The Stress Secret – How to become an Amygdala Whisperer with Dr. Emmett Miller [Episode 29]

So we'll— this will be a meditation just for being able to become more present. So right now, allow your body to be resting in a comfortable position, sitting or lying down. Choose a point in the distance to let your eyes focus on, and you may allow your eyelids to close whenever it feels more comfortable to do so. Become aware that you're in a safe place right now. There's nowhere else that you have to go. There's no problem that you have to solve. And therefore you can give yourself permission to relax, to relax deeply and fully. And you have the power to choose to become fully present. Now become aware of how your physical body feels at this moment in time. Starting with your head, your scalp, your face, just notice what you feel. Just observe. You don't have to do anything about it. Just observe. And now scan your body all the way down through your neck and shoulders and arms, through your chest and your abdomen, all the way down through your legs to your feet, noticing which parts feel warm, which feel cool, which parts feel tense, which parts are peacefully relaxed. And as you scan your body, inform it that there's nothing that it has to respond to at this moment, and therefore can relax and let go. Take a deep breath in, and as you let it out, imagine you're breathing out all tension and stress from your body. Imagine emptying completely. Relaxing, sinking down into a deep state of comfort and tranquility. Good. And become aware of any unnecessary emotional reactions that you notice inside. Positive or negative, and realize that at this moment in time there's no conflict that you need to respond to emotionally or mentally. You are free. And with your next breath out, imagine emptying your body and mind of all unnecessary emotional reactions. With each breath out, letting go. Breathing them out through your heart. And as your chest and your heart begin to relax, feel yourself becoming even more open, allowing the air to breathe for you, aware of the feeling of letting go as each breath leaves, noticing that each little pause after you breathe out and before the next breath enters, that in that little pause, feel yourself sinking deeply into that little pause. That little pause is the quietest time of all for all your mind and body. It's when you are most completely in the present moment. When you are closest to your spirit. Good. Then take one more deep breath in and hold your breath for just a moment as you prepare to completely release all remaining tension and stress from your body, your emotions, and your mind. And now let that breath go and feel yourself sinking as if you're floating down through the darkness in the most gentle and pleasant way and landing on a pleasantly soft and comfortable, gentle, cloud-like bed of receptive, peaceful serenity. Picturing the word relax there on the back of your forehead, feeling that little spark that starts each new breath at the end of the pause. As you allow the air to breathe you. And imagine this little burst of energy is the spark of life, a deep desire within your being to truly live. Within it is the source of deep wisdom that can guide you to becoming the person you really want to be. Be the person you came here to be. And with each breath out, imagine you're breathing all unnecessary thoughts out of your mind, emptying your mind of all distractions, emptying your body of all unnecessary tension. Distracting thoughts becoming fewer and fewer as you let them float away, sinking deeply into the space between your thoughts. Good. And allow yourself to know that anytime that you want to stop and enter the present moment, you can pause You can remember the sound of my voice. You can remember that peaceful feeling inside. Allow your eyelids to close. Take a deep breath in and think the words, "Now relax," as you release that breath. And know that you are exactly who you are supposed to be. And you are exactly in the place that you're supposed to be in at this moment. There's nothing missing. There's nothing extra. And think to yourself the words, "Right now, I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be. Everything is happening exactly the way it's supposed to." I am willing and able to see past the superficial. I can sense the essential in everything. I am able to look past illusion and see the truth. In every activity, with every person. Good. Take one more deep breath in. As you let it out, experiencing this moment as you gently return, return to a very pleasant awareness of the surface beneath you and the space around your physical body in this place in which it is relaxing. And when you're ready, allowing your eyelids to open and take a few moments and notice how comfortable you feel. Good. How are you feeling? Good. You can let me know in the chat box. Let me know you still hear me and that everyone hasn't fallen asleep. Because you do get very relaxed when you do that. It's in a way you don't quite go to sleep. It's almost like surfing on sleep. If you let go too much, you can go under and you can go to sleep. But there's an energy with that next breath that comes in that kind of boosts you up, and then you can kind of surf down. The other side. Great. And so we can call— I call it deep relaxation. You may call it meditation, you may call it mindfulness, you may call it prayer. It really goes beyond the words. The important thing is that you know it, and you know how to feel, how it feels, and you know how to contact it. For those who just joined us, this is Dr. Emmett Miller, and I'm here to share with you the secret of how to manage stress and harness its energy for peak performance. You know, although not everyone seems to be aware of it, by now we should be. I've been teaching this— it's pushing 50 years now— The true source of most of our illnesses, pains, failures, and addictions is stress. And I'd like to share with you the truth about what stress really is. Because contrary to popular belief, stress is not something that happens to you. It's not your work, it's not the stress. The stress doesn't come from your wife or your husband or your kids or the news or the weather. None of that. You will learn the true source of stress, how it produces illness and dysfunction and addiction, and I'll show you an amazingly simple way to turn off the stress reaction, how to, as it were, upgrade your ancient nervous system to cope successfully with the world that we now live in. I'll show you how to relax instantly, and even how to harness the energy of stress to help you achieve your life goals. You ready? Okay, here we go. As I'm sure you're aware, in today's world, stress is possibly the most dangerous challenge we all face. It's a poisonous current running through our lives. It's the source of most, perhaps all, of our misery, failed relationships, lack of success, and unhappiness. And although stress is the result of a specific behavior of our nervous system, it may be triggered by many factors. Both personal and universal. From the political turmoil in our nation to our own financial pressures and our relationship failures, from the looming climate change crisis to the global pandemic and the violence in our communities, from the many responsibilities and demands on our time to our sense of helplessness in the face of the vast injustices in our current world. Well, that's the bad news. The good news, again, is that stress is not something that happens to you. Stress is something that you do with what happens to you. Or more accurately, stress is how your limbic system, or what I call System 1, reacts to the demands that it perceives. Your limbic system is the feeling and reacting part of your brain. It's also called the paleomammalian cortex because it's the same, exact same neural structure found in the brains of all other mammals, which is why I sometimes call it the monkey brain. Your limbic system acts at a level of your central nervous system below the more recently involved conscious part of your brain. And the conscious part of your brain is the only part— that's important to remember. The limbic system, on the other hand, your monkey mind, evolved primarily to defend us and to help us survive the life-or-death threats or stressors of the prehistoric world. Here's how the limbic system works in the emergency system situations that it was so beautifully designed to deal with, what we call Type 1 stressors. Whenever the limbic system perceived a threat to life or limb, the rumble of a landslide beginning up the hill, the acrid smell of a nearby mountain lion or saber-toothed tiger, a shadow stealthily slinking through the bushes. The perceived danger would trigger a reaction by the amygdala, which is an almond-shaped nerve clutch— cluster that is part of your limbic system. Now, whenever the amygdala is triggered, it in turn causes the other nerve centers in the limbic system to fire their neurons, secreting stress hormones and activating the muscles and the other bodily organs that are part of that fight or flight response. Heart beats faster to pump blood to the legs and arms. The muscles tense for action. Breathing speeds up to increase the amount of oxygen delivered to those muscles. And now all of this is fine for eluding a predator, but not of very much use in dealing with the non-life-threatening challenges of today's world. What's more, and this is the most important fact, this limbic stress response inhibits the higher centers of the mind, blocking the ability to analyze, strategize, and act wisely. And it limits access to intuition, creativity, wisdom, and higher-level social skills. I mean, think about it for a moment. You're being attacked by a saber-toothed tiger. This is an emergency. You don't want the higher levels of your mind saying, "Oh my gosh, saber-toothed tigers have such deep green eyes. I had never in those eyelids. My goodness, what a beautiful beast. You're dead. So nature is careful to not let you get distracted by creative thought. That's what we call System 2. Instead, we want System 1. It hijacks the brain. And those of you who have anxiety attacks, or anxiety before public speaking, or panic, or anger attacks, or rage, You know that suddenly you're not thinking logically anymore. And then you do things that are very unwise. You say things that you regret. You fail to say the things that you know very well that you're supposed to say. And then you go and smoke or drink or drugs or gamble or eat or— and you behave in a very stupid way. That's because Part of that stress response is to shut off your ability to think and act wisely. Nature is so beautiful, isn't it? Ah, but unfortunately we live in a world where that reaction doesn't help us very often. So to summarize, stress is a reaction of your subconscious mind to protect you from physical harm. Nobody consciously decides to have a stress reaction. Using your higher mind, you don't say, "Hmm, I think that I'll raise my blood pressure and breathe more—" No. "Speed up the clotting of my blood—" No, you don't do that. System 2 doesn't do that. It happens automatically through the action of your limbic system, through your monkey brain, System 1. This stress response, which was perfect for dealing with Type 1 stressors, And Type 1 stressors are those that are severe physical challenges that occur occasionally, that demand instantaneous physical action to avoid immediate physical harm, and they can be dealt with through your physical behaviors that are called upon by the fight-or-flight stress response. Now, here is a very important point. Those threats in the world in which these reflexes evolved 500,000 years or so, or more, they last only a few seconds, the threats, or maybe a few minutes, and afterward, if you're still alive, there's peace, and there's a compensatory period of healing. That's called the recovery phase. Let me see if I can See if I can share a little diagram with you. This is your stress response, and you see there's a recovery phase where things are rebalanced within your body. In fact, if you've ever almost been in an automobile accident or come near to losing your life, uh, you may notice that it— after the threat is gone, You don't just go back to your original level, you actually become extra relaxed. You just close your eyes and your mind is blank, and you just feel a deep feeling inside of peace and gratitude. I mean, whoopee, you're still alive! And that of course is something that doesn't happen very much in the world that we live in now. We don't have time for that recovery phase. So stress has these two phases: the tension phase, which is limbic activation of the sympathetic nervous system, followed by the second phase, the relaxation phase, which is mediated by the parasympathetic nervous system. Its purpose is to heal the internal damage and imbalance caused by the stress hormones. And again, as I said, it worked beautifully back in ancient Africa where all the stressors were type 1 and occasionally occurred. But it doesn't help us in the challenges you face today at work or in your personal life. It doesn't help you cope with a threat produced by the endless cycle of doom and gloom news, or the exploitative clickbait articles and angry commentary, or stories about your Facebook friends who seem to be doing so much better than you. These are Type 2 stressors. Their true source is usually vague and non-physical. They're not life or death threats requiring instant escape or attack. They cannot be resolved through immediate, immediate physical struggle, and their proper solution requires creative analysis, strategizing, and action governed by your higher conscious mind. In other words, exact opposite of what you get from the ancient stress response. Indeed, although the world we live in has changed dramatically since our prehistoric days, we have exactly the same nervous system as our ancestors. And even though we don't usually experience the full-blown fight-or-flight responses and reactions such as people who have anxiety attacks and in panic attacks. Nevertheless, the constant low-level Type 2 stressors of our world create a kind of stealth stress. It's a stress that we may be only partly, partly, or even entirely unaware of until illness and dysfunction appear. So even though you may not be feeling intense anxiety or irritation or the physical tension and symptoms of a full-on stress reaction, the constant, unrelieved challenges in your life may cause your limbic system to produce a more insidious chronic reaction, in which low levels of cortisol and other stress hormones are se— created on a continuous basis. In time, those toxic chemicals and their effects gradually eat away at the health of your body's organs, producing illness and feelings of being emotionally and physically tense, irritable, anxious, and tired. You're tired. It's as if you're continually experiencing life like a character in a scary movie, continually on edge, irritable, and ready to react. But if you could think clearly and rationally, you'd realize that this tension wasn't helping your situation. And instead, you'd simply choose to relax and recover as nature designed you to. But as I pointed out a moment ago, one of the things that your limbic system does under stress is to hijack your ability to analyze, understand, strategize, and act wisely. Instead, to escape this chronic feeling of threat, your monkey mind goes into action down below the level of consciousness, producing automatic escape behaviors like withdrawal or becoming aggressive becoming depressed, or maybe having a migraine or stomach ache or other physical symptoms, or else getting sleepy and falling to sleep, falling asleep. And sometimes, in an attempt to temporarily relieve this stealth stress, it turns to another neurological system, the reward and pleasure system, which is mediated by the neurotransmitter dopamine, the so-called feel-good hormone. The dopamine system evolved to cause us to feel pleasant sensations when we engage in natural, necessary activities like eating, drinking water, or having sex. But risky behaviors and substances such as alcohol, gambling, overeating, drugs, and illicit sex can also trigger the release of dopamine. So desperate for relief from these Type 2 stressors, The monkey brain turns to these escape behaviors, and sure enough, they temporarily relieve the discomfort. You feel better. But they don't address the true cause of your original problem, which continues to wreak havoc in your life. And to make matters worse, these habits and addictions may even add to your woes. Indeed, they may kill you. Look at how many people die from opioids, I mean, an incredible number of people. And why are people taking opioids and taking downers and so forth? Just to get away from the stress that's being created by the monkey mind. So this is the cause of the real problem we're having with stress: the nonstop neural and hormonal pressures that gradually wear down body, mind, and spirit, leaving you vulnerable to disinformation, propaganda, and behavior that's destructive to yourself, to other people, and even to our planet itself. Now, you may have heard of the concept of good stress, that stress can actually be a positive force. This is true. Stress is not per se negative. Much like that cup of coffee in the morning, A little bit, just the right amount of stress, can enrich your life, can make things more exciting, can keep you alert, and occasionally save your butt if you run into a real physical emergency. But more than the right dose at just the right time, and trouble begins. So you may be wondering, well, how can I tell when I'm having too much stress? Well, you can simply Google the question, what are the symptoms of stress overload, and you will find a very long long list. But there's an even more sensitive way to measure the stress in your life that I'd like to share with you. It is to simply be mindful of how you're feeling, and especially being mindful of your emotions. Instead of suppressing your emotions, to be mindful of them. This mindfulness will reveal to you if you're feeling low-level anxiety, or anger, or sadness, or fear, resentment, guilt, shame, jealousy, envy, or other negative emotions that indicate that your higher mind has been hijacked by your limbic system. Because those emotions are not helping. In fact, they limit your ability to be who you are. Now of course we all experience such emotions briefly from time to time, but in a healthy system Once you've found the specific and effective response to the situation that triggered those feelings originally, the intensity of the emotion fades and goes away and disappears as your body metabolizes the stress hormones. If the negative emotion does not fade away, however, and you find yourself with lingering tension, anxiety, fear, anger, sadness, or really craving that drink or that drug that helps you to relax, then you need a better way to manage your stress. I'd like to share with you what I and my many patients and students and colleagues have found to be the most powerful tool For Outsmarting Stress. You've probably heard of the Serenity Prayer that urges you to seek from your higher power the serenity to accept the things you cannot change. Well, that seems simply logical. Of course you should accept the things you can't change. But if you're seething with resentment, wishing to take revenge, or trembling in fear of infection or job loss or the embarrassment about how much you away, for instance, then you're having trouble accepting the world as it is. What you need is what I call a mind tool that you can use to relax away the symptoms of stress and give you access to your higher mind so you can meet the challenge effectively, whatever it may be. But, you may ask, How can I relax when there are so many unresolved tissues clamoring for my attention? The answer is: you need a mind tool that can quickly convince your monkey mind that there is no imminent physical danger, and tell it to switch off the stress reaction. You know that alcohol, Valium, Xanax, morphine, or other drugs or behaviors might do this temporarily, But a much better and a much more permanent solution is to use the mind tool that I call deep relaxation. As I mentioned a few moments ago, your limbic system is designed to recognize when it is straight— when it is safe to be relaxed, or when it has to protect you with the fight-or-flight response. Your amygdala and your monkey mind feel safe when they perceive certain patterns or conditions associated with health and safety, such as silence or soothing sounds, the presence of safe friends and family, pleasant smell in the air, being surrounded by objects and movements, that are associated with relaxations. In such situations, your amygdala is quiet, permitting the parasympathetic part of your autonomic nervous system to be active. Your body relaxes and your mind becomes calm. But if your amygdala, programmed by your genetics and your past experience, perceives patterns that conflict with these conditions, the memory of an argument yesterday, the thought that you could lose your job, or worries about the wrinkles around your eyes making you look less attractive, then it triggers the stress response, turning on the other part of your autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic nervous system. Your body enters the fight or flight state. Your ability to use your higher conscious mind is sharply diminished, and you miss obvious solutions and instead make foolish choices. In other words, there's how you want to see yourself. You want to feel relaxed like this in this world, but the real world gives you a different picture that's not so rosy. There's a conflict between the two pictures that causes an internal, an internal what we call cognitive dissonance. And the cognitive dissonance looks like a conflict to your monkey mind. It says, "Ah, we're fighting a lion, we're fighting a tiger, the wolves are after us." It doesn't realize there's not really a conflict, it just is what it is. And then it generates the stress response, and then you have all of these feelings and all these behaviors, and you left reality far behind. So the takeaway is that the basic problem, and the most important thing I want you to understand, is that the true cause of your stress problems is that a lower and not very bright part of your brain is trying to solve modern Type 2 stressors with an ancient Type 1 response. And that's because it has no ability to comprehend the true nature of and the appropriate solution to your problems. Really, your world and your life are far too complex for a monkey brain to be in command. Instead, here is where you need to take charge. You, the higher levels of you, using the higher level of your mind, And all you have to do is to outsmart your monkey mind. It's not so difficult if you know how to do it. It's only a monkey. And by doing so, you upgrade your nervous system to deal with the modern world. Right? We're talking about a system upgrade. So convince your monkey mind and your limbic system that there is no imminent physical danger. Something your higher mind can quickly see if you stop for a moment and realize, "There's no place I have to go at this moment in time. There's nothing I have to do, and there's no emergency problem that I have to solve. And therefore, it's completely safe for me to relax." And then pass this information onto your amygdala. Now, how? Well, fortunately, your monkey mind cannot tell the difference between reality and imagination. That's why you can react emotionally to a movie or a story that's totally and completely fictional, and you know it. Therefore, you can use your imagine your imagination to take over control of your monkey mind's behavior. You use mindfulness to do this by focusing your attention on images that your monkey mind associates with safety: pleasant memories, beautiful things in your current environment, soothing sounds like gentle waves or sweet music, relaxed breathing, the feeling of your body becoming more and more relaxed, with each breath. Feel the relaxation in your body as it releases the stress, and allow yourself to be pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to learn when you have a good mind tool and are willing to simply practice. And so what I will be teaching you some of today and further into the future is that there are basically 4 steps for entering a deeply relaxed state, which is the key mind tool for freeing yourself from stress. Each time you you go through this process, such as the one we began with, or the ones I will— the one I will continue with in a few moments, each time you go through it you get better and better at it. After you've reached that deeply relaxed state and let go of the stressful feelings, then you will begin to use your imagination in that state to write your own life script. To deprogram behaviors and feelings and illnesses and diseases and stresses from the past. Whew! Come into the present moment and now project forward into your future, you being the person that you want to be and living the life that you want to live. Good. Now in that short period of time, I'm hoping that you understand something about the true source of stress. To realize it's not something that happens to you. Stop blaming the world. You can't make me angry, you can't make me afraid, you can't make me sad. Only I can do that by how I react to what you do. And in the same way, stress is not something that happens to you, it's something that you do, or your monkey mind does, with what is happening to you. And you see the true source of stress, and you can see what the remedy for stress is. Good. Thank you, Dr. Poon. Now, if a question comes up, you can put it in the chat box, and I'll try to respond to that in the next few moments, and then we will do a direct experience for dealing specifically with stress. Let me know how clear that's been, if I went too slow, if I went too fast. Yeah, I'll give you the 4 steps. Good, Colette, I am happy that you liked it like that. Oh good! Yes, when you practice, when you practice, every time you repeat a certain set of steps, a certain imagery within your mind, and each time you allow yourself to feel more relaxed because you've done that you're actually growing nerves. You know, more specifically, you're growing new synapses. And when the synapses that you're growing produce relaxation, it causes the other synapses that produce tension and anxiety to actually begin to dissolve to a certain degree. You're reprogramming your mind, you're rewiring your brain. And this is true. We see this when we look at the fMRI. You can see over a period of 6 weeks, if a person practices mindfulness meditation for relaxation, you can see a huge nerve tract, like a cable, leading through the brain from the prefrontal cortex where your imagery is, down to your amygdala, that gives you control over the monkey. It's like you get a microphone and the monkey has these big earphones, and you say, 'Cool it, baby. Kick back and relax.' He goes, 'Okay, I'm with you. I'm with you.' Yes, you can see this presentation again. It's up. It'll live. You can give it to your friends. Give it to your highly stressed friends. You can go to drmiller.com, drmiller.com/ Watch Life Meditations. It's really watch life— watch-life-meditations. DrMiller.com watch-life-meditations, and you'll be able to see it. It'll probably be up by tomorrow. Okay, let's see. Let me just give you a little bit of information while I answer a couple of questions here that Uh, see, there you are, and that's information for donations. And I am doing lots of distance coaching with people now. We have a good Zoom setup, and there's information on how you can see me for coaching sessions. Down at the bottom on the screen, you should be seeing the dates of our next webinars. When avoiding stress when a strong wind destroys your plants which you love so much. Well, all right, again, you will have feelings because a part of you does not want to let go, and so it clings to it. And so you can feel the anxiety and upset and anger, but you want to get beyond that because there's nothing you can do. You want to accept the reality, but accepting the reality means that you're going to feel some sadness. You're going to feel some grieving, some mourning. And so you have to grieve and to let go. If you look at that address that I gave you a few moments— there it is, it's right on the screen— watch past webinars at drmiller.com/watch-life-meditation/watch-life-meditations. Then, you know, I cover most of these things there, and I think I have one there that's I'll do that again. So we had one of those little drops out, but in response to what to do when the wind blows over your wind blows over your plants or whatever else might happen to you, then you want to mourn the loss. You have to accept it, which means there's grieving. Allow yourself to cry. It's letting the monkey mind, it's letting your body release it. The plants are gone. They're not coming back again. You know, there's nothing to do about that. But you have to mourn the loss because you're physical. It's just what you have to do. But the important thing is you've had joy from those plants. You've grown them. You've communicated with them. There was love there. And this is with anything that has been meaningful to you in your life. It's meaningful. The love was there. And the spiritual aspect of it, Lives forever. Don't think you have to let go of the spirit. You know, I can think of immediately 5, 10, 15 people that I've loved in my life that are gone now. But when I think, I mean, what we shared and what I learned in those experiences and what I discovered about myself and the greater world that I know because of the time I've been I spent with those friends, or with those flowers, or with the musical groups that I've played with. Nothing can take that away from me. And so that's what your higher mind knows, that that lives forever. But you can't have it to live with forever if you're busy resisting, or in denial, or not wanting to confront, or being stressful, because you're still fighting a battle. How are you going to open your higher mind. But you have to grieve the loss. And that's as much of an answer as I have time for today. Good. I'm just Okay, I'll take a look at your answers and I'll try to answer these in one of the upcoming webinars. But for now, let me just take you through those steps of deep relaxation. The first Step is to stop and let yourself, let your body be in a comfortable position and stop. Become aware that there's no other place that you need to go. Focus on a point out there in the distance. Keep your eyes focused on it, and again say to yourself, "There's nowhere I have to go, nothing I have to do, and there's no problem that I have to solve at this moment, and therefore I can relax." And picture the word relax. That's first step. You've initiated it. Your second step is to allow yourself to relax from head to toe. I like to do it by just relaxing the eyelids till they're so relaxed they don't want to open at all as you test them. Let that relaxation from your eyelids flow throughout all the rest of your body. A soothing wave of peace, calm, and comfort. Letting go. Feel your body relax, and along with it, feel your emotions relax. That's your physical relaxation, step 2. And now get your mental relaxation. You want to empty your mind of any unnecessary thoughts. Notice how with each breath out you sink into the pause between the breathing out and the next breath coming in as you let the air breathe you. That's the quietest time of all. Now notice any unnecessary thoughts that come along. There are always thoughts about the future, thoughts about the past. You know the past is gone completely, not even one second of the past will ever come back again. And so there's no reason you need to think about it at this moment. The future doesn't exist either, and never has. Be in the present because this present moment is the only moment that really exists. Anytime an unnecessary thought comes along, therefore, you want to let it pass through. With your next breath out, breathe out whatever thought has entered your mind, even doubts or questions or judgments, thoughts about the past or the future. None of those is necessary. Breathe it out. Imagine it rides out on your breath. And with your next breath in, imagine the fresh, clean air or swirls through your mind, relaxing your mind, and let that relaxation flow down through your body. Your mind is empty for a moment, another thought comes along, repeat that action. Or if you like, you can imagine that thoughts come along and just bubble out of your mind, but you're choosing to not engage with the thought. That's the trick. As the Chinese used to say, "You can't stop the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can stop them from making a nest in your hair." And as you let the thoughts go, the monkey mind goes, "Oh, that must not be important, he let it go. That must not be something I need to think about because she let it go." You begin to have fewer and fewer thoughts, and there's more and more spaces between your thoughts. Let yourself sink into the spaces between your thoughts. Good. That was your third step. Finally now, let yourself travel through space and time to a very beautiful place, someplace far away from anything that could ever disturb you. Picture it around you. Hear the sounds around you. Smell the fragrances in the air. Feel the textures of anything you're touching. You can be alone on a desert island or taking a walk with your BFF, with someone you love and feel totally peaceful with, a child that you have or a child that you've known or a beloved grandmother or grandfather. Spiritual teacher, meditation retreat, a prayer meeting, whatever it is for you. Put yourself in this scene and let yourself feel the relaxation and the joy and the peace. Good. And realize that all that you're feeling right now, the greater relaxation that you feel, the change that you've made during this imagery, is all the result of your showing your monkey mind a positive scene. Taking your monkey mind through 4 basic steps. And you can do it anytime you want to, anywhere you may be, as long as you know that you're physically safe. And every time you do it, you get better and better at it, and you can do it more and more rapidly. And pretty soon your monkey mind begins to get the idea And you find yourself not getting upset, not getting angry, not getting anxious, not reacting the way you used to do so often in the past. And guess what? When that happens, you have upgraded your operating system. You know, just like, it's like your computer has an operating system. It's not the same one it used 5 years ago because you can't You can't get anywhere with that. You have to upgrade the system so that it's able to deal with the environment that it's in. You can't do anything on the web with a computer system from 15 years ago. That was a perfectly fine memory. Maybe you had an Apple II. Try and go on the internet with the Apple II. You've got to upgrade your operating system. And we're about 500,000 years late in doing that. What's tricky is this next upgrade is not going to happen through evolution, physical evolution. It is mental evolution, mental transformation. At the higher level of your mind. So go ahead and allow yourself to come back to feeling wide awake, present, and comfortable. Remember, practice, practice, practice. It's been great being with you again. I think we've survived relatively unscathed in the absence of Erin, and hopefully we'll have her back again on May 20th, which will be our next presentation. And I actually somewhere have written down what that is. I don't know what it is, but I'm telling you it's going to be a really good one. I've got a series of fantastic webinars set up for you. So I'm really looking forward to seeing you next time. It's been a great joy to be with you. Tell all your friends. The more people are out there, the more excited I get, and the better the show that I'm going to be able to put on. It's just who I am. I respond to applause. What can I tell you? Thank you so much. I'll see you next time. Be well.