Lynne McTaggart, author of best-selling books The Field, The Intention Experiment, and The Bond, shares some things she discovered in her research about living with intention.
In this episode, she talks about the energy web that connects us all. And she shares the reasons why our intentions and thoughts are so powerful they can impact others.
Lynne helps us navigate spirituality in a way that is simple and easy to understand. Using science, research, and her journalism background, Lynne can inspire us to use our thoughts, our hearts, and our minds for the outcomes we want.
In this rare interview, Lynne shares insights from her research, ways we can live intentionally, and how we can create more positive relationship dynamics.
If you enjoy the work of Don Miguel Ruiz, Drs. Gay & Kathlyn Hendricks, Marianne Williamson, or any of our other guests, then you’ll surely love this interview with Lynne.
Table of Contents
Intentional living can benefit your own life
Living an intentional life has many benefits:
- Having more clarity when making decisions.
- Creating the space to spend time with loved ones.
- Adding more self care to a daily routine.
- Having family at the top of your priority list when you spend time together.
- Being able to create space for more meaning, inspiration, and feeling fulfilled.
- Having the ability to stay focused and set goals for a clear path to new opportunities.
- Aligning your priorities with your values instead of living on auto pilot.
- Living a meaningful life with more intention so you’re able to make conscious choices and have intentional control over your life.
- Being more aware of your body so you make conscious choices about what it needs.
- Living a better life of self care for your emotional and mental health so you have less stress, more joy, and a healthier mindset.
Key takeaways from the episode about living an intentional life
- The Zero Point Field unites everyone on a subatomic level like an invisible web.
- We’re all part of a giant energy web.
- We’re connected through the furthest reaches of the cosmos. We’re connected to everything.
- You can’t go back and fix the past, but the future is always having an impact on the present moment.
- Every thought we have is essentially light.
- All living things are sending out a tiny current of light.
- Our thoughts are a powerful mechanism that we feel in our bodies, and we also transmit them globally to other people.
- Conscious decisions can affect physical matter.
- The most important aspect of relationships is the connection.
- Vulnerability encourages the heart to open.
- Try sending out loving intentions while you’re having an argument.
- Conscious choice is being present.
Transcript: Living With Intention – Lynne Mctaggart
Luis Congdon
On today’s show, we’re going to be looking at how science and spirituality merge into one field of study. Specifically, looking at the work of Lynne McTaggart, who started off as a journalist and noticed this entire phenomenon happening. But then, she wanted to dive deeper and find out what’s the cause. We’re going to talk about how to live with intention.
Our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, mindset, and actions are they impacting people in different parts of the world. Can we really impact another person through prayers, thoughts, healing, and loving feelings sent to another person? All of this is living with intention.
Her work says yes. It’s really good to see that and her work, as well as to talk to somebody who’s spent tons of years, lots of money, lots of energy, and resources, showing us that our thoughts and our feelings do impact the people around us.
So without further ado, let’s bring on Lynne McTaggart and talk about her work in the field and living with intention.
Kamala Chambers
Lynne McTaggart, it is so wonderful to have you here talking about living with intention.
I found your work through The Field, and I was blown away by the research that you discovered and the ideas that you collected together about living intentionally.
I’d love to hear just for our listeners a little bit more about what The Field and how to live with intention.
Lynne McTaggart
I run a magazine called What Doctors Don’t Tell You, and I co-edited this with my husband, Bryan Hubbard, for 27 years. In the middle of my mental health research, in the early 90’s, I kept coming across very good studies. These are scientific studies with all the double-blind, everything of spiritual healing.
What Is The Field And How Does It Play Into Living With Intention
Lynne McTaggart
I kept thinking to myself. How does this work? That you can have a thought and send it to someone else and have them get better because this seems to violate everything we think about how the universe works.
So, I kept thinking there must be such a thing as energy fields in the body. I thought, “I’m going to just investigate this a little bit. I’ll talk to some cutting-edge scientists. They’ll probably know this, and it’ll be really simple, then I’ll write it up.”
What I wasn’t prepared for was what I did discover when I spoke to this scientist, which is that each of them was uncovering essentially the makings of a new science. And this science did not resemble the science we’ve been told in any way.
This science was talking about a giant quantum energy field. I called The Field. They call it The Zero Point Field, which unites everybody essentially at our subatomic level like an invisible web.
This isn’t just woo-woo. This is the stuff of scientific fact because they know with subatomic particles. They’re not little particles, even though they’re called that. They’re actually vibrating packets of energy. They send energy back and forth like an endless game of tennis. That particle exchange of energy, when it’s just between two particles, is pretty teensy. Half a watt worth of energy.
But when you multiply this by all the subatomic particles of all the things in the entire universe, you have this extraordinary, unfathomable amount of energy just sitting here in empty space like some sort of supercharged backdrop.
The energy density is so much that if you were sitting about a yard away from me, the energy in the space between us would be enough to boil all the oceans of the world. That’s how much heaving energy is going on out there in empty space.
Living With Intention As A Giant Web Of Energy
Lynne McTaggart
There are two big implications here.
- We’re all part of this giant energy web. It means we’re connected essentially through the furthest reaches of the cosmos. We’re connected to everything.
- It gives us a plausible means of trying to explain a lot of things we’ve never been able to explain, like remote viewing or ESP between loved ones or twins. All of this could be easily explained with this kind of energy field.
Luis Congdon
You’re telling me that the work you’ve done could explain why Kamala knows when I’ve been eating unhealthy, and I try to hide it from her. She’s really big into organic food, and when she leaves the house for a day or two, I go out and eat the trashy food that she won’t eat, and she comes home, and she’s like, “I know that you’ve been eating bad Luis.” I’m not sure how that plays into living with intention.
Lynne McTaggart
That’s ESP. Exactly.
Kamala Chambers
And I’m really curious. I know we’re going to get into how it affects our relationships, but before we do that, I was blown away by some of the research you’ve found about ESP and about remote viewing.
What is one of the biggest phenomena you’ve found that you have been blown away by the most?
Lynne McTaggart
There are so many, but probably the biggest one of all is information and studies demonstrating that we can control and affect the past.
There was an amazing by an Israeli professor. I wrote about this in my book, The Intention Experiment. He wanted to debunk alternative medicine. So he set up what he thought was an impossible study. He took a group of patients who had very serious blood infections. It’s called blood sepsis.
Living With Intention Experiment
Lynne McTaggart
He divided them into two groups. One was given ordinary drugs, and the other was given ordinary drugs, plus they were prayed for. He was very rigorous about it, and afterward, he studied the medical records of both.
He found the patients who had been prayed for were better in every regard. They’d left the hospital sooner. They had fewer complications. They’ve just got well faster. There was a really interesting kicker to this study. These patients and the study was carried out in the year 2000, and that included praying. The patients had been in the hospital in the years 1992 to 1994, 6-8 years earlier.
He published this on the Lancet, thinking that this was going to demonstrate once and for all you can’t use the scientific method to analyze alternative medicine. But that wasn’t how it was perceived. It was universally acknowledged to be a demonstration that we can go back and change the past. That was my blog boggling, but there are also lots of other studies that look alike.
It’s not that you can go back and fix the past but that the future is always having an impact on our lives in the present moment.
I once asked a Princeton University Dean of Engineering who’s been involved in a lot of this study, Robert Jahn. “How this could all work?” And he just turned to me and said, “Oh, simple then. Just take time out of it.” And it all makes sense.
That, to me, is probably the statement of all because that is probably a real demonstration that in the quantum world, in the world of this new science, time is a now, and space is a here.
Living With Intention In Our Relationships
Kamala Chambers
I am blown away constantly whenever I research something more about one of these studies.
One thing I’d love to hear from you is how The Field plays into our relationships.
Just thinking about how it affects our past and our future. When we get into relationships, we start to lose sight of our partner sometimes, and then, it kind of contains our past memories and past experiences that we had when we fell in love with someone.
How do you think that plays in?
Lynne McTaggart
I think the way it mainly plays in is the idea that our thoughts are not locked inside our heads. We always think of our thoughts as being somehow accordant to brain activity. That’s what we’re told according to conventional science.
What happened to many of the studies I’ve written about in my last three books, The Field, The Intention Experiment, and The Bond, are all about the fact that our thoughts are trespassers. Every thought we have is essentially light.
We know this from the work of the late Fritz-Albert Popp, a German physicist. He discovered that all living things are sending out a tiny current of light. This light has been associated with thoughts of healing and a number of other things.
The light seems to go up when healers are sending healing energy. So, thought is light to some degree. The light is beaming out all the time, and we know this from many experiments I’ve done with people. That people are picking up from each other all the time.
Living With Intention Has An Impact On Our Relationships
Lynne McTaggart
And we know this from what happens to bonded couples. There was a really intriguing study called The Love Study where the Institute of New Ethics Sciences wanted to find out what happens when one of the partners has cancer, and the other one sends him or her healing intention and living with intention.
They got together all of these couples, and one of the couples had cancer. They put the patient with cancer in one room, hooked him up to all sorts of physiological equipment, measured everything, and then had a camera trained on him.
The well partner was put in a completely other part of the building with monitors so he could see his partner’s image flash out from time to time. He was also hooked up to all sorts of physiological equipment.
Every time the ill partner’s image flashed up, that was the well partner’s signal to send a loving healing intention for living with joy and intention with his or her partner.
Afterward, when they looked at the entire readouts from all of this equipment, they discovered that when the well partner was sending healing intention, his brainwaves and the ill partner’s brainwaves started synchronizing. Their heart rates are synchronizing. Their breathing started synchronizing.
Every aspect of their bodies became synchronized. It was a little bit like two bodies became one.
Practicing Living With Intention In Relationships
Luis Congdon
It’s amazing. One of the things I’ve done is I’ve created this little deck for couples. Each partner has a little stand and their own deck, and then it has questions or thoughts like “What’s one thing I appreciate about my partner this week?” or “What’s one quality my partner gives to our children that I don’t?”
The idea is just sitting, and while you’re sitting on your computer, you periodically look at this question. Maybe you think about it. Maybe you decide you don’t.
What’s happening is that this thought starts to raise appreciation, and while you’re away from your partner, you’re creating this good feeling. So when you get together, it’s kind of like, “Wow! I know you’ve been thinking good things about me.” Somehow I feel that people picked up on that stuff.
While we’re away from each other, we’re creating really positive sentiments. For me, that’s just really the point meant what you said about how powerful this little deck is and why it’s important for couples or friends. We just want to focus on really loving thoughts.
Just as you were talking, I was sending out love to people in my life, and I just felt so good. Just to start feeling loving thoughts towards people in my life.
Lynne McTaggart
That’s the other thing too. There’s a lot of information I’ve got in The Bond that talks about how we’ve been designed to feel as good about giving to others as eating or having sex.
Nature has designed us to feel good about giving. And, when that has to do with the partner, there’s a whole big whoosh of all of those chemicals, the oxytocin, the vagus nerve activation.
All of these things are involved, and compassion, altruism, and love are all activated.
Paying Attention To Our Thoughts For Living With Intention
Lynne McTaggart
The reverse of that is true too. There was one very distinct study showing just one argument between a couple. If one of the partners has a wound, it takes a whole day longer for that wound to heal after one argument.
Luis Congdon
And according to the research of Dr. John and Julie Gottman, the work I thought for years is for every 7 putdowns or negative things said, the partner who hears this has been showing to get sick one time a year. They really talking about loving and living with intention.
It’s really amazing to hear how this research is showing us that just seems like common sense, but once we put it in research terms, it makes people go “Woah! It must be real. It must be true.”
Thoughts are so powerful, the things we say are so impactful, and the things we’re thinking can really negatively and deleteriously or positively impact our partner. That just makes me constantly scan my thoughts which sound like chaos as well.
What to say about that, or how do we create a friendship or alliance with our thoughts because I know that my mind can run wild sometimes.
Lynne McTaggart
One of the things I teach and a lot of my workshops is how to start monitoring what you’re sending. So that you’re not doing such an unconscious broadcast because that’s what’s happening all the time. People are unconsciously broadcasting. We’re just beaming out negative stuff.
Living With Intention And The Law Of Attraction
Lynne McTaggart
If you were to start journaling what you’re thinking, you would see that most people are probably about 70% negative. We’re making judgments about ourselves and everybody else.
We’re undermining our own job performance by worrying unnecessarily that we’re going to fail or thinking we’re going to fail.
Every little bit of flotsam and jetsam that are going through our brain is also getting beamed out, and that is becoming the broadcast, the intention you’re sending to the world when you’re living with intention.
Kamala Chambers
And you have this whole book on The Intention Experiment. Do you want to talk a little bit more about how intention affects our relationships and practice living with intention?
Lynne McTaggart
What I wanted to do was find out what intention was for one thing when I wrote that book. This helps you as you’re living with intention. Because after The Field, there were some implications in a lot of those studies that I’ve written suggesting that consciousness is an actual something with the capacity to affect physical matter.
A lot of people have been talking about manifestation, the law of attraction, and all of that stuff. And I wanted to be the serious investigative hard-nosed reporter in me who wanted to know, “Well, okay. What can you do with this, really?” and also, “What happens if lots of people are thinking the same thought at the same time? Does it magnify the effect?”
The Science Behind Intentional Living
Lynne McTaggart
I wanted to investigate a lot of the science of intention and living with intention, which I did. But I also wanted to go further and see about collective thought and what happens there. So The Intention Experiment is not just a book.
It’s also an ongoing experiment. Since 2007, I’ve been running these giant, global experiments where we invite our readers to come on my website and send intentions when you’re living with intention to some target that’s been set up very painstakingly in a laboratory in some university.
I’ve been working a lot with the University of Arizona but other universities, too, where we set up some sort of carefully monitored blinded study.
We sent intention to make seeds grow faster under very scientific conditions. This is living with intention. Every time we’ve done this, we ran it 12 times. The seeds sent intention grew higher than all of the controls. It was living with intention.
We changed water ph. We’ve even had 4 experiments lowering violence in a war-turned area. There had been 27 experiments to date and 23 of them have shown positive, measurable effects. That’s what we wanted to do, to see about group mind.
There’s a lot of really interesting things that relate to relationships. First of all, there is the fact that your partner is reading you all the time. Your unconscious broadcast is being sent out and replied to on a different level. We know that and we also know the closer you are with somebody, the more it seems that they are able to pick up a lot of information about you via things like ESP.
Being Kind And Living With Intention
Lynne McTaggart
The big question here is, how conscious are you? Are you using intention in a positive way? Are you living with intention? Are you using it to also create your relationship?
One of the things I’ve written about in The Bond so much is the power of changing what you have a relationship for. Most people actually have a dominant view of relationships. “I have to be right. If I’m not right, I have to demonize the other person. In fact, I had to pulverize them in order for me to be right.” That seems to be primary instead of making the most important aspect of it all, the connection.
Luis Congdon
I grew up with a hard childhood in the first 8 years of my own life. I was heavily chastised, punished, and treated badly when I made mistakes. In talking to people, I understand that this is just a common human thing that we tend to want to punish people for mistakes, or when we realize we’re hurt, we tend to lash out and do things.
Unconsciously, some part of us wants the other person to hurt, and it has taken me a lot of work. I’ve been working on this my whole life how not to punish the person when I’m feeling hurt or when they make a mistake and focusing on having a connection.
Kamala and I have gotten so much better when we’re upset with each other and saying, “I’m upset, but I desire connection with you, and I don’t want this upset to take over.” It’s something that really had an impact. This relationship impacts all other relationships.
It’s so important for couples to learn how not to punish each other.
Lynne McTaggart
I think that’s such a good comment.
Living With Intention And The Power Of Vulnerability
Lynne McTaggart
One of the things that’s come forth in a lot of the work that I did in The Bond the power of being vulnerable when you are in a relationship. People think of a relationship and dominance as a really important feature of it that’s because we’re taught from the very earliest times to be so competitive.
There is a lot of evidence about the power of vulnerability, and I take this from the work of a guy called Orland Bishop, who is creating relationships among the impossible and that is among rival gang members in Watts, California, which is one of the most violent places in America.
They’ve got this heavy-duty rival gangs, and he’s getting these young men who have all come from highly wounded backgrounds to come sit down and talk to each other with the idea of connection to relate in harmony.
It sounds like a false errand, but he’s managing it, and the way he’s doing is by encouraging them to have deep talk.
They talk about their backstory, why are they, who they are, and where did they come from. He encourages them to be highly vulnerable, and with that vulnerability, instead of the other being the dominant force, it encourages the heart to leap across the fence. It is the most powerful thing.
More people from opposing situations need to try to do this. There was a wonderful situation like this. Not with couples but with opposing groups. There was a shooting incident in a Planned Parenthood facility in America. A guy came in and started shooting all of the staff who was anti-abortion.
Opening Your Heart And Living With Intention
Lynne McTaggart
When that happened, the Right to Life people who were against abortion and the Right to Free Choice people who were in favor of abortion decided it was time for them to come together and start talking. They met in secret for a couple of years, and they learned during that time to be vulnerable, to talk with each other about why they believe in what they believe, and to stop demonizing the other.
So they were relating and at the end of the few years, they learned how to start working together in lots of ways.
They also held a press conference, and of course, the reporters asked them who won the debate.
They said, “Well, no one because now that we’ve shared why we believe what we believe, we believe what we believe more firmly.” The reporters said, “Oh well, then the whole thing has been a mistake and a failure.” They said, “Oh no, because now we go out together. We party together. We look after each other’s children. We love each other.”
Even in the situation of a big disagreement, being vulnerable, sharing why you believe what you believe, and your back story allows the heart to leap across the fence.
Luis Congdon
That’s so beautiful to hear, learning how to be vulnerable and weak. That’s a skill that’s incredibly special and challenging.
Living With Intention And Letting Go Of Competition
Luis Congdon
For some reason, I just think of a couple in a class. The wife is telling a story about how she and her husband just got into this huge fight. She got angry.
They’re about to go to bed, and she said, “Fine. I’m going to go to the other room and sleep there.” She went and laid down in one of their children’s beds. She laughed and said, “I was too big for the bed, and I was hoping the whole time that he would come in and get me and that we could fix things.”
While she’s acting angry, she still desires connection. I’ve noticed that within myself and within other people, and it’s so hard to admit that. I imagine that these gang members also desire connection. It’s just that they haven’t learned how to have it.
Lynne McTaggart
Absolutely.
Kamala Chambers
I would love to hear a little bit more about relating in a new way. Sometimes in relationships, we could get into these competitive, push-and-pull ways. I’d love to hear how we can move out of that competition and into a new way.
Lynne McTaggart
There are several things.
- Power of apology.
- Power of vulnerability.
These sorts of things are always thought of as real signs of weakness. It was as though our relationship was a competitive situation that we had to get there first on the finishing line in order to have a relationship.
One example of the things that I emphasized in The Bond that many people have, and I’ve got a lot of worksheets about this, is learning how to cross cultural divides and cross-ideological divides or just divides to connect with people who are not like you or people who aren’t agreeing with you at the moment.
Being Present And Living With Intention
Lynne McTaggart
The big thing is sending a loving intention while you’re having an argument. This is living with intention.
In my workshops, I have people come together and start arguing on a subject they really disagree with, or one will talk about why he believes what he believes, and the other one sends him loving intention and living with intention. It’s amazing.
All of the heat goes out of the person who’s listening by doing that. That’s one really important little tool that works beautifully.
Kamala Chambers
I love how simple it is but how impactful and profound it can be to be living with intention.
You talked about consciousness, and being conscious in relationships often requires us to be mindful of our own bodies, mindful of our own feelings, mindful of how the other person is responding
I would love to hear a little bit more about living with intention and consciousness and how we can bring more intention and consciousness into our relationships.
Lynne McTaggart
I think that being conscious is being present.
In my book, The Intention Experiment, I have a powering-up program that I devised from listening to a lot and interviewing a lot of masters of Intention; Buddhist Monks, Qigong Masters, and Master Healers.
They all have different ways of doing intention, but there were also so many commonalities that I sort of distilled all of their commonalities into a simple program people could follow. It was really how to be very focused on living with intention, how to be very heart-centered with intention.
But one of the things that’s really important in focus is just being present, and the easiest way to learn how to do that is some bouts every day of mindfulness meditation. That is non-judgmental awareness of the present moment and your present activity and slowing down just to come to your senses.
Living With Intention Through Dialogue
Lynne McTaggart
If you’re eating your breakfast, listening to the sound of it, feeling what if feels like when it goes down to your throat. I’m sure you don’t slow down enough. Smelling it and tasting the crunch of it. Really listening to all of that and just slowing down to absorb that.
We use our eyes a lot more and our ears to a slightly lesser extent but our other senses too are really operational. It’s so important when we’re relating to someone.
Even when you’re just waiting in line, you’re tying your shoe, or putting on your coat, just being mindful, just go into your senses for a few minutes. That can help you learn to be present when someone else’s there.
Another way of learning to be present is to do a dialogue.
If you’re with a group of people or just with one other, instead of arguing or discussing something in order to win, you discuss it as though you’re bouncing a ball around. You don’t win. You just slow down long enough to listen to where the conversation is going without judgment. That’s a meat little trick to stop wanting to dominate and win and be competitive.
Kamala Chambers
Everything that you’ve shared is so powerful. I‘m wondering if there are any last closing thoughts you want to make sure the audience walks away with.
Slowing Down And Living With Intention
Lynne McTaggart
Slow down long enough in your relationship to understand that it’s less important to be right and much more important to be mindful, to be present, to be conscious, and to connect.
Luis Congdon
Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy? Very well said, Lynne. I love what you’ve said about living with intention.
Thank you so much for coming on the show and talking about living with intention. We really appreciate it. We are completely in love with your work on living intentionally. That’s been an honor to have you here. Thank you.
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