Love in the time of COVID II – Guided Imagery Meditation & Talk. Watch On-Demand [Episode 6]

The show you're about to hear is a recording from Dr. Miller's webinar series titled Life Meditations. He began this series in response to the pandemic, and his goal has been to provide wisdom, practical tools, and comfort to people during these stressful times. Watch the entire series at drmiller.com/lifemeditations. That's drmiller.com/lifemeditations.

Welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Emmett Miller, as I'm known informally, or formally as Dr. Emmett Miller, and Welcome to actually part 2 of my little presentation, which I want to be talking about relationships. I think it's especially important during this time of social distancing, and especially the lockdown where we're locked away with our family and so forth. I understand that Divorces are up and child abuse is up. And, you know, sometimes we have wonderful lives and we know how to get along with each other in our usual lives when we're going off to work and we have our different things to do. But all of a sudden we're kind of squeezed together. It's more of a 24-hour, 24-hour thing. It reminds me a little bit of what happens when Well, the usual situation is when a man retires and suddenly he's home, and that's wonderful for him because he's not having to work anymore, but it's not always such a wonderful thing for the wife, who's run her own show up till now, and all of a sudden there's a guy who comes home and he's been the supreme commander, or thinks he's been the supreme commander at work, or the CEO, whatever it might be, and he comes home and he's now going to give his wife instruction. About things, and I don't have to tell you how incredibly well that works out. So that often has brought people to see me, uh, because the boundaries have been destroyed and we are safe behind those boundaries. And sometimes we've taken many years or even decades to craft those boundaries so that they work well. We have a system But so many of our systems are broken down, and we as human beings, we thrive on systems, and we thrive, we actually thrive on routine, most of the time. Sometimes it's really good to break out of the routine. But routines in terms of time, our time routines are broken up because we're not getting up and going to work. "Whoopie, I don't have to get up and go to work." So when do you get up? Whenever you feel like it. And so what does that do to breakfast? What does that do to lunch? And what does that do to the particular energy that you usually pick up, say, half hour, an hour after you wake up and you're going to work and you shift into a certain— actually, it's a state of mind. We may call it a mood or a feeling. I feel really productive today. I'm right on. I'm really thinking. I'm kind of fuzzy and I'm out of it. Or I'm feeling really amorous. Or I'm not feeling amorous. Or whatever it might be, each one of those different states are really states of consciousness. I got into this, of course, now some 50 years ago when I started practicing hypnotherapy. Hypnosis was this incredible tool that I found that was able to help people in amazing ways. Often the help only lasted a short while, And so of course no one used it, even though it's been 50, 60, 70 years that it's been available to us in the medical profession. And what interested me is the issue of how can we get hypnotic quality dramatic change but then have it happen consistently for, you know, for a long time, or maybe forever, so we can make changes in ourselves. You know, I had to figure out this, what this hypnosis was, and, and I found out that very few people, even the best practitioners of it, didn't really know what it was. They knew how, they knew how to use it. Yeah, you know, it's like you can, you can teach a monkey to ride a bicycle, but the monkey's never going to understand how the, how the bicycle works. I wanted to know how hypnosis worked. And I realized that what hypnosis is really, it's a collection of tools, a collection of mind tools, uh, in which you, uh, a person goes from thinking about one thing to another to another to another to another, a series of thoughts of what I call selective awareness one thought to another. And when a hypnotic state, let's say, is being induced, then there's a series of suggestions that are given by the operator. Either autohypnosis, it's you, or if there's someone else like a therapist, you're listening and they're saying, okay, do this, sit in that chair, let yourself be comfortable. And so we guide a series of of thoughts. And now I might say, think of a really beautiful place, a marvelous day, the sun is shining, you're feeling fabulous, and you're laying back on a beautiful beach in Hawaii. You can hear the surf, you can hear the seagulls, and smell the air, and even taste some of the salty taste on your lips. And as you do, the blood pressure goes down, tension in the body goes down, competing thoughts begin to fade away, because in effect what you're doing is you're convincing your monkey mind that you actually are on the beach in Hawaii. I mean, your monkey mind really believes that. I mean, you know it, but the monkey mind believes it, and therefore you shift into a state of consciousness which is a deeply relaxed state. It's different from the ordinary state, so people tend to call it a trance state. And then we say, okay, we're doing hypnotism or hypnosis, or we can do hypnotherapy with a person in that state. But likewise, I could say, imagine yourself and you're running a race, you're running a marathon, and this is the last mile of the marathon, and there's this person that you've been running against for years and they've beaten you every time, but this time This time you have the opportunity to catch them. And so you reach down into your soul and you find that part of you that really, really wants to win. And you run and you're catching them. You're going faster. And as I guide that imagery, a person's pulse rate goes up and their blood pressure goes up. And they start— and they shift into a different state of consciousness. Or perhaps you come home and your loving, marvelous spouse has the lights turned down, there's candles, fragrance, your favorite fragrance of incense in the air, and the most romantic music. Oh my God, they're playing our— she's playing our— he's playing our song. And suddenly, mm, and your spouse walks into the room dressed in, or not dressed, whatever, and suddenly you're in a different state of mind. And if you imagine that, you go into that state of mind. So what I'm saying is that hypnosis uses mental images, and by going through a series of mental images, all of which cluster around a certain topic, you induce a state of mind which is congruent with that scene or that set of images that you've been visualizing. So this is what we do. We go through life, we're shifting from one state of mind to another state of mind. Driving home in the traffic, "Argh, these idiots." Finally we get home, "Argh," stop the car, "Ahh," and we shift into a different state of consciousness. So this is happening all day. But when we're doing hypnosis or hypnotherapy, we're going to say, right now at this time, we're going to choose what kind of state of mind that you go into, and we're choosing it by choosing a series of images that you will allow to have in your mind, or that I will allow to have in my mind. This then produces a certain state. Well, speaking of states of mind, It's a state of mind that I've cultivated over the years, and it's like a positive psychotic state of mind. It's positive paranoia, is what I call it. You know, the paranoid thinks that everybody's against them, and no matter what they do, things are going to get terrible, things are not going to work out. Positive paranoia. Renee says, "No matter how bad things look, they're going to be okay." And no matter how big an obstacle you seem to see in front of you, if you take it on as a challenge, and you like a challenge, who doesn't like a challenge? Then it becomes an opportunity. And the trick in life is to be able to find the challenges in life and turn them into opportunities. And to have that positive paranoia. But sometimes it's a— you go through sort of negative paranoid states, and I think that the world of computers is, is out to get me because so much of the world is run by the computers. My theory is that the number of transactions that are taking place on the global level with computers is far more than has taken place in the average brain. In fact, we have a global brain make up— made up of computers All about 99% of them are programmed in order to get an advantage to the person who's doing the programming and trying to manipulate people out there. I'm trying to sell you things, I'm trying to get you to vote for me, I'm trying to get you to think a certain way, you know, I'm trying to get you to go along with, with what I want. And most of the time, without my thinking, I want what's best for you. How can I program my computer so that it serves you that's out there? But, you know, 90+ percent obviously is not doing that. So ultimately we have this vast computer brain that's trying to kind of get us to buy things whether we need them or not. And what I'm trying to do is to go up against that. I'm trying to teach us we need to know what our real needs are and to respond to those honest, true, sincere, essential needs we have within us. Not worry about whether we have dandruff or whether we're wearing the right deodorant or whether we have the coolest car and so forth. And the computer brain doesn't like that. So I was in the process of sharing about about this monkey brain that we have that's inside. You know, you— comes a time when you learn the ABCs and you— A, B, C, D, E, F, G— so pretty, you learn the words A, B, C, and then you learn to write. You learn to write the A, you learn to write the B, oh cool, and then the C, oh, this is great, and then the D— oh, wait a minute, isn't that a B? Oh no, it's a D, but it's a B. Is it not quite the same as the— and then you figure out the— you go on like that. Takes quite a while to get all of that, and pretty soon you can see all together, D-O-G. Oh, dog. And pretty soon you don't even have to think D-O-G, you just look at the word and go, oh, that's dog. Or else it's B-O-G, it's bog. And then you read a whole sentence practically in one glance. You're not doing it anymore. It's the monkey mind that's been trained to do all these things. And when we're working with hypnosis and we work with guided imagery— think this, then think this, visualize this— it's a series of images that guides you into a state of mind for change. And for therapy, you want a vulnerable open state of mind, because the monkey's in a vulnerable and open state of mind. Most of the time the monkey's kind of tense, he's worried, a little nervous, a little irritable, a little concerned about what's going on, feeling a little bit crummy about what happened yesterday, a little bit worried about what might happen tomorrow, because that monkey mind evolved 500,000 years ago when the threats in our lives were immediate physical, we had 5 seconds to save our lives, and therefore you have this hyper-paranoid little monkey mind that's in there. In other words, that creates a negative bias, and therefore we tend to have a lot of negativity in our lives. Those that want to sell us stuff, they crank the— crank up the negativity. Did you read the newspaper today? I mean, you know, let's have a riot, you know, let's— oh, looting, shooting. I mean, what's going on? And that little monkey mind feeds off of that, becomes more tense. As it becomes more tense, it wants relief of that tension. Well, now you can sell me scotch, or maybe you can sell me a fancy new car, or maybe Ashley Madison will get me to try to find I'll find a date, you know, or maybe you vote for who I'm telling you to vote for. The scheme, basically how we sell you things is to make you feel inadequate, afraid, unhappy, and then we put in front of you the thing that we want you to buy, and your likelihood of buying that is— and that's why you have these commercials. Some commercials, I mean, they're really awful, they're very irritating, but you know what? They work. Because the commercial's not selling to you, it's selling to your monkey. If you want to do therapy, you've got to quiet that monkey mind down, quiet down your limbic system. And once the limbic system is quieted down, once the monkey brain is now available, the mind is open. And now you can say, I'm going to suggest to you that you think about the world in a new way. I want you to think about the world in this way. There's this other person that's in your life. There's been some stress between you, maybe some arguments, maybe some irritation, or maybe just kind of distant from each other a little bit, uh, and that's not the way you want to be, and that's not the way he wants to be, that's not the way she wants to to be. None of you wants to be that way. That you're here to love each other. Love is what makes the whole thing happen. If it wasn't for love, the cavewoman would have tossed that mewling, puking 2-month-old right off the side of the mountain. But she didn't because she loved it. And she loves her man, and she loves her mother, and he loves his father and his uncle and his aunt and everybody in the community. There's a bond of love, and that's what gave us the ability to climb down out of the trees, come out of the caves, spread out around the world. That's at the core of it. When we lose that love, we're losing some of who and what we are. We have big brains not so that we can build computers and rocket ships, but so that we can love, and so we can love more people. You know, the more complex a society, the bigger the brain needs to be. As human beings, we're ready for much more complex society than our nearest relative, the chimpanzee. Okay, so we are here to love. I'm speaking to the monkey mind now, and we're speaking in a state of deep relaxation, because I— as I've been talking, you've let yourself sit back and close your eyes and maybe taken a few deep breaths and let yourself sink into the surface beneath you. Allowed your eyelids to relax until they feel like they just don't want to open, and let that relaxation flow throughout the rest of your body. And relaxed and allowed unnecessary thoughts to float away. And now the deeper levels of your mind open, and then I would say you're here to love. And with those people with whom the love isn't vibrant, alive, and stimulating, and thrilling, and beautiful, it's because we need to heal those relationships. We need to reconnect with you. Other. And that reconnection with each other means to be able to be open, to be able to be vulnerable, to be able to let down our guards so that the relationship can be intimate. Compassion is one of the highest achievements of humanity, not just to have empathy, which means that if you're having a feeling I can sort of feel in myself what that feeling's like. I know what it is to be really hungry. I know what it is to be really frightened or feeling desolate or abandoned. Oh man, I'm really sorry to hear that. Wow, I can feel it. Empathy. Well, one step beyond that is compassion. Not only do I feel it, but I want you to be relieved. I want you to feel calm. I want you to feel safe. I want you to be happy, and I want you to feel creative. I want you to feel loved. I want your pain to be less. I want that in my being. That's compassion. Now, I think if you're kneeling on somebody's neck and they're going, I can't breathe, I can't breathe, I can't breathe, ah! You're not feeling a lot of compassion at that moment. Now I just feel that compassion is something that's really extremely valuable. I think it's central to what's going on. And so I'd like to— so we talked about opening up that deeper part of us, the different states of mind that, that we can go into. And when we're alone with people, stuck, clamped down with people we haven't seen for a while, that's a strange situation. We sometimes— drives us apart in a way that neither of us wants. The same thing with the people that you're cut off from. There's members of my own family that I can't even be with. That's been months. We can talk on the phone, but It's a whole different deal, right? And so that relationship, it's a different, it's a different context, and that we haven't devised a way to really be deeply connected in the new context, because the new context creates a new state, a new state of mind within us, and often it's not a very useful state of mind. But we have the ability to change our state of mind. And that's the center of what we want to be able to do. And what is beautiful as a human being, you can change your state of mind to meet whatever circumstance that you're in. So if I see an obstacle, I can change my state of mind to see it as a challenge. And I can change my state of mind to say, "Hey, bring it on. Yeah, let's see." Let's see, you know, maybe you win, maybe I win, but you know, you're going to know you were in a fight, and that's going to feel good. And you know, maybe I win this challenge, and what an opportunity, and what I've learned about myself in that whole process. So that's our challenge, being alone. So let me say a little bit about what I have learned that I think is really so valuable for human communication. And it's what I refer to as the SAD. And so I talked about SAD because What happens is that, you know, even when a relationship is going well, the other person in the relationship— and let's think especially about really close relationships with that other person that maybe you love, you're committed to them, they're committed to you— and something that they say results in your feeling angry. Or it may result in your feeling sad, or make you feel hurt, or resentful, or insulted, disappointed, or lonely, something like that. You're having this feeling, the person did something or said something, and you're feeling bad. What are you going to do? How are you going to respond or react to that situation. There's 3 basic ways that people tend to respond when something like that goes on. The initials for those responses are S-A-D, which is convenient because it tends to produce a feeling of being S-A-D, or sad, because it doesn't work. The S is for the silent treatment. That's the cold shoulder. That's shunning them. That is to say, like, uh, hey, is something wrong? No, nothing's wrong. Well, you were talking, now you're not talking. I know I'm not talking, nothing's wrong. Are you angry? No. Uh, you want to go for a walk? No. Uh, you want to go to dinner? No. It's like you don't exist to me anymore. It's the silent treatment. It's punitive. It's a punishment. And punishment rarely serves relationships. It doesn't communicate what you're feeling. It doesn't give the other person any way to understand what happened. So it's generally quite unwise to do things like that. It doesn't lead to better relationships. The A is anger or attack. And so you can snap back at that person and say, "How dare you say that to me?" or "Who do you think you are to say something? I am so ticked at you. I can't believe you did that. And I'm gonna yell at you. I'm gonna scream at you. I'm gonna—" throw your favorite coffee cup against the wall. You know, I'm gonna be angry with you and attack. Well, how does that help? It doesn't, because generally what you call forth is a defense of the other person. It's going to convince you that they don't deserve to be attacked, or you get anger in return. Who am I to say that to you? Who are you to say this to me, and then you, mm, get these two heads banging together like that. And how many times does that result in a restoration of the loving, caring, compassionate, connected, communicative relationship? Or that the other person may simply withdraw when you attack. Then you get the silent treatment. Or maybe this is the person who's been so abused in their life that they try to placate you Oh, I'm sorry. Oh, George. Oh, please don't be so angry. Oh. And of course, they're feeling miserable inside and they may be placating you and they may quiet down your anger in a sort of an animalistic sort of way, but they feel awful inside and you have less of a person to relate to after that. Not a good idea. That's attack, anger and attack. And finally, the D The D, the third error in communication, is denial, or what's sometimes called the Uncle Tom approach. Oh no, it's okay that you smashed my fender. It's an old car anyway. Yeah, no, it's fine you didn't invite me to the party. I had other things to do that night. No, no, no, you can dump on me. You can call me anything you want. Yeah, it's fine that you tracked Mud on my white carpet. That's no bad. Things happen. But that's not saying what you feel inside. You feel hurt, you feel abandoned, you feel really bad about what just happened. You feel lonely, you feel, you feel unloved, you feel betrayed. Whatever it is, it's not a good feeling. You haven't communicated it to that person, and therefore, it's unlikely that person is even gonna figure out that you've been hurt, much less be able to respond to it in any way that's gonna improve the relationship. So those are the 3 bad ways, the sad ways to deal with it. Okay, here's a better response. First of all, realize that you've experienced some upset or distress at the way you've been treated, spoken to, or because of what's happened. But before beginning to try to communicate with the person, the first thing you do is what? Nothing. You stop. You relax because one of those S, A, or D is going to tend to come to the surface. Recognize that you're feeling an emotion. That's what's important here. It's what your emotions are. It's not what was done. It's not what was said. It's your feeling is the main thing that's important. And you feel what? What am I feeling? At having had that. She didn't show up for the date, left me standing here at the altar, party, whatever it is. What do I feel? Lonely, sad, fear, helpless, confused, tense, lonely. What's the emotion that I feel now? You know, maybe your monkey's gotten used to turning everything into anger. But anger is not the primary emotion. Anger is there when you really want to slaughter somebody. No, anger is there because we're covering up sadness, or we're covering up loss, or loneliness, or fear. And anger is a lot easier feeling. I'm so— oh my, I'm so angry. There's a joy in that. Oh boy, am I angry! You know, we're not— we don't let ourselves know that, but it's true. Much more than, oh my God, my marriage may be over. You know, maybe this woman doesn't love me anymore. You know, maybe I'm going to lose my job. You know, that's hard to feel. So anger just covers those things up. Go deeper than the anger. We'll talk more about anger later on. It's a really interesting emotion. Be in touch with the vulnerable feelings inside. Find a word for it. I feel sad. I feel lonely. I feel helpless. I feel such separation. So that you have a word that can describe your emotion. You can— I feel distraught, I feel pain in my stomach, I feel the sinking feeling, I feel breathless, I feel tongue-tied. I mean, anything where you're talking about yourself, you're talking about what you feel, and you're revealing that to a person. You will. You haven't done it yet, you're just letting yourself know. You don't do anything yet. You You go on to step 2. Step 2 is identify what happened in the real world that triggered those feelings. What happened? Well, it's when you didn't show up at the party, or it's when you weren't there when I called, or when you didn't buy me a present, or when I realized that you stole my car, or whatever it might be. What was that moment that triggered you? That's important because now you want to be able to communicate to your partner. And now you want to say to the other person— there's two steps to what you share with them. When you said blank, I felt blank. When you said I don't want to see you tomorrow, I felt really, really sad and really lonely. When you said that you were putting Tom into the new position instead of me, I felt left out. I felt fearful. Whatever. Now, what's— it's important that you're not saying something like, when you said that, I felt like you were you're a real asshole. That's not a feeling. That you're a real jerk, or that you're unkind, or that you're out to get me is not a feeling. That's an interpretation. It comes from you. What you know is true is that the person said or did that thing, and number two, that you actually felt it. Though this is honest, and it's true, and it's clear, there's no question about it. When you said that, I felt— and then when you say that to a person, one of the things that happens is it's very disarming because they're not being attacked. You're just saying, hey, listen, at that moment I felt bad. People may try to jump into defense. That's because they will think that they're being blamed or attacked, etc., etc. Well, it's important to say, well, 'Let me finish what I'm saying because I want you to hear the whole thing. So could you relax for a moment until I share with you what went on for me because I think it's important to me and to you and our relationship,' or whatever you need to get an opportunity to share the whole thing that you're going to do. Because there's another step, and another step would be for you to tell that person What your thoughts were. When you didn't show up at the party, I felt alone and lost and very sad. And the real reason you felt that is because of the story you told yourself. Because I thought that you didn't care about me because I I was thinking that you went out with Ralph instead of with me, or that you didn't do that for me because you didn't think I was worth it, or because you don't value our relationship. Okay, step 3, it's a little bit tricky, 'cause you were saying, this is the thought that occurred to me, and you know it's true. That's the thought that triggered your feelings, not what the person did. The person did something, you had a thought about it, it triggered your feelings. Now the thought may be correct or not correct. And let me tell you, in most relationships, the thought is not correct. The thought is either a lie or it tends to be a gross distortion of what the truth is. But now you own it. You are owning that that's your thought, and that's what triggered the feeling when they did so-and-so. So when you did that and you didn't show up, I felt alone and lost, and it seemed to me— I thought at that point, my thought was that, that you weren't caring about me. And then the fourth step is to say to them Is that the truth? Is that what was going on for you? Of course, usually it's not, but the person gets to hear it and they get to understand where your mind went and how you felt when that happened, and they have an opportunity in a sense to recognize, hmm, That behavior of mine created that in someone that I care about. Ideally, and if you're on the other side, your response is, I'm sorry. To say to them, I'm sorry that what I said or what I did brought up those thoughts those feelings in you. I'm sad that you felt that way. I'm sorry that you had those feelings. Almost as if to say, if I could turn the clock back, I wouldn't say that because I would want to prevent you from having those feelings. Okay, so they— you would want the response to be I'm sorry you felt that way. However, you've just asked me what was really going on. So no, I'm really sorry that you felt that way, but what happened was that my battery was dead. I couldn't get the car started. I had left my cell phone, and there I was in a 10-foot snowbank, unable to get my car started. Whatever it is, so I had a perfectly good reason. That they can share with you as to where they were coming from in terms of doing that. And that is the basis of being able to respond to what felt bad or what was a trauma or an insult to you in such a way as you open yourself up to give the other person an opportunity to have compassion for for you. I know what that feels like. I've been in that same spot. I never want you to feel that way. And now I haven't been attacked. You didn't attack me. You didn't give me the cold shoulder because of what I did. You didn't pretend that everything was okay. You were just honest with me. And I have a chance to say, oh my gosh, I had no idea that you were having thoughts that that's— let me tell you how I really feel. Let me tell you how important you are to me. Let me tell you how about how valuable you are to me, and I want to know what I can do to help you feel better. And again, when you're on the receiving end You want to do something. What can I do? You know, maybe you can give them a hug, maybe it's a kiss, maybe you can fix dinner or fix a cup of coffee or bring some flowers or whatever it is. Because again, it's the monkey that's having the problem. If the person— the monkey's not suddenly reacting to what they said when the person does that thing. Thing, there's no emotional reaction. It says, "Gosh, Bill, you didn't show up at the party last night. I was just curious as to what's going on." But you're not having any big feelings inside because you've got a monkey who's learned to be really relaxed and not to have this negative way of interpreting the world. But your monkey had the negative way of interpreting the world, which was which is why you end up with bad feelings, which we now have resolved. And now, if I'm the person on the other side, I say, "I'm so sorry, and now I want to give you a gift." Whatever kind of gift is appropriate to whatever our relationship is, because monkeys like gifts. The monkey will say, "Wow!" Gave me a banana, must really like me, must be telling me the truth. And that's why it's important to do something in return. Okay, so if you've been going through all of this in a deep state of relaxation, you can begin to guide yourself back to an awareness of where we are, where your body is located in space and time, because that's really all the time that we have for today. Is that our way of reacting is always based upon how we've learned to react. And we have no control over what's laid on us for the first 5 to 7 years of our lives. We don't even know that we have separate minds. We can't think different from what's laid on us. And so we're always going to be reacting in the ways that we've been trained to react, but those ways are limiting our lives. And so the opportunity in these relationship challenges is we get to set ourselves free from that automatic negative thinking, the ANTS, A-N-T-S. Automatic negative thoughts, automatic negative ways of reacting to things. So that's how this is. That's what the opportunity is here. But always remember, for you or for somebody else, they're reacting that way. It's not your fault. Your fault may not be a fault, but what you did was inadvertently step on that person's toe. That may have been very invisible to you, but now they're visible to you. And the reason that person's feeling pain is because they've been trained to feel pain in that kind of situation. That's generally what's going on. And what you want to be is the compassionate person that says, "My gosh, I'm sorry that you're feeling bad." You can't say to her, "I'm sorry that you're feeling bad because your father was such a jerk." I guess sometimes you can say that, but— But that's what it is. And the same thing about your feeling, whatever you're feeling. That's what we're always trying to do, is let go of the past. Um, so much of what goes on in our lives, and just about all of the painful, negative, awful things that are going on in our lives, is the result of how we've been programmed to feel about things. I had a woman who came to see me. She She had an interesting job. She was— this was back in the days when there was a big financial crash and companies were having to cut back their staff. They were having to fire people. And there were people who were specialists in being the hatchet man, that you would fire them, they would come on board, they would learn everything that's going And then one by one they would meet people and say, "You know, you're fired," or "You're being promoted," "You're being demoted." Terrible job, and you were a consultant, so when you finished your job they could get rid of you because if somebody in the company did that, nobody would speak to them again. And so she would go into the worst situations and engineer these turnarounds in these companies in spite of the disaster. And, but she was the sweetest, kindest, lightest person. Said, well, don't you get depressed going in doing that all the time? Isn't that awful to know what you're dealing with? And she said, no, you know, I grew up during the Depression and my father was out of work on many occasions. When he got a job, he would work, and as he was working, mom would always put a little bit of money away in in the candy jar up on the shelf. So there was always a little bit, and Dad would work maybe 2 months, maybe 3, 4, 5 months, but sooner or later he'd lose his job. We're probably gonna see a lot more of this coming up in the next months. And when Dad knew he was losing his job, he would come home and say, "Well, I'm losing my job. You know what that means?" And all the kids knew what that meant. That meant we were going to get down the candy jar and empty it out, and we're going to go buy ice cream, all ice cream and cake we could eat. And we had a party and we sang. It was wonderful-bolide. Now, this person, when they're confronting disaster, their reaction was joy and empowerment and positive expectation. And she could take that into these businesses and turn them around and leave a happy, thriving company in her wake. So it's as Shakespeare said, man is the measure of all things. There's nothing neither good nor bad but thinking makes it so. Now we've learned in our culture that we can blame our feelings on other people. You made me mad. You— That's not it. Nobody can make you anything. I tell you, 50 years of experience, I'm telling you nobody can make you feel it. Yeah, I can stick you with a knife and make you feel pain, okay. But I can't make you feel mad at me because I stuck you with the pain. I mean, that's your reaction. Well, in the 99% of the time, our feelings are purely and simply our emotional reaction to what's going on because of how we're interpreting the world. Realize you don't have to interpret the world in that way. And if you shut up until you take responsibility for your reaction, and give the other person an opportunity to hear you, to feel you, and to be compassionate, then you haven't— well, you haven't been responsible. You haven't been responsible to the relationship. And since the relationship is really why we're here in so many very important ways, you want to work on your way of dealing with those situations in which you feel, which you feel insulted. Our next one is going to be a real challenge for me. I started out as a militant agnostic, which means anyone who thought that they could speak in any kind of rational way about the existence of God or spiritual beings or anything like that, I used to love to get together and demolish them with my heavy-duty intellectual arguements. I was a militant agnostic, not atheist, because I think atheists, they have more faith than anybody in a certain way, right? Because atheist thinks everything happened automatic, by mistake. Everything just kind of fell into place. That's sort of like arriving on a desert island and finding a Rolex watch hanging from the frond of a palm tree. And saying, hmm, all of the elements that make up this watch are present in ocean water. Maybe the waves just crash together in such a way as to form this Rolex. It's just an accident. There was no intelligence that put this watch together. So to— you have to have a lot of faith to believe that. So I had to be an agnostic. But what I'm going to do is talk about spirituality, and I'm going to try to tie that into our viral situation, but that's just a tiny piece of it. That's just to kind of keep it topical, but I want to talk about what my experience has been of spirituality and how I became a spiritual person, uh, through the process of helping people discover how to heal themselves. And then the week after that, I want to talk about habits, addictions, and behaviors, because we have been on lockdown long enough now that I think we're aware, more aware of some of the habits that we have that we may want to take care of. And being on lockdown is an excellent time to focus on our own therapy and growth, to just as it is to focus on those relationships. So may you continue to find more and more love in your life. May you grow closer and closer to those who are in your life that you love. May you learn to love more and more people. Maybe you can learn to love all sentient beings, and even some of those beings Who aren't sentient. Namaste.

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