Deep Relaxation, Guided Imagery and Self Healing Here’s How to Make Them Work For You

Hi, this is Dr. Raymond Miller. Welcome to today's presentation, Deep Relaxation, Guided Imagery, and Self-Healing: Here's How to Make Them Work for You. And let me just start by thanking everybody who has helped to make this show possible by your wonderful donations. And remember that when you, when you purchase the audio, video, and written material that we have at shop.drmiller.com, that all of that, those are all donations too. So thank you for your help in whatever way you choose to share it. Today I'd like to present you with an amazing set of powerful tools that I have come upon and developed. The goal of these mind tools is to help you create relaxing, healing, and productive states of mind, and to use them to create the health and success that you deserve to have, to become the person that you came here to be, to remember the truth of who you are, the power that you have within, and to intentionally focus that power to create the world and the life that you truly want to create. I know that it's very popular to feel helpless when you look out at the world and to say, "Oh no, why bother trying?" And of course, I'm working to let you know that even though the world has worked for many years now, at least a dozen years or so, to create a state of learned helplessness in you so that they can continue to operate your world, while you buy their useless products to deal with symptoms, and their useless and harmful candidates to not even deal with the symptoms. But we have the power to change all that. But before we can use that power, it's very important that we know that we have it. So I'd like to offer you some tools that if you're interested in having the that power to change the things that are happening there, the punishment that's going on, the cruelty that's going on, the suppression of human beings, the trafficking of children, the domination by the millionaire, billionaire class. It starts with you. And that's what they don't want you to know. So, allow your awareness to be present here. With me. And I want you to imagine that there can be a world of love, of joy, of peace, of success, where people care about each other, and they are guided by deep principles and high spirit, where people join together and overcome this ridiculous polarization that we've been trained to join in, to avoid those who don't understand that we are all one. And I can't call you names without calling myself names. That my abuse of you is my abuse of myself, and abuse of that which we all share. If you can imagine that there is such a world, then you can begin to create it. But first you must be aware of what you want. You want healing? Okay, what does healing look like? It's not just getting rid of pain, because you can get rid of pain and trade that in for alcoholism. Ah, I want to stop drinking. We can get rid of your alcohol drinking. How about some opioids? Maybe that. Want to get over opioids? Join a cult. He's got symptoms. Boy, I got a million of them. But if you really want something that is real, that is caring, that is beautiful, that is heartful, that is spiritual, that is meaningful, then you must be aware of that which you want. We'll talk about how to do that in a little while. You will then learn to enter a state of mind that gives you access to the incredible tools that you already possess within yourself to reprogram your mind and your body, and then to activate the change that you want. You will learn how to consciously guide your mental images in such a way that you can rewire your brain— rewire your brain. When I started teaching this in the 1970s, people just said, how ridiculous. Everybody knows you can't grow nerves. Well, this has been absolutely proved at this point. And how do you do it? You do it by focusing your attention and holding in mind the image that you want. Then the neural connections which correspond to that image form themselves. Repeat this and those connections become stronger than the old connections. The old pains slip away, the confusion slips away, the bad habits slip away, and what emerges is the person that you truly are, the person that you came here to be. And in the process, you create the emotional and physical changes of healing. That you want, and also the optimal performance that you want. And by the way, people say, how can you talk about healing? We're thinking about cancer, we're thinking about inflammation, we're thinking about COVID How can you be affecting them and the same tool is going to produce optimal performance, winning, success, love, happiness? How can they go together? They are one, because optimal performance of the cells of your body equals healing. And when you are performing optimally and bringing into your life what you brought, what you intended to bring here, what you care about most, then yes, you are healing yourself. As well as creating optimal performance. That is, the cells of your body and the cells of your mind understand that you have a vision and that you're here to achieve it. Well, then they heal themselves. If your life doesn't mean anything, if you're a helpless bit of nothing, if you're an underling and all you can do is follow the big man and follow, repeat what the big man, big woman Big Honcho says, then your body thinks that you're not worth living. The balance fades away, the homeostasis melts away, and what we call disease emerges. Right? And you win the Darwin Award. And you gradually eliminate yourself. From the gene pool. But if you are performing at your optimal level, then you will heal at your optimal level. We'll get more into that. The techniques I'm going to show you can be used at any time. These techniques can enable you to develop a certain deep awareness about yourself. And I mean the Self with a capital S, your deeper self. And they will give you the ability to choose the kinds of thoughts, words, and behaviors that you want to guide your health and your life. All right. Big words, you say. I'm from Missouri. Show me. All right, I'm going to show you. I want you to sit still. Find a comfortable place to rest in and choose a point to focus, someplace on the wall opposite you. On the ceiling, wherever you may be if you're lying down. And I want you to focus on what is really the truth. Become aware that at this moment in time, there's no other place you have to go. There's nothing else that you need to be doing. And there is no problem that needs to be solved at this moment in time. And therefore you can give yourself permission to relax. As your body relaxes, you come more and more into the present moment. All tension in your body comes from the reaction in a deeper part of your mind, your limbic system, what I call your monkey mind, your monkey brain. It doesn't realize how safe you are. It still thinks it needs to worry about yesterday. It thinks that it needs to be embarrassed about something, or to feel ashamed of something, or to feel guilty about something, or to be resentful about something. And that produces a tension in your body, and it produces the unnecessary thoughts that enter your mind. Take a deep breath in. As you let it out, let go of all that tension. Let go of those unnecessary thoughts. They're not real. They're just ghosts passing by. Don't grab on to them. They're just ghosts passing by, like leaves blowing by the window. Relax into the present moment, because this is the only moment that really exists. There is no past and there is no future. Not one second of the past can ever come back again. The future is completely unknown, and it's totally safe for you to be here in the present. Take a deep breath in, and as you let it out, be aware of that truth. And let yourself sink down deeply into that quiet spot after you breathe out and before the next breath begins itself. And imagine that you can go deeper than all these distractions, and that as your body relaxes more and more deeply, you can begin to approach your true self, which is ever-changing. It is a living being that is always growing. And yet you can find it in every moment. And be certain, even though that self may be different from the self that was here 20 years ago, or 10 years ago, or 10 minutes, or a day, or a half-second ago, even though it may be different, yet in some mysterious way It is the same. Take another deep breath in. As you let it out, if you haven't already done so, and if it's comfortable to do so, allow your eyelids to fall closed. Allow your eyes to roll upward behind your closed eyelids till you're looking upward toward the back of your forehead. And imagine there you can see the word "relax." Relax. Relax and allow yourself to be open to your Self with a capital S, that Self that is the source of your personal wisdom, that is your inner leader, your trustworthy guide. When your eyelids are so relaxed they don't want to open at all, gently try to open them and notice how they resist being open. And let that relaxation from your eyelids flow out like ripples throughout all the rest of your body, down to the tips of your fingers and the tips of your toes and everything in between. Great. And anytime any unnecessary thoughts come along, just imagine those unnecessary thoughts are like words written on a blackboard in your mind's eye. Remember the relaxation in your eyelids, and as you gently test your eyelids, imagine you're drawing an eraser across your mental blackboard and erasing the unnecessary thought, and sending another wave of relaxation flowing throughout your entire body. Deeper and deep— deeper and deeper into the present moment. And now become aware of the sensations within your body. Who is aware? And just let that question echo within you. Who is being aware? Imagine with each awareness you're spiraling in step by step, inching closer to your center, the balance point of your mind, body, emotions. Become aware of whatever emotions you may be experiencing at this moment, and be aware that they are in the constant process of change. And wonder, who is being aware of all these changes? And be aware of the thoughts that pass through your mind. And from this place of experiencing who is being aware, ask yourself, who is this that is being aware? Spiraling in more and more towards your center, a place of peace and calm in this moment. Be aware of a feeling of lightness in your body, as if you're floating on a magic carpet. Float on your magic carpet of relaxation and imagination to a special place far away from anything that could ever disturb you. A place of calm and peace. And here at this place, give yourself permission to continue to open and to learn ever more deeply the lessons that are most important for you to receive at this moment in time. In this present moment. Good. And whenever you wish, you can allow yourself to slowly and gently return to an awareness of the space around you, letting your eyelids open when they're ready. Good. I talk about healing. What is healing? Healing is an active living process. You can learn how to heal yourself. That's what this is about. Medicine, supplements, surgery, exercise— they help, but they're only a support for the self-healing process. All healing comes from within. Antibiotics can weaken a bacterium, but only your immune system can actually kill it and get rid of it. A cast for a broken arm can protect it, but it is only your internal healing system can knit together those bones once again. Many studies have demonstrated this most remarkable fact, that the single most important thing that you can do to prevent and heal disease, illness, distress is to create mental and physical relaxation and balance. They've been shown to be effective in virtually every illness in which they've been tested. In my work, I found that in addition to this is when you add in the techniques of guided imagery of meditation, of self-hypnosis, yes, and prayer, then you have a set of incredibly potent mind tools for getting yourself well and keeping your well— keeping you well, helping to heal others and really bring healing into this world that we live in. Now we all have some basic idea of what healing is. I say healing is really wholeness, becoming more whole. It's an ongoing process, like the ongoing process of getting to know yourself more and more deeply. Maybe once or twice you've had a cut. It bled for a while, but soon it closed up and the skin closes and you're not losing blood anymore. You're now whole and you say, "I've healed." Or maybe you've had diarrhea or been sick in some other way, and you just couldn't think, you couldn't be interested in anything, you couldn't enjoy anything. But then gradually you got better, and boing, you're whole again. That's healing, that's wholeness. So wholeness then at the physical level, and that of course is one of the simplest place for us— places for us to be aware of it involves the healing of wounds, inflammation, excessive tension in the body, hyperstimulation, and so forth. Becoming whole goes on to the creation of a sustainable lifestyle that affords the body a certain diet, a certain set of exercises that you do on a regular basis, the avoidance of certain toxins. All those kinds of things allow a body to be more whole. For wholeness is healing, virtually by definition. But again, how are you going to change your diet? How are you going to change your routine? Yeah, you'll see all of the programs out there to help you do that, but why aren't they working? Because they're not going to work unless you change the patterns of behavior so that you start to desire to do those exercises more than you desire to just flake out and have another beer. There's wholeness. Wholeness at the emotional level, which means the calming of excess emotions, passions, anxieties, fears, resentments, etc. Lust and greed, jealousy, all of those. Instead, providing regular opportunities for yourself to experience safety, peace, love, and joy. We have We have the freedom to feel all our emotions, and it's important that we be able to, but we need not be forced to feel any particular one. Wholeness at the mental level means removing the impediments to clear and logical thinking. The goal is to enable the efficient and untrammeled operation of those two bio-computers. That comprise the apparatus upon which your mind depends. This involves understanding you have two brains, two systems of processing information. You have the conscious mind and the unconscious, or monkey mind. You have two systems: System 1, you know, the rapid, immediate, pre-programmed one, and System 2, the intentional strategic, careful, focused one. You need to know that you have these two, and the System 1 is always unconscious to you, that it is the source of the stress that is inhibiting the healing that we want, and that by lowering that level of stress at that level and overcoming the vast amount of disinformation you're exposed to on a daily basis, you gradually begin to produce true healing there at the cognitive level. And it goes on up to higher levels too. There's a social level, there's healing of your relationship, your primary relationship, your family, and so forth. And then there's spiritual wholeness. Spiritual wholeness. I think true spirituality, as it has been said, is seeing a sunset and knowing who to thank. Wholeness at the spiritual level means understanding how important it is that we see the world from a whole systems perspective. The brain and the mind have the job of ensuring clarity and accuracy. At the spiritual level, we make choices that are wise. Based on our deeper values, and informed by our sense of a higher power or spirit. It seemed to me that one of the most important things that we can learn in life is what a good gambler learned, as Kenny Rogers taught us: You got to know when to hold, know when to fold up, know when to walk away, know when to run. You never count your money when you're sitting at the table. There'll be time enough for counting when the dealing's done. You got to hold and you got to let go and reach that higher level of your own self to know when it's right to hold on and when it's time to let go. I want to go on and talk to you a little bit about the process of stress, because this is a most— it's a most crucial piece of what it is that we need to be able to be in touch with, to be able to control, as it were. And we are talking about a set of mind tools for accessing the healing state, for guiding your thoughts, imagery, and passion to heal body, mind, emotions, spirit, and behavior, to experience deeply relaxed states, to access and use that power, and to develop a new paradigm of thinking and healing Basically to upgrade your mental operating system. We want to develop mindful focus and deep relaxation, to access the highest level of mind, acquire deep self-awareness, access wisdom and spiritual guidance, to use outcome, outcome imagery and process imagery. We're going to go quickly through those, but we're going to touch on all of them. Just briefly, if we look back through time, Hippocrates said in 400 BC, "It's more important to know what sort of a person has a disease than to know what sort of a disease that person has." Then along came René Descartes, in 1650 or so, to set the science of medicine free from the control of the church, he started believing that the mind and body were separate. And because the mind and body were separate, then the priest says, "Cool, you can operate on the body, but don't mess with the mind." Up until then, we weren't even able to do autopsies on people. But the Newtonian-Cartesian model of the universe was one that was based on his idea, "I think, therefore I am." But that's not really— his true words was, "I doubt, therefore I am." I suggest you go back and reread that. So it's all based upon negativity. I doubt, therefore I am. Then 200 years later, in the 1800s, Louis Pasteur developed the germ theory. Believing that the primary cause of disease was these little things that were attacking us from the old— from the outside. A good example of what I call old paradigm thinking. But at the same time, Claude Bernard was there. Claude Bernard said that host factors were primary and that when we have homeostasis, then we can fight off the diseases. Huh? So his focus was on strengthening the being, and that's really what we're talking about. So his was kind of a new paradigm way of approaching things. Then along came Hans Selye, and he noticed that no matter how an animal was killed or injured— starvation, infection, electrocution, trauma, whatever it is— he always saw the same syndrome underneath: swelling of the adrenal cortex, atrophy of the thymus, gastric and duodenal ulcers, and so forth. His professors told him they weren't interested in those symptoms because they didn't permit diagnosis of a different disease, and so they wouldn't pay attention to it. But Hans Selye did, and he developed the notion of stress. Because no matter what animals die of, one of the most important aspects of their death is the stress that they're under. And that information laid around for a couple hundred years until this fellow I'm really close to— my path has been similar to these people who plowed into new areas. By the time I opened my private practice of medicine in 1970, I was already aware that the the mind played a role in many more diseases than was generally believed. People have often asked me how I was able to see so many things that others couldn't. Well, a few things made— I think made the truth visible to me, um, and I think that had to do with my growing up in a multicultural environment, that I was already a scientist and a mathemati— mathematician before I went into medicine, that I had studied computer programming, and that metaphorically it enabled me to see the similarities between the digital computer and the human brain and mind, particularly our relation with the unconscious. So therefore, it made it possible for me to see the incredible importance of having an integrative medical practice to create the tool we call guided imagery nowadays, to focus on the use of stress management to heal and prevent disease, to introduce mindfulness into medicine, and also the use of meditative techniques. Uh, I had reached the point where I felt I knew enough to write a book on it in 1972. Title of the book is Selective Awareness. You can find it on my store, on my on-site shopping, shopping spot, shop.drmiller.com. It's called Selective Awareness. I also had been a specialist in electronics, repairing radios and amplifiers and things like that. And I quickly realized that just as we have tubes and transistors that can either be off or on, and put them together and you have a radio or television or whatever. We have nerves, and the neurons of our body, the nerves, each nerve has only two states. One is off and the other is on, just like the transistors. And I said, wow. And then I begin to realize that just as you put together a network of transistors and tubes and other other items like that. So too, what's going on in the human brain, in the human mind, is a network of neurons, a neural network. And the results of the patterns that— and the processing that goes on in these neural networks, then that provides the information which impacts the behavior of the organs of the body and impacts whether they are being sent signals which enable them to grow stronger, or whether they're receiving signals that cause them to become less healthy and less well. For instance, if I say, use a state of hypnosis, and I measure the temperature of your hand, and I imagine you— or have you imagine caressing a child and thinking of love, then that hand will receive more blood and will become warmer. If I have you imagine that you are using that hand to strike, hurt, or kill somebody, that hand will become cold. It will have less blood. If that hand is injured already, then it will heal more slowly. Whereas if you imagine caressing that child, your hand will heal more rapidly. This is very simple, but the same thing happens in a very complex way. Now, I'm— most of what I'm teaching you today are the things that I taught back in the early 1970s. So I want to tell you that the tools that we're working with, that I use in much more complex ways And, um, that's what we deal with in the other webinars that we have every Thursday— not every Thursday morning, but Thursday morning once a month. And what's at the top of this neural network is your thinking part of your brain, particularly the prefrontal cortex. Healing then is balance. That balance is created by how we're thinking about things. About the level of tension or relaxation within. Healing is balance, harmony, coherency, all the parts of us working smoothly together. If they're not, then there's conflict, dysfunction, stress, and the chemicals of stress that inhabit, that inhibit healing. What is stress? What Hans Selye taught us is that stress is the non-specific reaction of body and mind to a perceived demand. Stress is not something that happens to you, it's something you do with what happens to you. When there is an alarm, a threat, a conflict, stress goes up, blood pressure goes up, heart beats faster, blood clots more quickly, the muscles are fighting in the anti-gravity muscles, become tense and active, digestion goes away, and so forth. You resist with stress until your system figures out how to deal with the situation, and then this generalized stress goes away. You see a rhinoceros, you have a lot of stress, you're running, you're screaming, and you're thinking, and And then you climb a tree, and as you climb the tree, you see the rhinoceros is not able to climb the tree. You keep climbing, but your stress becomes less and less. Then once you've climbed up into the tree, ah, oh, you relax. You've done that when you've almost been in an automobile accident and you pull off the road for a second, you go, "Wow, that was close." That's called the recovery phase. The stress cycle consists therefore of two parts: the reaction and the recovery. Now, in the world that we grew up into, when our— where our system evolved, those Type 1 stresses were finite, short-lived. The demand was from an easily identified source. They were present— the demands, not what's going to happen next week— and they can be resolved by responding immediately. That's why your blood pressure goes up immediately. But those things didn't come along all the time, once every day or two, maybe several days or a week. Before another stressor would come along. So yeah, you would have stress, but you'd recover. You'd have stress, but you recover. So you'd have this two-way cycle, and that kept an overall balance. But in 21st century stress, there is a different pattern that takes place. Computers are often the source of it. The stresses we have now, they're all future-oriented. It's not something that's going to happen like the lion's going to jump on you in the next 5 seconds. It's whether or not you can pay the mortgage, or if we're going to stop that fool who's starting a war over across the ocean right now. They're intangible. You can't reach out and grab him by his neck and say, listen, we want a different kind of the world. 'And either you do it or we'll put you—' You can't do that. Social stressors, not physical ones. There's no clear response. Therefore, the tension accumulates. It accumulates more and more and more over time. And then soon we reach the symptom threshold. Then we begin having trouble sleeping, Then we begin to feel the tension. Pretty soon it builds up to when we have headaches. Pretty soon we're feeling frustration and anger. Then we feel more insomnia. Then our allergies begin to kick in. Then we have infection. Then we have a heart attack. Then we have cancer. On and on and on. And all of those things, these are all the things that we deal with in traditional mainstream medicine. They're all symptoms. The only cures that medicine offers are surgery. If you have a cancer, the surgeon goes in and cuts it out, you have been cured. I mean, your body still has to close that wound. I've seen people whose wounds didn't close for weeks, months, and years because of the anxiety that they had about the original illness. Or about the cut, about the wound from the surgery. And by working with them for an hour or two, the wound closes. But still, surgery goes a long way to actually being a cure. So the health of the body, the management of the stress so it doesn't produce illness, is what the brain does. So to maintain this wholeness and healing, we have to differentiate ourselves from the external world and say, "Yeah, that person may not like me, but that's, that's their problem. I'm going to enjoy the movie." To maintain and restore balance within and in relationship to the environment, that's our challenge. And we do it through these neural networks that we have inside. And when they're in balance, then we have the kind of coordination that makes beautiful music. When the violinist is feeling frightened or angry or frustrated, their music doesn't sound so good. The gymnast can't perform as well as Simone Biles has told us about, nor can the ice skater or the dancer. And at the basis of it, as we deal with so many times, is the sense of feeling safe, of feeling connected to others, of feeling a sense of love and family. That is the deepest the most healing potion that there is. We all know it. We felt it. If you've had a child, and let yourself feel, or if you've been a child, as I'm sure most of us have, and felt love, which many of us, but not all of us, have. What we feel when we see that, the warmth. Let yourself feel it. Let yourself know that this feeling of love, of wholeness, of oneness, of deep connection— you have a purpose in being here, you belong here. We know it, we share it with the animals that are around us. Love, as Plato said, Love, which is the pursuit of the whole. The secret then to life and healing is balance, harmony, coherency, all parts working smoothly together. If they are not, there's conflict, dysfunction, stress, The stress chemicals that result in— basically what stress does, it begins to dissolve the organs of your body and the organ systems of your body to convert them into glucose so that you can run away from the lion that is going to kill you in about a half a second if you don't do something right now. That's why we get sick. You can't think well because it turns off your higher mind. You don't want to be looking at this saber-toothed tiger as it jumps on you and say, "Oh God, the eyes are such a beautiful blue, and the smoothness of the fur. My gosh, I should paint a picture. Maybe I'll write a poem." Well, nature doesn't want you to do that. As much as you may want to do it, and even though that's the point of your life, man, when a lion or a Mack truck is on your butt, or when you're feeling conflict, feeling bad about yourself like you're an imposter, imposter, or fear that you're not going to do well in the speech next week, or fear that somebody's lying to you, all those things So you cannot think clearly, and instead you are driven by emotion. You feel angry, or you feel frustrated, or you feel alone, you feel afraid, you feel anxious, you feel panic. Or maybe you attack somebody, maybe you scream at somebody, or do something else that your monkey mind does because it thinks it's solving the problem. It thinks it's solving the conflict that it believes is there. Yeah. So it leads you to take a drink, or it leads you to take a drug, leads you to beat up somebody. But you know, the next day you look back and you say, "Oh no." So a moment to share with you some of the products that you may use to go a little more deeply. All right, so I'm showing you just the basics. Now we'll talk about how you can go more deeply. There is Healing Journey, which is the first one, first recording ever made in the studio. We wrote a symphony to go along with it, which is on side B. Healing Journey. All of these you can purchase them, download them immediately. You can buy a CD. In many cases, we actually still, still have cassettes available. Letting Go of Stress with New Age music pioneer Stephen Halperin. Letting Go of Stress, the most popular stress management tool of all time. 4 different techniques for reducing stress. My classic book written back in the '90s called Deep Healing: The Essence of Mind-Body Medicine, which I I summarized the essence of this field that I had created, and I called it Deep Healing. You can get an MP3 download of my reading it. Also, uh, go a little more deeply, a deep dive, you can get the book, you can get Healing Journey, you can get Abolish Anxiety, Easing into Sleep, Letting Go of Stress, and a number of different CDs or other products. It's called Deep Healing, Your Personal Wellness Suite. Then there's Balance, Stress, and Optimal Health. These are 6 CDs. They're a little bit different, but look them up, shop.drmiller.com. And as I said, the other thing that's very, very useful is if you send a donation my way. We're still getting enough, enough donations to carry on here once a month, so keep them going. We started out at once a week, we're down to once a month now, but I'd like to think the presentations are getting better and better, and I know that the quality of the information is extremely high, but you gotta practice. It's important for you to learn these tools that I'm offering to you. And, you know, a story that I always like is the story of the fellow who's driven to Manhattan and he's on his way to a symphony at Carnegie Hall, but he's caught in midtown Manhattan traffic. And it's like, oh my goodness, he's got about 5 minutes before the performance begins and he's just at his wit's end and he's stuck at a stoplight and there's a cabbie next to him and he leans out the window and he says, "Hey buddy, can you tell me, how do I get to Carnegie Hall?" The New York taxi driver leans back out and says, "Practice, practice, practice." And every musician knows that. That's how you're going to get there. We're talking about reprogramming your mind. We're talking about rewiring your brain. Your brain that over the last 10 years especially has been at the mercy of the hundreds of thousands of attention specialists, people who have PhDs in how to attract your attention and get you to believe something when you don't even know that you're made— being made to believe it, and feeds you misinformation. And so you become part of this big horde that is all of us that is losing our precious democracy here in the United States. Would you ever have dreamed that something like this can happen? Well, it can, and this is how. And guess what? You're part of it, and I'm part of it too. So I'm hoping that you can start practicing. You can go all the way from the individual healing that we are focused on now, all the way up to healing the planet. We have products on healing the planet and also awakening your, your inner healer. Oh my, I want to skip over— I think you know by now what stress is at the root of most inflammation, tendinitis, arthritis, GI problems, muscle pain and dysfunction, backache, headache, muscle tension, elevated blood pressure, emotional imbalance, anxiety, irritability, depression, unhappiness, mental dysfunction, low creativity, insomnia, procrastination, attention deficit disorder, behavioral disorders, drinking, smoking, overeating, overspending, sexual acting out, gambling. Chronic stress over a long period of time— I'm reading fast because each one of these is a different study— chronic stress over a long period of time actually shrinks your brain. It kills neurons by the millions. Girlfriend leads to, I believe, the dementia that so many people have. Relaxation, and especially deep relaxation, is what begins to rebalance the system. So I'm going to go through a quick healing process with you. If we run out of time, you can grab one of the products at drmiller.com. And so let yourself be in a relaxed position. Become aware there's no other place you need to go, nothing else you need to do, no problem you need to solve. At this moment in time, No lions, no wolves, no landslides, no floods coming at you. Just you in this precious moment right now. Become aware that this present moment now is the only moment that exists. There is no other moment. The past moments are gone forever. The future moments haven't happened yet. There is only this moment in time. And in this moment, you are the only person that you can be. And the only thing that you can do that's wise is to sink in a deeply relaxed state, to know who you are, to be at peace. Just where we started with before, circle in on that sense of self. Let yourself go to that special place. Far, far away from anything that could ever disturb you. And in that place, go deep into your sense of self, the deepest sense of yourself right now. Become aware of what are your deepest principles. What are you here for? What would you like to be remembered for? Tap into your sense of spirit. Be in touch with the highest spirit you can be in touch with. Good. Now picture in your mind yourself, maybe a few weeks or months or years from now, looking and feeling exactly the way you want to look and feel. Imagine you can look forward into the future. Future. The future, you know, is not someplace you're going. It's a place you're creating, and you're creating it with each breath and with each thought. Imagine yourself totally happy, totally healing, every organ of your body working smoothly within and in harmony with every other organ of your body, and yourself relating with the world in the way you really want to. Feeling love in your relationships, giving and receiving. Functioning well in whatever work you do because you care. Playing and enjoying life. The best possible image you can come up with of yourself. See it visually as though you're watching a video of the future. And then step into that image and become that person, and notice how good it feels. Let yourself feel it emotionally. Feel the joy. Feel the inspiration. You felt that before in the past. Think of one of those sacred moments in the past when you felt wonderful, an epiphany that you had. When you felt free and strong, joyful. Feel it again. It lives within you. Be this person. The more strongly you can feel it, the more joy you can feel, and the more you let yourself know deep inside, this is the person that you really are. And each time you allow yourself to envision the person that you really are and to inhabit this person and embody this this sense of who you are. You become more and more this person because this is the person you really are down deep inside. Good. And now come back to the moment for a moment and think of what you need to change within your body. What needs to change within your body, your mind, your emotions, your spirit, your relationships? Choose something. What needs to change within you to take you one step closer to being that perfect person, that ideal, that image ideal of yourself? Think of that, whatever it is, what needs to change, and think of it as a dysfunction, as a disorder, like a smudge on a window that you're looking through. But imagine that underneath that is the healthy you, and you can wipe it away just as you wipe away the unnecessary stress, just as you wipe away the unnecessary feeling of conflict, just as you wipe it away and get in touch with the deeper levels of yourself. Visualize yourself changing. Visualize that organ of your body healing itself, chasing out the unwanted bacteria, dissolving away the cancer, building up the muscle, taking on those behaviors, eating the way you really want to eat, exercising in the way that you really know you need to. And picture yourself becoming that person. You have the power and think to yourself, I accept myself exactly as I am. I have the power within to choose who I become. My future is a place I'm choosing, not simply a place I'm going to. I love my body and my mind, and I am training them to work smoothly together. I am learning to step out of polarized ways of treating the world and to see the fundamental oneness and love, beauty, harmony. Compassion, joy, happiness, and success. That is the core of our being, and I give it permission to take place. Yes. I call upon the highest spirits with which I am in touch, and even those spirits that I am yet to discover that are present and guiding me. Yes. Good. And I know that each time I enter the deeply relaxed state and then use guided imagery in one of its several approaches here, Zin I Am reprogramming my mind to think differently, to analyze better, to strategize better, to choose my goals, to aim toward them, and to achieve them. Good. And now, gradually, when you're ready, allow yourself to return back to this place of calm comfort. As your eyelids gently open, but only when you're ready, simply allow the colors to come in before you begin to try to define anything the colors, the shapes, the movements around you, and notice that you are still keeping that sense of peace and calm within. And give yourself permission to take it with you wherever you go. Great. In one month, we'll be going on to a more advanced topic. We'll be talking about wisdom, the truth of what wisdom is. The most powerful understanding that I know of that we can integrate into our thinking and our behavior at every level is that this present in the Serenity Prayer: to have the serenity to accept what I cannot change, to have the courage to change what I can change, and to have the wisdom to know one from the other. Gosh! If you do that in every moment of your life, you'll find yourself achieving just what we've been talking about. Take care. Been so good to be with you. Once again, if you'd like for me to have a little more time so I don't have to go so fast with everything and we can hang out more, send a check to Emmett Miller, Post Office Box 803, Nevada City, California 95959. Go to PayPal, accounting@drmiller.com, or go to the website shop.drmiller.com/donate. I appreciate it. Have an absolutely wonderful month, and we'll see you then.