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Meet Kari Bandle, a professional psychic, medium, empath, healer and owner of Sacred Whispers Studio. This podcast dives into the messy, magical and meaningful parts of being human. Each episode blends science with spirituality to explore real life topics along with techniques for empowerment and healing. Sign up for your weekly energy forecast along with the podcast topic in Kari's emails on the main page at: sacredwhispers1111.com
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Hey, you. Welcome back to Medium with a Mic. I'm Carrie, and I'm so glad you're here with me today. Today, we're talking about two fascinating structures in the human body, the pineal gland and the vagus nerve. We're going science deep and spirit deep in this subject because these two things cannot be separated when we're talking about these particular structures.
Kari Bandle:Scientists are fascinated by them. Mystics have known about them for thousands of years, and the conversation happening now at the intersection of those two worlds is pretty exciting. So let's start with the pineal gland. The pineal gland is a tiny pine cone shaped structure, hence the name from the Latin panea meaning pine cone, located roughly in the geometric center of your brain. And when I say tiny, I mean it.
Kari Bandle:In an adult human, it's about the size of a grain of rice, maybe half a half a centimeter long, weighs less than 0.2 grams. And yet what this little structure does is extraordinary. From a purely biological standpoint, the pineal gland is an endocrine gland, meaning it produces and secretes hormones directly into the bloodstream. Its primary known function is the production of melatonin, the hormone that regulates your sleep wake cycle, your circadian rhythm, you know, your body's internal clock. The pineal gland is exquisitely sensitive to light.
Kari Bandle:It monitors light levels through a pathway from the retina of your eyes. And when light diminishes as evening approaches, it begins releasing melatonin, signaling to every cell in your body that it's time to wind down, to rest, to restore. But here's where it starts getting interesting. The pineal gland is the only structure in the brain that is not part of a pair. Every other brain structure has a left side and a right side.
Kari Bandle:The pineal gland sits alone, singular, right in the center, right at the midline, and it sits outside of what's called the blood brain barrier, meaning it has direct, unrestricted access to the bloodstream in a way that most brain tissue does not. It also contains photoreceptor cells, the same kind of cells that are in your eyes, inside your brain, responding to light, in a gland that is entirely enclosed in darkness inside your skull. Why does a brain structure that sits in complete darkness contain cells designed to perceive light? Scientists are still working on that question and the answers they're starting to find are remarkable. I have to talk about DMT here because it is central to the spiritual conversation around the pineal gland and it deserves a real honest treatment.
Kari Bandle:DMT, Dimethyltryptamine, is a naturally occurring psychedelic compound. It exists in nature. It exists in plants and animals, and yes, in the human body. Your body produces it. It's been found in human blood, urine, and cerebrospinal fluid.
Kari Bandle:The late Doctor. Rick Strassman, a psychiatrist at the University of New Mexico, conducted the first federally approved research on psychedelics in The United States in the 1990s after a long hiatus. He administered synthetic DMT to volunteers in controlled clinical settings and documented what happened. What his subjects reported was remarkably consistent: contact with other intelligences, beings, entities, a sense of entering a realm more real than ordinary reality, profound spiritual experiences that many described as the most significant of their lives. Strassman wrote about all of this in his book, The Spirit Molecule, which I highly recommend if you want to go deeper.
Kari Bandle:Now, Strassman and others have theorized that the pineal gland may be a site of DMT production in the human brain. This has not been definitively proven in humans, though DMT has been found in the pineal tissue of rodents. But the theory is compelling for a number of reasons. The pineal gland has the enzymatic machinery necessary for DMT synthesis. It sits outside the blood brain barrier giving it unusual access to circulate substances directly into the bloodstream.
Kari Bandle:And the timing of pineal activity? Peak activity during deep sleep during the hypnagogic state between sleep and waking, and potentially at birth and death aligns with the experiences people report during those altered states. Near death experiences, vivid dreams that feel more real than waking life, spontaneous mystical experiences, the sense of leaving the body, the sense of contact with other intelligences or realms. If the pineal gland is producing or releasing endogenous DMT at certain moments of deep rest, of crisis, of transition, then the body itself may be equipped with a built in mechanism for accessing non ordinary states of consciousness. Your body came with this factory installed.
Kari Bandle:Now let's talk about why mystics have been obsessed with the pineal gland for thousands of years before any of us knew what DMT was. The concept of the third eye, the Anya chakra in Hindu and yogic tradition, is located at the center of the forehead, slightly above and between the eyebrows. It is associated with intuition, with inner vision, with the ability to perceive beyond the physical senses. It is considered the seat of spiritual perception, the point through which higher dimensional information enters the human system. And anatomically, the pineal gland sits almost exactly behind that point at the geometric center of the brain, right where the third eye is mapped.
Kari Bandle:This is not a coincidence. Traditions that mapped the body's energy centers thousands of years before modern neuroscience had any idea what the pineal gland was pointed directly to the place where it sits and said, this is where you see beyond the physical world. This is your inner eye. The ancient Egyptians venerated the pine cone as a symbol of spiritual awakening and the pineal gland's connection to divine sight. The pine cone appears in Egyptian art, in Sumerian art, in Greek and Roman iconography, often held by gods and figures of spiritual authority.
Kari Bandle:The staff of Osiris is topped with a pine cone. There's a massive bronze pine cone sculpture in Vatican City in a courtyard called, fittingly, The Court Of The Pine Cone. The Freemasons and other esoteric orders have used the pine cone as a central symbol. This symbol has followed humanity across cultures and across millennia. Rene Descartes, seventeenth century philosopher and mathematician, not exactly a mystic, called the pineal gland the seat of the soul.
Kari Bandle:He believed it was the principal seat of the rational soul in the place where the soul and the body interacted. He was working from anatomy and philosophy, not spiritual tradition, and he arrived at the same conclusion. Deepak Chopra, the late Terence McKenna, DMT researcher Rick Strassman, physicist and consciousness researcher Amit Goswami, across disciplines and traditions, brilliant minds keep arriving at the same tiny pine cone shaped structure in the center of the brain and saying, there is something here we don't fully understand yet and I believe them. Here's something that almost nobody talks about that I think is critically important. The pineal gland calcifies.
Kari Bandle:Over time, calcium phosphate crystals accumulate in the pineal tissue, a process called corpia organasia or brain sand. By adulthood, the majority of people have some degree of pineal calcification, and studies have associated increased pineal calcification with decreased melatonin production, disrupted sleep, and in some research with cognitive decline. On a funny side note, I once envisioned two goldfish swimming into my brain and nibbling off the crystal on my pineal gland. I must have needed a little bit of help. So what causes calcification?
Kari Bandle:Several things. Fluoride is a significant one. Fluoride accumulates in the pineal gland at a higher concentration than virtually anywhere else in the body because the gland sits outside the blood brain barrier and fluoride is readily absorbed there. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is documented in peer reviewed research, including work by Jennifer Luke published in the journal Carre's Research in 2001.
Kari Bandle:Fluoride in drinking water and in toothpaste accumulates in the pineal gland. Other contributors to calcification include certain medications, heavy metals, and this one is very relevant chronic stress and poor sleep, which disrupt the glands and natural rhythmic function over time. So what do you do about it? The evidence is still emerging, but here's what researchers and integrative health practitioners have pointed to. Reducing fluoride exposure, filtered water, fluoride free toothpaste is a reasonable starting point.
Kari Bandle:Magnesium, particularly magnesium threonate, has been studied for its ability to support neurological health and may help counteract some calcification effects. Boron found naturally in leafy greens, fruits, and nuts has been shown in research to help the body metabolize and excrete fluoride. Iodine supports overall endocrine gland function. Sunlight, particularly morning sunlight, supports healthy pineal function. And darkness, genuine darkness during sleep, is one of the most important things you can give your pineal gland because it is most active in complete dark, including that red dot on your TV or phone charger.
Kari Bandle:And meditation. I want to talk about this one specifically. Practices that involve focused attention at that third eye point, breath awareness, visualization, Yoga Nidra, certain forms of pranayama have been associated in research with increased pineal activity and melatonin production. When you sit in meditation with your awareness resting gently at that point between and slightly above your eyebrows, you are not just doing something symbolic. You may be directly stimulating the gland itself through focused neural attention.
Kari Bandle:Okay now let's talk about the vagus nerve And if the pineal gland is your antenna, the vagus nerve is the cable that runs the signal through your entire system. The vagus nerve is the longest nerve in the human body. It originates in the brainstem right at the base of the skull and travels down through the neck, through the chest, through the heart and lungs, through the diaphragm, and all the way down to the abdomen, connecting to virtually every major organ heart, lungs, stomach, liver, kidneys, intestines. The word Vagus comes from the Latin for wandering. It wanders through your entire body, and it is the primary component of the parasympathetic nervous system.
Kari Bandle:The rest and digest, calm and connect side of your autonomic nervous system, as opposed to the sympathetic fight or flight side. Here's one of the most remarkable facts about the vagus nerve, and I want you to really hear this. Approximately 80 to 90% of the nerve fibers in the vagus nerve are afferent meaning they run from the body to the brain not the other way around. Your gut, your heart, your organs, they are constantly sending information upward to your brain through this nerve. Your body is not just receiving instructions from your brain.
Kari Bandle:Your body is informing your brain constantly. Your gut feelings, literal nerve signals traveling upward through the vagus nerve to influence your thinking and your emotional state. The gut has been called the second brain for good reason. The enteric nervous system, the network of neurons aligning your gastrointestinal tract contain approximately 500,000,000 neurons, more neurons than the spinal cord, and it communicates directly with the brain through the vagus nerve. When you have a gut feeling, when something feels off in your stomach before your conscious mind has processed why, that is real neurological information.
Kari Bandle:That is your enteric nervous system picking something up and sending it north. The vagus nerve is essentially the biological infrastructure of what we call the gut brain heart connection. And in spiritual and intuitive community, this is the hardware that underlies so much of what we experience as intuition. Think about it. When you walk into a room and something feels wrong, before you've identified anything visually, before anyone even has said a word, Your body knows.
Kari Bandle:Your gut tightens, your heart rate shifts, your breath changes. That is information moving through your vagus nerve from your body's sensory systems to your brain, bypassing your analytical mind entirely. When you meet someone and you feel an immediate deep resonance, a sense of recognition of safety, of this person is my people. That's not just psychology. That is biological response.
Kari Bandle:Your nervous system is reading that person's nervous system. Co regulation the way our nervous systems literally entrain to each other through proximity and presence is a real documented neurobiological phenomenon. Heart Math Institute, a serious research organization in California, has conducted extensive studies on the heart's role in intuition and information processing. Their research has found that the heart generates an electromagnetic field that extends several feet outside the body, that the heart responds to stimuli before the brain does in certain conditions, meaning in some situations, the heart receives information first. They've documented what they call cardiac intuition, the heart responding to future events before they occur in controlled experimental conditions.
Kari Bandle:The heart communicates with the brain primarily through the vagus nerve. When people talk about heart centered knowing, that deep, quiet certainty that has nothing to do with logic, this is the pathway it travels. The vagus nerve connects the pineal gland's home, the brain, all the way down through the heart and into the gut. It is the thread that runs through the entire system. The antenna at the top, the intelligence in the heart in the middle, the ancient knowing in the gut at the bottom.
Kari Bandle:The vagus nerve is the wire that connects them all. Your body was built for this, every single part of it. So now let me talk about the vagal tone because this is incredibly practical and most people have never heard of it. Vagal tone refers to the activity level of the vagus nerve, Essentially how well it's functioning, how responsive and resilient it is. High vagal tone is associated with better emotional regulation, more resilience to stress, stronger immune function, better cardiovascular health, and this is the part relevant to our conversation today, greater access to calm, receptive, open states of consciousness.
Kari Bandle:The states that are most conducive to intuitive perception. Low vagal tone, a sluggish underactive vagus nerve is associated with chronic stress, anxiety, depression, inflammation, poor emotional regulation, and a persistent sense of being stuck in survival mode. When your vagus nerve is underperforming, you are essentially living more in the sympathetic nervous system, more fight or flight, more threat scanning, less able to drop into the open receptive states where intuition and spiritual connection live. Here's the critical insight. You can train your vagal nerve.
Kari Bandle:It's not fixed. It's not something you either have or you don't have. It's a function of your nervous system that responds to practice. How do you increase vagal tone? Let me give you the research backed methods.
Kari Bandle:Slow deep breathing, specifically breathing with a longer exhale than inhale. The inhale activates the sympathetic nervous system slightly. The exhale activates the parasympathetic vagal response. A breathing pattern of inhaling for four counts and exhaling for six or eight counts practiced consistently measurably increases the vagal tone over time. Box breathing, four seven eight breathing, coherent breathing at about five to six breaths per minute all of these are effective.
Kari Bandle:Humming, chanting, and singing. This one blows people's minds. The vagus nerve innervates the muscles of the throat and larynx. When you sing or chant particularly with low resonant tones you are directly stimulating the vagus nerve through vibration. Toning, chanting Om, humming your favorite song in the shower, singing in your car.
Kari Bandle:These are not just emotionally soothing activities. They are literal vagal nerve stimulation exercises. Every chanting tradition in the world, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Gregorian, indigenous traditions, was doing vagal nerve therapy without knowing the neuroscience. They just knew it worked. Cold water exposure, splashing cold water on your face, cold showers, or swimming in cold water.
Kari Bandle:These activate what's called the dive reflex, a strong vagal response that slows the heart rate and activates the parasympathetic nervous system. It's a shock to the system in the most therapeutic way. Meditation and mindfulness consistent contemplative practice has been shown in multiple studies to increase phagal tone, reduce inflammatory markers, and support the kind of nervous system regulation that opens access to deeper states of awareness. Social connection and physical touch. The vagus nerve is heavily involved in social bonding, Eye contact, genuine laughter, physical affection, being truly heard by another person.
Kari Bandle:All of these activate the vagal system. Loneliness and social isolation conversely suppress vagal tone. Your nervous system was literally designed for connection. Yoga and breath work. The combination of physical postures, breath awareness, and inward attention in yoga practice creates a powerful vagal toning effect.
Kari Bandle:Particular postures, inversions, twists, forward folds stimulate vagal activity through direct physical pressure on the abdominal organs and the vagal pathways running through them. Let me bring all of this together because I want you to leave this episode with a sense of the whole picture. You have in your body a system that was built from the very factory floor of your biology for exactly what we talk about on this show, for spiritual perception, for intuitive knowing, for connection to something larger than your ordinary conscious mind. At the top of the system, the pineal gland, your biological third eye, sensitive to light in ways we don't fully understand, potentially producing endogenous psychedelic compounds at key moments of consciousness shift, mapped by ancient traditions across the world as the seat of inner vision and higher perception. Sitting alone at the center of your brain, outside the blood brain barrier, pointing at the sky.
Kari Bandle:Running through the middle of it all, the vagus nerve, the wanderer, the information superhighway connecting brain to heart to gut, carrying 80 to 90% of its signals upward. Your body speaking to your brain, your gut informing your mind, your heart leading the way. The nerve that when toned and healthy puts you in the exact state, calm, open, receptive, connected where intuition and spiritual perception are most available. And at the center of the nerves journey, the heart, which generates its own electromagnetic field, which responds to information before the brain does, which has been documented in research to exhibit what can only be called its own intelligence. This isn't a bunch of woo woo.
Kari Bandle:This is anatomy. It's neuroscience. This is what your body looks like when you study it closely enough. Every human being walking this earth has this system. It doesn't matter if you've been told you're not intuitive, not sensitive, not spiritual.
Kari Bandle:You have a pineal gland. You have a vagus nerve. You have a heart with its own intelligence. You have a gut with 500,000,000 neurons sending information north. The ability is there.
Kari Bandle:It was always there. It just needs to be developed, and the spiritual path needs to be lived. That's it. Let me give you a daily practice framework that supports both structures working at their best. In the morning, wake up and get morning sunlight within the first thirty minutes if possible.
Kari Bandle:Not through a window, but actually outside if possible. Even just five or ten minutes. This sets your circadian rhythm through the pineal gland and starts your day with healthy hormonal signaling. While you're out there, breathe slowly and deliberately, long exhales. Wake up your vagus nerve gently.
Kari Bandle:Meditation, even ten to fifteen minutes of daily quiet, focused attention with awareness resting at the third eye point, supports pineal health and builds vagal tone simultaneously. You're literally exercising your spiritual hardware. Throughout the day, when you feel stressed, activated, anxious, use your breath. Long, slow exhales, quietly if you can. Touch your face with cold water if you need a reset.
Kari Bandle:These are not coping strategies. They are nervous system recalibration tools. Journaling. Check-in with your gut and your heart daily and ask what is my gut telling me about this situation? What does my heart know that my mind is arguing with?
Kari Bandle:Write it down. Practice trusting those signals before they're confirmed by logic. In the evening, protect your darkness. Blue light from screens suppresses pineal melatonin production. In the the hours before bed, dim your lights.
Kari Bandle:Put away your screens. Allow your body to begin its natural nighttime processes. Your pineal gland does some of its most important work while you sleep. Give it the environment it needs, and always sing, chant, laugh, connect with people you love. These are vagal toning practices disguised as the best parts of being alive.
Kari Bandle:I wanna just sit with this for a second before I let you go. You are not broken. You're not blocked. You're not someone who just isn't intuitive or isn't spiritual or isn't able to proceed beyond the ordinary. I want to repeat, you are a human being with a pineal gland and a vagus nerve and a heart that generates its own electromagnetic field and a gut with half a billion neurons that are constantly reading the world around you and sending that information upward to your brain.
Kari Bandle:You were built for this. Every single cell of you. The conversation between science and spirit is getting louder and more exciting every passing year. And what they keep finding every time they look closely enough is that the body knows. The body has always known.
Kari Bandle:We're just finally developing the language to describe what the mystics have been pointing to for thousands of years. So honor your body. Tend to your hardware. Breathe slowly. Sleep in the dark.
Kari Bandle:And sing and chant. Trust your gut and follow your heart. And come back and listen to this one again when you need a reminder of just how extraordinary you actually are. If you'd like to learn more about developing your intuition, check out the Sage Method. It's the best internationally attended intuition school.
Kari Bandle:Thank you so much for being here today. You know where to find me for questions, comments, or suggestions. Go to sacredwhispers1111.com and share this one, would you? I think a lot of people need to hear it. Until next time, trust what you feel, honor what you know, and remember you are so much more than you think you are.
Kari Bandle:Keep listening to those whispers of wisdom.