] And as I'm inhaling for the second round, I just remind myself of the intention. I go back into that space and go into a window and see a whole timeline and out in a window and see a whole timeline and out. And then I go into a window, and I see dim. And then it shatters, and I go out, and I had a full on exorcism.

[00:01:26] I got out of it. I was shaking. I was throwing stuff off of me. I was like, "You're not a--" Just a total breakdown mentally. Like a psychotic break. And luckily, I was in a place where I could take a deep breath and realize, oh yeah, I knew that. The whole point is to just be grateful for the moments with them. I wrote a journal integration after that that I still recite every morning to myself to just connect back to that place.

[00:01:55] Yeah, that's the first thing that came up when you asked that question. That was the most intense thing for my mind, to see that. I say they're not real, and people are like, "That's harsh. And I know they're real, but I just, for my mind, say it that way. Yeah.

[00:02:11] Luke: One of my favorite things about the human experience to learn about are near-death experiences. I love watching testimonies, reading about them. And every time they describe that experience, it sounds very much like Bufo to me.

[00:02:34] Salim: Well, they say that's what our pineal gland produces when we die, dimethyl tryptamine. Yeah, makes sense.

[00:02:41] Luke: Yeah. I was watching one actually last night and I was like, "That sounds very familiar." I think one thing that's been good about Bufo for me, and it's been a few years since I've done it, but it definitely lowered the threshold on fear in general about anything and everything, especially dying. Almost like staying here feels harder than being there.

[00:03:14] Salim: I've cultivated such a beautiful now relationship with Bufo to the point where I have an incredible pen. And often after my morning practice I'll do a microdose.

[00:03:23] Luke: Really?

[00:03:24] Salim: And just go into a whole somatic practice because it is wild how much-- and at first it was scary because it is a very confronting medicine. But with consistency now, it's like, oh man, I have so much reverence for it and its ability to really just align me in that moment after my practice when I've centered, said my purpose, know what I'm for, and to go in and really just fully work on my hips and all the things. It's profound for me.

[00:03:55] Luke: Interesting.

[00:03:56] Salim: Yeah.

[00:03:56] Luke: See, I've always wanted to find a way to microdose 5-MeO-DMT. The only time I tried, I went to hold space for some friends and had no intention of sitting because I sat pretty a couple weeks before that. And I tried four times that day to do just a tiny bit, and each time it was a full send, and it kept getting fuller and fuller.

[00:04:21] So I was like, "Well, I guess--" I don't know. I thought I was taking such a tiny amount, and I'd sit back and like, oh fuck, here we go. And each one of the four, after the first one, I was like, "Okay, I'm done for today. That was a lot." And then I'd be like, "Once it wears off, you feel great." You know what I mean? You're like, "Oh, that was nothing." So then I would keep going back.

[00:04:41] Salim: But it's still in you. So that's why you get one shot to-- that's what I've experienced because I'm like, ""Oh yeah, it's done. Let me do another." And it's like, oh no, this is much deeper of a send.

[00:04:50] Luke: Yeah. But that's intriguing. I would like to learn more about that later. Unlike some of the conversations I have meandering all kinds of different places, you have a very-- I know you have a lot of gifts and a lot of stories and things, but you have one particular passion, an area of expertise. So despite my initial question, that has nothing to do with that--

[00:05:16] Salim: It actually has everything to do with that.

[00:05:18] Luke: Okay, we'll find out. But I really want to focus on the nervous system, on HRV. This is something that, I don't know-- it's becoming more well known, thankfully. People are becoming aware of this as a driver of our quality of life, but I think you can never know too much about it.

[00:05:36] So start out by just giving us a general framework for what heart rate variability is and means, and then we can talk about how you discovered it and became as obsessed as you are.

[00:05:51] Salim: Absolutely. So HRV, heart rate variability, measures the gap or the variance between each of your heartbeats. And what that gap is telling you is how your heart is perceiving its ever-changing environment. So essentially, your relationship to your perceived stress and a direct reflection of the health of your autonomic nervous system and its ability to move from a sympathetic fight or flight state into a parasympathetic rest and digest state.

[00:06:22] And when I realized that that's what it was measuring, and at that point I was already obsessed with biohacking, obsessed with you, as I've shared, and all the pioneers in that space-- and I was an engineer, so I have a very analytical mind that needs to understand how things work.

[00:06:40] My obsession in longevity had me knowing that science has very much proven that we all age, get disease, and eventually die from cellular inflammation. The root cause of everything, unless you die in an accident, if you peel the onion back enough, is cellular inflammation.

[00:06:57] And the number one cause, the lead driver for cellular inflammation is chronic stress. Not stress, chronic stress. A prolonged sympathetic high beta state is the number one cause of that cellular inflammation. And the reason why--

[00:07:13] Luke: And everyone's freaking out about seed oils.

[00:07:15] Salim: Exactly. Which--

[00:07:17] Luke: Seed oils are bad, but--

[00:07:18] Salim: Totally, totally. And the reason for that-- because when I realized, I was like, "How come chronic stress is the root cause?" So to understand that, you need to understand the most intricate system, the autonomic nervous system, which governs 90% of our voluntary and involuntary functions.

[00:07:33] All of our breath, our heart, our digestion, our reproduction, all those things are governed by this incredible, incredible system. And it operates in two states, two primary states, the sympathetic fight or flight state and the parasympathetic rest and digest state. The parasympathetic state has three different brainwave states-- delta, theta, alpha-- that all are responsible for different things.

[00:07:58] Delta is sleep, our deepest restorative. And actually, I should also mention they correlate with developmental years as well. And I think that's very important because I'm sure later on we'll be talking about what it is we're projecting in this educational simulation. But that delta state, which is between 0.5 and 4 hertz, is our baseline when we are born till about age two. Our brain is really oscillating in delta.

[00:08:22] Babies are asleep, still very alert, but all the neuro pathways in the foundation of their nervous system are actually being built. And the next state in parasympathetic is theta, between four and eight hertz. That's meditative, zen-like, between conscious and unconscious state that you're hypnotic, very suggestible to everything around you.

[00:08:43] And that correlates with the ages two to seven, known as our formative years, because they quite literally form us. During those ages, our brain has that baseline, meaning we're a sponge to everything around us. And our frontal cortex is being developed, meaning we don't have the ability to discern and make decisions ourselves, and we accept reality as it is.

[00:09:07] So caregivers in those years are so crucial because any reaction, even unintentionally, gets imprinted in our nervous system. And the third and final state in parasympathetic is alpha, known as the flow state. An athlete in their zone. You're awake. You're alert, but the mind is focused on one thing. And that correlates between the brainwaves eight and 14 hertz. So that's the parasympathetic side. Then we have the sympathetic or fight or flight state.

[00:09:38] Luke: Womp womp.

[00:09:40] Salim: Yeah. This state, it--

[00:09:42] Luke: And thank God. You don't step front of a bus. But if you can't turn it off after the bus goes by, you got a problem.

[00:09:50] Salim: And that's what we'll get into now. Why? So first, I wanted to understand how did we evolve creating this state? Because evolution, the most brilliant thing, sole purpose is survival always happening for us. And we evolved creating this sympathetic site because for most of human evolution, we lived in the jungle. We didn't have the luxury and privilege of this beautiful houses, food, all the things that we need to survive.

[00:10:11] And there were actual real life or death threats, like tigers or weather, or whatever it would be. And so our brilliant nervous system created this sympathetic state for survival. And if you break down what's happening physiologically when the amygdala fires off and your limbic brain goes on, all those vital organs go into a function to support survival.

[00:10:32] A bunch of things happen. Eyes dilates. Saliva production reduces, all these things. But the most important to get to the cellular inflammation is all of the vital oxygenated blood that normally goes to our visceral organs to support their repair, normal homeostasis of the body, your blood vessels constrict to send all that blood to the extremities to run, fight, or freeze.

[00:10:55] Which is brilliant if a tiger's chasing you or a bus is coming because you want to jump out of it. That's only supposed to last, or at least used to only last for maybe an hour, maybe two hours, and then we drop back in a parasympathetic state. So all of that vital oxygenated blood can go back to our visceral organs to support homeostasis.

[00:11:14] However, if you stay in that prolonged state for an extended period of time, known as chronic stress-- think about it-- then the vital organs can do their functions. And consistently doing that over time, cellular inflammation begins, the root cause of all aging, disease, and death.

[00:11:31] So when I realized that, oh my God, if I read an email and I'm stressed, those same things are happening inside, even though it's not real life or death. Now, that's okay if it happens. But if I stay in a story and loop around that from when I wake up in the morning until when I go back to sleep in my deepest delta parasympathetic state, then that's 8, 10, 12 hours of consistent, vital, oxygenated blood going here instead of going here. And over time, that's what will lead to cellular aging.

[00:12:00] Luke: Well said. I think you just decoded the common phrase when someone's afraid, I just shit my pants. I was so scared. Right?

[00:12:11] Salim: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:12:13] Luke: I was also thinking about, back in the day, if I was in the middle of a really tumultuous breakup or something like that, my digestion would be wrecked from just living in that state all the time.

[00:12:25] Salim: Of course, because the--

[00:12:26] Luke: It makes sense why that would be.

[00:12:27] Salim: Yeah. Your digestive system takes a back seat because your mind and body brilliantly thinks it needs to survive. And the body doesn't know the difference between a mind-ade stress, a thought, versus what we perceive as a real-life threat. And so that's why I became so obsessed with HRV, when I understood all that.

[00:12:49] And I was like, "Wow, okay. There's a biomarker that's actually telling me if my body is in a prolonged stress, if it's in a sympathetic state. And it's really sharing what is resonant and dissonant with my body. It's also expressing how much am I feeling my body versus up in my head and thinking in my mind."

[00:13:12] Luke: You said something very important earlier. When you refer to stress, the first time you said perceived stress. So break down the difference between factual stress and perceived stress, because I think most of us, myself included, the stress we experience is just a hallucination.

[00:13:34] Salim: Yeah. So in the most humble way in, I believe-- I call this the educational simulation. People call it the matrix simulation. I know you have been in experiences where you've felt and seen what God, consciousness, love, Allah, whatever you want to say source is that I believe we all come from and go back to.

[00:13:56] And so I call it an educational simulation because I truly believe what we are projecting and co-creating is always happening for us. And it's happening for us to feel something inside that's stuck in us. And so I say perceived stress because I believe it's all.

[00:14:15] Luke: Everything's perceived.

[00:14:16] Salim:  Everything's perceived.

[00:14:17] Luke: All reality is based on perception.

[00:14:19] Salim: The double slit experiment and the observer effect has--

[00:14:23] Luke: Explain those. Those are cool.

[00:14:24] Salim: Yeah. Back, I believe 1805, Neil Young, and it's been further validated by so many scientists since, but essentially if you--

[00:14:34] Luke: I thought you just said Neil Young, like the rocker.

[00:14:36] Salim: Yeah. I may be saying the--

[00:14:38] Luke: Neil and Young?

[00:14:39] Salim: Yeah. They proved that sending a single electron through a double slit, you would expect to see a wave pattern, meaning on the projected screen, you would see a strong light or a strong display in the middle and then slowly around each one, it diminishes. And that's what they saw. And they wanted to know if that electron was splitting in two, or how it was actually going through that double slit.

[00:15:12] And the second they put a camera to observe what happens, it stopped behaving like a light particle, meaning it stopped showing that. And it showed as if the electron was going through to slit and made just two single patterns. Which means essentially the act of observing, the act of measuring, transforms the particle from a light to material mass.

[00:15:37] And if you were to look at that on a human scale, and we were to break down the most foundational building block of matter in atom, within an atom the only physical material mass is inside the nucleus. And it's the neutrons in the protons. And that consists about 0.00000000000, I think to the negative 15th degree of the entire actual volume of the atom.

[00:16:03] The rest of the atom is often referred to as an electron cloud, and it's a space of, call it, emptiness. Electrons flow in that emptiness freely as potential. Not like the planets around the sun. There's no orbit. They just flow. And scientists observed and realized that those electrons only appear under the microscope when they put their attention on it.

[00:16:26] The second they remove it, it goes back into the infinite potential. So if you were to zoom out and look at the actual physical mass in all human beings on earth, from an atoms standpoint, there is 70 trillion atoms in a single human cell. There is about 37.2 trillion cells in a human body, and there's over 8 billion humans on earth.

[00:16:48] So the math shakes out to about 30 decillion atoms in all human beings on earth. If we were to only look at the physical mass, that 0.000001% in every atom in all 30 decillion, we would fit in a sugar cube-- to paint a picture at how much what we are actually perceiving just in the human physical form is electrons flowing as infinite potential only becoming a particle when we put our attention on it.

[00:17:21] Luke: Holy shit.

[00:17:23] Salim: Yeah.

[00:17:24] Luke: Damn.

[00:17:26] Salim: So when you ask the question perceived stress versus true stress, it's, in my opinion, all always happening for us. And it's our perception that is creating it. And the good news is it's creating it for us to actually feel something inside of us. Because if you were to map out the body, anytime you have a perceived stress or a real stress, whatever you want to call it, beneath that, there's always an emotion or multiple emotions associated with what you're projecting.

[00:17:55] And directly connected to that emotion is a physical sensation that's stuck in the body. And if you peel the onion one layer deeper, an a emotion on a quantum level is just a scalar wave of energy. It's just frequency, like everything. There is no such thing as a good or bad emotion. We are meant as humans to feel every emotion on the spectrum. Fear, anger, love, joy, all of it, we're meant to feel. And I believe Dr. Joe Dispenza says, feel it for about 90 seconds until that scalar wave moves through us.

[00:18:23] Luke: Mm-hmm.

[00:18:24] Salim: However, if the nervous system cannot process that emotion in that moment, or more often than not, we're in those formative years between the ages of two and seven, when that brain is oscillating in theta and we don't have the ability to discern reality for ourself, that scalar wave of an emotion that's supposed to move through you freezes.

[00:18:42] I like to think of it as a glacier in the fascia in our body. An incredible book, The Body Keeps Score talks about this, how literally, our bodies are an akashic record of all of our stuck frozen emotions from this life. If you believe in past lives, from past lives. And all we're doing in these grownup meat suits are projecting these emotions for us to feel them.

[00:19:04] Luke: Wow. You have a great knack for explaining complexity in simple terms.

[00:19:11] Salim: Thank you.

[00:19:12] Luke: Going back to the perceived stress, I'm trying to think how I think of this. Lifting weights, getting in a ice bath, doing a sprint, to me, that would be objective stress. To many people, being late to a flight would be counted as authentic, objective stress. But in that case, it's still completely based on perception because one could be late for their flight.

[00:19:52] And if they have no mental resistance to it, it's not stressful at all. They're just sitting in an Uber having the best time ever. But the mental construct of like, if this doesn't happen, then this bad thing and that bad thing and that-- but there's a cascade of fantasies that we call worry and projection into a future that doesn't exist, that creates the stress. But it's only because we're holding it in a certain way. Would you agree with that?

[00:20:15] Salim: 1000%. It's the story. It's our relationship to it that actually materializes it. That creates it. And I believe the most important thing and the best way to support your HRV is auditing your relationships to your stories. Because when we say the observer effect, like our perception creates and materializes the thing, it's our relationship to it that actually is doing that. So your relationship--

[00:20:39] Luke: So a relationship is the governor of our perception.

[00:20:44] Salim: Yeah, yeah. Which is why someone could be late to a flight and have one story that actually causes an internal visceral reaction of stress where someone else's relationship to it is totally different, and it's a totally different story in the body. Same exact thing, same exact moment, but two different stories, two different relationships to those stories.

[00:21:04] Luke: Yeah. Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning.

[00:21:07] Salim: Yeah, exactly.

[00:21:08] Luke: I love this topic because I used to be, oh my God, so tortured by my mind before I understood anything around this. And things that used to be absolutely terrifying or torturous, now it's like nothing. It's like the same things are happening. I'm the same person, said event, whatever. Just name anything that would stress you out or freak you out, like being late to the airport, right?

[00:21:42] Salim: Yeah.

[00:21:43] Luke: And that gives me a lot of gratitude and hope and self-appreciation. That it's like, man, I just applied some things for some time. It's a lot of work. But now I experienced the world in a different way.

[00:22:03] Salim: Yeah. And so my take on such a beautiful analogy-- and just so you know, you and every human being deals with the lovely mind in that journey. That's what we're all here to cultivate a relationship with.

[00:22:15] But whatever it is that you're thinking that now you experience differently, because of the educational simulation, because of you continuing to experience it and then continuing to do whatever, use whatever tools you had to regulate to feel more, the same thing happens, but you have a different relationship to that story.

[00:22:32] So it doesn't elicit that stuck emotional charge as strong, or that frozen wave actually moved, and you got the medicine you needed out of it. Reminds me. You're familiar with Wayne Dyer?

[00:22:43] Luke: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:44] Salim: Love Wayne Dyer. Actually, someone in his audience gifted him this philosophy that I think also correlates with our chakras, with dimensions, all the things. And it's tell your life story in five sentences. Have you heard this?

[00:22:57] Luke: Mm-mm.

[00:22:57] Salim: Oh, you're going to love this. Chapter number one, you're walking down a street. You fall into a pothole. Oh my God, oh my God, I'm in a pothole. Oh my God, I'm so scared. Somebody help me. Somebody help me. Chapter number two, walking down the same street, you fall in the pothole. Oh my God. Who put this pothole here? Who did this? Somebody get me out of here.

[00:23:15] Chapter number three, you're walking down the same street. You fall in the pothole. Oh my God, how did I fall in this pothole? How did I get here? What did I do to do this? Chapter number four, you're walking down the same street. You walk around the pothole.

[00:23:31] And only when you prove to the simulation, you prove to yourself that in the same moment, instead of autonomically reacting from the limbic, scared, stuck, emotional state, you made a conscious effort to, with your agency, choose another path, then comes chapter number five. You walk down a different street.

[00:23:52] Luke: Oh, that's good.

[00:23:53] Salim: Yeah.

[00:23:54] Luke: I thought four was going to be you falling again, but this time you figure out how to climb out. And then five, the final one--

[00:24:00] Salim: You walk around.

[00:24:00] Luke: You walk around it.

[00:24:02] Salim: Yeah. No, no. Chapter four, which is time, the fourth dimension time. And I believe our aura is a toroidal field. We are toroidal beings. And if there's a hole in your toroidal field, meaning if there's a stuck energy, you keep manifesting, materializing the same pattern and version of this emotion in every flavor of your life-- relationship, friendship, business.

[00:24:23] You'll keep repeating this pattern if you zoom out enough until you actually feel the stuck emotion, until you process it, until you consciously decide to walk around. And then when that hole in your toroidal field is full, there's no vacuum in it to manifest the same thing over and over, you walk down another street.

[00:24:43] Luke: That's dope. It works that way a lot in relationship, I've noticed. Patterns that will keep presenting themselves with different faces.

[00:24:55] Salim: Mm-hmm.

[00:24:56] Luke: And then as you said, one of those chapters you realize like, oh, there's one common denominator here. It's the guy in the mirror. This dumb ass is the one that keeps-- which is a good stage to get to, but still doesn't necessarily stop the pattern. But that was always fascinating to me. It's like the educational simulation of Earth School is just set up to keep magnetizing these painful experiences until we were able to freaking learn them.

[00:25:31] Salim: Yeah. And pain is such an interesting word because pain is all perception. Similar to what you described as like perceived stress. That, again, is your story to it. Anytime someone says pain, my mind goes to the picture of the monk who burned himself.

[00:25:47] I don't know if you've seen online, if you Google the monk. Literally this monk sitting in front of all these people smiling, burning himself and allowing himself to go because his mental story, and that was his dharmic gift-- and I'm not saying people to go do that, but pain truly is a mind-created description of a stuck energy or sensation that we are uncomfortable with feeling.

[00:26:12] And I believe in the educational simulation, we're all mirrors walking each other home because that's what you materialize. And there's no bigger of a mirror than your partner, your soulmate that you get, and your parents. I believe we come here and we choose our parents based on our purpose, based on our soul's journey as the best teachers.

[00:26:36] And if you're going to pick a teacher, you don't pick a teacher who's going to allow you to just walk through school. You pick a teacher who you're going to get the best medicine from to embody what you came here for.

[00:26:47] Luke: That's a helpful perspective. Have you heard of Irene Lyon? She works with nervous system in the somatic space. Had her on the show a couple of days ago, and we were talking about this evolutionary aspect of lineage, where, to your point of picking the perfect mirrors, the perfect teachers, the ideal dynamics for your soul's evolution.

[00:27:17] Because we wonder like, goddammit, how did I end up in this family? You know what I mean? But I've observed in my lineage that over each generation, they get healthier and healthier and more evolved. And I thought, everyone's family lines must be like that. And Irene was like, "No, some of them digress."

[00:27:40] And so I thought some of it might be a karmic thing where you come into a family system that might be really difficult and there might be a lot of trauma involved in that. But zooming out to a higher perspective, if it is, following the line of improvement along the way, it's like, no, in my case at least, it was actually perfect.

[00:28:07] Because in order for me to carry on that evolution, it had to be worse when I came in. And then from my lying down-- my brother has a couple of kids. He's a way better parent than our dad was and so on and so on. It's like when you go backward. One thing she brought up is maybe the family lines that seemed to be in regression could just be newer souls, like a family lineage of newer souls.

[00:28:32] And then you have a family lineage of older souls and they're still totally screwed up, but they do tend to get a little better. What's your take on that and what do you know about your own family line? Are you the first renegade to really take the bull by the horns and go, I'm going to use this Earth School for everything it's got, and I'm going to evolve, goddammit. Or did people in your line before you also make some progress?

[00:28:55] Salim: I would say every line has made progress because if it happened, it was--

[00:29:00] Luke: It was progress by default.

[00:29:02] Salim: By default. And before I go deeper in that, I will just say in terms of the lineages that you're saying that go in digression, I would say that's just the perspective of whoever's seeing that, because the reality is that I believe there's an infinite amount of fractal dimensions.

[00:29:19] And so there is timelines where it's the opposite, and the only reason we're perceiving it as them digressing is it's actually medicine for us. If it's in our field and we're seeing it, it's always us. And so there's something in us classifying and labeling that as digression that is medicine for us. And that's the shift that I look at. And in terms of my own family line, that-- Celestine Prophecy. Have you read that book?

[00:29:50] Luke: Mm-mm.

[00:29:51] Salim: Oh man.

[00:29:52] Luke: I'm aware of it. I know it's one of the classics, but--

[00:29:54] Salim: It's my favorite book to gift, so you could expect it here. I have your address. It's a fiction book that I think James Redfield just said fiction so he doesn't get shit for it. Because I believe it's true. It talks about nine insights that govern this educational simulation. The first insight is there's no such thing as coincidences. There are synchronicities happening in every moment if you are aware and paying attention.

[00:30:16] Luke: Yeah, I agree.

[00:30:17] Salim: Yeah. I read this book when I was 33 at really the beginning, I'd say, of my inward journey. An insight, I think six or seven, was that our souls choose our parents based on our purpose. The thing I shared. And when I read that, I got so furious. I put down the book, and I was like, "Why the hell--" I lost my father when I was seven. I was like, "Why would I choose a dad who was going to pass if I knew he was going to pass at seven?"

[00:30:41] All I ever wanted was a father, a male figure. That makes no sense. This is bullshit. I put it down, and I went to sleep. And the next morning I got up and I was like, "You know what? Let me just bring that to my meditation. Let me zoom out. Let me like look at, like you said, the big picture and see what actually has happened. And when I zoomed that, I realized like, wow, okay.

[00:31:01] I'm first generation Lebanese. And the Lebanese culture, very patriarchal, very masculine-dominant. The oldest male is the one that carries on everything. My dad was the oldest. He made it out of Lebanon, came here, got his PhD, was a pioneer. But also very-- the Lebanese culture, stubborn and has things that are dissonant with me now.

[00:31:23] And I'm the oldest male. So for seven years I was raised with that very strong, assertive, stubborn energy. And then after he passed, I was raised by my mom and my grandma. And it took about 33 years for me to unravel that version of the strong masculine and be the more sensitive, attuned masculine that I am.

[00:31:46] And as I look at family members and other Lebanese families and the typical culture, it is so hard when you're in that energy to get out of that. But because my father passed, I was able to. And it was the first time I was able to not only accept his passing, but appreciate his passing and connect with him now every morning since because he's stronger on that side. And how aligned it was for my dharmic purpose in this chapter to break that lineage and that generation of the masculine and in that version of it.

[00:32:23] Luke: Wow.

[00:32:23] Salim: Yeah. Very, very powerful. Yeah.

[00:32:26] Luke: What about your grandparents in terms of their, I don't know, spiritual acumen or consciousness?

[00:32:34] Salim: Yeah. Minimal in the way we're talking about. They're very religious. Orthodox Christian is how I was raised. So very, very religious and not open. Yeah.

[00:32:50] Luke: How common is that in Lebanon? Would that be a minority, a wide gap of minority in a Muslim country?

[00:33:01] Salim: Lebanon is not Muslim. It's the only in the Middle East of the Arab countries. There's about 30% Muslim, but then so much Christian Catholic, Maronite. It is a melting pot. You have a mosque and a church across each other in Beirut. Beautiful, diverse country.

[00:33:17] Luke: I didn't know that. I've never been to the Middle East in general, so I just bucketed them all in the same--

[00:33:23] Salim: Yeah, no, not at all.

[00:33:25] Luke: So there's a lot of Christians there.

[00:33:26] Salim: Oh yeah. Most of North of Lebanon, which is where my family is from, all Christian.

[00:33:30] Luke: Really?

[00:33:30] Salim: Yeah.

[00:33:31] Luke: What a trip. I wonder how that happened.

[00:33:34] Salim: Yeah. It's known as the Paris of the Middle East, Beirut. It's the center of the Mediterranean, so it's just a melting pot, and been conquered by France the longest. So everyone there speaks French, English, and Arabic. It's just a melting pot of so much different cultures.

[00:33:47] Luke: Wow. Is it cool?

[00:33:48] Salim: Oh, it's biasedly my favorite plate.

[00:33:50] Luke: Really?

[00:33:50] Salim: Yeah. Beirut is--

[00:33:51] Luke: Should I go some day?

[00:33:51] Salim: Oh man. I talk to Carl all about--

[00:33:53] Luke: The only other Lebanese I know is Khalil.

[00:33:56] Salim: Oh, and Khalil's a brother. Yeah.

[00:33:57] Luke: But I don't know what his connection is to that land still, if he has one even.

[00:34:03] Salim: Yeah, no, I've talked to him about going there, so yeah. It's a beautiful, beautiful place.

[00:34:08] Luke: So your Lebanese grandparents were devout Christians, and they were religious, but in terms of dysfunction and trauma and, let's say, the downside of lineage, which as we've discussed, isn't really a downside if you look at it the right way, are you guys getting better?

[00:34:29] Salim: Oh, 1000%. Yeah, yeah. I wholeheartedly believe that, and that's what I think evolution is here for, to just get a little better every time. Even if someone else is looking at it as a little worse, my guess is if you actually look inside, somehow something is better.

[00:34:46] Luke: Do you think as a collective humanity in terms of spirituality, consciousness is evolving over time?

[00:34:55] Salim: 1000% yes. And from my perspective and the reality that I am living in, amplifying it. People talk so much about AI this. Where's the world going? What's going to happen? And again, I truly believe there's an infinite fractal amount of dimensions. And based on our purpose, based on our intention, based on our frequency and emotional state and what we're putting out there, we consciously choose which one we go in.

[00:35:20] So there's a utopia. There's apocalypse. There's everything in between that you can think of, and you consciously choose based on your intention and thought and every moment which one you want to join. Now, that doesn't mean bad things are happening in the world, but my belief on that is it's to wake people up.

[00:35:40] And that doesn't mean it's okay, but feeding into the cycle of the hate and the separation only amplifies it. During a recent trip I was sharing that I've been the past few years traveling to a lot of sacred sites, and one of my favorite and most profound activations and journeys was at the portal of Aramu Muru. Have you heard of this?

[00:36:03] Luke: No.

[00:36:04] Salim: It's known as the oldest Lumerian Stargate it's in lake Titicaca at the border of-- on the Peru side, at the border of Peru and Bolivia. I did this ceremony there. Profound in terms of the information. I love going to sacred sites because there's so much information there.

[00:36:24] If you listen and usually do some journey usually with psilocybin to just listen in deeper-- and actually, I got visited by a lumerian, by a mu, during it. And I got the most simple lesson that has just stuck with me so deeply. Someone else in the group was going through a challenging experience and my default is supporter, always analyzing, looking at the room, seeing I could help, seeing efficient-- all the things, wanting to help. It's been something.

[00:36:57] In my earlier years I used that power and aggression too much and have been continuing to cultivate a relationship of supporting in a way that can be received. And in this moment I was, on my medicine and I was wanting to go support. And all of a sudden I get visited by this beautiful being.

[00:37:18] And they basically just say, "Who do you think you are that you know what is best for her? And actually, she is going through this for you. This is you. So you should thank her for what she's doing. And instead of going to say or do something, embody what you want her to feel. Be the thing that you want her to do."

[00:37:41] And that's the best way to actually help anybody, because anybody is just a mirror and a reflection of you. And so to truly embody the change you want to be in the world because that's how we change the world.

[00:37:55] Luke: Absolutely. Yeah. I wish people out protesting knew that.

[00:38:01] Salim: Yeah.

[00:38:02] Luke: Oh man. A lot of wasted energy trying to change the world out there through being out there.

[00:38:10] Salim: And there's a time and place for that. I always look at the example of Martin Luther King and what he did. And he used anger so beautifully because anger's a beautiful emotion to fuel it. But the thing that he said in the protest is, "Don't hit back." Don't fight them with what they're fighting.

[00:38:27] And that, according to Dr. David Hawkins and the scale of consciousness, I think we went up, I forget how many points in the book-- he talks about power of force-- from that movement right there. Humanity as a whole. I light up even saying that because of really going about to change a system in a new way, as Buck Meer [Inaudible] says.

[00:38:46] Luke: And not to disparage on freedom fighters out there, when I'm talking about protesting, it's more like the left versus right, false paradigms of people fighting against the wrong enemy. Because we're manipulated and pitted against one another with the emotional manipulation. And I think that's where a lot of the energy's wasted when-- I always say like, if you want to change the world, make up with your grandma.

[00:39:18] Salim: That's literally what my client said.

[00:39:19] Luke: The work that I've done that no one has seen, I'm certain has contributed more to the collective and the peace on earth than anything I could do by running down the street and trying to change it.

[00:39:30] Salim: I could not agree more, my brother.

[00:41:53] Luke: Talk to me about-- okay, so getting back to the HRV, which this is all related anyway. But there's different ways that you can measure it. So if people listening are like, "Oh, am I parasympathetic or sympathetic?" And is my trauma still living in my body? Those scalar our waves of emotions in my fascia.

[00:42:14] If we want to improve something, some of us-- you're the engineer mind, and I'm a little bit like that. I want to track things and see if what I'm doing is working. Not to use it as a higher power, but just a point of reference to know if I'm anywhere in the ballpark.

[00:42:30] So take us back to, as you started to learn about HRV and became interested in improving yours and healing your nervous system, what did you use to track it? What's accurate? What's not? What changes have you seen or did you start to see? And then we can talk about some of the things that help those changes happen.

[00:42:53] Salim: Totally. Yeah. So in terms of measuring HRV, again, if it's measuring that gap or variance between each of your heartbeats, that is changing over 40 to 60 to 80 times a minute because your heartbeats that many times a minute. So your real-time HRV is forever fluctuating and changing and is going to go [Inaudible]. That's what it's supposed to do.

[00:43:14] You want malleability so that your heart can handle and manage the ever-changing environment it's perceiving. What most wearables, like Oura Ring, Apple Watch, Whoop, give you is your average nightly HRV, meaning the average variance between every heartbeat while you are sleeping.

[00:43:33] Now, HeartMath Institute and other researched institutes have said the gold standard for measuring your HRV is first thing in the morning when you wake up, sitting up. Because your HRV also differs from laying down and sitting up, the nervous system. But in order to do that, you either need a chest strap, or there are phones now that allow you to just measure your HRV with your finger.

[00:43:53] The next best, I believe, way to measure is that average nightly, because that's giving you a good pulse when there's not much simulation happening-- you're sleeping-- of the overall health of your nervous system and what you did the day before. And the best wearable to measure, I say, is the one that you'll actually use consistently.

[00:44:12] Because in terms of the accuracy for this number, it fluctuates so much. It's not about knowing the exact number. It's about understanding what I call your HRV baseline. And I define your HRV baseline as your average nightly HRV score, or if you measure it first thing in your morning, your average daily HRV score over the last 30 days.

[00:44:32] And this gives you a good snapshot of the overall health of your nervous system and how it's been feeling with what you've been doing over the last month. And the best way I like to think of HRV, I say HRV is a language. It's the language of your nervous system communicating to you between those gaps in your heart.

[00:44:52] And when you think of a language, you don't think English is better than French, is better than Spanish, is better than Arabic. The whole intent of a language is for an ecosystem to communicate. The whole intent of your HRV is for your nervous system and body to solely communicate with you.

[00:45:10] So the first thing you need to do, which I was very bad at, and most people especially in the biohacking world are, is not compare scores. Because it is such a unique language only for you. And your 35 could be better than my 100 for your body. There is no HRV range published, even the HeartMath Institute, because there is no range.

[00:45:34] There's studies that show like, we study 2,000 people and this is the age for this range. But out of 2,000 healthy people they study-- there's no published range, like heart rate between 40 and 60 or whatever they say. There's nothing like that for HRV because it is so uniquely individualized.

[00:45:51] So what do you look at then? You look at your baseline and compare your morning score to your baseline. And over time, ideally, say your baseline maintain or go up. Because the one thing that has been proven, and we talked about, is as you age, HRV generally declines, which makes sense if it's measuring the health of your nervous system and the amount of stress you're taking.

[00:46:13] As we age, we go through a lot, and by default, yeah, it's going to slowly decline. However, I have seen it myself and so many people the opposite happening if you train it, which we'll get into the different ways to do that. So if you wake up and you have an HRV score, your baseline is 40, and your morning score is 30. That's not a good or bad thing.

[00:46:35] That doesn't mean, oh my God, this is so bad. It is data. It's a language. What matters is if you listen, that means if your morning score is lower than your baseline, honor your body by having more of a recovery day. Instead of doing a hit workout or an extreme thing, go for a leisurely walk.

[00:46:53] Do something that you know resonates and fills up your body to support the nervous system in whatever load you did the day before that's more of a load than it's used to. If you wake up and your morning score is higher than your baseline, that's your nervous system giving you permission to push it more. Because that's how you increase the capacity. You train.

[00:47:13] Luke: So if it's not apples for apples from one person to another, which I'm really glad to hear because I hear people like you, like, "Oh, my HRV's 150." And I'm like, "Dude, I don't know any other people that commit to health like I do-- we're very few of them-- and mine will be 35 or 40."

[00:47:33] And when I first heard other people's numbers, I thought, wow, what am I doing wrong? So that's really good to know. What I want to know is how meaningful is the spread, say between 45 and 35? I think we looked at mine on my Oura Ring app and is basically for the past few years somewhere in that range. A slight dip over time. But is one morning you wake up and you're a 45 that much more meaningful than a 35?

[00:48:04] Salim: Again, that's going to be so dependent on the person. And what normally happens--

[00:48:08] Luke: I want something binary.

[00:48:09] Salim: I know. And that's why I love this biomarker, because I call it a technology and a bridge between East and West. Because like you mentioned, like I, a decade ago, six years ago, my engineering analytical mind, I needed numbers. I needed to know. And when I realized, oh, this biomarker is the number one metric, in my opinion, for longevity, I'm just going to put all my attention on this.

[00:48:31] Luke: Didn't you work in a nuclear power plant?

[00:48:33] Salim: Yeah. Yes, I did. For five and a half years. That powered most of New York City. Yeah, yeah.

[00:48:37] Luke: That would make sense.

[00:48:38] Salim: That would make a lot of sense. And so when I started. First trying to improve my HRV, I did it the way I was doing everything, biohacking, hacking it. And I did not see it move. And it wasn't until I started the journey from here to here, the inward journey, the plant medicines, the somatic, the prioritizing parasympathetic and recovery, as much as my mind thought I needed to always optimize, perform, and go, that I started seeing it move.

[00:49:05] And the biggest step changes in my own HRV in any clients has always been what you so beautifully shared, your grandma, the mom, the stuck emotion, the strong core belief or pattern that you feel and you process that gives way for your nervous system to be more fluid and clear.

[00:49:22] Luke: Really?

[00:49:22] Salim: Oh, hands down. I'm going to say a score. Remember, no comparing. My highest HRV score, 222. And it was the day after my most profound ayahuasca ceremony that I processed such a core wound on. And it was, I call it the AYA glow, but I was fucking floating. 222. Yeah.

[00:49:43] Luke: Wow. I got a funny one for you. Back when I was more in the tinkering and experimenting phase many years ago, during the middle of an ayahuasca ceremony, I did a HRV test for hour or two or whatever. On the Oura Ring, you can set a meditation or a workout or whatever.

[00:50:04] I was like, "Oh man, I'm so deep in this space. I bet it's going to be really high." It was like fucking 10 or something. I was almost dead. I said, "Oh, that's interesting." But it made sense because the stress on your body when you're in that experience, but my consciousness and emotionally I felt so elevated. I thought for sure, man, I'm like balanced and parasympathetic. But the body was like, "No, this is hard."

[00:50:28] Salim: And again, that just goes back to the real time doesn't matter as much. It's going to. And maybe in that time you were just going through-- it's the baseline in the overall trend. So two years ago, when I had a shoulder surgery, going into the surgery, I was like, "I'm going to get my body in the best shape possible for it." Doing all the things, the colonic before everything. The morning I woke up for the shoulder surgery, my HRV was 150. The next day, eight.

[00:50:54] Luke: Eight.

[00:50:55] Salim: Eight. Oh, yeah.

[00:50:56] Luke: Wow.

[00:50:57] Salim: Eight. Because I had a pain blocker in. I had two titani-- my nervous system had just been through hell, and it was screaming eight. And it stayed eight, 10 for a week. And then slowly over time. And I share that because mine doesn't just stay above 100. It'll go to 30. It'll change all over.

[00:51:16] And it's more important to track your baseline trend over time and just listen. If you think you have a bad score, you need to be better, guess what? You're leading to your next bad score. Because it is measuring how you're perceiving the simulation. And our thought dictates how we perceive it more than anything.

[00:51:35] Our relationship to the things we're doing is what dictate it more than anything. So it's a very counterintuitive objective but subjective metric. That's why I love it so much because it is a bridge, I believe, between the two worlds.

[00:51:49] Luke: There's so many catch 22s in the human experience.

[00:51:52] Salim: It's dualistic reality. It's all a cosmic joke.

[00:51:55] Luke: Everything's paradox when you boil it down. It's crazy. I was hoping, you're like, "Oh, I brought my score from an average of 36 to one whatever by doing these biohacks." And you're telling me, "Oh, it was just emotional, ancestral healing and trauma stuff." I'm like, "I already did all that." So I think.

[00:52:17] Actually let's talk about, I don't know, I don't have a better way to phrase it, but biohacking obsession or addiction, orthorexia, and all of the uptight control around optimizing, performing that some of us-- never me, of course-- have gotten stuck in and how maybe some of the things we're doing for vitality and longevity are actually causing more stress because of the constraint around them.

[00:52:49] Salim: Yeah. I was, Luke, the most guilty of that. And I think I shared with you before, but I would literally every week go on your shop page to see what the new toy that you talked about came out so I could go-- I was so obsessed with biohacking when it first came out.

[00:53:03] And to get a little into the story, I worked at that nuclear power plant as an engineer for five and a half years. I really became obsessed with health and nutrition at that time and experimented with every diet and found ketosis 15 years ago before the industry totally ruined that word, and cut out sugar completely because I--

[00:53:21] Luke: Do you still not eat sugar?

[00:53:23] Salim: No, I eat whole sugar. And I eat intuitively now. I used to be the most regimented extreme.

[00:53:30] Luke: It's a hard way to live.

[00:53:31] Salim: Oh yeah. Kyle and I bond deeply over that because we have similar minds like that. And so all I drink was water and unsweetened tea while I was at the power plant. And that's when a colleague of mine who was health conscious came in one day with Yerba Mate, but he had brewed it, cooled it, and put it in a soda stream.

[00:53:49] And so it was the first sparkling tea. I took a sip, and it was like, love at first sip. And I was wanting to leave corporate America and really into health, and it aligned so well until 11 years ago. We launched Sound, which is an unsweetened sparkling tea company. Have no idea what we were getting into. Quit the job, moved to New York City, and that's when the biohacking movement emerged.

[00:54:09] You and Dave Asprey, and Ben Greenfield, and all these people started coming out. And I was so addicted to optimization and health and optimizing my body that I just went down deep rabbit holes in everything to the point where I was living in New York City, showing off. I was hacking my way to five hours of sleep.

[00:54:28] NuCalm a big part of that, which what we'll talk about. Running 10 miles every other day, listening to a minimum of three audio books a week, raising money from 170 people. Just boom, boom, boom. Thinking I am winning. Five years of doing that and then my knee gave out from running way too much, running 10 miles literally every other day at 70 minutes. So seven-minute miles.

[00:54:48] Luke: 10 miles is farther than here to Austin, downtown.

[00:54:53] Salim: Yeah, no, it was--

[00:54:54] Luke: I don't even like driving that far.

[00:54:57] Salim: And so when my knee gave out, I was so addicted to the endorphin release of sweating. I needed to find a way to sweat. I looked every possible way without a knee, and I came across Bikram yoga. And that was the first time my mind was forced to shut the fuck up for 90 minutes.

[00:55:11] And that's when Dr. Joe Dispenza's book, Becoming Supernatural, came into my field. And that's actually the perfect-- in the beginning of that book, he talks about HRV relating to stress. And that was the first time in literature I saw that. And that was really the beginning of this journey.

[00:55:26] And so to get back to your question, I was like, "Okay, I only care about this metric. What can I do to optimize it?" I tried hacking with all the technologies, and for about six months it didn't move. And then I started shifting that relationship, and now I have what I call the five pathways for HRV growth, which really go along with my story of how I saw mine continue to improve.

[00:55:49] And so the first pathway is sleep, the foundation. And again, we've talked about sleep being our deepest parasympathetic state of delta. And if HRV is measuring your ability to go from one state to another and you're not getting your deepest restorative sleep, the REM sleep as well, which I was cutting out in my five hours of only sleeping, you're not going to see that move no matter what.

[00:56:11] And so that was the first big shift for me in seeing a little bit of a movement. So sleep as the foundation and prioritizing sleep. And I know you talk about it all the time and there's so many ways out there, but really making it an intentional activity that is something sacred for your body is super, super important.

[00:56:30] Luke: The thing about sleep, I think it's just a tougher self for younger people. Because at least you think you can coast when you're in your 20s, even into 30s. Dude, I used to be extremely sleep deprived, and it was no problem. I'm 55 now, as of a couple of weeks ago, or a week ago.

[00:56:50] Salim: Ah, happy belated.

[00:56:51] Luke: Thank you. And so now it's really easy for me to be a sleep champion because if I don't pay attention to it and really honor it as sacred as you described, the price is--

[00:57:03] Salim: Amplified.

[00:57:04] Luke: It's unbelievable.

[00:57:06] Salim: I was very guilty of that and just saying, plenty of time to sleep when you die. And especially as an entrepreneur, it's like, oh my God, I'm not productive. If I'm not doing something, then I'm not being productive. So that was the first.

[00:57:19] Pathway number two is hormetic stress, which hormesis, hormetic stress is a process of intentionally putting yourself in a perceived stressful situation and then consciously getting yourself out of it into a parasympathetic state. So working out the nervous system. I say training to be an emotional athlete, training the capacity and malleability of that system.

[00:57:41] And this is where biohacking was so helpful for me, because most of us don't have an issue putting ourself in a stressful state. We're in it all the time. I was very guilty of not completing the circle and getting my body back into a relaxed parasympathetic state unless I go to sleep.

[00:58:01] And this is where NuCalm became the biggest game changer for me, because they say NSDR, non-sleep deep rests, or power naps, or some way during the day, to intentionally put yourself in a parasympathetic state is crucial for improving your HRV and increasing the capacity of your nervous system.

[00:58:20] The analogy I give, which I think you talked about a little bit, when you go to the gym and you lift weights for your bicep, you're intentionally lifting more than you can, and you're actually tearing the muscles in that bicep right to increase its ability to handle more. But what do you do the next day?

[00:58:34] You don't lift on that. You allow it to recover. You allow it to heal so that when you go back the following day, you can lift more weight. Same thing with the nervous system. You need it to go like this in order to see the trend go up. So I kept myself for the next five years and arguably some would say the most challenging in the street beverage space, raising money from the 170 people, fully operating it.

[00:58:56] But I would intentionally, multiple times throughout the day, non-negotiable, minimum 20-minute power nap with NuCalm. You're going to love this. I had a Beamer, I had a hydrogen inhaler. I would stack it in the 20 minutes. Literally people called it the [Inaudible]. And I think I got a lot of it from you, to be honest.

[00:59:11] Luke: That's a really good strategy. If you're going to spend 20 minutes of your day doing something and there's five things that are compatible, why not do them all at once?

[00:59:20] Salim: Especially when you have NuCalm getting you in a parasympathetic state because it just exponentially enhances the effects of all the other things.

[00:59:28] Luke: I never thought about that.

[00:59:28] Salim: Oh, yeah. because when you're in that parasympathetic state, more blood is flowing everywhere, more oxygen, all the things. So the PEMF, the hydrogen, everything-- I had a NanoVi. I had all the things, hyperbaric, sauna, cold plunge, contrast therapy, you name it. I did every hack. My home was known as the biohacking home when I moved to Venice throughout the day.

[00:59:48] And that is how I took my baseline of 30 up to above 150, by putting myself in the most stressful situation, but training to continue to go, boom, boom, boom, boom. That for me was the biggest change. And what's crazy now is my baseline isn't as high as it was back then because I'm not in as stressful a state.

[01:00:09] And I'm okay with that. I know I don't need the highest baseline. I'm happier now than I was then. But it's crazy. As I look back on it and as I was creating my course, it's like, oh man, I used to have a higher baseline. I'm like, "Oh, of course. Because I was actually training harder back then than I need to train now."

[01:00:27] Luke: That's interesting because as I was telling you earlier, I'm a little disappointed to not really see a lot of upward movement on my HRV baseline. And I'm like, "Oh man, I do all these things." But when I started tracking, it was 2018, and I'd never been doing all this stuff for a good 10 or more years.

[01:00:47] So I can't really get an accurate trajectory because I can't go back far enough. I don't have the data that shows when my average was 10 or something when I was a total train wreck. So that feels better.

[01:01:01] Salim: Good.

[01:01:01] Luke: The stress, the intentional hormetic stress thing is really interesting because I've noticed over the years of doing cold plunges, that-- now it's like nothing getting in there. If it's really cold outside, it's a little harder, I'll admit. But if it's warm outside, which it usually is in Austin, I get in there. It's like I don't even notice. I'll be in there for a couple of minutes, going, oh yeah, I'm in here.

[01:01:26] There's no hyperventilating or anything like that. I've just acclimated to it. And I swear, I think I told Irene Lyon this too, you can never prove anything that's totally subjective. But I think my adaptability to external perceived stress has gotten much higher over the years from just doing that.

[01:01:48] From just learning how to not freak out when my nervous system is thinking it's going to die, just over and over again, training myself to just be calm when something happens. And sometimes it's like, I'm so-- not always. I worry about shit. I'm stressed out as fuck right now, trying to get my book done, as you know.

[01:02:06] So it's not like I don't have any stress, but I'm talking about just being triggered by stuff and freaking out and being pummeled into fight or flight. Not much does that to me anymore. And that used to be something that I had zero defense over. Just being late to the airport, back to that example.

[01:02:24] I would just completely lose my shit. And now things like that happen and I notice I'm just, eh. And sometimes it's annoying to other people even. Because if they're panicked and I'm not, it's annoying to them. They're like, "Dude, join my nervous system in this panic." And I'm like, "I literally can't fake it. I'm not worried about it."

[01:02:45] And part of that is just surrender and trust and just living enough years where things that I thought were the end of me, just the worst thing that could ever happen, and then some time goes by you see like, as you said, the synchronicity. I go, "Oh, of course that happened. It was the best thing ever."

[01:03:01] It hurt, but ultimately it served me. So I see life in real time more like that. So if there's a trigger or something that would've been disappointing or concerning, it's like, ah. The minute I see that contraction or the mind making a story about it, it's like, no, I'm not grabbing that story.

[01:03:20] I don't know what's going on. I have no idea what this actually means in the long run. And then sure enough, every time I don't get my way or something bad happens, hindsight, you go, "Oh, thank God that thing didn't happen."

[01:03:34] Salim: Yeah. And I would say just to you, I know you're questioning your score between 30 and 40 and not seeing it go up, to me, and I've had people like, "What do you think?" It's also HRV, just a number. And I care more about how you feel and how you're living your life. And to hear you say that you don't allow things like that to get you in a sympathetic state and to get all the visceral things happening internally is more important than having a high HRV score.

[01:04:01] Because remember the whole reason why I can't access this, because I just don't want all of that vital oxygen going away from here. So if you are doing that, then again, your score of 35 is just as good for you as my score of 150. I just was in a much higher stress environment during that time. So that's why you don't compare. You just go by how you feel.

[01:04:21] Luke: Compare and despair. Just like everything else.

[01:04:24] Salim: Exactly, exactly. And I still resonate with the cold plunge. I every day did it, and then I wouldn't. And I got to a place that I actually started getting psychedelic. I'd do it for five minutes and only take 14 breaths in it. So really just slow down. And that just kept increasing my malleability and resilience of the nervous system.

[01:04:42] Luke: Sounds cool.

[01:04:43] Salim: Yeah.

[01:04:44] Luke: Back when I first got into it, I wanted to impress people, so I'd stand in there a really long time.

[01:04:51] Salim: Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah. Oh, me too.

[01:04:53] Luke: One time I stayed in there, no one was even watching, but I was like, how long can I do this? I stayed for, I think, 20 minutes or something. It didn't feel safe. I got out and I was like, "I don't think I'm okay, actually." I couldn't drive or anything." I was maybe getting toward hypothermia. Now people, it's like people, what diet are you on or how long do you stay in the cold plunge?

[01:05:12] I'm like, "I have no idea." Not very long usually. Long enough where I know I'm totally relaxed. And then that's when I go, "Okay, I'm good. That's what I was trying to achieve, was just to be completely gummy listless in there, like I'm sitting in a hot tub.

[01:05:31] Salim: So to me it sounds like you already have what I believe the point of being aware of HRV. And this metric and this language is to listen to your body. Because the body is the most sacred-- intuition is your body. And it is a temple that can heal itself if you just listen. And for me, HRV was a biomarker that allowed me to start to listen.

[01:05:54] I think it's such a cool technology for the West four people who are very much in here to support that journey. But when you can listen, that's all you need to do. So many different diets out there, so many different-- in a world where we're inundated with information, which is an incredible gift, what resonates for your body?

[01:06:13] Because just because this diet works for this person, we are all so unique. We co-create this simulation based on our relationship to it. And so your upbringing, your epigenetics, your ancestors, all those things go into it. You should choose to do things that resonate with your relationship. And HRV is reflecting your relationship with it.

[01:06:34] Luke: That's epic. So it's the language. It's not the message. The message is your body and the HRV is a language that you can learn.

[01:06:44] Salim: It's the signal. I call it compass.

[01:06:46] Luke: Got it. Got it. Yeah. That's cool. That's a neat way to think about it. Because I'm always weary of putting too much emphasis or dependency on technology and just input and tracking. I've gotten so lost in it in the past that I think just intuitively I've learned how to just listen to my body. I'm cranking away on this deadline, and the other day-- and I'm going for hours and hours and hours a day.

[01:07:11] Look, I don't know where the energy's coming from, but it's showing up somehow. And there was a day a week ago, and I was just smoked, dude. I was so tired. And I had a whole plan, like, today I'm going to get this done and not done. And my body just was like, "No, dude. You're going to lay around all day and not do anything. I don't want to say it made me. I chose to listen to it, but it was very clear.

[01:07:32] The body was like, "We're done. We need a break." But there's many years where I'd never listened. I'd just power through and be like, no, no. It's like other people are more productive, or I need to make money, or whatever it might've been. It's really nice to actually just go, "Hey, man. Thank you. Finally learning to listen to this thing a little bit better."

[01:07:54] You're one of the few people I know that really gets the relevance and power of NuCalm. It's something I talk about on the show a lot. I've had Jim, a mutual friend of ours on the show a number of times, and he's just like, "I can't emphasize it enough. I don't think it lands with people. They think it's, I don't know, like Headspace or some meditation app."

[01:08:17] I'm just like, "Dude, NuCalm has been-- and they're not paying me to say this. It sounds really forced testimonial, but it's been one of my top five things for many, many years, probably since, I don't know, 2018 or something. Just non-negotiable almost every single day. And the Focus tracks when I really need to like be present, and then those PowerNaps, man, the 20-minute, 40 minutes, sometimes 90-minute. Using them on flights.

[01:08:47] There is nothing that resets me like a NuCalm. It's just insane. But I don't know. I don't meet many people that get it. I tell all my friends about it and they're just like, "Oh, whatever." I'm like, "Dude, all you got to do is have this fucking app and some headphones and an eye mask, and your life will change so freaking dramatically."

[01:09:06] Salim: I love hearing this because I don't meet many people who get it that way too. And it is single-handedly the number one thing that I've used consistently over the last eight years, almost daily, if not at least five times a week, that has been the biggest mover on my "HRV and nervous system."

[01:09:23] It's the only thing I talk about in my course as the brand. And the reason is because it is the only patented technology guaranteed to get your body in a parasympathetic state without the use of any external substances. Because it uses binaural beats. Binaural beats is a phenomenon that's been around forever that is essentially taking two different frequencies in each ear. And your brain gets confused and chases the delta.

[01:09:46] So it's a way to guide your brain into a desired brainwave state. And we talked about those parasympathetic states. Now you could YouTube and go look at binaural beats. But what makes NuCalm so unique and different is because two decades, the best sound engineers and neurosciences that they don't just go-- for example, 16 hertz one ear, 10 hertz in the other ear, your brain goes to six.

[01:10:07] They start out the first 10, 12 minutes of the track at the high beta state, slowly going from maybe 16 to 14 to 13 to 12, guiding you into a six. And then when you get to six, they oscillate it in a pattern that your brain can never actually recognize. And that's why we could do it so consistently for eight years.

[01:10:27] It works every time. And again, hormetic stress, the pathway we're talking about, you need to be able to dip in. And I could not dip in in the middle of a workday. It would be impossible for me to shut off my so obsessive extreme mind that when I listened to my first NuCalm track, I will never get it.

[01:10:42] In New York City, at my friend's gym downstairs, I got out of it and I was like, "I need to know to founders. I need to find--" And I somehow manifested Jim and David a week later. It was wild. I met them, and I was a little kid. I was like, "Let me know. I'll help you raise money. I need to be--" I got to taste what being in that theta parasympathetic state is for the first time. At the time, that's when they had the CES machine, the much older version, older things.

[01:11:06] It took the full 90 minutes for me to get there. But when I finally did, I was like, "Oh. This is what people are talking about. I need this so that I could come out and be sustainably productive. I could be clear. I can actually do things more efficiently in my time." Jim is a brother of mine. He's the one that actually originally connected us, knowing that we would back when you were in California.

[01:11:32] I wasn't living there, and we were never able to connect, but yeah, I cannot stress NuCalm enough. I share it with everyone, every client, all my family members, planes. The only thing I listen to on a plane. If you're pregnant, kids. It's impossible that-- people are like, "Can I do it too much?"

[01:11:48] No, you can't do it too much because most of us can use being in that parasympathetic state. And now they have, you said, the FlowState, the Ignite, all those other tracks that get you indifferent. Oh my God. And then I always listen to the sleep ambiently.

[01:12:01] Luke: Oh, you do?

[01:12:01] Salim: I do. I love it. I love it.

[01:12:03] Luke: I haven't really tried that in a consistent way because I always fall asleep to podcasts. Back in my 20s, when I was doing a lot of stimulants, the only way I could come down or fall asleep was listening to Howard Stern. Howard Stern would come on at 3:00 in the morning, and I wasn't going to bed at 3:00, but the show would start over at 6:00 AM.

[01:12:28] So I would maybe catch some of the feed 4:00 or 5:00 or something, and then it would start over at 6:00. And then after the 6 o'clock restart on the West Coast, I would eventually fall asleep. And I did that for years. I don't suggest that to people, but I think that's where I train my brain, where talking makes me go to sleep. I've wanted to do the NuCalm thing, but I'm like, "I need someone talking." That's what puts me back to sleep.

[01:12:53] Salim: You know what you can do?

[01:12:54] Luke: What?

[01:12:54] Salim: You could do both because you just have the NuCalm playing, and maybe it'll help you sleep. It sounds like you don't have an issue sleeping. But if you need the talking, you could still have the talking.

[01:13:03] Luke: Oh, totally, dude. I could have a iPad the NuCalm going and then have my podcast of choice, which in this case was one that you were on last night.

[01:13:11] Salim: Totally. Ah, thank you.

[01:13:13] Luke: I always listen to all the podcasts of guests to make sure I don't just say the same shit over and over again. And to learn about their life. It's how I knew you worked at a power plant. I knew you were Lebanese. And, I would've said I knew you grew up in New York, but I can tell because you don't say duh. You say, duh.

[01:13:32] Salim: Oh yeah, that New York accent is still.

[01:13:34] Luke: I heard that. I was like, "That's so interesting. I wonder if he can say the, if he really tries."

[01:13:38] Salim: No.

[01:13:39] Luke: Can you make that sound, the?

[01:13:42] Salim: The.

[01:13:42] Luke: Oh, okay. But it would be labored.

[01:13:44] Salim: It would be labor. It would be very labeled. The is what comes out. That, this, the.

[01:13:48] Luke: Yeah, the nervous system.

[01:13:49] Salim: The nervous system.

[01:13:50] Luke: The nervous system. Eh, forget about it. Okay, so I think we were on path three.

[01:13:54] Salim: Pathway number three, which is one that we've been talking about the entire time.

[01:13:58] Luke: Okay. While we're on three of external inputs, what do you think of the Apollo? I'm wearing the Apollo here. It ran out because it was only on 60 minutes. But I love this thing for just-- it's one of the stacks. So I'm at my computer. I put on the Focus one. I put on the Focus, NuCalm.

[01:14:13] It's like I'm going to be sitting there anyway, so I just do all the things. But this is one I really like, with the exception of each journey is only so long. And I turn it on airplane mode so I don't get the Bluetooth. And then I have to go put it on the charger to return it on. I wish it would just go for eight hours.

[01:14:32] Salim: Totally. So well, now you could have a playlist.

[01:14:34] Luke: Oh, for real?

[01:14:35] Salim: Yeah. Dr. Dave, they've been improving it. So literally that's what I do. You could stack and put the ones you want so it keeps going.

[01:14:41] Luke: Thank you, Apollo. I had no idea. When apps update, I never really-- I'm just like, "Oh, they changed the design."

[01:14:47] Salim: They've done a lot of really cool things with it.

[01:14:48] Luke: Oh, okay.

[01:14:49] Salim: And I got turned onto it through you, and I've had it for eight years, and it has also been a consistent thing. And when I do my 20-minute stack, I have the Recover. I have it on my legs on Recover. I love it for sleep, and I love it for traveling. That is my two favorite things. I had it on before coming here. I didn't bring it, but yeah, big, big fan.

[01:15:06] And again, HRV is measuring how you're perceiving this simulation. How do we perceive it? Through our senses, through our taste, through our touch. This is touch, vibration. And they have studies showing how to support HRV training, because of what you can do and really dropping your body in a stressful state out of it through touch and through vibration. So big, big, big fan. They're actually going to be a part of the course offering as well. So love them. Yeah.

[01:15:32] Luke: Cool. Anything else in three?

[01:15:34] Salim: No, that was two.

[01:15:35] Luke: Oh, that was two.

[01:15:36] Salim: Yeah. And there's contrast there. Hormetic stress is everything. These pathways--

[01:15:40] Luke: Two is hormetic stress. But I skipped ahead and went into the NuCalm and Apollo.

[01:15:44] Salim: Well, that's two. NuCalm is part of hormetic stress because it's the other side. It's getting your body in a parasympathetic state. And the five pathways, again, there's not a single way to do them. You need to practice them in your unique way. So whatever sleep looks like, whatever hormetic stress looks like. Some people it's cold plunging, contrast therapy.

[01:16:03] Some people it's running and HIIT training and then recover. Whatever that looks like for you. But honoring that pillar and foundation to improve your HRV is what I found for me.

[01:16:16] Luke: What about in the two phase-- I don't know if you've looked into this, but something I got into probably about a year ago was CO2 therapy. One of them is this inhaler where you make--

[01:16:30] Salim: I've used it.

[01:16:30] Luke: It's oxygen and CO2, and then there's a freaking suit. It's like a big Michelin Man suit.

[01:16:35] Salim: Yes, yes, yes. My buddy's got it.

[01:16:36] Luke: You fill that shit up with CO2. Dude, it is so relaxing. It's like taking a Valium. It's legit. I don't do it as much as I would like to because it's a process. And you got to walk around as the Michelin Man. But if ever I'm super freaked out and stress, I'll inhale that for a few minutes, maybe 10 minutes, and then put that CO2 suit on and just lay there for two hours with the NuCalm. It's good night.

[01:17:02] Salim: It's bliss.

[01:17:03] Luke: Yeah, you're out. But I think, the thing about CO2, it feels stressful. I don't know if it is scientifically, but it feels like a hormetic stress because you're like [Gasp].

[01:17:12] Salim: It absolutely is.

[01:17:13] Luke: You're gasping for oxygen. But then once it's over, it's like, oh my God, it's so relaxing.

[01:17:18] Salim: That's hormetic stress at its finest. And it is hitting the most ancient limbic stress state, oxygen, CO2, deprivation of oxygen and CO2. It is the one thing James Nestor, Breath, talks about. Nothing scares our limbic reptilian brain more than CO2.

[01:17:38] This past year, I trained for the first time with a dear brother Rodo, who has Alchemy Rewire, and he's an ex-professional free diver. And free diving, the way he broke down, he thinks very similarly to what I do about the nervous system. He cured his neurodivergent schizophrenia through basically CO2 retention, breath work, and free diving.

[01:17:58] And I went with him to Tulum, and he gave me a training. Drowning is my biggest fear. I feel like in a past life, I've seen-- and I went scuba diving and went through caves, and holy shit. I have never been more fucking scared or stressed in my life, but then I have never been more exhilarated.

[01:18:16] And my HRV skyrocketed after, because if you think of it, it is literally-- all other stuck stories, fears, emotions, this is hitting your oldest one in just a drain hose, fricking pushing all that other stuff out. Incredible, CO2 retention and work for hormetic stress. Yeah, absolutely.

[01:18:34] Luke: Cool. Okay. Anything else at that level?

[01:18:38] Salim: The list, all the things that you do--

[01:18:41] Luke: What about breathwork? This is something I don't really talk about that much because it feels so played out at this point. But looking back, it has been extremely helpful at times.

[01:18:53] Salim: Breathwork is the freest and most reliable way to practice hormetic stress. And I've been really the past year, getting obsessed and loving all the different breathworks, whether it's my friend Rodo and his Alchemy Rewire. I've recently trained with a dear friend of mine, Brian, who's a breathwork facilitator, and he taught me these 10 Tibetan movement breathworks, and I'm on day 53 in a row doing in the morning.

[01:19:16] Luke: Is it the Tibetan Rites?

[01:19:17] Salim: No, I do those every morning. I've done those for 10 years. I love those five Tibetan  Rites. Those are the--

[01:19:22] Luke: Oh yeah, there's five.

[01:19:23] Salim: They're five. Yeah.

[01:19:24] Luke: I tried it a couple of times and I was like, "This is too much like exercise."

[01:19:27] Salim: Well, you got to slowly start off and then you get to 21 reps, and it takes about three minutes.

[01:19:31] Luke: Really?

[01:19:31] Salim: Yeah. Oh, I love it. So good for just moving the centers, getting the qi going. But these are 10 Tibetan movement and breathworks combined, and they take a while to do, but I feel high as a kite after doing it. Like I took two espressos. Just so crystal clear. Yeah, breath is everything.

[01:19:53] Luke: Have you ever used the Othership app?

[01:19:56] Salim: I'm good friends with Robbie. I love Othership. Love those guys. Great, great stuff. Yeah. They combined it with contrast therapy and--

[01:20:03] Luke: Yeah. I really like that app. Breathwork's one of those things that's difficult. It's difficult to build as a discipline for me because it's work. They call it breath work. When you first start, it's always like, oh God, I don't want to do this. I've never started any breathwork, whether on my own or with a facilitator and being like, "Yeah, let's go." It's always like, "Oh my God, I can't do this. I'm leaving."

[01:20:25] Salim: Yeah.

[01:20:26] Luke: There's a certain threshold you hit and then it starts to become more automatic and you have some momentum. But that's been a tough one. I know it has so many benefits, but it's like, man, you really got to commit.

[01:20:38] Salim: You got to build the habit.

[01:20:40] Luke: All right. Take me to three. Take me to four three.

[01:20:43] Salim: Pathway number three is reframing the shifts. And that's what we've been talking about so much, just your relationship to your story. And for me, after five years of very much training with the beverage company and then the hormetic stress and thinking that everything was great, what was happening on the outside still, the beverage company was blowing up incredibly.

[01:21:05] Over 2,000 retailers. Number two beverage in Whole Foods on the East Coast. Really doing well. And with that, you need a lot of product to keep up with the demand and it's a rather capital intensive industry. And I was struggling raising enough money to keep up with the demand and was really internally getting stressed out and holding a lot.

[01:21:26] And on my birthday two years ago, a little over two years ago, in front of all my friends in Topanga, I asked to step into less doing, more being. A common statement entrepreneurs approaching burnout will say. And I got gifted from all of my friends, a super 73 electronic bike, this Burning Man bike that I wanted so badly. And I take said bike for its first spin on the Venice boardwalk.

[01:21:53] The sun was setting. It was actually summer solstice 2023. And I'm like, "Oh, the money's going to come. Everything's going to be okay. It always is." And I get in the silliest accident that anteriorly dislocates my right shoulder, tears my labrum, and fractures 30% of my socket off.

[01:22:07] Luke: That's on your first ride?

[01:22:09] Salim: My first ride with it. I couldn't put my arm down. I drove myself somehow to the ER. They had to dislocate to relocate it. Furious. I wake up the next morning, like, how can I raise money? How does this-- all the stories, blah, blah, blah. And my HRV, which the day before was about 120, dropped to 30. Which shows my nervous system screaming, rightfully so.

[01:22:31] Injured, hurt, physical pain, mental pain. And luckily, I had a call with my coach that day. I get on a call with him, I tell him the story, and he breaks out laughing. I go, "What the fuck is so funny?" And he goes, "Let's break down the body spiritually. The arms represent the doing. The torso, the body, represents the being. The shoulder connects the doing to the being.

[01:22:56] "What did you ask for on your birthday? Less doing, more being. What did you get? Exactly what you asked for from the gift in front of everybody that you asked for it. How can you not laugh at the paradox that we live in?" And the second he said that, something happened and I just started dying laughing.

[01:23:13] I'm like, "Oh, I get it. My body is asking me to finally let go of this 10-year boulder that I've put all my energy in. I had just launched that HRV guy. I had a client. I was really passionate about this, but I also was passionate about the beverage. And I had 170 people that invested in me putting everything I could into it, which I had and continued doing.

[01:23:35] And I was like, "Okay, I get it." I need to let go. And I shit you not, 24 hours later, same pain, same shoulder injury, all the things. But my HRV the next morning, 97. Tripled simply for me changing my relationship to the injury to happening for me. And that's the power of reframing, which we spent so much time already talking about. So super, super, super important pathway for reframing.

[01:24:02] Luke: There's a quote that I love by Shakespeare that goes, there's no such thing as good or bad. Only thinking makes it so.

[01:24:12] Salim: So true.

[01:24:14] Luke: If one could live by that--

[01:24:18] Salim: I have another one that--

[01:24:20] Luke: It's a worthy goal.

[01:24:21] Salim: It's such a worthy goal. And I have a maybe not as extreme, but a mentor taught it to me. Instead of labeling things as good or bad, right or wrong, blue verse red, since everything is all frequency, use dissonance or resonance. And just because something is dissonant to me, it actually could be very resonant for you.

[01:24:42] And just because it's dissonant to me now, tomorrow it may be resonant for me. But by not calling it good or bad, it takes away to mind box on the thing that will cause an autonomic reaction the next time it happens. It's just simply energy. I'm dissonant with this. I'm resonant with this.

[01:24:59] Luke: That's dope. That's much better than that guy is a dick.

[01:25:02] Salim: Totally, totally.

[01:25:03] Luke: [Inaudible] relationship, that's a thing I applied it to immediately. Just like, "Hey, rather than like that person's wrong, it could be they're not right for me." It might be totally right for them and everyone else in the world, but they're wrong for me.

[01:25:17] Salim: You're just dissonant for it now.

[01:25:19] Luke: Yeah, that's good. I like that.

[01:25:20] Salim: And here's another one that-- I'm a big fan of etymology and the meaning of words. And as a New Yorker, a sumo was meant, don't make an ass out of you and me. And I was in Egypt on these travels and doing an activation in the King's Chamber. That was profound.

[01:25:35] And as I was doing it, I don't know why I got this download visually of the word assume. And I saw it split into three words as-sue-me. So I got out of it and I was like, "I wonder what sue means. And I started just Googling. And the Latin origin of the word sue is in. As in me.

[01:25:56] My New York judgmental mind flipped because it's like, oh, of course, I'm calling that guy a dick. The whole reason I'm seeing him is because there's medicine in it for-- there's some part, doesn't mean that's me, but there's something I need to integrate and feel. I could be dissonant with it, but it's actually, me and it's hidden in the word assume that I don't think it was intentionally in there, but that's the coincidence that's always there. And so now I always try bringing curiosity when the New York judging comes into me, like, "Okay, let's--"

[01:26:25] Luke: It's not only New Yorkers, by the way.

[01:26:27] Salim: Yeah, totally, totally. Definitely not only New Yorkers.

[01:26:30] Luke: There's an East Coast energy or attitude that is somewhat prevalent, in contrast to West Coast people that tend to be a little more laid back.

[01:26:39] Salim: Absolutely, absolutely. So yeah, those are a couple on the reframing side that have really supported my journey. So then pathway number four is intentionality.

[01:26:49] Luke: Thank you for giving us a lot of your course here for free by the way.

[01:26:52] Salim: Oh, my pleasure.

[01:26:53] Luke: Obviously, I'm sure it goes much deeper, but--

[01:26:55] Salim: Yeah, yeah.

[01:26:56] Luke: I like getting the secret sauce for the audience.

[01:26:59] Salim: Totally. It's the least I could do for your audience because I've been a part of your audience for a long time. So yeah, really, really grateful for it. Pathway number four is intentionality, the alignment. And for my story, it goes, when I realized that the shoulder in my body was telling me to stop, I was like, "Okay, time to let it go."

[01:27:18] And I wasn't just going to let it go because I had so many people that had believed in me. So we did everything in my power, my co-founder and I, to find a way to somehow allow it to survive. And after about six months, we found the holding company that acquires the stress beverages.

[01:27:32] They came along and did an APA, an asset purchase agreement. So they purchased the brand and asset. They started a new company. We convinced them to take our cap table, which I'm so grateful for. So our investors own some of the new company. They took the debt to the suppliers, but the rest of the debt fell on the company's shoulder, which we dissolved. I was the guarantor and had my own debt, and it so literally fell on my shoulders.

[01:27:53] And I had to file for personal bankruptcy. So I had my whole identity, my whole mind, physically, financially, emotionally, everything just totally shattered, needed to be shattered because of how extreme it was to step into the next chapter. And so I decided to go to Bali because my soul had been called to go to Bali for so long, and I knew it was the only place I could really afford to spend a good amount of time there because-- have you ever been?

[01:28:19] Luke: No, but I know it's inexpensive.

[01:28:21] Salim: Oh my God. And just the beautiful Mama Bali.

[01:28:24] Luke: Alyson is a huge fan of Bali. I was all set to go with her when we first got together, and I'm looking on Airbnb at these places. I'm like, "This has to be a scam. There's no way this place is $150 a night." And so I was like, we're going.

[01:28:36] Salim: That's expensive. [Inaudible] a nice place.

[01:28:38] Luke: I'm like, "We're going dawg. Let's go for three months." And then I looked at the flights and I was like, "Oh, that's where they get you. Okay." If you want a good seat, at least.

[01:28:46] Salim: Totally, totally. But when you go, you got to go for two, three months so the flight's worth it. So I go to Bali, and every single morning, during my practice, I contemplate my gift, my question. Less doing, more being. And every morning my beautiful mind would be like, "You're here to do you. You have so much--" What do you mean? We're going to just be?

[01:29:06] There was just this constant shatter that wouldn't go away until one morning I had an epiphany that that statement, less doing and more being is mind-made and dualistic in nature. And it implies that doing and being are mutually exclusive. When the reality is, we're always being, even though we're unaware of it 99% of the time, and we're always doing, even if we're sitting, sleeping, breathing.

[01:29:31] So it's not about doing less and being more; it's about the intention in your doing, the why in your doing, the purpose behind your doing. And it reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from the Bhagavad Gita, which I love. Have you read the Bhagavad Gita?

[01:29:49] Luke: Bits and pieces.

[01:29:50] Salim: Oh my God. Such a profound piece of literature. This quote--

[01:29:53] Luke: I got one sitting over there. It's been on my shelf for 20 years. It's like, okay, I'm going to read it. Just get a couple of sentences in. Okay, I'm tired.

[01:30:02] Salim: Read one passage and there-- a friend of mine, Swami Chidananda literally just goes around and spends an hour and a half lecturing one parable. That's how much profound wisdom is in this book. But this passage states you have a right to your actions, never your actions fruit. Act solely for the action sake and don't be attached to inaction.

[01:30:28] Meaning our souls came in here to do, to create, to be artists. We don't have it right to the results of that creation. And actually that expectation is what leads to all suffering. And a mind-made belief on how it comes up, we are simply to act for the action's sake.

[01:30:46] Act for your why. Act for your purpose, and trust that it will unfold better than the mind can even imagine. And don't be attached to not doing. And so when I had this epiphany, I was like, "Oh man, I could still do, I just need to be super clear on why I'm doing it on my purpose."

[01:31:04] And that's where this intentionality pathway comes in. Because I believe HRV is reflecting your alignment with your purpose, with your highest self. And for me, and I find so many entrepreneurs, we're running on a story that we need to to grind, to build a thing. But then we get to a place where it's built, but we're still running the same program that it took to get there and not auditing our current purpose.

[01:31:29] And as we grow and evolve, our purpose changes. And so HRV is a compass. A compass needs three points to triangulate. One, what you're observing. Two, how you're reacting to what you're observing, and then three, the thing to compare it to, your purpose. And so every morning--

[01:31:47] Luke: Damn, you put some thought into this, bro. That's just great.

[01:31:51] Salim: Thank you, man. Thank you.

[01:31:52] Luke: It's a really clear model. I like it.

[01:31:54] Salim: I appreciate that.

[01:31:55] Luke: This is all things that I apply in my life in different ways, but I would've never put them together around this central compass. That's so interesting.

[01:32:03] Salim: Yeah, yeah. And so for me, for my clients, it's always really aligning on what your purpose is now. And purposes can change. And they can ever evolve. But grounding into that for me and my morning practice, and then consciously going about your day, infusing that, and then reflecting the next day on how that align. And that drastically supported my HRV. So intentionality.

[01:32:29] Luke: Epic. I like that. And that was a really beautiful idea around that you're always being, even when you're doing. It's a matter of the degree of presence in the doing. I forget who it was, it might have been Eckhart Tolle or something, was talking about how you can be moving quickly but not be in a hurry.

[01:32:52] You can be driving really fast or running really fast, but you're just totally chill. You just happen to be-- your locomotion is fast, but there's no anxiousness around it. And I don't know where I heard that, but I really took that. It's one of those nuggets that just landed. That's stuck with me, is when I find myself getting all frantic and I'm not in this moment where my body is. It's like, whoa, hold up. I can still be crushing it and being productive and getting things done as long as I'm 100% in it.

[01:33:22] Salim: Yeah.

[01:33:23] Luke: Yeah. That's cool. With the results thing, you reminded me of another funny thing. Some of these truths are languaged in different ways, but around the attachment to the outcome or to the action you were describing.

[01:33:36] One of my teachers used to say, because I'd be all disappointed about something about which I had an unrealistic expectation, and you'd say, "Luke, you got to stay out of the results business. That's not your business." And that was another way to say the same thing. And it just stuck with me. Anytime I'm like, "Ooh, I'm doing this thing, so this other thing happens." And if it doesn't, I feel deflated.

[01:33:58] It's like, what if the intention, to your point, is just in the doing? Cool. Then you don't have to worry about it. And if it doesn't happen, it's like, now I'm grateful because I feel like I'm being protected from something that doesn't serve me. You know what I'm saying?

[01:34:14] I put out this merch line last year, whenever it was, and I was really excited. I thought of in a deep meditation with the [Inaudible] machine, all these really cool slogans and memes downloaded over the course of a couple sessions, like 80 of them or something. And I was like, am I crazy, or are these really good? Told all my friends. They're like, "Oh my God, that's genius." One of them, I'll run it by you. It's a design that has a mushroom and a cell tower, and it says 5G's not 5G.

[01:34:40] Salim: Love it.

[01:34:40] Luke: [Inaudible] me. It's not my idea anyway. It came from the ether, the muse. So I was really excited. It took me months to find someone that just had cotton shirts. I couldn't even find organic, but I was like, "They got to be all cotton, at least the T-shirts." And I put it out and it's just like a thud. No one seemed to really respond. I still have the site up, lukestoreymerch.com, if you want to help undo that expectation that was failed, you guys.

[01:35:06] But it was one of those things, and it was like, ah, I really thought this is going to be fun for people and it would be a cool thing. And it just like, eh, just petered along and hasn't done anything. But I wasn't terribly disappointed or affected by it, even though I put a lot of energy and some money into it.

[01:35:21] It was actually just fun to do it, to think of the ideas, to hire a graphic designer to implement them, to get them on some shirts, find the company. A lot of work went into it, but the work taught me how to do something that I didn't know how to do, which is take this particular creative idea and bring it to fruition. Now, whether or not it was meaningful to other people is none of my business because the results business is not my business.

[01:35:42] Salim: Mm.

[01:35:43] Luke: Super cool.

[01:35:45] Salim: Cliche saying, it's not the destination, it's the journey. And the reality is, we're all going to the same-- we all know where we're going, right? It's the classic, the Buddhist circle philosophy where if you know how a circle ends, but you're at a point in the circle-- if you don't know how it ends, you're at the point you're like, "Ugh."

[01:36:04] But if you actually know how it ends, it doesn't matter what's going on in this point. You know the ending to the story. So why does it matter? All you need to do is enjoy, cultivate a relationship with this point, because you already know how it's ending. And we all know where we're going. We all know how we're ending.

[01:36:19] And so the more we can just zoom out and remember that, and we came here to experience-- as humans, we came here to feel. That's what I believe the whole point of the educational simulation is. And a mentor of mine said like, bliss is fully feeling every emotion. To fully feel every emotion, all of them, the ones even that we say are bad is what bliss is.

[01:36:40] And so this line that you put out, if your intention of putting it out was-- if it's for you to like fully go through that process to experience, to understand these things and there's no attachment to it, you get all the medicine that you need out of doing that. Yeah.

[01:36:54] Luke: What's number five?

[01:36:56] Salim: Pathway number five is community, the amplifier. Because at the end of the day, we all are mirrors walking each other home, and co-regulation has scientifically been proven to be a thing. Hearts synchronize with the nervous systems around them. And when you say like, people get upset when you know you triggered them, if you're so calm, that's their medicine.

[01:37:16] And over time their nervous system will start to sync. Because the heart is the largest magnet. Literally like a metronome we sync to who's around us. And so to be open and vulnerable and feel all those feelings and be witnessed just amplifies the regulation in the body.

[01:37:35] And the longest study in human history, the 80-year plus Harvard study, one of my favorite TED talks, they spent over 80 years, I think over 72 youth from Boston, 18-year-old [Inaudible], following every aspect of their life, following their medical records, their jobs, their spouses, interviewing everything.

[01:37:52] Three generations of scientists, unimaginable amount of data, all to find what led to a longer, healthier, happier life. And after all of that, they came back with one thing, and it was relationships. And not quantity, but quality relationships led to a longer, healthier, happier life. And that's the foundational pillar of all five blue zones. And all the things is really community. So yeah, community is pathway number five.

[01:38:19] Luke: One of the, I'm tempted to call it a hack, but it's a really bad word for an expression of love. But one of the tools, practices that I use as one of those breaks, like NuCalm or doing CO2 or whatever, is I grab my wife and I just give her a super long hug, and we just breathe together. We just sync our breathing. We never planned it. It wasn't like, "Hey, let's try this thing we heard about on a podcast." We just did it from day one.

[01:38:45] Salim: That's in my course.

[01:38:46] Luke: Oh, really?

[01:38:47] Salim: Yeah, yeah. To get--

[01:38:48] Luke: Yeah, weird. And I'm like, "Have you ever done this with anyone?" She's like, "No." I go, "How did we come up with this?" I don't know. We just--

[01:38:53] Salim: It works because it's touch, hearts. Oh man. It is an actual scientific thing.

[01:38:57] Luke: It calms me down. I can be so stressed out and, I don't know, two minutes of that, and I'm just like, "Wow. I feel like I just took a nap. I'm so chill." It's amazing.

[01:39:05] Salim: So true.

[01:39:07] Luke: Part of it's because she's really special, but I'm sure it works when any two people have coherence or resonance as you said.

[01:39:14] Salim: Absolutely.

[01:39:14] Luke: Do you think that's a good tool to use?

[01:39:17] Salim: 100%. I love giving hugs. I give very long hugs for that reason.

[01:39:21] Luke: Yeah, yeah. It's just such good medicine. All right. So tell me what people will find at lukestorey.com/theartofheart. And by the way, there's a code there for you guys when you find out what this is, which is LUKE. And it's 10% off his course. And everything we talked about that's linkable today will be found at lukestorey.com/hrv.

[01:39:44] But before we get out of here, tell me about your course. What's up with that? I'm assuming it's somewhat based on these five levels or stages you described. What else is in there? Who would it benefit?

[01:39:54] Salim: Yeah. So the offering is called The Art of the Heart. And within the offering there's my HRV fundamentals course. Then there's different offerings that offer some deeper work and different PDFs around NuCalm and all the different gadgets. So it's a plethora of things, but the foundation is this HRV fundamental course, which is five modules.

[01:40:16] And each module guides you through some of the conversations we've been having. Module one is really totally breaking down the autonomic nervous system and going very deep into what we first talked about. Module two is breaking down HRV as the language, and going much deeper into understanding it, all the different ways it impacts you.

[01:40:33] Module three is going deep into each of the five pathways. Module four is my favorite, and it's called the Educational Simulation. It talks about the observer effect, talks about science, talks about much deeper into what we're actually projecting, these frozen emotions. And talks about how we thaw them out.

[01:40:50] And then module five, which is the most important, is my HRV Reset, which is a somatic activation, a meditation that I created that intentionally takes you from parasympathetic into sympathetic and gives you an opportunity to, I say, sit in the arena and actually feel the frozen emotion. And then guides you out of the arena back into parasympathetic. So it's something I do daily, something my clients do daily. And that's what you get in module five, as well as an audio clip to do it at home anytime you want to.

[01:41:21] Luke: Cool.

[01:41:21] Salim: Yeah.

[01:41:22] Luke: Awesome man. I'm excited for you and the people that go into it. Because this is new, right? It's not out as we record, but--

[01:41:29] Salim: It's going to be out when you-- yeah, yeah. It's pairing with this. This was a big deal.

[01:41:34] Luke: Well, thank you for that contribution because as we started today, this is just so important for people. So many of us are running around trying to supplement and biohack ourselves into enlightenment, and it's like, "Dude, your nervous system is listening. You can't get past it. It's just one of those things I've learned the hard way at times. It's just, oh man, you got to address the meat soup, man, from an energetic nervous system level.

[01:42:04] Salim: Yeah. I like you. Couldn't get past it. And if you don't listen, it speaks louder and louder and louder until a shoulder injury or bankruptcy. And so one of my missions is to really support and share my stories to hopefully allow other people to start to listen before it gets to that extreme.

[01:42:23] Luke: Yeah. Epic. All right. Who have been three teachers or teachings that have influenced your life? You probably knew I was going to ask you that.

[01:42:30] Salim: I did.

[01:42:31] Luke: I do my best to ask it at the end of every show.

[01:42:33] Salim: Yeah, yeah. My first is my mom, who was just beacon of unconditional love, and what unconditional love is. And now my relationship with her has just deepened as I've gone on this journey. At first, in the beginning of the journey, one healer called her my corset of my third chakra because of my attachment and belief to feeling I needed to support and protect her.

[01:42:58] And I have grown to just fully love and accept every part of her. Yeah, she's been unbelievable for me. So she's my first. My second would be my father and actually a mutual friend, Kimberly Van Der Beek. Really, maybe six months ago, opened me up. I did a beautiful tea ceremony with her, and she got this download, and just realized how powerful he's been on the other side for me and the ways he's shown up in the men in my life and at times.

[01:43:30] And really, I shared a little bit about just zooming out of his passing and what that meant, and how that shaped me, and how that's gotten me really to be able to step into what I believe my dharmic purpose is in this carnation fully. So that'd be two. And then number three would be Dr. Gabor Maté.

[01:43:51] His work is so resonant with the stuff I talk about in terms of our formative years, the importance of nervous system, of the emotions stuck in our body, of what we're projecting. He's just such a beautiful soul that I-- just deeply inspired by him.

[01:44:09] Luke: He's badass. That guy cracked the code.

[01:44:11] Salim: Oh, yeah.

[01:44:12] Luke: Yeah. We did a show a couple of years ago. I'll link it in the show notes here. It was one of my career highlights. People often ask like, "What was your favorite interview?" And they're all fun and inspiring for different reasons, but on a personal level, that was-- talking to someone that really knows how to look under the hood.

[01:44:33] Yeah, it was really a beautiful conversation. And at the end, when we stopped recording him, I'll never forget this. It was so affirming. He didn't know me. They probably didn't know who they're talking to. Their assistant's like, "Hey, you got to podcast at 2:00." Okay. Who are you? Where are you? That kind of thing.

[01:44:50] He didn't know who I was. But during the course of the conversation, I can't help but make it somewhat subjective and personal because I'm asking things that are relevant to my experience. We stopped recording, and he goes, "Luke, before we go, I just want to tell you, it's such a pleasure to do an interview with someone that you can tell has just really done the work.

[01:45:10] Salim: Hmm.

[01:45:10] Luke: And I was like, "I have?" I feel like this work never ends. There's always something. I'm like, "Oh God, okay. Another little pocket of neurosis that I'm trying to fucking ferret out." And it was such a sigh of relief. Like, oh yeah, I sometimes forget. I think many of us on the path forget to look back and go, "Oh shit, I'm not perfect, but from where I came from, oh my God, there's been a lot of change."

[01:45:34] So it was such a gift to hear that from someone that I respect and also someone I really sense would have no reason to blow smoke up my ass around that. He would just be like, "Thanks. Nice to meet you. Bye." He was like, "Wait, hold on. I need to share something with you." I was like, "Shit, cool. Good job, Luke. Keep going." That was beautiful.

[01:45:53] Salim: And the one thing that I feel called to share after that because I so resonate with the inner voice, like, oh man, there's always more work to do. My desire, I talk to Carl about this all the time, to continue doing the work, is that if the work is done, then we wouldn't be here in these meat suits.

[01:46:13] So anybody who says the work is done, you smile at humbly. But knowing that allows them to be like, "Oh yeah, no, the joy is in the work." So to actually experience the work and not be like, "Oh shit." So that reframe for me has really supported, like, yeah, I came here to learn.

[01:46:32] I came here to be a part of educational simulation and feel everything. And, even the shoulder, the bankruptcy, all the things, it's all part of the ever-evolving process that I get the privilege of--

[01:46:45] Luke: It's crazy because what most people fear most in the human experience is the graduation. That's the only time, at least the work on this level ends, when you leave the body. And that's the thing we spend our entire life trying to avoid at all costs. And that's actually probably the best thing ever. Not that I'm in a hurry to graduate, but I share that perspective. When it's hard, I go, "Hey, man. This is what you signed up for."

[01:47:12] Salim: Yeah.

[01:47:12] Luke: All right, dude. Thanks for coming by today. I appreciate it.

[01:47:15] Salim: Truly such an honor as a big fan of you and this podcast. So thank you so much.

[01:47:20] Luke: Awesome, man.