Speaker 1: 0:42

Hello, hello and welcome to Beauty of Breathing. We have another live episode right now going on on Instagram and I have such a wonderful guest with us today, dr Yossi Amram. I'm going to introduce him to you guys, introduce the topic, and we're going to start chatting. So here we go. We're going to start chatting, so here we go, presenting Dr Yossi Amram, a clinical psychologist, ceo coach, pioneering research in spiritual intelligence and bestselling author, a former founder and CEO of two successful public companies. He has coached over 100 CEOs, many leading billion-dollar enterprises, with degrees from MIT, harvard and Sophia University. Yossi's research on spiritual intelligence has over a thousand citations. His award-winning book Spiritually Intelligent Leadership explores how SI spiritual intelligence enhances leadership through purpose, trust and integrity. Drawing from his early leadership in Israeli military, he's dedicated to advancing SE worldwide. Welcome to the Beauty of Breathing stage. Today's topic is spiritual intelligence in action transforming leadership and relationships. Wow, what an honor to have you.

Speaker 2: 2:07

Thank you, I'm delighted. Thank you, I'm honored by your introduction. I'm going to have to breathe it in. Let it soak and nourish me. Hopefully it won't get to my head and my ego will inflate and then my spiritual intelligence will just all dissipate.

Speaker 1: 2:27

I know we talk so much about IQ, but we know that there are so many other intelligences out there, like emotional intelligence, spiritual intelligence. Can you just share with our listeners a little bit about what is spiritual intelligence?

Speaker 2: 2:42

Great, well, that's a good point and a great question. Great, well, that's a good point and a great question. So, yeah, you know, our IQ, our cognitive intelligence, has landed us on the moon. We split the atom, deciphered the genome, we built the AI that's smarter than many of us like myself, and we have EQ that helps us manage and connect with our emotions.

Speaker 2: 3:05

So, just staying on the analogy of emotional intelligence, which is the ability to draw on and use emotional resources and information to help manage our own and other emotions, so spiritual intelligence, by analogy, is the ability to draw on and embody spiritual resources and qualities that have been hailed by all the world's wisdom and spiritual traditions as character, strengths and virtues.

Speaker 2: 3:34

So what are these?

Speaker 2: 3:35

These are things like purpose, service, trust, gratitude, beauty, joy, presence, humility, integrity and so on Across the world's traditions for thousands of years, regardless of their cosmology and theology, whether they believe Christ was the Messiah, or Muhammad was the last prophet, or the Buddha was enlightened, or Father Sky, mother Earth is what gives rise to all creation, whatever the cosmology, theology, they believe that these are the qualities that make for good, meaningful human life that connects us with ourselves, with our essence, and with other people, with all of life, with the sacred and transcendent dimension of life.

Speaker 2: 4:21

So the reason I call this spiritual intelligence is because it is the common qualities shared across all the world's spiritual traditions and it is the qualities that naturally emerge when we connect to our spirit, which is our life force, energy, our breath of life, which is what the root of the word spirit in Latin is the animating breath of life which connects to. You know the name of your podcast and this show, so I'll pause there. I could say a lot more about its benefit and the research and how it converges with different modern branches of positive psychology and leadership and so on, but let me just give you yeah, I love how it connects with the work that we do in myofunctional therapy.

Speaker 1: 5:19

You know, we learned that breathing is number one. I always say that it's the first thing when you're born, it's the last thing before you die. If you can't breathe, it's the first thing when you're born, is the last thing before you die. If you can't breathe, it's going to affect every single system in our bodies. But I feel like there's so much more out there that we're even unaware of how the spirit and the breath connect. Are there any diseases of the spirit? Yeah, sorry, I went super deep in the first question. You just came to me. No, it's good?

Speaker 2: 5:54

It's a great question. Well, one disease of the spirit is alcoholism. We call it spirit. When our spirit is depleted and we don't have spirit, then we have to resort to spirits. So that's a spiritual disease, because we don't have the real thing. We look for substitutes and you know we need our life force, energy, to be alive, vital, healthy, and we are, you know, one system.

Speaker 2: 6:24

There's a connection between the mind and the body, and the spirit and the thoughts and the emotions. We are one integrated being and when we divide and split ourselves, then we become weak and you know, different parts of us are pulling in different directions. So there's no wholeness, there's no integrity to our organism. It's like different organs in our body are fighting with each other, which is what cancer is when you have or you have an autoimmune disease where the body cells attack itself. So if we are divided and our thoughts and our emotions and our spirit and whatever is in conflict, and where in conflict, and when it's not integrated, it's not whole, it's going to result in all kind of, you know, expressions of disease dis-ease in the body, in the mind, in the emotions, in the heart and the spirit.

Speaker 1: 7:22

So yeah, so, yeah, this is incredible.

Speaker 2: 7:32

I love this talk y'all, um, how important is for all of us to believe in something? Well, yeah, so, uh, that's a great question. Um, I think we all believe in something and you know there's now this whole thing around, you know, when modern culture and the secular society has kind of disconnected from our religious, spiritual roots in modern secularism. But you know, something has to take its place. So we become, we believe in science, and maybe science is the new religion, or we believe in the dollar, or we believe in something, but we have to believe that there is some value, something that is of importance to us, that becomes our North Star, and you know that connects and directs our life and gives it meaning, purpose and direction.

Speaker 2: 8:29

Now, when I speak of spiritual intelligence and I'm just going to make a little segue it doesn't, it's not the same as a spiritual belief or a spiritual experience. So you can have a belief. I can have a belief in God and I might go to church on Sunday or synagogue on Saturday, or I might go, and my sanctuary is in the woods, I do forest bathing, whatever it is, and during those moments my ego dissolves and I experience oneness with God, with nature, with whatever. Okay, so I can have a spiritual belief, I can have a spiritual experience, but when I'm talking about spiritual intelligence, it's the ability to embody these qualities in daily life. So I'm in a work meeting and we have this agreement across team members marketing, sales engineering, whatever it is across team members marketing, sales engineering, whatever it is and all of a sudden I'm focused on my ego. I want to be right, I want to advance my career and I'm against other people, but on church on Sunday, I pray and I'm, you know, whatever one in God. Or I get on the freeway and I'm driving in this metal box that disconnects me from all the other metal boxes called cars, and we're all fighting against each other to get on and off the freeway and it becomes a dog-eat-dog world.

Speaker 2: 9:56

So what I'm interested in in spiritual intelligence is how do we embody these qualities of compassion, forgiveness, gratitude, presence, connectedness and so on in our daily lives? So that's in a work meeting, that's in my family, in how I relate to my partner, how I treat people in the supermarket, when I'm standing in line and I'm impatient with the person in front of me or the cashier. Do I take them for granted or do I, you know, relate to them as a human being and make an eye contact and really genuinely express appreciation. So the belief is nice and it can be an important foundation to emerge from that. Then for me it's not as valuable or meaningful.

Speaker 2: 10:55

On the other side, you have people that don't have belief but still embody these qualities. So I've worked with over 100 CEOs and many people in therapy and they've spanned across the range of spirituality and religion, from people that are devout practitioners of one tradition or one religion to people that identify as I'm spiritual but not religious, to people say I'm agnostic or people that are devout atheists. But regardless of their belief system, when they find their purpose, their calling in our field, move to serve or they start practicing gratitude or presence or you know, and they embody integrity, they become more empowered, more powerful, they're more connected to themselves and other people follow them. So you can be an atheist and not have belief, but you can develop and cultivate many of these spiritual intelligence qualities which are now highlighted in the field of positive psychology.

Speaker 2: 11:58

So Marty Seligman, who started the field of positive psychology, looked at and developed this measure called character strengths inventory or values in action, and they identified 24 qualities things like hope and gratitude and humor and transcendence and integrity and so on. And in my research on spiritual intelligence there are 22 qualities and they cluster into five domains and so on. I don't need to get into all the details but there's over half the qualities in my spiritual intelligence map into qualities in this research on positive psychology. So you have convergence again from these ancient traditions for thousands of years that said trust and hope and service and gratitude and joy are good human qualities to embody. And now you have research in positive psychology that says yeah, these are the qualities, these are the character strengths that make us live richer, happier, more meaningful, better lives.

Speaker 1: 13:05

As parents, how do we encourage our children to have this positive spiritual intelligence? How can we help them build a good spiritual intelligence awareness?

Speaker 2: 13:23

Yeah, well, that's a great question and you know, I think good parenting is a great topic, but and a crucial topic but I think the first thing is to embody it yourself. I mean, you know, we are role models. Our children grow and follow our example. So if we embody compassion, we embody kindness, we embody patience, we have purpose and meaning in our lives and our children see that our work, our life has meaning and purpose, then those are the values that we instill in them.

Speaker 2: 14:03

The other thing is obviously encouraging their curiosity and learning and helping them believe in themselves and their inherent goodness and that the world is a magical, wonderful place for us to explore. And you know, children are coming to this world with an amazing sense of joy and curiosity and desire to learn and they're like mesmerized by everything. But somehow, as we grow, we get wounded, we get hurt and then that curiosity, that openness to life starts to close down and invariably we're all hurt and whatever. And we're never perfect parents there is no perfect parent but we can be good enough and we can be there for them when they come home from school and you know they've been hurt, they've been bullied, they've been abused and just support them in connecting with themselves instead of leaving themselves and encouraging them to, you know, connect with and express their unique, authentic talents so they flourish and thrive and grow and have this sense of adventure and exploration of possibilities through life.

Speaker 1: 15:29

Is it safe to say that we are born with a heightened spiritual intelligence and these traumas and emotional things may be wound, or or?

Speaker 2: 15:43

freeze. Yeah, I mean, you know it's a. There's a difference. When we're born, we're pure being you know, we are pure, you know.

Speaker 2: 15:55

That's why when you're with children, you feel their life force and you feel their, their aliveness, their beingness, their openness, and that's why it's just so wonderful to hold a baby and our nervous system immediately relaxes. We look at their smile and we just kind of melt because their beingness, their life force is so readily apparent. And so in that sense they are uninhibited spirit, they're unfiltered life force, but there is no consciousness of it, there's not the maturity of it, so they don't have the resources to, when thrown off of that, to come back to it. So in that sense it's not the same as the spiritual intelligence we might have when we're 40 or 50 or 70 or whatever it is. So the raw potential is there but it hasn't been refined and, you know, shaped and so on. You know pure being, pure life, pure amazement, pure curiosity, pure openness, which is what we're trying to get back to. Is that inherent state. But this is kind of our hero's journey in life.

Speaker 2: 17:19

You know, the hero journey archetype is we are kicked out of our home for whatever it is, there's trauma, and then we have to go on this journey through life and slay the dragons and then we come home. And then we come home, back to our place of origin, and then we find our beloved mate and that's the reward. But you know, in this metaphor we're thrown off our home, our true nature, our sacred spark of life, because of these woundings, and then that gives us all these limitations. We feel shame. Something's wrong with us, I'm not worthy of love, I'm deficient. I'm not worthy of love, I'm deficient. And these are all false dragons, self-limiting beliefs that we have to go and slay those dragons to come back. And then we find the beloved which is our own soul.

Speaker 1: 18:31

Now, of course, we also want about it as coming back to our soul, our spirit, our essence, our divine. I cut you off, I'm sorry, our divine.

Speaker 2: 18:36

Yeah, our divine nature. Our divine nature, the sacred spark of life that lives in each of us.

Speaker 1: 18:45

This is so beautiful. Since we mentioned a little bit about emotional intelligence before, how these two differentiate and how these two relate Does one affect the other Can you go a little bit deeper into spiritual intelligence versus emotional intelligence?

Speaker 2: 19:05

Yeah, so I was saying my research, my doctoral research, was to look at emotional intelligence, spiritual intelligence and personality and how it explains leadership, what part of it is important to make for effective leadership. So I'm going to talk dirty for a moment. No, I mean nerdy, I'm just joking. I love nerdy Nerdy, okay, nerdy. So I looked at emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence, and emotional intelligence explained 41% of the variance of leadership effectiveness. I'll come back to explain what that really means. And then spiritual intelligence explained 46% of leadership effectiveness. So it's somewhat bigger effect, but both were important on their own, but combined they explained 67% of the variance, which means they're synergistic and complementary. And there was a small to moderate correlation between them, between emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence, but they're not exactly the same. Now when you think about the concept, you'll see why it makes sense that they would have some correlation.

Speaker 2: 20:27

I said emotional intelligence is the ability to be aware of and draw on our emotional resources, so a key part of that is self-awareness. Now in spiritual intelligence it's knowing our self. You know, one of the dictums of the wisdom traditions is know thyself. Who are you? I mean it starts from the Greeks or before that, the Hindus, whatever. We want to know our essence. So it also involves self-knowledge, but it actually is at a deeper level. It's knowing our essence, not just knowing our emotions, but involved in that is knowing our emotions, which is part of emotional intelligence.

Speaker 2: 21:10

The other thing in emotional intelligence we talk about self-regulation. So I get angry, I get sad, I, whatever. So emotional intelligence is like okay, I can feel my anger, I'm aware of it, but I don't explode, I don't curse, I don't yell, I don't throw shoes at people, I don't break plates, whatever. So that would be emotional self-regulation. Now in spiritual intelligence, again, it goes a little deeper.

Speaker 2: 21:38

We talk about inner peace and equanimity. So again, I might be aware of my anger or I might be aware of my sadness, but with spiritual intelligence I am rooted in my essence, in that divine spark which is deep. So like if I'm in the ocean, you know the surface might have a lot of waves and it might be really noisy, but I have an anchor, that I'm rooted at the bottom of the ocean, so there's quietness and peace. So with spiritual intelligence I can have this equanimity. I could still feel the anger and the sadness and whatever. It doesn't mean that those emotions never arise, but I have something deeper that gives me that sense of equanimity.

Speaker 2: 22:22

So again, that goes a step further than self-regulation. But if I have equanimity I am going to have self-regulation. So that's where they overlap. But spiritual intelligence goes deeper in some things. And then emotional intelligence has some things that are unique to its domain with regards to emotions in other people, part of emotional intelligence is the ability to read emotions in other people, and that's not part of spiritual intelligence. So again, they have some overlap, there's some correlation, but they have their distinct domains and spiritual intelligence goes deeper.

Speaker 1: 23:06

Wow. I want to go back a little bit to your training. Can you share your journey from being a CEO and military leader to becoming a pioneering researcher in spiritual intelligence? What inspired this transition?

Speaker 2: 23:23

Okay, well, I'm going to have to cover my life journey of three years in three minutes or less. No, it's taken a long three years. We have a part two. Three years.

Speaker 1: 23:35

We have a part two?

Speaker 2: 23:37

Yeah, all right. Well, let's see. So I was born and raised in Israel, a war-torn part in the Middle East, a war-torn part of the world, which you know is really horrific what's going on there now. And like all young Israeli men, I was drafted into the military at age 18. Now, fortunately, it was a quiet, peaceful time and I was a shy and introverted you know math and science nerd. But to my amazement I had the fastest promotion record in the history of my regiment and I won all these leadership awards. But you know, despite excelling at the military, the command and control model chafed at my soul and even though it's effective in battle, you don't have time to have great group discussion, go on to the whiteboard and brainstorm and trying to build consensus. Now someone has to take charge and say run there, do that, do this. You don't have the time. So it's effective, but it doesn't necessarily inspire and bring out the best in people. So I resolved I was interested in leadership. I said someday I want to build an organization based on more humanistic principles that inspire and bring out the best in people. So that's what led me to come to the US and study engineering and business and then ultimately start my first company and along the way I was so devoted to it I was Well, just be careful, be careful you don't burn out like I did.

Speaker 2: 25:25

And the internet came and our business model was threatened and I had to reinvent it and I just got frozen with fear. I didn't know how we're going to navigate that. So I went into depression or a dark night of the soul. I persisted and we reinvented our business and take it public and it was a high flying stock and it was a hot company and I was trying to relax. But one day I was getting a deep tissue massage and I was relaxing, relaxing, deeply relaxing. And then my ego dissolved and all of a sudden I experienced my body as made of consciousness and I was looking through the face cradle and the massage table and the floor looked like it was in me, it was part of me and it kind of shattered this sense of separation and identity and I felt like everything was one field, one interconnected thing, and that blew my mind and blew my circuits and threw me actually into a manic episode, because I had this thing you can call Kundalini awakening and if you're not grounded I didn't know how to manage that energy. It really threw me off and I was the CEO of a public company and I wanted everything done yesterday and I had all these visions and downloads about where the internet was going and I wanted my company to be the leader and I wanted everything done yesterday and my team couldn't keep up and my team couldn't keep up and my board couldn't keep up. So eventually they put me on a leave of absence, voluntary leave of absence, they called it. Go for 90 days, get centered, get grounded, because we can't run a public company like this. So that was very devastating for me. I fought them, et cetera. I resigned. They fired me.

Speaker 2: 27:19

It was a big drama. There were headline stories in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times about, and all the people that were seeking my company as this high-flying CEO, hot Silicon Valley company all of a sudden stopped returning my emails and my calls. I was kind of shunned. I was, you know, I was canceled. So it brought a lot of shame and embarrassment. But I was trying to understand what happened to me. You know why? Was I so identified with the business that I worked 78 hours a week? Was this awakening real or was it a delusion? Psychotic episode, or was it so that changed the direction of my life and I went back and got a PhD in psychology and clinical psychology, just trying to understand myself.

Speaker 2: 28:07

And then I heard the term spiritual intelligence. That was coined by this woman called Dana Zohar, but she didn't really define it or operationalize it and how to measure it. And I knew about all the research on emotional intelligence and how emotional intelligence makes us better leaders, more effective human beings, happier and so on. I thought, oh, spiritual intelligence would be a parallel interesting. But it wasn't really defined and measured. And if you want to study something scientifically, you have to know how to measure it and so you can study how it relates to other variables. So that was the research I set on to define.

Speaker 2: 28:45

So I started out interviewing 71 teachers across all the world's traditions, from Hinduism, buddhism, shamanism, taoism, islam, christianity, judaism, earth-based and so on, and I discovered that, regardless of their theology and cosmology, as I said, they spoke of the same qualities and the same virtues. So that was very exciting. And then from there I developed the first academically validated measure of spiritual intelligence that then I used to study the effect on leadership, which is what I was talking about earlier about emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence and leadership. And then, since then, that measure has been translated into over a half dozen languages and studied by many other researchers, some of which are in different languages, different cultures, different countries, and what they've all shown is that spiritual intelligence contributes to our satisfaction and quality of life, mental health, resilience, productivity at the individual level, at the group level, and leaders with greater spiritual intelligence actually produce better financial results for their organizations.

Speaker 2: 29:57

So you know, that was all very exciting and then I felt like, okay, this is my calling, my mission. It's like, you know, when you look at, when I look at my life, it didn't make sense going forward. It was just I was just kind of following one step, one foot in front of the other. But when I look back now then it all makes sense. It's like everything kind of tied to bring me to this point where spiritual intelligence and leadership and all of that is what I'm passionate about. But, as you pointed out, it really started in the military, which you would think is the farthest away from the place. But you know, life works in mysterious ways and there's some intelligence that drives this life. I don't know what it is, but I'm blessed or lucky or both.

Speaker 2: 30:51

And here I am with you and enjoying this conversation and your wide smile.

Speaker 1: 30:57

My cheeks are hurting so bad right now because I can't stop smiling. I am just in awe of everything that you're saying. I mean, it interests me so much. I've been studying emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence for some time and I just absolutely love this, and you know what brings somebody to start looking within. I've always been that three year old it's like, but why? But why? Like I want to know more. You know, I've never been, I've never been OK with people just giving me an answer. I want to go deeper and deeper, and everything that you're saying reminds me of one of my mentors.

Speaker 1: 31:40

He says that your struggle in life has intimacy with your purpose, pablo Marcel. He's a Brazilian entrepreneur and it's incredible. You know, all of these things in our lives have to happen so we can learn how to heal from them, because it's connected and related to our purpose. You know, I feel like we do have a gift inside each one of us and we are here to help the world and to serve with this gift. But in order for us to find this gift, we have to become vulnerable and break down and get to a place where we can heal from this and learn from this. So our scars are other people's medicine for their wounds, and it's just beautiful. I absolutely love your life story and how you came to find out all of this. So how does this spiritual intelligence actually help in leadership positions?

Speaker 2: 32:40

Well, when you think about leadership. So, but before I go there, I just want to say it was very sweet to hear you and feel touched and like see the sparkle in your eyes right now. So that's beautiful and touching. And, yes, what is to give light, somebody said, must endure burning, must endure burning, and and uh, you know, uh, the oftentimes our sacred wounds are what, what gives. You know, I call them sacred because they, they are sacred, they are. What leads us to be that wounded healer, or, as you said, our scars is, is what becomes our gifts to others and what we learn.

Speaker 1: 33:26

But okay, your question. I did say something the other day that really, like it went deep, that it is through our womb that the light comes in.

Speaker 2: 33:37

Yeah, well, there's a song, Leonard Cohen. There's a crack in everything. That's how the light comes in. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 33:46

Yeah, look at that. Yeah, we need to go through these things. So yeah, virtual intelligence and leadership. I am a CEO of two companies, single mom, do work insane hours. I never stop. Yeah, it's hard, but how do you manage?

Speaker 2: 34:04

Okay, yeah, it's hard, but how do you manage? Okay, yeah, yeah, well, you know it takes me back to I remember one of my first business school cases at Harvard was managers and leaders. Are they the same or different? So you know managers are important. You know you have scarce resources and someone needs to decide how to allocate them and make decisions and so on. So that's what a manager is, but what leaders are.

Speaker 2: 34:30

Leaders inspire, and when you think about the root word of inspire, it is spirit. It's the animating breath of life. So leaders breathe aliveness and cohesion and purpose into their organization. They set a vision. They say why are we here? How are we going to serve the world? And then they define the mission and the set of values. And then people that resonate with that calling, with that vision, with that mission, are drawn. And then, when you have a cohesive group of people that have a shared vision and a shared mission and a common set of values, then you have a community of people that are aligned, so our energy is multiplicative, and then you have mutuality of care, and then everybody is focused on doing the right thing as opposed to trying to be right and prove ourselves right, which is coming from an ego place of insecurity and it's a dog-eat-dog world and it's a zero-sum game and there's only so many promotions in the company and I got to look good and make my peers look not so good and put other people down, which becomes toxic. But when you have a leader that can inspire people with that vision, that sense of purpose and create a community, where is that mutuality of care? You know, in our world right now there's a loneliness epidemic and we're so disconnected and for many people work is the primary community. We spend more of our working hours with people at work. So it's so important for people to be able to identify with the purpose and vision and thing of the organization so that they have a sense of belonging, a sense of community. And when that's there, there's so much research about how their productivity is multiplied, how their absenteeism, their health, their physical health, is improved and so on. So I think that all speaks to the leader. That sets the tone and the example. And then the other thing is having that sense of presence and compassion and whatever.

Speaker 2: 36:48

Sometimes as leaders we have to do really hard things like laying off people. There's a downturn, whatever the business to survive has to do that. But can we do that, can we make those hard decisions? And people could still feel our heart. It's not just a thing. Can they feel our heart, our care, the fact that these are human beings that are impacted? And if we could do that with compassion, then we build a lot of loyalty and trust and so our integrity and all these qualities become super important.

Speaker 2: 37:20

So Bain Company, which is one of the top management consulting companies in the world, studied thousands of companies and what they found is that employees that are inspired are twice as productive as people that are just going about doing their job to earn a paycheck and doing the minimum they can. And then they looked at what were the qualities of leaders that got people inspired, and it was the same. Over half of them map into the spiritual intelligence, and it's like servanthood, service, purpose centeredness, being centered, being a good listener, being compassionate and all the same qualities. So the bottom point is that all of this pays off to the productivity and effectiveness of the organization and the well-being of each individual, which then ripples out. They go home, they feel fulfilled, they're not coming from a toxic place, so it becomes a win-win.

Speaker 1: 38:25

My goodness, I just love this. So if somebody out there is listening and they're thinking this sounds really interesting and I want to learn more, I do want to learn more and dive deep into my spiritual intelligence. You mentioned you have a book.

Speaker 2: 38:44

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 38:47

And can you talk a little bit about the book and then do you recommend any other resource out there where they can start the journey?

Speaker 2: 38:54

Yeah, well, happy to talk about my book. It's a great book, of course. So the book has this framework model of spiritually intelligent leadership and all these domains around purpose and grace, which has to do with trust, beauty, joy and gratitude, presence, how you show up with your authentic presence, and so on. Now for each of these spiritual intelligence qualities, each chapter starts with a case study of a client. So I try and anchor it so it's not just theoretical, but how someone is dealing with a difficulty in their business one of my CEO clients and how helping them cultivate and find that quality in themselves helps them address the issue and the challenge they're facing. And then each chapter for each quality has exercises for people to develop that quality. So you can't develop spiritual intelligence by just reading a book. It's not cognitive intelligence. It's important that you have a map of the territory, but just like you can't it's important that you have a map of the territory, but just like you can't, you know, become healthy, physically fit, by learning about the human anatomy, you have to go to the gym or out in nature and you got to work your different muscle groups. So you know we have different muscle groups for spiritual intelligence.

Speaker 2: 40:21

Like I mentioned some of these qualities, so you have to practice it. So what I recommend is people take one quality and work on it for a month and build a habit. So you could start with gratitude, for example, and practice gratitude at the end of your day and then go through your day looking for moments to experience gratitude and then express appreciation, and then that makes you feel good, improves your mood, and then that energy vibrates out and people that feel appreciated are more motivated. So you can work on gratitude. Then you work on your sense of purpose and you find a way to align your personal purpose and calling with the business.

Speaker 2: 41:03

Then you work on presence, which is super important in our world right now, because we're so distracted with so many things competing for our attention text messages, social media you know what have you? So I think one of the greatest gifts we can give someone is our time and attention. We're having a meeting or whatever. Am I thinking about what happened yesterday? Am I thinking about my lunch tomorrow? Or with so-and-so? Am I here with you, right?

Speaker 2: 41:33

now and we're connecting and I feel your presence and you're tracking me and that makes me come alive, like, okay, there is this other human being that's really paying attention to me, and then we're our quality of interaction and problem solving deep, and so you know, you could take any of these things, but you have to practice and build the habit and and build those muscles. Um, and it's a lifelong journey, it's not a once and done type of thing.

Speaker 1: 42:06

Oh my gosh, 100%. Last question I seriously could stay two more hours talking to you because I have so many questions. Maybe we can do a part two, but let's end with AI, because it is such a hot topic right now. Ai in the last six months has just thrown everybody off of their heels. That's not an expression, but I just made it up and it's crazy. And recently somebody sent me a prompt for us to use in one of these ais talking specifically about spiritual intelligence. So I have the prompt with me.

Speaker 1: 42:52

I haven't tried it yet, but it kind of. You know, you tell ai of who you are and how you are and it gives you somebody. The other day spent like an hour, an hour and a half, talking through some points and things that you're able to do every single day. So every morning you wake up and you do that thing that AI gave you and it's kind of insane to try to break your limiting beliefs. That's what it was. You know it talks about. It breaks down your limiting beliefs, but it gives you now the recipe of things that you have to say and do to try to break those things and become a better human being. It's incredible. What else is out there that we don't know.

Speaker 2: 43:31

Yeah, well, that's wonderful. So that's where AI can support our spiritual intelligence, but there's no substitute Like so okay, so the AI gives you these tips, but unless you do them and unless you practice them, you don't really reap the benefit. The other thing is worth saying is yeah, in fact, as AI gets more powerful and takes over more of what human beings used to do, you know, it's like in the old days, you know, people were farmers and then a lot of technology developed and you could produce the amount of food with, you know, much smaller fraction of human effort. And then we had the industrial age and people were working on the assembly line and we had robots and machines that could assemble cars and whatever, and do that more automatically. And then we became information and knowledge workers and whatever. And then AI is going to take over some of those roles in customer service and you have, you know, chatbots that are helping you, et cetera. So what's going to keep us distinctly human? And actually that increases the importance of our spiritual intelligence and our creativity and our inspiration.

Speaker 2: 44:49

So I think it's important to understand the role of AI and how, like anything, if we use it properly, then it can enhance us. Otherwise, it could be dangerous, that it can enhance us. Otherwise it could be dangerous, and so I think it's fascinating what's going on. But you know, this is where we also need this quality of trust in ourselves, in life, in the universe, in whatever you want to call it higher power, the life force that we could deal with these uncertainties. There's so much uncertainty going on in our world right now politically, geopolitically, ai, all these. We live in very uncertain times.

Speaker 1: 45:41

I think, now more than ever, we need something that we can hold on to to keep us sane during these crazy times and connecting with your uh also, spirituality, what you believe in, but having higher, like I said, uh, spiritual intelligence kind of keeps you grounded. I think that is the most important, one of the most important things that we can do right now to to be able to live through this crazy changes and crazy world right now.

Speaker 2: 46:12

We have to trust, we have to trust ourselves, we have to trust life, we have to trust the universe. Einstein said one of the most important fundamental questions do we believe that we live in a friendly universe, Like you know? Somehow, you know, you can adopt one of two outlooks and say, well, everything came into being out of random fluctuations in the quantum field and random genetic mutations, and you know, life has no inherent intelligence or meaning, et cetera, and that leads us, you know, to despair. And as Richard Dawkins said, well, if that leads you to despair, and that's the truth, so be it.

Speaker 2: 46:56

Now, you can't prove that there's something more intelligent or whatever. As the Greeks called it, telos, like direction to life and creation. I can't prove it, but we get to make a choice. And do we want to take on that worldview which makes us more resilient? And I think there's more evidence than not for that view? You can't prove it, but I think, yeah, that's where having that basic trust in ourselves and in life is what we need to be resilient to carry us through and bring our best selves forward. Otherwise, we just sink into despair and that doesn't help ourselves or anybody.

Speaker 1: 47:48

That is the perfect way for us to end today's episode. So increase the trust in yourself. I have no words to thank you. This has been one of my favorite episodes. Dr Amram, Thank you so much for spending this time with us. Any last words how can people find you? Can you share a little bit about that?

Speaker 2: 48:12

Well, sure, I mean I could do my little commercial. I do have my website. It's yoseyamramnet, just my name. Yoseyamramnet, just my name. Or you can go to I have a nonprofit, awakening SI just the acronym for spiritual intelligence, awakeningsiorg or awakeningspiritualintelligence, I'll spell that org. And then there's a YouTube channel at Awakening Spiritual Intelligence and Instagram and so on. So there are many ways to get to me. There is that book you can buy online.

Speaker 2: 48:50

And the other thing, just as a parting thought that comes to me right now, is that everything in our universe we think of as finite and limited, and so if I have a certain amount of money in my pocket a hundred dollars I give you a dollar. I have 99 left, I have one less. But if I have a certain amount of love and joy in my heart and I share it with you, do I have less love or joy in my heart? No, I actually multiply. So that's self-renewing. So I think, to the extent we can connect with the love and joy in our heart and share it, then we renew ourselves and we have this positive ripple effect with everybody around us and, whether or not that person pays it back directly or not, it just feels good for ourselves and we have more love and more joy in our heart. And so that's my parting thoughts for how I like to live with connecting with my love and my joy and sharing it.

Speaker 1: 49:58

That is wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. Guys, if you're not following yet the Beauty of Breathing, go to your favorite podcast platform. We are everywhere. Spotify apple podcast and make sure you hit the follow button and share this episode with your friends if you loved it as much as I did. Uh, we usually meet on tuesdays at 12 pm Eastern time on my Instagram account. Myomove is one of my Instagram accounts and we go live so you can send questions through there as we're doing these incredible interviews. And thank you so much for everybody who supports the show, who supports all of this. You know incredible knowledge that we want to share with everybody. I know that we focus here on myofunctional therapy and myomoves, but I like talking about everything else because we're such complex beings. It's not just one thing that's going to help us find healing. There's so much more out there, so thank you for adding into our pool of incredible lectures and webinars. We really appreciate you, Guys. Have a wonderful day and we'll see you guys next Tuesday. Thank you.