The Magic of Relationships, Key to Healing, Joy, and Longevity Part 1

Welcome to The Magic of Relationships: Key to Healing, Joy, and Longer Life. This is Dr. Emmett Miller. Welcome aboard. Glad you're here with me today. I initially considered entitling this presentation "Life Discoveries About Relationships from One Who Throughout All of Grade School Consistently Failed the Subjects Works and Plays Well with Others and Respects the Rights of Others." Each time when I'd come home with my report card, I could fully expect what was going to happen to me. My father was going to take me down into the basement, pull off my pants, and take off this huge belt that he wore, and he would whip me until there were blue and purple lash marks across my, across my legs. And of course I'd be screaming my head off. It always took me a while to get over that. But sure enough, next report card, there I am getting unsatisfactory in works and plays well with others. And I don't know why. I got A's in everything else, but you know, I thought I understood what the words meant, and I thought I was working and playing well with others, but What did that mean? So it was quite a while before I kind of sat down and said, what is respecting other people? And what really constitutes playing well with other people? It doesn't just mean that I feel good about speaking to somebody and I'm feeling respectful, or I feel like I'm playing well but had something to do with how is that person experiencing me? Are they feeling respected and are they enjoying the playing? So that was quite a discovery for me. And then I finally, even when I got into the practice of medicine and I'd already discovered that I wanted to create a new field of medicine, mind-body medicine, Gradually, as I was doing my work, I began to understand that there's something very special about relationships. Of course, you know, we've talked about the fact that once upon a time Louis Pasteur surprised everybody by showing that there were wee beasties, microorganisms, that seemed to be cultured from the wounds of people who had infections. And we started with the germ theory of disease. And so the whole point was, how can we get rid of germs? And how can we wash our hands? And it's called pasteurization—pasteurize our milk and so forth. But at the same time, there was a fellow around that time, also in France. His name was Claude Bernard. And he said, well, yeah, germs have something to do with it, but perhaps more important is the milieu intérieur, or the inner environment, and that we must maintain a homeostasis, a balance within. And if we maintain that balance, then the body can fight off disease, can fight off infections. And that's more important than waiting until we get infections and then having to treat them. But that was pretty complicated for people back in the mid-1800s to comprehend what that meant. But they could see the germs and you could drop poison on them and watch them die. Ah, yeah. So we went in that direction. You know, it's, uh, sorry to say, medicine is still in that direction. We're not preventing our illnesses. We're treating by trying to kill the things that occur. Because we're not in balance. And that's what I had discovered in medicine, was that the overwhelming majority of our illnesses, uh, of our dysfunctions, were primarily the result of traumatic experiences that we were having. Our thoughts, our emotions, our habits that they give rise to all lead to the breakdown of homeostatic mechanisms within the body through the medium of stress. And we've talked about that, the stress chemicals, the constant pressure of stress chemicals with no break that, that happens for us and gradually tearing down our bodies, making us now vulnerable to infection, inflammation, allergy, accidents, organ breakdown, and perhaps even cancer. As well as failure, unhappiness, harmful habits, addictions, and even mass murder and war. So in my work, I discovered that I could trace back into people's pasts and find out the sensitizing event, the original traumas in their lives that caused that splitting of their personality that led to a constant stress, a constant pain, a constant trauma in the unconscious part of the mind, the monkey mind, even while a person manages in their conscious mind to do pretty well in the world, but they're not really happy and they have these symptoms and they have various anxieties and they lose their temper and things like that. But it was by going back and unlocking that and then using the process of desensitization by reciprocal inhibition that I used once we had found these sensitizing events. And then amazing things began to happen. There was a certain point at which I began to realize, you know what, in all of these situations, we end up going back to some point in the past where there was a breakdown in relationships in some way. I'll share more about that in a few moments, but let me just let you know that this is Dr. Emmett Miller, and you are here with me on my regular webinar that we have every 2 or 4 weeks. Thank you once again for those of you who've been kind enough to send donations in. When I receive donations, they gives me the feeling that you really appreciate the work that I'm doing, and even more so, that you're beginning to integrate it, uh, in, into your life. Um, this that's on the screen is a, a photograph that was taken by, by a physician. This is when I was practicing in Monterey, California. I had I had just begun my practice. I'd just been working there for a couple of years, but I had become known as someone who had some special techniques. And the physician was in a quandary because this young woman had come with extreme case of ulcerative colitis. She had lost a huge amount of weight over the years. Her entire colon was inflamed and oozing blood. You know, maybe you've never, maybe you've never seen an inflamed colon. It's a, a pretty terrible sight, particularly when it's bleeding. And of course you have continuous diarrhea and it's— she had failed medical treatment. The only thing left to do was to remove her entire large bowel, which her physician was bolted at the thought of doing that to such a young woman. So he took the very unusual step of calling on this young physician whose work he had heard of. As best I can remember, I saw her a couple of times in the hospital and then another 10 or 12 times in my office. She learned some of the basic techniques that I knew at that time, and I guided her on a selective awareness exploration into a deep state of hypnosis. And we went back to the sensitizing events in her, in her life that were producing the stress that in turn was triggering her ulcerative colitis. As we desensitized her to those events, her illness cleared up pretty rapidly, and Here's a photo of her just a few months later. Um, she was very healthy. I spoke to her, I guess, about a year ago, which is some 20 years after I treated her, and she was still free of any severe ulcerative colitis, and she was still doing fine. Well, the amazing thing was that, of course, what we went back to were broken relationships. In her life. And I was able to understand then— it started— of just how important it is, our relationships, how much they do for us, and how when they are disturbed, how much trouble they can make for us. I'd like to share with you a very amazing study. That's the Harvard Study of Adult Development. Back in, actually in 1938, a group of researchers gathered 268 Harvard sophomores together into to do a long-term study, and that study lasted for many decades. Their goal was that the longitudinal study would reveal clues to what it took to lead a happy and healthy life. It's now 80 years later, and we have some fascinating data as part of this amazing study by Dr. Waldinger. It's one of the longest studies ever done of adult life. Of the original cohort at Harvard, only 19 are still alive, and all are in their mid-90s. Fascinatingly, they also expanded their research to include the men's offspring, who now number 1,300, and they're in their 50s and 60s. So they've gained a lot of information about how early life experiences affect health and aging over time. Now, some of the participants went on to become successful businessmen, doctors, lawyers. Others ended up as schizophrenics or alcoholics, broken homes, and so forth. And over the years, the researchers studied the trajectories of these people's lives, including their triumphs and failures in careers, in marriage. And what they found was pretty startling. Dr. Robert Waldinger, the director of the study, who's a psychiatrist at Mass General Hospital, said the surprising study is that our relationships and how happy we are in our relationships has a powerful influence on our health. I could have told him that, but I, I didn't get to do a study like this. Taking care of your body, he said, is important, but tending to your relationships is a form of self-care too. That, I think, is a revelation. Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives, the study revealed. Those ties protect people from life's discontents, help to delay mental and physical decline, and they're better predictors of the long and happy lives that we were like to live. And they're better predictors than social class or IQ or even a person's genetic makeup, right? Social ties are better predictors of health than your genes, than your IQ, your, your social class. Later on, they started a study with some inner city dwellers, lower socio, socioeconomic class, and they found across the board exactly the same findings. About relationships and health. Several other studies found that people's level of satisfaction with their relationships at age 50 was a better predictor of physical health than their cholesterol levels were. And those people who are most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest. When they got to age 80. I mean, remarkable stuff. You know, I highly advise, if you're interested, want to know some more, go and see the TED Talk by Dr. Waldinger, and that one's entitled What Makes a Good Life: Lessons from the Longest Study. You know, in addition, one of the things that's very important is marital satisfaction. If you're happy in your marriage, it has a protective effect on your health, and especially your mental health. People who have happy marriages in their 80s report that their moods don't suffer, even on the days when they have more physical pain. Whereas those who have unhappy marriages feel more pain, both emotional and physical, and their moods suffer from it. So in general, healthy relationships are characterized by such qualities as communication, fairness, individuality, trust, compromise, understanding, honesty, confidence, and especially respect. God, I wish I'd known that back at, back at that time. One of the things that's most important to focus on in relationships is the quality of love. In our previous sessions, we have demonstrated clearly how love is the most powerful healing agent at the level not only of emotions but also mind, body, behaviors, addiction, relationships. And love leads towards contentment, happiness, and success, in addition to all the things that Dr. Waldinger's study is showing us. And that this quality of love that I hope to address, that is present in all relationships. Another thing that Dr. Waldinger said that, that was quite powerful in my mind was loneliness kills. It's as powerful as smoking or alcoholism. As a result of his study, that's not just his guess, but that's what he found in his study. I'll say a little bit more about loneliness because not only is loneliness uncomfortable for us, scientists have linked loneliness with a greater risk for obesity, heart disease, anxiety, dementia, stress, inflammation. Different studies for each of these has demonstrated each of these things. You understand there's tens of thousands of studies that demonstrate this and so if you don't know it, it's time to know it— produce reduced immune function, poor sleep, and premature death. I'll say a little bit more about that in a moment. Loneliness is also associated with a greater risk of addiction. For instance, the rate of deaths directly attributable to alcohol rose by more than 25% in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, when so many people were self-isolating working from home. The trend continued into 2021, by then up to 34% more than pre-pandemic levels. Deaths due to alcohol. Loneliness has been at epidemic levels for several years now. In 2018, Cigna Insurance company surveyed 20,000 Americans aged 18 and older. 46% reported sometimes or always feeling lonely. And other studies show that social isolation is associated with most forms of disease and mortality, as well as changes in immune cell gene expression, having an effect on your immune system, leading to allergies or cancer, or poor ability to fight off infection, and, and so forth. And what it does, this social isolation, it produces upregulation of pro-inflammatory genes and downregulation of antiviral genes. Loneliness is also strongly linked to reduced lifespan. One 2015 meta-review concluded that loneliness can raise your risk of dying by as much as 30%. Older adults are also much more likely to die within 30 days of emergency surgery when loneliness is a factor. Wow, we've just scratched the tip of the iceberg here, but I think you get the idea. I mean, we could go on all day talking about what the studies have shown us, but let's move on. And take, take a look, understanding that having positive supporting relationships is really important to living that long, happy, and healthy life. Now let's take a look at the notion of love and how that can play a part in creating healing relationships. Actually, love is part of the basic human experience. From our infancy, that's when it starts. We came upon the quality of love quite naturally due to the fact that human babies are basically— this is a very important point— we're all born prematurely. All right, I mean, we probably should have stayed in the womb an extra year or year and a half. We come out, we're totally helpless. We're no more than a than a fetus that's inside. Now, you take the baby monkey, when it's born it climbs up the hair of its mother, it fouts, takes the breast, climbs up on her back and holds on tight as she swings. We can't do that at 1 day old. The baby wildebeest is born, 20 minutes later it's running 40 miles an hour to keep up with its mother and the herd. Why don't we stay inside longer? Because of this. It always comes down to this, doesn't it? Our heads are so big that if we stayed in there until we were a year and a half old, our heads would be so big we couldn't be delivered. In fact, it's all we can do to get out through the pelvic canal as it is. So many of us have to be born by cesarean sections. We're right at the limit. So what that means is that we're unequipped to handle with a lot of the challenges of life. And so we should be kept quiet and loved. We should be warm. We should be protected from loud noises, from heights, from falling, from anger, from hearing people argue with each other. Diaper pin sticking in us. We should be protected from that until we've developed enough of a way of relating with the world that we can begin to understand and deal with challenges. Well, we don't get that. Most of us get invaded really early. But if we didn't have that love of our mother, let's say 100,000 years ago, and we wake up screaming and mewling, puking in the middle of the night, throw us off the mountain. No, no, no. We're treated with love and a loving family. Our hormones are designed to make us love our babies. And so that's what we should have. And only gradually, as we grow through the years, do we get to take on challenges. But we only take on challenges that we can comprehend what they mean and have a strategy for leading out of it that is wise. Most of us didn't get that because our ways of raising children is lousy and our culture is lousy in so many ways. We've talked so much about that. So we end up all having many little traumas. Some of us have big traumas. We get raped or kidnapped, things like that. Some of us have little traumas. You know, we get separated in Safeway from our parents and we're screaming and yelling for 2 minutes and finally we're found. There, there, there. And we stop crying in a few minutes, but there's been a trauma. And that child is going to be more susceptible to feeling anxious when they feel alone, lost, or abandoned in their life. They may do very well in many ways, but they may not do well in that way. One of the things I found is amazing to me is working in Silicon Valley, um, the, the CEOs of vast corporations cannot spend a day alone. Remarkable. So we all have these little quirks, and those all tie back into traumas in our lives. And that's what I've discovered in my work. And so not only people who have a legitimate disease, you know, depression or borderline personality or social anxiety disorder or attention deficit— no, but a lot of us have the same symptoms as people who have those diagnoses, but they're not bad enough that we get to be called sick and that we get to be taken care of by the sick care. It's not even a sick care system now. It's really a pharmaceutical marketing system that we have out there and surgery marketing system. So, so what we want to look at is how we can undo some of those problems that we've come up with. That we all need the ability to take a look at the unpleasant emotions that we have, to the behaviors that we have, to the habits of thought, to the addictions that we have, whether it's to alcohol or drugs or gambling or philandering or spending or eating, whatever is that we don't like that we have these in our lives, and yet we have it. Why do we have it? That's what I'm talking about. We can deal with that by taking a look at the past and also by working with increasing our ability to be in warm, beautiful, loving relationships. In order to survive, human beings had to have relationships. We can't survive alone out there in the world. We really need people. Like Hillary Clinton said, it takes a village to raise a child. It takes a village to take care of all of us. And if you look at the, the brains as we develop through time, let's say from Australopithecus through Homo erectus up through Homo sapiens, we see constantly the brain gets bigger and bigger. And why is that? Well, because as we develop larger and larger social groups, we need larger and larger brains because we've got to manage relationships. We're designed to have warm relationships with a lot of people, up to 100 to 150 people. That's our normal environment. You know, it's like bees, you know, there's thousands of bees You can't say, okay, here's a bee and we'll put you in here with these other two bees and see what happens. Yeah, well, you don't get much done. And so if we don't have those relationships and our relationships have fallen apart, our communities have fallen apart, and therefore we don't have the villages. And so we're all experiencing a certain trauma because we're not getting what we need. We were designed to feel good about having lots of good relationships, and so we'll tend to form that relationship if we're given an opportunity to do so. It's built into our genes. We want to be close. We want to be connected, and when we don't have it, there's something in us that knows that we don't have it, and that constitutes a stress. It's like if we don't have food, if we don't have someone holding our hand going across the street, there's a stress, and that stress inside is what then goes on to produce our illnesses and our dysfunctions. What can help us out of these tough spots? Healing experiences such as you get in quality therapy, or that you have in warm relationships with other people where you have heart-to-heart sharing in loving relationships. Until we do, those little inner traumas, the little microtraumas in everyone's life, continue to ooze toxic stress chemicals into our system. Producing organ damage, early death, systemic illness, emotional distress, maladaptive behavior patterns. Some people are aware of that internal stress because they're aware of their emotions. But in many ways, we have a tendency to, in our culture, suppress our emotions so that we don't, so that we don't feel them. I mentioned briefly that This also, the lack of those relationships, as they produce stress, they also shorten our lives. Why do they shorten our lives? Well, that seems to be due in many cases to our telomeres. Telomeres are structures that are made of DNA, and they're found at the ends of the strands of chromosomes in our DNA, in our body. And they're very much like, uh, those little, little plastic caps at the ends of your shoelaces that keep them from becoming unraveled. And every time your cells divide, they tend to lose telomeres. And as the telomeres become shorter and shorter, then the cells begin to die. The length of your telomeres corresponds basically to how much life you have left for you. And research has demonstrated pretty solidly now that lower telomerase activity and shorter length are productive of shorter lives. Women, for instance, in one study with the highest level of perceived stress have telomeres shorter on average by the equivalent of at least one decade of additional aging. In other words, your cells are 10 years older. Okay, let's go back to that paradigm of love because it's so important, and I want to not be so too intellectual about it. So let's have an inner experience of love. Take a moment and allow yourself to be in a comfortable position, somewhere that you can relax for the next few minutes, because the experience is what's really important. Take a deep breath in, and as you let it out, let your eyes find a point off in the distance to focus on. Some point that's not moving, something boring, and think to yourself, there's no place I have to go at this moment in time. There's nothing that I have to do, and there's no problem that I have to solve, and therefore I can give myself permission to relax. To relax. Good. Allowing your eyelids now to fall closed because that's what they feel like they want to do. Behind your closed eyelids, let yourself look up toward the back of your forehead. Picture the word relax and let your eyelids relax all the way down to the point that they feel they just don't want to open at all. And when you feel that relaxation in your eyelids, test your eyelids. Feel them so relaxed they just don't want to open at all. And as you test them, let that feeling of relaxation from your eyelids flow throughout the rest of your body, through your face and your scalp. Your jaw muscles relax, your neck and shoulders relax and let go. Let that relaxation flow, flow down through your neck your shoulders and your arms, down through your arms and your wrists and your hands, through your wrists and your hands and your fingertips. And when that relaxation reaches your fingertips, take a deep breath in and draw that breath from your fingertips up through your arms into the center of your chest. Draw the relaxation up into the center of your being. And as you let that breath go, think to yourself the words, "It breathes me," and sink down into that pause after you've breathed out and before the next breath comes in. It breathes me. With each breath out, think the words, "It breathes me," and feel your chest emptying your body of all unnecessary stress, of all unnecessary tension. Peaceful and calm, relaxing your back and flowing down into your abdomen. Your abdomen rising and falling with each breath in and out, a gentle massage of relaxation to all your internal organs. Relaxation flowing through your pelvic organs and down through your thighs, your knees, and your legs and your ankles and your feet, all the way down to the very tips of your toes. More and more peaceful, more and more calm, sinking deeply into that pause after each breath out before the next breath begins itself. The quietest time of all for all your mind and body. Good. Now imagine you're floating on your magic carpet, and imagine that you're floating back through time, and that you can float back through time to a very pleasant place, your special place. Maybe when you're on vacation, maybe you're meditating or in prayer, maybe you're taking a walk or running or skiing or dancing or surfing or being with someone that you really love. On a mountaintop or in a garden. So many places you can go. Choose one and use the power of your imagination to picture this place around you. And if you have trouble picturing it, just imagine that you're picturing it and that you can see the colors. Look at the shapes around you and the objects that your eyes can see. Look all around. Oh, very peaceful and beautiful. Maybe someplace in nature. Feel anything that your body may be touching. And if you're moving, feel the smooth movement of your body. And if you're at rest, feel the peace as your body becomes more and more calm and more and more peaceful in this your special place. And anytime any unnecessary thoughts come along, with your next breath out, just breathe those unnecessary thoughts out of your mind. Sink down into that pause. Good. Let the next breath in. Breathe in fresh, clear, smooth relaxation. If that same unnecessary thought comes along again, Simply erase it in the same way. There is a deeper sense of self that you can let yourself be aware of now. It's a sense of yourself that you've probably been aware of on many different occasions. And if you can recall memories like this and revivify them, to visualize, to experientialize them, they can be used as what I call reference memories. Resources you can call upon. And the times I want to guide you to now are times of peace, times when you're feeling safe, and a time when you felt love. Just choose one. And if you can't come up with a specific memory of feeling loved, for the time being, just make one up— an imaginary love that you've had. It's okay. Because there's something in you that knows and understands love, even if you lost contact with it at some point in your life. It may be giving birth. It may be art or music that you love, or on a walk with someone that you love, having a wonderful conversation, or it may be sitting on the lap of a grandparent or loving parent when you're feeling really, really connected. And open yourself, open yourself as fully as you can at this moment to that feeling of love, a deep feeling of Knowing that you're right where you're supposed to be, fully accepted and fully accepting, loved and loving. Good. Take a deep breath in, let it out, and as you let that memory fade away, see if you can find another time that represents love for you, acceptance, connection, deep feelings of gratitude and peace. Good. And give yourself a signal inside, a physical signal. Maybe put your hand or both hands over your heart. Feel the place in your body where love is the strongest and breathe into it. And let the feeling of your hands being on your chest above your heart and that feeling of love deep inside And the feeling of each breath, breathing that love throughout the rest of your body, be a signal so that anytime you need to be back in touch with your sense of love, being lovable, and ability to love, come back to you to relax you deeply and bring you into this moment of safety. And peace and calm. Because this love and this peace and this calm and this safety and this relaxation are always here at the center of your being. All you need do is quiet your monkey mind, and you can learn to do that, I promise. Just practice. And then get in touch with your center. And from this center, you can now open yourself to the wisdom that is within you, to allow yourself to see and feel the truth intuitively. The truth is that which is self-evident. Open to your spiritual guidance from within. And allow yourself to know that stress is just a way that your monkey mind reacts inappropriately to the world. When there's a social challenge that needs your creativity and the monkey mind thinks it's a life or death emergency that you have to escape from through whatever trapdoor you can find to run away or fight or drink or whatever you do or have done in the past. You know you don't have to do that now. You can come back to this place. Put your hands over your heart. Go to your special place of love. Good. And now, as I count from 1 to 5. Let yourself just return to the place where your physical body is resting comfortably. 1, 2, as though you've been on a long journey deep within but still stay in touch with that peace and that love. 3, as you tune into your environment. 4, allowing your— your eyes to slowly open when they're ready. 4 and 5. Simply enjoying the colors around you, the shapes, and still your breathing. How very peaceful and wonderful-bolide. Excellent. And I'd like to pause for a few moments to make some suggestions as to how you might deepen your knowledge and experience of love. And that would be by having the experience— experiences that are offered to you through some of the products that I've created through time that I would like to invite you to experience by coming to shop.drmiller.com. And know that by purchasing these products, you're helping to support this program as well as future experiences that I hope to be able to make available during my final years here, where I'm trying to sum up everything that I've learned over the last 50 years of creativity. Uh, I think it's wonderful that Mainstream medicine is beginning to accept some of the work that I published in my first book back in 1973, but I've been busy a lot since then, and I hope I get to share all of it before I have to move on to, to my next adventure. So I'd like to suggest that you take a look at and listen to the Love Meditation. It's there at shop.drmiller.com. Check out Creating Your Island of Peace, Abolish Anxiety, Sexual Intimacy, because that was a very special Form of Love. The video which is called Healing Your Relationships. Another audio called I Am Awakening Self-Acceptance, because self-love is actually right at the basis of all of this. In the beginning, uh, as an infant, you, you can't quite experience that self-love, but you can experience that love that's coming into you. But gradually you will reflect your environment, and feeling well loved, you begin to love yourself. And Also, to remind you, donations are so valuable. It, it's remarkable. I probably get an average of 2 or 3 donations out of the 200 or 300 people that watch the webinars. Just got a message that I had the video turned off, but I don't anymore. That's good. Anyway, there's— so it's just remarkable that there's so few donations, and you can help me correct that by just sending them. You can send it to Emmett Miller, Post Office Box 803, in Nevada City, California, 95959. Or just go to PayPal, it's accounting@drmiller.com. Or you can go to shop.drmiller.com/donate. You know, all of those will, all of those will work. So thanks a lot. And I'd like to share with you another little story from my past. And it's something that happened back in 1980 when Sandy and I went to Nepal and we trekked up out of Pokhara towards Muktanath high in the Himalayas, up and down these steep, steep hills. Fascinating. No motors, never the sound of a motor, just the silence. But we keep passing people, and among those people, so often, and they're all carrying, and you'll find a woman who's probably in her 70s, she's got a backpack on, and then that backpack, she's got 150 pounds of wood. She's been carrying it for 3 or 4 hours from where she's had to get it to bring it home so that she can cook dinner. But as she passes us, she says, "Namaste. Namaste." And it's like, in the beginning you say, "Oh, that's cool." Like, in the beginning you say, like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." Like, "Namaste." Like, "Cool baby." Yeah. And then after a while, something else begins to touch you, and you don't know what it is. And then you begin to realize that you're feeling differently. And then you find out that the— that namaste refers to something that they believe, and that they believe that there's a place in you of light and love and wisdom and beauty. And in me, there's a place of light and love and wisdom and beauty. And when you're in that place in you and I'm in that place in me, there's only one of us. Isn't that beautiful? That's the oneness. And that's what we're talking about in terms of this, in terms of this love that, that I'm aiming at. It's kind of a kind of a very special, very special kind of love. You know, we've talked in our previous sessions about the paradigm shift that it's so important for us to make, that we are kind of living in Plato's cave, where we're being shown only a portion of reality, really just the shadows of it. They're pretty scary shadows is what we're being fed in our culture. And yet, if we could but free ourselves from those chains and get up and take a look around, we'd see that there's something very, very beautiful. Something very, very, very, very important. And one of the ways that we're kept blind is that we're continually fed ideas and thoughts that are violent in nature, a way of thinking that is violent. It's about conflict. Either/or, black or white, differentiating, fragmenting, good versus bad, us versus them, me versus you. It's exclusive. It's critical. It's judgmental. It's contemptuous. It's rejecting. It's debating. It's attacking. If you don't believe me, listen to the news any day, and that's what you're going to be hearing. You're going to be fed that because it makes you listen. And the world is composed of a lot of money which is out there, and the focus of that money is to capture your attention so you'll buy their product or vote for their candidate, because your monkey mind thinks that that's going to take away the anxiety that's being created inside as we are separated from our fundamental feelings of love. And so what it is that I've been trying to share with you is that the paradigm shift is, yeah, sometimes you do have to be analytical, but there's another way of thinking. It's the holistic way of thinking. And it's about shared values. It's about integration and inclusiveness, both-and, caring, intimacy, balance, harmony, empathy, compassion, wholeness, collective intelligence. And that's what I call Love with a capital L, just as I call the other Violence with a capital V. Not physical violence, but, you know, that violence. And what we need is to add more love into our thoughts. And ideally, our first thought should be about love. And maybe then we can go on into analytic thoughts. Thoughts and compare and contrast. The Greeks had a word for it. They described the type of love that is found in romantic relationships as eros. They have four kinds of love. The second type of love is called philia, and that's the kind of love found in strong friendships. There's affection and support and a sense of equality. Then there's storge, the type of love found in family relationships where there's empathy and affection and compassion. And finally, agape, or agape, selfless unconditional love. And agape is a love of choice. You're not loving out of attraction or obligation. It's a disinterested love that doesn't need anything in return. Very special kind of love. And, and I think it's really toward that kind of love that we are aiming. One story I've heard is about— I believe it was the Museum of Modern Art— where 12 monks were creating a huge sand mandala on the floor. 12 monks, it was going to take them a week to do it, and they were about 5 or 6 days into it. And there was a provision made so that people could file into the room around the periphery and they could watch the mandala being made. They had a red velvet rope around to keep them in line, and all of a sudden, some woman lifted the rope, ducked underneath of it, stepped into the middle of the mandala, and started scuffing her feet, completely destroying the mandala. Everybody in the room was frozen. I mean, this is over. It's like you can't fix a sand mandala. It was over. And people were horrified, fearful, angry, but in shocked silence. And then one of the monks turned to the museum guard and said, "That woman must be so unhappy. Is there anything that we can do to help her?" Yeah, that kind of love. It's not about what you've lost. Finally, I want to end with an experience that happened to me a while back when I was visiting my friend Gabriel, uh, who was, uh, living in a home on the edge of a cliff in Big Sur, looking at the island down a mile below and looking at the ocean a mile below. And there I met a young man from Ireland who had been traveling through the United States. He had been keeping a diary of his travels, and I asked if I could read it. He graciously agreed, and the first thing I turned to was a poem written by someone I never heard of. The person was Thich Nhat Hanh. Thich Nhat Hanh is a Vietnamese monk— well, yes, he recently died— a Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk who had escaped from Vietnam and who was living in Hong Kong, where he was engaged in trying to get the Hong Kong government to admit the boatloads of people arriving from Vietnam after Vietnam had fallen. And he had heard the story from a mother about her daughter, a teenage girl, a young 13-year-old girl. And of course what was happening as these people were out in their boats with all of their belongings in their little bag Sea pirates would set upon them, steal everything that they had, and rape the women. And this young girl had been raped, and she was so ashamed at having been raped that she threw herself into the ocean and of course was drowned. And that touched him so deeply that he wrote a poem that I would like to share with you. This is the monk Thích Nhất Hạnh. Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow, because even today I still arrive. Look deep Deeply, I arrive in every second to be a bud on a spring branch, to be a tiny bird with wings still fragile, learning to sing in my new nest, to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower, to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone. I still arrive in order to laugh and to cry, in order to fear and to hope. The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of all that are alive. I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river, and I am the bird who, when spring comes, arrives in time to eat the mayfly. I am the frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond. And I am also the grass snake who, approaching in silence, feeds itself on the frog. I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo sticks. And I am the arms merchant selling deadly weapons to Uganda. I am the 12-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat, who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate. And I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving. My joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom in all walks of life. My pain is like a river of tears, so full it fills up the four oceans. Please call me by my true names so I can hear all my cries and all my laughs at once, so I can see that my joy and pain are one. Please call me by my true name so I can wake up, and so the door of my heart can be left open, the door of compassion. I cried, and I knew that I had learned something from this Vietnamese monk. And this was, I think, maybe 19— in the 1970s. Touched me really deeply about compassion. I really got it, and I made up my mind I would find him. Well, it wasn't difficult because he became very popular over the next few years. Check out his work, like Being Peace. Thích Nhất Hạnh. Another book that I read I want to share with you was by S. Rawan. It was called Gandhi: The Man. It's another one. It's a very narrow, small book. I read it. It was full of Gandhi's quotes and little pictures. And again, I started crying about one-third of the way through the book and didn't stop all the way through. It was like I felt what I later learned that Albert Einstein had said, he said, "Future generations will read about this man and will have trouble believing that such a person ever existed." And I just cried, even after I closed the book. The tears just continued. I highly recommend it, Gandhi: The Man. One of the things that Gandhi said, this has a lot to do with creating and maintaining friendships, because there's conflict sometimes in life, and sometimes it's with people you're close to, and a lot of us are afraid of conflict, because we've been misled about it. Conflict is beautiful. It is the source of all new creativity. It's the source of so much understanding. And in our next session, we're going to learn some really fantastic ways to remedy the broken bonds of relationship, how to clear up conflict. One of the most important is this concept of Gandhi, is that with another person that you're struggling with, whoever it is, the ally you must always seek is the part of your adversary that knows what is right. Grok that. Digest it. The ally you must always seek is the part of your adversary that knows what is right. There is that place of beauty and love inside that other person. That's what you want to be seeking. That's the part of love. That's the place where we're all one. That's the place that's right. Seek that. That's love with a capital L. So in our next session, we're going to cover some wonderful new ideas. You're going to learn the SAD technique, which is one of my first understandings of how to relieve interpersonal tensions. We'll learn the difference between debating and having a dialogue. We'll learn those spiritual perspectives on love and communication that are central to learning how to make these, how to make these connections and, and many other things. So I look forward to seeing you two weeks from now. Meanwhile, it might be a good idea for for you to go to shop.drmiller.com, take a look at the love meditation with transformative imagery, creating your island of peace, sexual intimacy, abolish anxiety, Heal Your Relationships, the video, and the audio I Am Awakening Self-Empowerment. And of course, if you feel moved to send a donation this way. See you next time. Namaste.