11 3 22 Staying Positive In A World Of Toxic Negativity

Hello and welcome. Part 4 of New Paradigm Thinking: Staying Positive in a World of Negativity and Birthing Your Spiritual Perspective. Of course, New Paradigm Thinking is about how to change your mind and change your life. And before I begin, let me remind you that we still have an opportunity to see episodes of, or else the entire movie of Live Life, uh, movie that we created about 10 years ago, myself and multi-award-winning Jerry Sher was the producer, uh, and you can see it. Easiest way is just to go to drmiller.com/live-life, L-I-V-E-L-I-F-E. You know, this is an incredible, absolutely incredible time to be alive, really, because everything is unfolding so clearly, yeah, out, out there in the world and, and, and, and all around, really, that people have to try really, really hard so clearly hard to, and even bend themselves out of shape in order to not see the truths that lay before us. People sign on to lies that are incredible, uh, and yet it's so visible. And gradually more and more people are waking up, stepping away from that noise factory that's creating all the misery. That we see in the world around us. All the wisest people in the world have told us that the crucial quality we need to have in life is love. We've heard from Jesus, Gandhi, the Buddha, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Muhammad, Lao Tzu, Mother Teresa, and on and on and on and on. It just keeps coming up again and again and again, as if they're all As if they're all in, in some kind of, uh, conspiracy theory. Yeah. No. So to me, this means loving myself and loving the beauty that I find within my being and within other people. And in the world around me. It means having empathy, and more, it means having compassion, truly discovering what love is. Love of others, even those that I don't like. Well, that creates a challenge for, for most of us to love people that we don't like, and yet Sometimes that's the most important part, most important thing for us to do. And sometimes it's difficulty. There's difficulty, great difficulty in feeling joyful when we look at some of the horrible things that are going on around us. We have beautiful, beautiful yachts on one hand, and then we have abject poverty on the other. And the yachts are all over, but the poverty is all over too. How can you not see it? I guess I guess you could manage to not see it if you spent your time on those yachts, or if you stayed home in your mansion, as long as you didn't walk too far down the street. Yeah, what do we make out of that? How can that be in this world? Mansions, poverty, and the roundup of the Haitian immigrants coming from a terribly poverty-stricken place. And they arrive only to have Gene Autry and Roy Rogers round them up with ropes. And in the midst of all of that, we have the billionaire space race that's going on. I forgot which one of them, which one of them won, but somebody, somebody got there first. So I've heard F. Scott Fitzgerald said, the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things that are hopeless and yet to be determined to— one should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet still be determined to make them otherwise. So, well, but I think it's worthwhile, you know, with that mess that's around us, to focus on the good news, because there is good news around as well. For one thing, it's definitely a good time to celebrate the election in Brazil that brought about the end of the presidency of a man who championed the soaring deforestation rates that have brought the Amazon ecosystem to the brink of collapse. The new president, Luiz Lula da Silva, promises to stop the loss of these millions of trees that have already resulted in decreased rainfall right there in the lungs of our planet. So that's a good idea. And you want to focus on positive things because our brain has this negative bias. It's going to orient us towards seeing the negative things. That means if you, you know, have a board and you have 50 photographs on it, and some are a picture of a flower, picture of a house, picture of a cloud, picture of a severed hand, a picture of a a dog running down the street, a picture of a rainbow, picture of somebody with an arrow sticking in his chest, and picture of a beautiful mountain, and so forth. And you tell the person to spend 15 seconds, 30 seconds looking and memorize as many of those pictures as they can. And then you take it away from them and you tell them which ones can they remember. They will always remember the ones with the knife sticking in somebody or a severed hand or an arrow. Because we are organized to see and retain, because that's how we live. There's carrots and sticks out there. You better be careful of the sticks or you won't get to have many carrots. So if you can't quite tell if it's a carrot or a stick, you should be suspicious, shouldn't you? Because if it's a stick and you think it's a carrot, you may get whacked in the mouth. So we have to look at the positive things. And people say, you want the good news or the bad news? Always get the good news. 'Good news first,' and don't think about what the bad news might be, then you get the positive feeling first. Yeah, we still have to deal with the media that's around us, the media that puts the words and the ideas and the pictures in front of us all day long. That's what our— we're in an information society. Now, the Collins Dictionary last year proclaimed the word of the year for 2022 is 'permacrisis.' I was reading that the lyrics of the songs we listen to have changed. So between 1965 and 2015, popular songs in the top 100 mention love only 50% as much as they used to, and instead there's twice as much increase in the words of hate. In our popular songs. But what do we do about things like that? Squeezing our eyes tightly shut is not the right answer. To not see and not speak up is wrong. Silence is the voice of complicity, right? Well, this toxic negativity— important that we look at, important that we pay attention to it, because we have to deal with it. And if you don't deal with it, then it affects you unconsciously, and you can't understand why things are going wrong. It surrounds us all day because it's being injected into every pore of our being. We live in an information society, and the vast majority of those who are channeling information toward us care much more about selling us their product or their candidates than to inform us about the truth. Is that— the truth is like Doesn't make any difference. Truth is on the town. The channels are so crowded that there is less than 3 seconds to attract our attention. Unfortunately, the best way to do that is to trigger our anxiety or our anger or our hatred or our disgust because of the negative bias. So therefore, the vast majority of everything that's set before us is designed to cause us to feel uncomfortable because that will attract our attention. Make us look at their advertisement and make us tend to believe that the product they're trying to sell us is in some way going to help us with the anxiety that they've triggered within us. And that same negativity that's in our culture reflects the negativity that we feel in our daily lives. Between 1990 and 2018, the share of Americans who put themselves in the lowest happiness category increased by more than 50% in polls. and that was before the pandemic. Worldwide Gallup polls tell us that the amount that people experience negative emotions related to stress or sadness or anger, worry, and physical pain hit a record high last year. And on top of all the negative commercial messages being beamed at us, the enemies of democracy— democracy, remember that? The form of self-government in which human rights are recognized and every individual is entitled to equal treatment under the law. Well, the enemies of democracy are accelerating their attacks. Brutal extremists seem to be on the rise everywhere. Twitter has disrupted China-based operations consisting of nearly 2,000 different user accounts that were all fakes, just designed to disrupt our upcoming election using the very clever tools that Russia used to really disrupt the election of 2016. And those 2,000 are probably just a drop in the ocean. And even right here in our own nation, as well as in other countries with long-established democracies, internal forces are exploiting the shortcomings in our systems, distorting national politics, to promote hatred and violence and unbridled power. So I've mentioned Philip Wiley's book Mindfick, M-I-N-D-F asterisk C-K, and that he was at the center of Cambridge Analytica as one of the programmers until he realized what he was doing was really evil. Shifting the American election and the Brexit movement. But, and he tells all the secrets of how they do it. It's absolutely jaw-dropping when you begin to see the very clever ways in which they're doing things. So these enemies of democracy are causing problems all over. And it's almost as if the global order is at a tipping point. And if democracy's defenders do not work together, e pluribus unum, to help guarantee freedom for all people, the authoritarian model will prevail. It's gaining all over the world, this movement towards authoritarianism. Which is built upon fear, the thought that, "Oh, the strong man is the one who's going to save us." And then, you know, right in our own country, we have more and more hate crimes, startling rise in armed white supremacist bands, and then we have the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband, who's somebody who— I don't think he had too much against the husband, But, uh, but there's so much, so much vituperation, vile statements made about Nancy Pelosi. That's what's behind it, even though the people who are writing those placards didn't hold the hammer. But, you know, that's how it happens, and that's, that's how it is happening all over. Now, so I'm not even going to talk about climate change and possible global nuclear annihilation, but that's enough. You can see there's struggles out there. And as we know, pain in life is inevitable, but suffering is not. And that's something that, that the Buddha was so eager to teach us. Hello, this is Dr. Emmett Miller, and today our session is going to be focused on staying positive in a world of toxic negativity and birthing your spiritual perspective. So why is it we live in this kind of world, and what can we do about it? Well, The answer to these questions may be more straightforward than you'd expect. And what we need to do is, at least as a first step, is clear. The answer is simpler and easier to apply if you know how and you realize how important it is that you do it. And you have to be willing to, to practice applying this answer. And the first thing I want to point out is that all of these little bits of bad news that I've thrown at you— please forgive me— they all have something significant in common. You may have guessed it, but I'll come back to it soon. But first I'd like to build toward that answer by briefly reviewing what we've been exploring in other sessions, in our earlier sessions, the other 3 programs in this series. And we discussed the fact that life on Earth began with what I call the urge to merge, that at some point, instead of just forming highly polarized compounds, the carbon atoms realized that they could share electrons. And it's really that sharing that was the beginning of being able to create different kinds of compounds, namely what we call organic compounds because they contain carbon and we are carbon-based. And now you could make big, big molecules that do fancy things because it's not so much polarity, it's not so explosive. And these, among these proteins, we also find desoxyribonucleic acid, that giant spiral, the DNA spiral that made it possible for us to have a very special reproductive advantage of having a male and a female and passing on qualities of the, the, the parents. We had a single cell. Soon the cells figured, well, might be better if we hung out together instead of separating. So again, that urge to merge that pulled together the chemicals to make the cell now pulls the cells together to make a multicellular organism. And they become more and more complex, having many, many different kinds of organs that are woven together. And in order for, in order for this to happen, what's needed is a brain and a central nervous system that can coordinate all of these so that everything works together as a whole. And so that urge to merge that creates the body of the person or the animal then also we can merge with others in the environment to make things happen. We can merge for safety, for family, for instructions. Animals get together in herds and flocks. And then there's that basic urge to merge that happens between a couple. There is that urge to become one mother with her child inside. A mother and her infant, or a father and his infant. And what I'm going to ask you to do is to feel the tone of what we're talking about and what you can visualize in your mind of what that feeling is, that urge to merge, now we can start to call it love. In love between a man, a woman, between members of a couple, between a mother and her child. Can you feel it? And if you have a child, you know what that's like. Animals feel it too. There's an urge to merge. We might as well call it love, that connection, familial love, connections with friends. So what I'm saying is that from the depths of the carbon atom comes a message of wholeness, a guide for behavior at all levels. And when that wholeness and oneness is intact, then the animal or the couple or the family or the community can work well together. But if the wholeness is broken, if, uh, the cell membrane is cut, or if the skin is slashed, or, uh, an arm is fractured, then there's a lack of wholeness. And it's the return of the wholeness that is what we call healing. So we're talking about life, the urge to merge. We're talking about love, the urge to merge. We're talking about healing, which is the urge to get together and reform wholeness. And so I tend to call this whole energy that we're talking about love with a capital L, shared values, an eye toward integrating things, there's an inclusiveness. There's a both/and. It's, yeah, me and you can do this. There's a caring and intimacy. There's a balance, a fairness, a harmony, empathy, compassion, wholeness, collective intelligence, coherence. I mean, they're all ways of referring to the same thing that I'm calling Love with a capital L. The secret to life and to healing then is balance and harmony and coherency, all parts working smoothly together. Without that, there's conflict, dysfunction, stress, and the stress chemicals that result destroy health, block healing, and impair performance. That same urge to merge happens when primitive human beings got together to form tribes that lived together, that worshipped together. And they developed these incredible rituals and worship and songs and dances that were very powerful, and they kept groups of people together. This is in Bali. This is in Saudi Arabia, the great Hajj, with all the people together walking in the same direction at this very sacred site. And the goal of all these relationships is to stay connected. And if the integrity of the group is broken, it must be prepared— repaired. And this is Healing at the collective level. So we have this energy and a way of thinking about the world where it's, come and join me, be with me, I love you. There's another way of approaching the world, um, which is analytical. It's about dividing things. It's about comparing. It's not both and, it's either or. It's where black or white— remember in school they said compare and contrast? You're differentiating, fragmenting, you're looking for good versus bad. There's an exclusiveness, critical, it's judgmental. There is a contemptuous, rejecting, debating, and attacking quality that it can lead to. and this unfortunately is the mode that our world has been slipping into. I introduced this first back in 2005, and it was the basis of my Our Culture on the Couch, the book I wrote in 2009 warning that if we didn't do something, we'd end up right here where we are. And so I call that way of approaching the world, the old paradigm, because it guides and informs so much of the things that we see around us and the way people think and the way they treat each other. And what we can see obviously is that the world needs a great deal of healing. Out there. Now, I'm not suggesting that we throw analytical thinking out the window. That's not something you can do. If you are alive, you're alive because of violence to other forms of life made it possible. That's obvious if you're a meat eater, but even vegetarians have to kill a carrot in order to consume it. No, what I'm suggesting is that because of the natural negative bias of the human brain, We should be certain first to consider the holistic viewpoint, the me and you, the integrative system. Look at the system as a whole before you jump in there. Remember my story of the two sisters fighting over an orange? The father says, "Well, cut the orange in half, and that way no one gets cheated. Everybody gets the same amount." The mother comes along and said, "What did you want the orange for?" And the first one said, "Well, I needed the flesh of the orange to make some fruit salad." She asked the other girl, "What did you want the orange for?" She says, "I wanted the rind of the orange to make marmalade." And so the mother divided the same orange differently, and both girls were completely satisfied. There are sometimes answers, but only if we look at the whole context. Look at the situation, look at the system. And that means looking at it with the eyes of love, with the eyes of the merging, of the connection between things, and of the balance between things. But there are sometimes, certainly when we do need analytic thinking, that's for sure, you know. And I guess nowhere is this, is this old paradigm more clear than in politics, you know, and Politics used to be, I hear your point and that's a clear idea from my worthy opponent, but I beg to differ with him and here's what I see. That's the way it used to be. There was respect. People worked across the aisles. But now it goes like this: I'm right and you're an idiot, a traitor, and a scum. They're calling each other scums all over the place. I was looking at some of the things they were calling each other recently. These are actual quotes. Michael Wolff is a total loser. Sloppy Steve Bannon. Haiti and some African nations are just shithole countries. Little Adam Schiff. Little Adam Schiff, who's desperate to run for higher office, is one of the biggest liars and leakers in Washington. Crazy Maxine Waters, one of the most corrupt people in politics. OkaHontas, anti-American communist. And so we see this kind of vicious, violent, dehumanizing way of communicating, and it sets the stage for political violence, for physical violence. So when when a former president referred to the pandemic as the Chinese flu or the kung flu, um, then all of a sudden there's all of these acts of violence against Asian people. You know, little old ladies are just being pushed over in the middle of the street. And again, look at what happened to Mr. Pelosi. You know, some Guy from Canada, of all things, he's going to set the world right by breaking Pelosi's kneecaps. Then there's the rise of antisemitism and the way that many of our performers who have huge audiences and huge followings on social media are putting out antisemitic statements. I mean, didn't we figure something out during the Second World War. So again, the purpose of all these is to dehumanize the enemy. That gives you then the right to disrespect them, to cheat them, to steal from them, to lie and take away from them. And if necessary, yeah, you might have to kill a few of them. Hmm. And that's where it begins. And so one of the important things for us to do to not get swept up in the propaganda and infected by that violence. That's what I call the other kind. I call that violence. There's a violence in the analytic either-or judgmental critical way. The other side is love with a capital L. The other is a V with a capital V. I call it that way because I want to make those— I want to make the distinction really clear. The old paradigm basically only looks at the violent side. The new paradigm uses both, but is careful to first look at the love side of it. Mohandas Gandhi said, He said, the ally that you must always seek is the part of your adversary that knows what is right. The ally you must always seek. I want to talk about your two brains, my two brains, our two brains. Yeah, because we all have two brains. Well, we have many different brains, but there are two that are particularly important. And one of the main problems with human beings and cultures throughout the world that is the source of most of our illness, dysfunction, failure, unhappiness, is our failure to understand that we have two brains and to understand how to operate them properly and do it. Most people just don't even know that they have two brains or have any understanding of what that means. But those who are in power use that information. They know about it, and they use that information to manipulate us and to control us. Maybe the best example of that we can see if we look back to the work of this fellow Edward Bernays. You know, what's the standard American breakfast, huh? We all know what that is. It's eggs and bacon. But it wasn't always that way. It was only after they hired Edward Bernays, who happened to be the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who read Freud's work with the unconscious, figured out he could put it to work. So working for the Hormel Ham Company, he sent out, uh, letters and ads saying that 3,000 doctors feel it's better to have a heavy breakfast in the morning before going off to work, and a great breakfast to have is bacon and eggs. And that's where it came from. And of course their sales soared. But of course these are things that lay down crust inside of our arteries and damage who knows how many people's health. You know, there was a time back then in the '30s where you never saw women smoking. Some women smoked, they'd sneak off, but they would never smoke in public until Bernays came along and created this event in front of the Easter parade. On Easter, he had a bunch of debutantes, fancy ladies all dressed up, and as they passed a certain corner, they all pulled out their cigarettes and lit them. They called them freedom torches, and this was females showing that they could smoke too. And this started women smoking in public. And then of course they learned to inhale and learned that, you know, smoking is really, really, really sexy. Well, until you get to emphysema or lung cancer anyway. Wow. And this is how he did it. And so he created then what we call propaganda. Until he came along, people bought things because they needed them. But ever since Bernays, people began to shop because they desired things. He realized the unconscious could be tricked. Instead of purchasing because they're needed, purchase things because they want them, they have a desire for them. And at that point, Advertising is about creating desire. He also said propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government. And he worked for 5 different presidents, I believe, from Woodrow Wilson all the way up to Eisenhower. Now, Wilson never wanted to go into the First World War, but when J.P. Morgan started losing money because he had, he was bankrolling France and England, then he went to his friend Wilson, said, "We have to do something. I don't want to lose all my money." And they hired Bernays. And it wasn't like about— because nobody wanted to go to fight in a war so that the European kings and queens could settle their problems. But instead, we went there to bring democracy to Europe. That was his clever line. And sure enough, We did it. Well, it was going fine. Then, of course, along came Adolf Hitler, Göring, and those fellows, and they started using his techniques. They read his book, it was entitled Propaganda, and figured out how to control people, and they did a magnificent job of it. Or as Goebbels said, if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. And people began to believe what they were putting out there. And we all know what this— what the story was. A very ugly, very ugly story. They demonstrated how the Christian community of good German citizens could have their fears and angers whipped up into a murderous pitch. And even convince people that was worth killing other people on a genocidal scale. And so Bernays was so shocked by this, he changed the name of what he was doing to public relations. Well, no. Well, in many years since then, in our country as well as in many other countries of the world, scientists have developed even more effective techniques for manipulating people's beliefs. They study it in graduate school. They become attention engineers. They have learned how to manipulate people's beliefs by triggering emotions, using a form of mass hypnosis to channel the energies of these emotions of fear, anger, and hatred, and to manipulate people to buy their product or vote for their candidate. And I don't use the word hypnosis advisedly. I've been practicing hypnosis ever since I discovered the incredible things that it could do to help people heal back in the '60s and '70s. That's what it is. It's simply a form of hypnosis. You're just fooling with the unconscious parts of people's minds. And of course, when you use hypnosis in in medicine or psychology or psychiatry, you're doing so in order to serve people. But this is a much more nefarious way of using it because you're using it to manipulate people, a despicable way of twisting people's minds. And that's the source of so much of, of our polarization in, in, in, in our, in our current world. There's an excellent book by Ezra Klein. It's called Why We're Polarized, and it does a very good job of showing exactly how this has taken place in our culture, leaving us in our little silos where we can't even talk to each other. But as Carl Jung said, Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. Whatever is rejected from the self, what you don't recognize is coming from your internal self, appears to be coming from the world. And then you go out and you attack it. You attack it in the world. And just as the Nazis were so good at dehumanizing. This is one of their posters here, where here you have a rat's body and then a sort of a caricature of a Jewish face, and underneath in German it says, "Destroy them!" See, because if they're not really human, then it's okay to destroy them. They do that in the army. They Yeah, you're not fighting Vietnamese people, you're fighting gooks. You know, so you don't have to feel bad about killing them. You don't have to feel bad. And here's an amazingly similar one from a piece of left-wing propaganda in Britain in 2016: You're never more than 10 feet from a Tory. Mm-hmm. And it's important to know what we have to deal with so that we can, so we can ready ourselves. Let me pause for a moment. Let me tell you why I'm into what I'm into. It all started when I was in the 5th grade, when I learned about the Nazi death camps, and I was horrified at the industrialization of human slaughter. that how machines were being used to kill people. I somehow realized at that point that there was a potential evil to create mass destruction, but it was not dead. I realized that future tyrants could create even greater disasters, and I went around trying to tell people, I said, "Oh no, Hitler's dead, the Nazis are over, it's okay, we don't ever have to think about it again." And I didn't believe it. I decided I was going to try to figure out some way to solve this problem. It led me, curiously enough, to become a physician and a shrink and to learn all the secrets I could of life, of how the human mind and brain and body all work, to find a solution to this problem. And as you can see, I've spent 50 years of my life working on what I believe has the potential to save our world. Not alone. There are others who've been working together and in parallel because they believe the same thing. And if we can join ourselves together, then we can achieve the team that can win in the way that we want to win. Not victory over but of, you know, finding that part of our ally that knows what's right and join together. I've wanted to be a contributor to that. And then I saw people with all kinds of ideas go viral and pick up huge throngs of people who support them with donations and support them by spreading the word to other people. And things go viral, and pretty soon you've got millions of people joining together with some belief. And sometimes the beliefs are pretty silly. You can go look up the Flying Spaghetti Monster. There's a whole bunch of people who worship a Flying Spaghetti Monster. And some, some things are very positive for sure. And my belief was that what I have been studying has been demonstrated over and over to be powerful by so many people that I would be able to at least become one of those people who got a lot of support through donations instead of my seeing individuals and then taking the money that I make from seeing individuals and pouring it into, into this system. And so I wanted support, either donations or people purchasing products. And I must say that I'm saddened that it didn't go viral. I've been doing this show now for about a year and a half, and, you know, every week we get the same 150 people sign up. Every week, you know, I ask people to tell other people about it, and let's see if it can catch on. I mean, I, I just, I think this material is incredible, uh, and I'm trying to put it together in the clearest way as possible. So I haven't given up, but I can't afford to do it every week anymore, or even every other week. And so if you have some ideas, you can help me out, or you can— you can help me out by sending a donation this way, you know. And it's each week, and I put probably 30 to 50 hours into preparing these talks. Each week, and I get 3, 4, 5 donations that— I mean, right, it doesn't, it doesn't really add up. So I'm— I really do need to be putting my time where it's going to pay off. I'll still be doing something here. I'm still working on a website that's going to make the material available. I'm going to keep trying, maybe not as often, but maybe with just as much, with just as much vigor. So, so, um, do continue to, um, send in your donations and, uh, allow yourself to visit drmiller.com, drmiller.com. So that you can see the various things that I've, that I've provided for you to learn in detail, to apply in your own life the tools that I've been presenting. Related to today's program, Rainbow Butterflies, a beautiful meditation on transformation. Inspired Imagery is some advanced techniques of imagery originally designed for my students who are practicing, the doctors that practiced it, but you can use it for yourself. The Love Meditation, which of course is about love. A video called Nurture Your Spirit, which is part of a set of 6 DVDs, which from— they're called The Power of Your Mind. So The Power of Your Mind to Deal with Stress, The Power of Your Mind to Nurture Your Spirit, The Power of Your Mind to Be More Physically Healthy. Those are what the other videos are. My— the original book from the '90s Deep Healing: The Essence of Mind-Body Medicine. Once I had figured out just how mind-body medicine worked, I published that book. And then the one that I published in 2009, Our Culture on the Couch, uh, where, um, it was a little bit too early. People didn't see that we were having a problem with violence at that point. Um, so the first couple of chapters are a little antiquated because things hadn't gotten as bad as they are now, but the rest of it's good. Our Culture on the Couch, 7 Steps to Global Healing, uh, they're still very meaningful. And then there's Imagery for Healing Our Planet, and you can find that at shop.drmiller.com. D.R. Miller dot com, Dr. Miller dot com is an informational site where you can learn a great deal about dealing with stress. You can learn a lot about guided imagery, about self-healing, and so forth. So I want to mention for a moment— let me go back to that, to that screen, which Now, in our development of our nervous system, the first of those two brains is the limbic system, what I call the monkey brain. This is System 1, and the other is called the neocortex or the prefrontal cortex, where the higher thinking goes on. I also call that limbic system, because it lives in the paleomammalian cortex of the brain, it's something that all of the mammals have, I call it the monkey brain. And that's the one, among other things, that's responsible for our emotions. For stress and for reactions. It's about saving our lives. It is System 1. It acts automatically, unconsciously, fast, effortless, automatic. System 2 is slow and effortful. It's not automatic, and it seeks new information and makes decisions. So it's System 1 that's responsible for our stress. Stress is a situation where the monkey mind reacts when there's a demand, but it believes that there's a life or death demand. That's what calls forth the stress response, because 100,000 years ago, that's the only demands there were. We didn't worry about our income, we didn't worry about politics. We didn't worry about inflation or whether we'd get fired or whether Susie Q is going to go to the dance with us. Instead, it was life or death. And so you would react by pumping chemicals into your bloodstream—cortisol and adrenaline, things like that—shifting blood away from your internal organs out to your muscles so you could fight, suppressing your immune system, basically dissolving the organs of your body so you can fight like hell for 10 seconds. Because if you don't, you're going to be dead. But then you didn't have another emergency for days or weeks even, so you had plenty of time to relax and recover. That's the second half of the stress cycle. It's the recovery phase. And so because that only happened every once in a while that you had stress, there's always a chance for recovery and the body would rebuild and rebalance its organs. But now in today's cavemen, it's a different story. There's no rest. There's phone calls, there's texts, there's emails. There's everything that you can name coming at us. There is no rest. And every single one of them is telling you that your life is in danger. So the stress builds up over time. This is what creates illness, because it wears away the body. It creates all of our addictions and bad habits. Because what we do— our addictions are how we get away from the uncomfortable feeling inside because of the built-up stress. When a person is calm and peaceful, they don't say, "Oh, I gotta have a drink." You don't gotta have a drink unless you are not in control of what's going on inside of you. And in virtually every one of these situations, that feeling of anxiety or fear or fury or whatever it is, is misplaced. It doesn't help you. It only harms you. So So what I want to do is to just kind of share with you an outline of how you can deal with this kind of situation that we, that we are confronted with. Yeah, and so I want you to let yourself be in a comfortable position because we want to take the awareness inside. Yeah, it is true that the— your mind is like a safe, but the combination to that safe is locked inside. Well, how we're going to open it? Well, we have to go inside. So step 1, enter the now, become radically present, because most of us are not present. We're just simply not present. We're thinking about the past, feeling bad about it, worrying about the future, comparing ourselves with other people, thinking about other places. So your first step in doing this, first level, is to do physical tension. Release your physical tension. The second level is to set your mind free from unnecessary thoughts. So take a deep breath in. As you let it out, let it be a feeling of letting go. And just focus on each breath out as you choose a point in the distance to focus on. With each breath out, think to yourself the words, letting go, letting go. When your eyes begin to feel like they would like to close, allow them to close, and behind your closed eyelids, Imagine you see the word relax on the back of your forehead and feel your eyelid muscles relax all the way down to the point they don't want to open at all. Test your eyelids and feel how relaxed they've become, and as you do, let the relaxation from your eyelids flow throughout all the rest of your body. You're relaxing deeper and deeper. And as you relax, you automatically come into the present because the things that interfere with your relaxation are things that are in the past and in the future. And if you're not thinking about them, they don't exist for your monkey mind. So allow yourself to feel in complete acceptance of this moment in time. There's nothing missing. There's nothing extra. With each breath out, you're breathing out tension and stress. Each breath in is breathing in relaxation. Everything is exactly the way it should be right now, and it's perfectly safe for you to relax every muscle in your body from the top of your head all the way down. To the tips of your toes, and feel yourself being bathed in a cloak of warmth and love, feeling all the safe, peaceful, loving qualities that an ideal mother should have available for her child. And allow yourself to be in this safe place, this present moment. Good. And if you like, you can imagine you're flying on a magic carpet through space and time and fly to a very beautiful place, your special place of relaxation. Go there and relax in this place. Be at peace. See the colors and shapes around you. Hear the sounds. And truly feel the relaxation. Good. That's presence. That's being in the now. Step 2 now is centering. Become aware of who you are. Become aware of your talents, your gifts, your skills, the beliefs that you have that are meaningful to you, spiritual connections that you're aware of. Be aware of your ability to love, to be loved. You might make contact with this by traveling to a time in your memory when you felt really good about yourself, when you were in a most creative mode, when you were feeling free, important, and loved. A time when you were in touch with and feeling all the emotions that flow out of that, the joy, the freedom, the happiness, perhaps a feeling of love. Feel all this wealth, all this beauty, all these possibilities that are inside you, and even your ability to love another and receive the love of another. And think of yourself with that loved person. Feel the love and anchor this feeling in your body by Putting a hand over your heart or just squeezing a couple of fingers together and think of a word that best describes this feeling that you feel now. And anytime any unnecessary thoughts come along, just imagine those unnecessary thoughts are like words written on a blackboard in your mind's eye. And then as you gently test your eyelids, imagine you're drawing a wet eraser across your mental blackboard, erasing all the unnecessary thoughts. How wonderful it is to be you in this safe place. And now we go on to step 3, accessing your wisdom and spiritual resources, because there is wisdom within you, and there are spiritual connections. Can you recall a time in your life when you felt deeply connected to spirit, like a holy moment in your life, an experience of being really inspired? Maybe it was a certain experience you had, like a sacred moment, an epiphany of sorts, or a time when you were praying or meditating. Or maybe with others, or in a sacred place, something that was pure and beautiful, or a time when you felt inspired by great music or poetry or another art form. That's it. Find a time when it feels like maybe you were connected to spirit, whatever spirit means. Maybe a spirit guide or a wise center within you. Maybe it's a voice you heard long long ago. Maybe you're aware of a spiritual sense but can't think of a specific entity. Maybe if it's just like the spirit that moves through all things, or universal intelligence, whatever it might be, Mother Nature herself, whatever it is, open to allow your experience of this higher level of you. This spiritual level, this philosophical level. Good. Open your heart to receive from this level. Allow your palms to be up. Allow your hands to rest on their backs so that your palms are facing upward. As a way of anchoring that feeling of being open, willing to receive. Good. And now let's go to step 4, which is creating your future. You've probably heard me say on many occasions that the future is not someplace you're going. The future is a place that you're creating, and that you created with every thought, word, and action. Now, at this moment, while you're in touch with this deep reservoir of relaxation and security, in touch with this great storehouse of inner powers that can enable you, and a sense of openness to a higher level. Imagine that you can look forward into the past, perhaps days or weeks or months ahead, or years, whatever. But just as you can look back at the past, imagine you can look forward into the future and see yourself at the time that you have surmounted the problems and challenges that you've been struggling with in the recent past. Instead, picture yourself being totally successful in the way that means something to you at a deep level. Create an image of this future as it might happen if you were to use all of your powers and strengths, open to the wisdom and guidance within you. Put yourself into this image. Feeling this feeling of success. Imagine that that inspiration from the spiritual level of you is carrying you forward into the future, transforming your life and the way you think and the way you move and act, and transforming the world around you. So that in this scene, you're dressed the way you like to be dressed. Doing something that's very joyful to celebrate your creativity and your ability to create this success, this healing that you truly wanted to create in your life and in your world. Feel it. Good. And within, allow yourself to feel gratitude. Feel really grateful, really thankful for all that is, for all that you have, and for all that Spirit has done and can do for you now. Feel it. Feel that gratitude. Good. Now when you're ready, just guide yourself back to an awareness of the space around you, but keep these positive feelings within you and the knowledge that you can come back and create this process again and again. When we get together next time, We're going to put together a really, really beautiful version of this imagery for you to experience, and also we'll go deeper into the meaning of spirituality and its incredible value in all of our lives. So once again, I'd like to thank you for being here with me. I'm Dr. Emmett Miller. Come and enjoy what I've put together at drmiller.com, at drmiller.com, and check out the various products that I've suggested. You can listen to samples of them there: Rainbow Butterfly, Inspired Imagery, the Love Meditation, It's been wonderful to be with you. Take care of yourself and namaste.