In this interview, Dr. Emmett Miller argues that the majority of physical and mental illnesses stem from unresolved inner conflicts created by cultural and media programming that blocks our ability to relax, focus, and transform our thinking. He describes how this "sick" cultural system generates anxiety, manipulates neural networks, and prevents individuals and societies from accessing their true power and healing. Miller emphasizes the importance of love and supportive relationships in early life, labeling the lack of such nurturing as "spiritual abuse" that damages the psyche. He then introduces his work with the Warriors for Healing movement, a holistic program for veterans and others with post‑traumatic stress disorder. The program combines deep relaxation, meditation, hatha yoga, selective awareness, guided imagery, and mindfulness to de‑potentiate traumatic stress networks and promote neuroneogenesis and synaptogenesis, effectively “upgrading” the brain’s operating system to heal body, mind, emotions, and behavior. The overall message is that by re‑programming our minds and rewiring our brains, we can heal ourselves and transform the broader world.
Chapters
[FOREIGN] More than 80% of all our illnesses and dysfunctions result from our unresolved inner conflicts, the conflicts between different parts of our minds and different parts of our nervous system. We fail to resolve them because of our inability to simply relax, focus, and transform our thinking and our lives. Our minds are much more powerful than most of us realize, although we are kept from knowing this by a social and cultural system that is designed to control our thoughts, our emotions, and our behaviors. This system, the through propaganda and the mass media creates anxiety in us, neural networks that are then used to manipulate us and block our access to our truth and our power. The result is that not only are we not free individually and as a group, but we are blocked from healing ourselves and transforming the system. The resulting emotional friction within us creates stress, illness, and dysfunction. But just as a computer can be reprogrammed, we can rescript our minds and rewire our brains. We can break the cycle of violence and denial and overcome our prejudices and limitations by eliminating distractions and then skillfully using our imagination and our emotional power. We can begin to heal ourselves deeply. And to transform our world. This is my message.
Each person has been highly programmed by a very, very sick culture and media. And so all of us have deep wounds in the psyche because we haven't been given what we need. The human being is born seeking love. That's what makes us grow, the way light causes a young plant to grow. If you cover that plant so the sun can't get to it, the leaves wither and they're pale. When the human being doesn't receive love, doesn't have the sense of being surrounded by a loving, supportive family who can look in the eyes even of that infant and say, You are absolutely beautiful. Or as Kunta Kinte's father said when he took him outside the hut and held him up toward the night sky and said, "Behold, Kunta Kinte, the universe, the only thing more powerful than yourself." Well, what if we grew up in a world that taught us that? Our spirits would be nurtured. And when you listen to those people, who speak, who make chills go up and down your spine. When you listen to those people who inspire you and those people who have, like the Lotus, grown up out of the mud to become absolutely beautiful human beings, you hear a spirit speaking. You hear a spirit that believes in itself. But for most of us, we don't get that. It's what I call spiritual abuse. As a result, We don't understand at a deep level how important it is to take care of our bodies, our minds, our emotions, and our relationships.
Currently, I'm working with a fascinating movement called Warriors for Healing. Along with Bhava Ram, I work with men and women who have post-traumatic stress, especially but not only veterans of United States wars. Instead of the usually merely symptomatic treatment, ours is a holistic approach to trauma and PTSD. The difference is that we use a variety of powerful mind, body, emotion, and spiritual approaches with the explicit goal of correcting the deeper imbalance that is the true source of all the symptoms and dysfunctions that we see after trauma. First, we use such tools as deep relaxation, meditation, and hatha yoga positions that favor the restoration of inner balance and the de-potentiation of traumatic stress networks. Then, through the use of selective awareness, Guided imagery and mindfulness, we guide the growth of new neural networks. This rewiring of the brain and nervous system is called neuroneogenesis and synaptogenesis. Our goal is nothing less than to upgrade the operating systems of our minds to heal our bodies, emotions, and behaviors.
