Treating Source, Not Just Symptoms: Training Your Monkey Mind and Healing Your Self

Hi, this is Dr. Emmett Miller welcoming you to Treating the Source, Not Just the Symptoms, Training Your Monkey Mind, and Healing Yourself. Today you will have the unique opportunity to be directly, experientially introduced to your monkey mind, the ancient limbic system of your brain, your emotional brain, and how to use the tools of mindfulness, meditation, guided imagery, and mental image rehearsal to upgrade your mental operating system. To change the course of your illness, change your behaviors, and to change your life. So why has no one taught you this till now? Because, well, simply, there is virtually no money to be made in teaching you the tools to heal yourself and take charge of your life, compared to the tens of thousands to be made treating symptoms with MRI scans, heart surgery, medications, radiation, chemotherapy, and the like. It's true, those interventions have their place, but when you look at it, what we call our medical treatment system is really a disease management system. They don't— we don't, as doctors, make any money unless you're sick. So if we give you tools to make you healthy, that would cut into our salary. Now, I don't think anybody actually thinks that way, but that's how the system is set up. That if I spend an hour with you, or 2 or 3 hours, and show you how to heal some aspect of yourself, let's say panic reaction, how much can I charge? A few hundred dollars is all I'll get paid. But if I say, oh, panic reaction, let's send you to the emergency room by ambulance, and let's take an EKG, and let's take a couple of films, and so you walk out a couple hours later with $12,000 or $15,000 charge. I mean, that's the way it works, uh, and that's what we train for. That's what we're trained for in medicine. We're not trained to look at the other aspect of things. The system resists approaches that put you in charge. If you are making wise decisions, then you won't buy the superficial products or vote for the superficial fake politicians, and you won't hate who the system tells you to hate. My goal is quite the opposite. It is to teach you the tools to be in control of your mind, your body, and your life, and hopefully we can get control of what's happening on the planet. It starts with me and you. It really does. Again, I'm Dr. Emmett Miller, and I'm most pleased to be here with you again. And let me begin by thanking those of you who've sent donations to support these programs. Really appreciate it. Well, early on in my practice of medicine, I realized that the crucial factor in healing the diseases and the addictions, the failures, and in changing the world was to have honest healing information along with the tools to train the monkey brain. When I started medical school back in 1963, I was a rare item. I was a physician who knew how to program computers. And a few things quickly became obvious to me that probably were not very obvious to most others. And what I realized still is that a major failing in our whole medical system is that we're not taught about how the subconscious brain functions, that we have virtually two brains, and how vitally important it is to be able to guide it from a higher level of the mind, from the part of our brain which— in which dwells our conscious mind. The tragic result is that we don't know it, and we haven't discovered how to use it for our intentional benefit. And as a consequence, outfi— outside forces take over control of it. And I'm talking about the corporations and the people who control, uh, social media, and those who control the internet and who control the ads that we see and own the news publications, magazines, etc. The result is the untold human suffering and the disastrous state of our entire world. I wrote a book about this back in '09. It was called Our Culture on the Couch, and I spoke directly about exactly what's happening now. Our problems stem primarily from the fact that we have not upgraded our mental operating system. In time, evolution would probably give us another layer, uh, that's even above the prefrontal cortex, which is what we call the brain's brain, but it hasn't had time to do that, maybe in a few million years. Now what we need to do is to emulate that next level of the nervous system that can have us making wise decisions instead of decisions based upon what the monkey brain is telling us to do. Oh well, anyway, let's begin as we usually do with a little meditation. Let's do a little mindfulness meditation today. It's about mindfulness and presence. Allow yourself to become aware there's no other place that you need to go at this moment in time, nothing else that you need to be doing. You can give yourself permission to relax. Give yourself permission to clear your mind and come into this present moment, the only moment that really exists. We'll begin with a mindfulness meditation. Choose a point on the wall or an object in front of you and keep your focus there, or simply let your eyelids close now, or when they're ready, and allow yourself to be aware of your breathing. The air comes in and the air goes out. Simply allow yourself to be aware. Are you breathing in right now, or are you breathing out? Just identifying This is an in-breath, and this is an out-breath. That's all. That which recognizes your in-breath is your mind, your conscious mind. The object of your mind, of your mindfulness, is the in-breath, and you are totally focused on it with each in-breath. As all other thoughts fade into the background. Breathing in, this is my in-breath. Breathing out, this is my out-breath. And as you do, your out-breath is the object of your total focus. Breath follows breath effortlessly. Thinking slows down and slows down until thinking is gradually vanishing, and there's simply breathing in, breathing out. The past does not exist and can never exist again. Breathing in exists. Breathing out exists. No future, only the ever-present now. Breathing in, breathing out. And soon you begin to really enjoy each breathing in. Each fresh new breath is like a celebration of life. Each breathing out is like a joyful release into the miracle of being alive. Sometimes the breath is short and shallow, sometimes it's a deep breath. No need to control it, just allowing yourself to be aware of what is in each moment. This breath, this now. Breathing in, breathing out. Good. Now, focusing on that breathing out, let yourself sink down into that little pause after you breathe out and before the next breath comes in. This is the quietest time of all for all your mind and body, and it exists there between the out-breath and the in-breath, always, no matter where you are or what's happening around you. If you choose to, you can pause, focus on your breath in this way, and allow yourself to be guided to this pause, sinking into that pause. Good. And now with this focus and this mindfulness, gradually begin to bring yourself back into an awareness of the space around you, the room that you're in, the light the colors, and enjoy each thing that you experience, each miraculous color that you can see, each sound that reaches your ears. That's good. Our goal today is to understand the monkey mind and to actually understand how to communicate with it using imagery and emotion, but it's very important to realize that there are two systems of thought that are always going on within each of us, although generally we're unaware of it. It is by harmonizing and coordinating these systems of thought, however, that we can get the best performance out of our brains, out of our bodies, and out of our life. Now I'm sure that for many of you, some or even much of what I will be presenting in this brief review here in the beginning will be familiar It's worth repeating because it's only when you fully comprehend and integrate these truths at the emotional and physical level that you can truly reap the benefits that they offer. So following this brief review, we'll go on to the experiential and the experience of communicating with your monkey mind. Our monkey mind. Always there to distract us. It all starts, you know, at the level of the neurons. Your neurons are the basic building blocks of your brain, and there are more than 86 billion, maybe 200 billion of them. A single neuron fires between 5 and 50 times per second, and on average received— receives 5,000 connections from other neurons. Every thought, word, feeling, and action is the result of neurons firing in such a way that it allows you to have some kind of understanding about what's going on and to make meaning out of your world. The understanding that you have of your world may be accurate or it may be an inaccurate reflection of what is actually happening in your world. However, it is through repetitive firing patterns of neurons that learning takes place. Remember learning the alphabet? A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P. A lot of people didn't know what the letter LM was. And then you learned to write. A, B, C. And it was very, very difficult to tell certain things at that time. And like, for instance, the difference between the B and the D. What was different between the B and D? Or the P and Q? What's going on there? But soon you learn that, and then you learned how spelling turns in— into long strips of letters and words and sentences, and then you read the sentences hardly without even thinking about it. You trained the monkey mind by repeating the same lesson over and over again: A, B, C, D, or B, D, B, D. Each time you did that, you forced a set of neurons to fire in a specific pattern. So whether it's learning to read, play the piano, program a computer, or intentionally change unwanted patterns in your life, the basic rule is that neurons that fire together wire together. This is the essence of learning, and it is the essence of what we call neuroplasticity. The experiences that you're having here with me are simply an introduction. It's important that you recognize the importance of these tools and take the responsibility to practice using them so that they can become as easy to use as, well, ABC. At the neuronal level, your brain is malleable like clay, and your experiences determine its shape. Remembering, experience isn't something that happens to you. Experience is the result of how you interpret what has happened to you. By learning to modify how you interpret what is happening to you, you can change your experience from negative to positive. Positive to deeply nurturing. It's like exercising to build up your body. A day in the gym won't make a difference, but if you go every day for a few months, you will see a big difference. Simply— similarly, simply experiencing an idea, a thought, or algorithm in your mind, no matter how brilliant or profound, once or twice won't make a lasting change. But if you practice regularly, the change will take place. Much of my work has been to make it so that this practice will be really enjoyable. That's been my goal. The easiest path for learning these basic skills is through the use of these guided imagery meditations, such as we're doing here. Again, by way of review, let's look again at the triune brain. We think of there being three primary sections to the brain: the reptilian section, which is the basic things like heartbeat, breathing, digestion, body temperature, and so forth; the limbic system, or the emotional brain, the monkey brain; and then the neocortex, where higher-level thinking takes place. We want to focus especially on the limbic system, the monkey brain, in its relationship with the— with the neocortex and how to gain control. The highest level of the brain is the neocortex, and the highest level of the neocortex is the prefrontal cortex. This is— is the area just behind your forehead, just above your eyes, that's where your prefrontal cortex is, the brain's brain. It's very important to remember that whatever the monkey brain does, it does subconsciously, and that means that we don't intentionally choose to have it behave in a certain way, it just reacts. We're not aware of its inner processes and almost completely unaware of when it's affecting us. People get angry and they think that they are angry, they're We're not angry, it's the monkey brain that's angry. Time when we feel like we really need to have an another piece of candy or another drink, we don't want that, it's the monkey brain that wants that. We want to stick with our diet, we want to stay on the wagon. What's going on? We know that when we're anxious or afraid or alone, but we're not aware that those feelings come from the monkey mind. After all, who would choose to be fearful, furious, freaked out, and hopeless? And yet we end up being that way. Yeah, we have difficult situations in our lives, but we wouldn't choose to have those feelings, yet we feel them. Feelings of anger, a little bit different. People especially defend their feelings of anger and resentment. "I deserve to be angry, and I'm not going to let him off the hook." You know, anger, it's like holding a hot coal in your hand, waiting until you have a chance to throw it at somebody else. So we defend it. The reason is that anger gives us a feeling of strength. We feel somehow potent, you know, we can flip the bird, yeah, you know. And why are we doing that? Because we've been insulted, because we've been hurt. But we don't look at the feelings of hurt or anxiety that's going on inside, or that we've been tapped into our own feeling of insecurity. The neocortex is, evolutionarily speaking, the most recent addition to our splendid human biocomputer. It's capable of abstract thought, analysis, evaluating dangers, language, and strategy. The monkey mind is the limbic system, and that's responsible for our emotions, for our stress, and so forth. Because we have these two parts of our mind happening, we also have two dis— different systems of thought: that unconscious mind, or monkey mind, which has what's called System 1 thinking. System 1's thinking is unconscious, it's effortless, it's automatic, it's without self-control. What you see is all there is. What that monkey sees, that's the monkey's whole world. It can't think of the future, it can't think of the, the past, it can't think of purposes, it can't think of meaning, it can't think of goals. None of those, strategy, none of those. It assesses the situation and it reacts. The higher levels of our mind are different, however. They use System 2. It's a slow system. Its defining characteristics are: it's deliberate, it's conscious, it takes an effort, it's a controlled mental process. It's like we can— if you're a good driver, when you are driving along, you come to a stoplight or someone slows down in front of you, it doesn't take you any time at all, and you don't use any thought at all, and your foot moves from whatever pedal to where it needs to. And if it's a standard shift car, the shift happens automatically, whereas System 2 is needed if you want to parallel park your car. You got to use System 2. It has self-awareness and control. It's logical and skeptical. So, wait a minute, yeah, it looks like that's a bad guy, but I don't know, let me gather a little more information. System 1 may be already having you on edge, feeling anxious and a little bit frightened, but System 2 says, hang on, let me see. And the guy speaks, you go, "Oh, it's you, Charlie!" You need System 2 for that, otherwise you might have decked poor Charlie. And its role is to seek new and missing information, and it makes intentional decisions. System 1 was perfectly fine 500,000 years ago, 1,000, 10,000 years ago, But not anymore, because we're not cavemen living in that brutal world. Yeah, we're 20th century cavemen, and the very different situation that we're dealing with. So in those days, if we saw something that was dangerous, we would react to it. If you're walking across your lawn, you see something curled up in the grass, You immediately think, "Ah! Maybe a snake!" That's System 1, because System 1 doesn't want to take the place. Of course, it could be a piece of garden hose you were looking for last week, but before you have a chance to think about it, you find yourself reacting. Your hippocampus remembers scary snakes and stories. It triggers your amygdala, the fear center of your brain, to transmit chemical messengers to the organs of your body, which then prepare your body for fight or flight. You instinctively leap backward without thinking about it. And then you realize that a snake can't strike you at this distance, then you go, let me see, what is it really? Is it a snake? What kind of snake? Or it's a garden hose. Okay, we need to be able to bring System 2 into work because we are continually having System 1 responses of stress, anxiety, fear, frustration, and anger. So what we need is basically a system upgrade. We need to upgrade the system because every system works in a hierarchical manner, and this hierarchy says that there is— information should be flowing from the lower levels clear information up to the higher levels, and control and guidance flow from above down to below. Of course, I'm walking along and I'm feeling totally comfortable, and all of a sudden I walk past Mrs. Fields and I smell a chocolate chip cookie cooking, and I go, ah, you know, that's system 1. It's a me want eat cookie cookie. Well, sometimes it wins even though the mind is saying, "Wait a minute, you don't want to eat any more sweets. It's not good for— it's not good for your teeth, not good for your heart, not too good for your body." "Me want cookie." So there's a struggle that goes on, and it's because we keep giving in to that other level of our mind that we keep creating so many problems for ourselves. The vast majority of all our illnesses, suffering, failure, sadness, and even war are simply due to the fact that we need to upgrade our operating system. Yeah, so the secret then is that we want to be able to develop a way to communicate, and we're going to focus exactly on how to become familiar with our monkey mind. But first, a word from our sponsor. Actually, actually, there's no sponsor than me, but there's a great deal that you can learn from the work that I've done, and the work that I've done is what I believe to be a source of honest and useful information for self-healing and for transformation at the personal and global level. So if you'd like to learn more about my work and you want to see some of the products that I've created so that you can learn it most rapidly you can go to shop.drmiller.com. Letting Go of Stress, the world's best-loved and best-selling stress relief imagery, is available as a CD or download, as most of the items here are. Writing Your Own Life Script is a summary of the entire process of cleaning up the past and creating the future that you want. The next I'd like to tell you about is a, is a DVD. It's called The Power of Your Mind to Manage Stress and Heal Your Body. And finally, you might want to take a look at the classic Deep Healing: The Essence of Mind-Body Medicine, which is available as a paperback or as an audiobook, also there at shop.drmiller.com. And much of what we're talking about today is also present in my first book back in 1970, '72, Selective Awareness: The New Science of Mind-Body Medicine, when I first introduced the world to the kinds of things that we're talking about here today. Okay, now let's go on to the experiential part. I want you to— we're going to begin by experiencing volitional control. In other words, the part of your mind that we're in control of. And the intentional voluntary system. Snap your fingers— not problem, right? Stick out your tongue. Breathe in and hold your breath. How did you do those things? Actually, all you do is send a signal to some part of your nervous system that says, for instance, snap your fingers, and you just will it. But this won't happen unless the lower level of you knows how to do it. For instance, wheel your ears, lift your right eyebrow only. Are you able to do that? How about this, huh? Pat your head and rub your stomach simultaneously. A lot of people can't do that. Switch hands and do it. Can you do that? You can learn to do it, but if you haven't learned to do— and those who've learned to do it can do it as easy as snapping their fingers— but if you haven't yet trained yourself in how to do it, then you may have found it a formidable or even an impossible task. Now try this: take a moment and without moving any muscles, salivate. You can't. You can't. Again, this is not part of the voluntary system. Or try this: without moving, raise the temperature of your bottle— of your body. Cause hydrochloric acid to flow into your stomach. Have its muscles tighten. Make saliva flow into your mouth. Speed up your heartbeat. Raise your blood pressure. Cause your digestive organs to tense up. You have no ability to do that because they— all those behaviors are just under the control of your subconscious mind that right now sees no reason to perform these actions. The wonderful thing that we're going to experience today is that there are ways to directly communicate with these deeper levels, okay? And that key involves using your mindfulness. So Take a moment and be still and just be in touch with your experience of this moment: the temperature of your body, the taste on your tongue, the fragrance in the air, the feeling of gravity beneath you, unnecessary thoughts that flow through your mind. Accept that this experience is yours at this moment in time. Now let's do this. I want you to clasp your hands together as if you were saying grace before dinner, and notice that one of your thumbs is on top of the other, either your left or your right, right? You may have never realized it before, but whenever you clasp your hands in this way, that thumb is always on top. Try clasping your hands the other way so the other thumb is on top, and notice how strange it feels, unfamiliar. Because every time you clasp your hands, your monkey mind tells you to do it in a certain way. Now unclasp your hands and fold your arms in front of you. Fold your arms and notice that one hand is on top of your arm. You've also always done it that same way. Fold your arms in the opposite way. It's not even easy to do, but it feels really strange. What I'm just saying is that these are patterns that your monkey mind has been doing a certain way that you may not have thought about. Now let's go on and communicate in the other direction with your monkey mind. Clasp two hands together again firmly and just extend two index fingers so that's maybe a half inch to an inch between them. Good. And now focus on that space between your two fingers, and I want you to imagine that as you do, there's a strong rubber band wrapped around those two fingers pulling them closer and closer together, or like they're really strong magnets and they're pulling themselves together. Can you feel it all the way until they touch? Good. I learned this little exercise from a man who, who would interview new engineers for a certain company. He would give them this exercise, and if their fingers didn't come together, they wouldn't hire them, because they found that only those whose fingers came together were the really creative ones and capable of imagining. Let's try another one. This time, extend your arms and hands straight in front of you with your hands down as though they're sitting on top of a table with nothing underneath them. Put them at the same height to each other, yeah, and then close your eyes and imagine that someone comes along and places a brick on the back of your right hand. Visualize that. Feel that brick and feel the rough surface of the brick and its weight on the back of your right hand. Imagine you can see its dark red color. And now imagine that person goes to the other side with a helium-filled balloon. The ribbon tied around the neck of that large balloon is tying around the wrist of your left hand. Feel that helium balloon pulling upward on the ribbon, pulling upward on your wrist, pulling upward as the balloon tries to float up higher. Feel that brick you can see on the back of your right hand, and imagine that a sandbag is being placed on top of that brick on the back of your right hand, and feel it growing heavier, pressing down. And let's tie another helium-filled balloon around the wrist of your right hand— a red balloon, a green balloon— and now let's add another balloon around your left wrist. Notice the difference in feeling between the two hands. Notice which one feels light or heavy. Then open your eyes and see if you notice a difference between the height of those two hands. Good. Your imagination created that diff— that difference. Now let's try this. Clasp your hands again. This time squeeze them really tight together. Squeeze tight and imagine that as you do, that super glue is oozing out of the pores the pores of your hands. It's flowing between your hands and gluing them together. Take a moment to feel that glue set. Good. Now your hands feel solid and welded together, and in a moment when I ask you to try and pull your hands apart, you'll begin to notice how tightly they are stuck together. Feel how tightly that glue sticks. Slowly begin to try to pull them apart and feel how they resist being pulled apart. Pull harder and they resist more and more. Now imagine that in front of you is a basin of warm water, and that as you dip your hands into the warm water, you feel the glue melting away. And as the glue dissolves, you notice how easily your hands come apart from each other. You may notice they're still feeling kind of sticky, but now you can separate them. And now let's focus on more use of your selective awareness. Allow yourself to close your eyes and imagine that you have in your hand a lemon. See the bright yellow color of the fruit. Feel the smooth and bumpy surface. Is it round? Feel the stem. Feel its firmness. Drop it on the table and hear what it sounds like when you drop it on a wooden table. Pick it up again, and you have a sharp knife in your other hand. Cut that lemon into quarters and look at the cut surface. And look at that, you've cut some of the seeds in half. That's how sharp your knife is. See the juice on the surface of this lemon and bring one quarter of that lemon up to where you can smell it. Smell the lemony fragrance of the lemon. Then open your mouth and place that quarter of a lemon into your mouth. Let your lips close around it and sink your teeth into the moist flesh of the lemon. Feel the juice burst out of the lemon, flow throughout your mouth, through every part of your mouth and around your tongue. Mm. Do you notice some salivation? Mm-hmm. Open your eyes. You can salivate by communicating with your deeper mind, with your monkey mind, through the use of images. Hasn't been any lemon here, but your monkey mind doesn't know because it doesn't understand what imagination is. It thinks everything that you imagine is real. Now close your eyes again. Imagine you're downtown in New York City in a lobby. You're standing in front of an elevator. Imagine the door opening and you step inside. You turn around and face the door. Watch as it closes and feel the pressure on your feet as the elevator begins to lift. Look above the door and you see the numbers changing: 1, 2, 3, changing more and more quickly as the elevator speeds up, up up the number 46, 47, 48. The numbers begin to change more slowly. 49, as the elevator slows. 50. Feel the elevator jerk just a little bit as it stops. The doors open and you notice that you're standing on the roof of a building. It's a beautiful day. You step out into the sun, only a few clouds, some pigeons flying by, not too high above your head. Now walk over to the edge of the roof where you see a low brick wall around 2 feet high around the edge. You look over the wall and look down, and you can see the street far below. The cars look like little matchboxes. People walking on the sidewalk look like little ants. Climb up on that brick wall carefully. Step forward so your toes are just over the edge. Then carefully lean forward a little bit and look out over the side of this 50-story building and see if you can see all the windows on the building stretching down below you, getting smaller and smaller as they get near the street below. Feel your body balancing carefully as a little breeze blows and become aware of what you feel in your body. Notice your breathing, your heartbeat, Notice the feelings in your belly. Good. And step back off the brick wall, go back to your elevator, and quickly return back down to where you're resting here. Let your eyelids open. Huh? What did you feel? Your blood pressure went up, your heart beat faster, you breathed differently, your temperature may have increased a little bit. All the things you have no control over, you can control if you know how to communicate with your subconscious mind, with your monkey mind. This is called the Law of Concentrated Attention. When attention is concentrated and narrowed to a particular mental representation or an image, psychological and behavioral changes occur which are consistent with that image. When you think of a lemon, you salivate. When you think of the roof Something else happens. You don't salivate on the roof, and you probably don't get a speeded-up heartbeat from thinking of a lemon. Okay, so what you have been experiencing is mindfulness meditation and guided imagery. As you know, it's possible for you to think of an innumerable number of different thoughts at any given moment, yet you're only capable of focusing well on a single one. This is selective awareness. So we're now going to talk about how to constrain that awareness to create more complex changes within you. Then you can change your life basically by becoming your own advertising agency. To advertise to your deeper mind the changes that you really want to happen. So let's do a more complex application. Allow yourself to be in a comfortable position, sitting or lying down, whichever feels most natural and normal to you. Choose a point on the wall or ceiling opposite you focus on it. And as you do, let it slip out of focus as you slip into daydreaming. And it's when it's comfortable to do so, let your eyelids close. Take a deep breath in. As you let it out, Think to yourself, there's no other place I need to go at this moment, nothing else I need to do, no problem I have to solve. I can give myself permission to relax. Good. And as you enjoy the warm, moist comfort behind your closed eyelids— very pleasant feeling. Imagine you can see the word relax as though it's written there on the back of your forehead. And as you do, feel your eyelids relaxing all the way down to the point they feel as if they just don't want to open at all. And when you feel your eyelids so relaxed, they just won't budge, you can test them. And feel how heavy they feel. They just don't want to open. And as you test them, imagine letting that relaxation flow from your eyelids throughout the rest of your body. Ripples of relaxation flowing outward, like ripples of relaxation flowing outward from a stone thrown into the quiet, still surface of a mountain pond. Relaxation flowing through all the muscles of your face, muscles around your mouth. Relax. Let that soothing relaxation flow down through your neck and shoulders, through your arms and your hands, down to the tips of your fingers. And when that relaxation reaches your fingertips, take a deep breath in and draw that relaxation up through your arms into the center of your breath. With that breath out Let yourself sink into that pause before the next breath comes in. How peaceful. Allowing the air to do the breathing for you. Noticing the breathing in during the breathing in. Notice the breathing out during the breathing out. Breathing in oxygen, breathing in energy, Breathing in relaxation, breathing out tension. Feel the rising and falling of your chest and abdomen, breathing relaxation into your back, into your chest, into your belly. Relaxation flowing down through your pelvis and your thighs, your knees, your legs and ankles and feet, all the way down to the tips of your toes. And whenever an unnecessary thought comes along, imagine as, as if it's written on a blackboard in your mind's eye. Remember the relaxation in your eyelids, and as you gently test them, imagine you're drawing a wet eraser across that mental blackboard, erasing the unnecessary thought and sending another wave of relaxation through your body. Letting all unnecessary thoughts disappear. And imagine your body feeling light and free, as if you're floating, floating, as if you're floating pleasurably on a magic carpet, or in a time machine if you wish. A magic carpet of relaxation floating ever so gently through space and time to a very, very pleasant place. A place far, far away from anything that could ever disturb. A place of peace, of calm, of comfort. A place of relaxation that you choose to let yourself go there now. Let yourself go there now. Where I like to go is to the beach, and if you'd like I'd like to invite you to come along with me to visit a very beautiful beach, perhaps a lovely tropical beach you once visited, or a place by the water that you know very well. And feel your magic carpet gently come to a landing. Feel yourself step off into the soft, warm, sunlit sand, and imagine Wiggly holding your toes and feeling the dry granules of sand between your toes. And take a step or two in the soft sand, feeling the healing warmth of the sun on your back, walking toward the sound of the whitecaps of foam atop the blue wavelets that gently sweep up onto the sand. And you watch as each wave gently lightly caresses the glistening sand and flows effortlessly back into the sea. Good. And allow yourself to look off into the horizon. Look off to where the azure of the sea touches the soft, clear blue of the sky. You feel a sense of freedom and spaciousness in this healing place. A few white fluffy clouds drift the winds nearby, and the crescent of golden sand extends off into the distance in this peaceful beach. You can smell the fragrance fragrance of the sea on one side and the waving palm trees on the other, breezes bling— bringing to you the delicious aroma of flowers and of tropical fruit. Nearby, you see a very comfortable place to sit or lie down in the shade of beautiful palm and you feel yourself settling into a comfortable position. You feel very safe and very serene. And if you wish, you can bring a loved one here to be with you. Perhaps someone you have loved or who has loved you. Could be a child or a parent or a grandparent. One with whom you feel pure love, perhaps a favorite pet you've spent time with. Whoever or whatever will put you in touch with that safe, warm feeling of love and deep connection. Good. And allow yourself to feel these wonderful feelings. Notice where in your body you feel them the most. Breathe into this part of your body and come up with a word to describe those feelings, your own personal word that will serve as a cue for you to come back to this place whenever you wish. Think about this beautiful beach and you can come back here. Let those sensations grow stronger and stronger with each breath, breathing those feelings throughout all the rest of your body, filling your entire being with light and love. Enjoy being in this place. With whoever or whatever you've chosen to be with. And now, perhaps squeeze two fingers together, or place a hand on your heart, or choose some other movement that can serve as an anchor, a signal you can use to return to this beautiful safe place anytime that you wish, just by thinking of this place, thinking of that special word making this movement, this anchor, in practice. Good. Now once again, climb aboard your magic carpet of relaxation and float forward through time to a very positive experience, a few days, a few weeks, or a few months into the future, after you have mastered the skill of being relaxed and free of unpleasant feelings at will, as if you're watching a movie of yourself looking and feeling wonderful. See yourself dressed in the way you want to be dressed. Your body is healthy and strong. You've taken charge of your health. You've taken charge of your emotions. You've taken charge of your life. There's a look of happiness on your face. You look good and you're dressed in a way you really want to be dressed and doing something you really want to be doing, and you feel confident and secure. You love it. Good. Now step into that scene and feel it. Feel how good it feels. Feel the relaxation. You came here for a purpose. You are valuable. You have the power to relax. You have a great deal of wisdom, and now you know how to access it. And now you are becoming the person you really want to be, the person you came here to be. And you feel that joy, feel the movement of your body. You can sing, you can You can dance, you can yell, you feel a great feeling of success in overcoming that issue that you used to have. Yes, you have healed. And each time you picture yourself the way you really want to be, you become more and more of this person because this is the person you really are down deep inside. And in a moment, I'm going to count from 1 to 5. 5. And as I do, you ain't come back on your magic carpet, float back, yet you can bring back all of the good feelings, the sense of love that's inside, the sense of power, and the firm commitment that you're going to do what it takes to teach yourself to relax. 1. To come to a place of calm. At will. 2, coming back to this place where your body is resting comfortably. 3, bringing this feeling of relaxation and confidence with you. 4, reorienting to the here and now. 5, reawakening, feeling refreshed. As if you've had a nice long restful sleep, ready to meet whatever challenge comes your way. Take a deep breath in, and as you let it out, allowing your eyelids to open, enjoying the beautiful colors and shapes around you, thinking wide awake, and notice how wonderful you feel. Good. You've just learned how to go to a deeply relaxed place, to touch a place of peace, to go to an image that can put you in touch with joy and love, because they live always within you, just as there is always this peaceful place within you. And whenever you feel yourself yourself becoming tense or anxious or afraid or resentful or angry or frustrated or furious or jealous or whatever negative emotion, you can think that word, give yourself that anchor, and return to your special place. Meanwhile, do it 3 or 4 times a day so that you learn that you can you can do it whenever. Then you start doing it from memory. It's like magic, I promise. My next presentations will offer you some fascinating applications of this process. On June 9th, we'll go into how to heal your body Illness and Disease with Mindfulness and Guided Imagery Meditation. On July 7th, we're going to focus on new paradigm thinking, a whole new way of thinking that emerged for me over the last 50 years as I looked at the kind of thinking that led to success, healing, happiness, and love. New paradigm thinking— how to upgrade your mental software wear and defeat the media propaganda that has hijacked our lives. And I will show you exactly how the media does it to you. You don't want to miss that. And remember, practice these tools and techniques. I started making my recorded imagery, the first products of this kind, I think, on the planet, because they were done just as audio cassettes were being developed. And one of the reasons I did it originally was for my patients, but in time I started doing it and making it available to other people and to the world in general. And again, I'd like to mention those products which are most relevant to what we've been doing today. Letting Go of Stress with Steve Halpern, 4 different techniques with Steve Halpern, who virtually, uh, helped invent New Age music. Then there's Writing Your Own Life Script that has 4 different processes on it for clearing up the past, writing a script for the future, and reinforcing the positive changes. This has the essence of those techniques that I had invented and presented in my first book, which was Deep Healing. It was published in the early '70s, so it's a beautiful set of imageries for you. And then there's a video and a DVD, which is Manage Stress and Heal Your Body. Those are all available at shop.drmiller.com. And of course the classic book, Deep Healing: The Essence of Mind-Body Medicine. So enjoy them. You can find them all at shop.drmiller.com. And for those who are feeling, gee whiz, maybe it's a good idea to, um, help put this information out there, there. Just go to shop.drmiller.com/donate. That's one of the ways you can do it. There are other ways that you can see on the screen if you happen to be watching this on the video. It's been wonderful to be here with you. Thanks a lot for showing up. Thanks for all your support and Be well. Namaste.