Coping With Stress - Imaginative Solutions for Stress Relief

this program is a presentation of uctv for educational and non-commercial use only so how many of you have been here for two or more of the other lectures good most of you so I wasn't able to be at them but I reviewed the slides and talks from the other lectures and I see that you've had a very thorough education in stress and stress physiology and sort of mind-body aspects and medical aspects of stress as a matter of fact if any of you who have been here for all of those lectures have a much better education than most medical doctors in stress physiology and in dealing with stress how many of you are health professionals are there any of you that are also health professionals okay good so as I go around the country and talking about the art and science of mind-body medicine and talk to doctors groups and so on one of the first things I often ask them is you know how many of you think that mind-body interactions are critical factors in your patients health and well-being and without any hesitation audiences of doctors what do you think happens with audiences of doctors how many of them do you think raise their hand yeah 100% immediately without thinking about it without looking around to get approval from everybody else or see what everybody else says everybody just shoots their hand up and then I ask them well how many of you have ever had any education or training in teaching your patients how to use their mind-body connection to reduce stress or to help with their with their health or illness related matters and about 2% of people raise their hands at that point and a lot of the things that you've actually seen in this or in heard in this series is education of a higher nature unfortunately than many of many medical professionals get or make use of on a day-to-day basis so what I hope to do tonight is to take about 30 to 40 minutes maximum and and review some of what I think of as sort of stress management 101 and out of this will be some of this will be repetition I don't feel like I have to drill very deeply into it because of what you've already heard but to kind of review it and frame it from the from the perspective of a primary care practitioner because I'm a general practitioner I've been practicing close to 40 years now and practicing is both a medical doctor and an acupuncturist and as somebody who tries to integrate mind-body health into my practice and then what I'd like to do is offer you a chance to experiment with some guided imagery technique that I've found to be very very helpful I'm going to talk about some others that are very helpful that you may have been exposed to but I want to share one with you that not that many people are aware of that I think in many cases is one of the most useful approaches I've learned and I'll give you a chance to explore that and experiment with that for yourself and then have a little bit of commentary on that from me and then have plenty of time for us to talk and for you to ask questions or share your experiences and so on and so forth so let's see if we can accomplish that so as you've heard in a number of different ways you know we used to talk a lot of people talk about stress as what happens to us and certainly there are a lot of things that happen to us that are stimuli for stress response but you know now after sitting through the other lectures that stress is actually a response to what happens it's a term that refers to what happens inside us in response to events that happen and it's quite variable you know there are people who experience hugely challenging threats and accidents and illnesses and losses and so on who respond to it in such a way that it's not nearly as stressful for them physiologically as it is for another person who might meet the daily hassles or things that we would think of as minor stresses with huge dramatic responses and so it's not just respond what happens to you it's how Yuri's respond the stress response often called the fight-or-flight response you've heard that term before prepares us for an acute short-term threat to our survival the saber-tooth tiger that attacks us outside the cave makes us feel highly charged and more likely to survive that attack on sale yay whoo I know dr. Folkman talked about called it the general adaptation syndrome and it's a state where one part of your autonomic nervous system your sympathetic nervous system has nothing to do with being sympathetic is highly charged and prepares you to meet an acute kind of challenge so here's a guy that's not having a great day and he's reacting to stress in a particular way with with a lot it with a rage reaction and without going through all of the physiology you can just see that from his brain in the middle of his brain the hypothalamus which which sort of is the main conductor of the fight-or-flight autonomic nervous system responses sending lots of messages to his vital organs and his muscles and his heart and his blood pressure control and his digestion his bladder and colon and so on and so forth and so it's all connected it's a system-wide response that makes us prepare to survive something that's immediately threatening so why do we want to learn to manage stress better I think that's kind of a no-brainer from certainly from a medical point of view outfits like the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health give us figures like this which are really pretty startling that 75 to 90 percent of all visits to primary care doctors in the United States are intimately related to stressful events and the kinds of reactions that people have to them so because we react physiologically stress is not a mental event it's a brain body event it's a whole event your your system gets changed and that change especially as I hope to show you over time creates patterns that can make us more more vulnerable to illness on the other hand better stress management can help make us harder and more resistant to these kinds of things so that we're not necessarily running to the doctor for stress-related events which is not generally a very good place to go because the doctors only two percent of the doctors have any real training and how to help you manage those stress related events there what they will do is they'll try to rule out that you have some horrendous disease and then you can drop that one off your stress chart and I can make a pretty good case for this statement that almost all illness is stress-related because and I don't mean that it's caused by stress but it's either caused by stress or it causes stress or it's aggravated by stress you know and so there's almost no serious or significant medical event that doesn't also have a significant stress-related event which can amplify it or if you've got tools that can help you put it into perspective and manage it and reverse or reduce the physiologic response can help you prevent amplifying the seriousness or the difficulty of the situation and then the third important thing that I'm not sure I saw addressed too much in the other in the other lectures was that what I call toxic coping adds fuel to this whole fire toxic coping are all the ways that we try to manage the stress and live through the stress and get through the night when things are really stressful and they tend to be things like eating too much or eating too much of the wrong thing or drinking too much alcohol or smoking more cigarettes or causing trouble for ourselves and getting involved with affairs and you know doing stupid things and losing our jobs and stuff like that I mean it's just stuff how do I get through the next hour how do I get through the next day so what can make me feel better temporarily when we're especially if we're living in very high-stress situations over a long period of time it's natural for us to seek comfort and to seek respite from stress but there are a lot of early learned ways of reducing that stress that don't serve us well in terms of our health again eating among them other habits like drinking and smoking and so on and so forth getting mad at your husband or wife things like that that do discharge you and give you a little relief but cause more problems in your body in your family and your relationships in your work that's what I mean by toxic coping and then it just circles in and starts to form a vicious cycle I'm going to deal with this the best I can somehow these things got completely mexic missed up and we'll see how this goes so I'm going to talk to you about imagery because tonight and give you a chance to work with an imagery process because I can also make a pretty good argument that it's the human mental function that is most intimately involved with both stress and relief of stress is the imagination it's not generally the intellect that creates stress or that resolves stress it's generally the imagination and the simplest example is the most common source of ongoing stress is your imagination it's worrying okay so we could all be right now taking a nice walk out on a nice beach or up on a mountain or on a beautiful sunny day here in the beautiful Bay Area and it could be the nicest day in the world and if we just looked at what was going on around us there's nothing dangerous nothing happening it could be very pleasant you could be with friends you could be with somebody you love and you could be so depressed that you just don't even want to look up and in your head you're worrying about what will happen if this happens and what will happen if that happens and I'm sorry that I did that and you could be living and regret you could be living in worry and so just because we have the capacity to remember and imagine we can create a huge stressful perspective for living in that sunny day and that's a function of the imagination it's a function of it's a bad habit with many people I mean we all worry sometimes and worry is useful for solving problems up to a certain point but then sometimes we develop a worried habit where we're just if when we're done worrying about one thing we go on to worrying about the next thing and we're always living in the future and the future and the future that is filled with things that were worried about and the problem with that is that the brain where that worrying is happening is sending alarm messages to that part of your that deeper part of the brain that really is only listening and conveying to messages that Center part of the brain that I showed you in the sky it only listens for and sends out two messages one is everything's okay and the other one is watch out danger and when it sends out the danger signal that's the stress response and when it sends out the okay everything's okay signal that's what some people call the relaxation response and so and you can create an okay signal even in the midst of all that worry by learning how to utilize your imagination on purpose more skillfully rather than letting your imagination kind of constantly run away with you not learning how to use your imagination skillfully is like having a very highly spirited horse or a wild animal that just has a huge amount of energy and a huge amount of potential to help you but without training and well learning how to communicate with it and use it skillfully could be dangerous and just run you ragged and run you wild this is the most common thing that humans do with their imaginations we worry are so sick drive ourselves crazy you know we learned most usually from our moms you know and but they learn from their moms and here's the thing here's the thing it's it's adaptive up to a certain point it's useful to think about what's going on in to way ahead that's what makes humans the most powerful animal on earth that's the difference between a human being in every other organism we know is the ability to think into the future and to plan and to create and to manipulate the environment now the big question is whether we will become wise enough to use this ability before we destroy the environment that's what's going on now and I have hope that we will because when you think about it outside of God and nature everything that exists on earth that wasn't created by God and or nature whatever your favorite term is was created by the imagined human imagination it started in somebody's imagination all these buildings the computers the bridges the rockets to space the diving bells to the bottom of the ocean started in somebody somebody imagined it and then there was a lot of work getting from that imagination to the actual thing but it first entered this world in somebody's imagination so it's a hugely powerful tool and learning to use it so I'm not blaming mom because it was mom's job to protect me and so it was a good thing in mites and thank God for my wife who looks out for the things that my daughters should be looking out for and again it's really good and adaptive and survival it's adapted for survival up to a point but we all know people who go way beyond that point and then that's all they do and then your life oh it's just all worry and all fear and all threat and all physiological arousal all the time without interruption and that's sets off the physiologic soup that I think interacts with our health because the imagery which is basically thinking with sensory qualities so it's thoughts that were actually we're seeing hearing smelling you know so few people sit there and worry with their eyes closed and their fingers you know like I'm going to really worry now but if you do worry like that what you'll find is you'll really supercharge your worrying you'll get you could actually scare the clutter yourself you know by taking well gee I wonder how we're going to do that and then really sitting there and thinking about it in full color sound Technicolor sensory modality so I don't recommend it you know and in the same way if you take that time for instance just to say okay I'm just going to take ten minutes I'm going to go to somewhere that I love to be I'm going to daydream myself somewhere that's beautiful and peaceful and safe and where I feel relaxed and comfortable and God's in his heaven and all's right with the world and I'm going to imagine what I see and what I hear and what I feel there and what the temperature is like and what's what it feels like in my body to appreciate the beauty that's there your body will go into a very lovely relaxation response so that's one of the read that s-- imagery which is the coding language of the imagination sensory thinking okay and we'll we're going to do a different exercise let's go to the simplest most direct way to experience the effects of imagery and and you could go later on I'll give you a website address it's the healing mind org it's my website there's a free I call it a stress Buster that you can download at no charge it's 12-minute little journey to your place that's beautiful safe and peaceful and it'll take you through your senses sensory modalities and you can just check it out for yourself how quickly and easily that can take you from a place where of relative stress to relative relaxation and that's just a gift to you and the the thing about the sensory based thinking is that it has not only emotional but physiological effects so as you take yourself through your senses what we know now we've been doing this for years and people doing hypnosis have been doing this for many years we know now that we can look at the brain with these amazing machines called functional MRIs where you saw some pictures of it about what fear looked like and what parts of the brain anger active it's well when you look at the brain and you ask people to imagine something visual we find that the visual part of the brain that processes vision lights up and when they imagine sounds and music the part of the brain that processes sound gets active and when they imagine odors and smelling thing the part of the brain that smells lights up so the you can imagine now that as you go through all of your senses seeing hearing smelling feeling you're activating more and more of the cerebral cortex the thinking cap of the brain and that's now sending messages down to that hypothalamus the head of the autonomic nervous system and it's saying it looks like a beautiful safe peaceful place it sounds like it it smells like it it feels like it and that autonomic nervous system sends out the all-clear signal and then your body automatically relaxes and when it physiologically relaxes there's a lot of what I call clean up pain up fix up repair processes and restorative processes replacing chemicals the body goes into kind of a facilitated repair and healing state because when it's in the stress State it's busy looking highly vigilant how do I deal with an outside threat to my health when it's in the relaxation state that's the place to restore and renew and replenish and fix things up and we a lot of times we don't get those punctuation pauses in our day unless we decide to do it if we were more primitive living people we what we would find is that a lot of the days if you look at primitive the few primitive tribes that still exist and you look at our closest relatives like chimpanzees and apes there they have intermittent stress the way that nature looks like they designed it they have leopards come around they have humans come around they have tribes of other apes and chimps that come around try to get their their food and steal their women and their babies and stuff like that but it happens relatively infrequently and when it does they beat their chests and scream and climb trees and go to and you know they have a big deal for a while but then it's a it's usually over pretty quickly half an hour an hour and whatever happened whether they'll even if the worst happened at the leopard took one of them away everybody kind of settles back to what they were doing before which is largely next to nothing it's like they're eating their pick and fleas off each other they're playing with their kids they're they're making love they're playing they're wrestling they're sleeping that's what they do probably 80% at a time okay the men do it more than the women you know so in the primitive tribes the women are doing more work but even then in primitive societies you know there's huge stresses famines droughts animals Wars and stuff I got but they're pretty intermittent what they're not getting is they're not getting every bad thing that happened on the face of the earth in the last hour on the television on the internet in your ear on the radio in the newspapers all day long and sometimes all night long they're not getting that most of the time they're eating they're picking fleas they're making love they're taking naps okay so I don't know about your life but that's not most people's lives these days right so to make time and in those down times that they have they've got plenty of time for their physiology to go into these restore and reparative things they don't have to think about it they don't have to visualize it they don't have to make it happen it's natural Nature has repair processes and it's trying to do it even when you're highly stressed it's just that it's much more efficient and effective when you're not highly stressed so there's a lot of different ways that imagery can help they tend to bunch into the relaxation is one thing to just punctuate your day with a relaxation technique once twice a day to say I'm getting off the world just because I'm deciding to I don't need any other excuse I'm just or if you have a health issue this is your excuse okay it's just I just need to turn it off for a little while just like you have to charge your cell phone if the charge your iPod you have to charge your computer you have to charge your brain if tutored your body and the equivalent of plugging it into the charger is distracting yourself with something Pleasant safe beautiful or using something like a meditation where you just focus on a neutral point which turns off the constant worry and then your body will do the rest the other thing that one of the other great functions of imagery is imagination is Royal Road to insight there's a wonderful very complex world inside each one of us it's every bit as complicated and rich and interesting as the outer world and it's where dreams come from and intuitions and creativity and problem-solving and there are ways to use imagery to help us problem-solve you know one of the ways we use we have people invite people to go to that peaceful beautiful place where you're nice and quiet and relaxed and then if you have a problem that you've really haven't been able to solve with your usual ways of problem-solving an interesting thing to do is we call them inner wisdom meditations so you go to a quiet place and you imagine that there you have a friend could be human could be an animal could be a spirit it has two characteristics it's very wise and it's very loving right and so you and that might be a real person you knew or a mythical person or a religious figure or it may be it may come in any form but you just imagine that you're there with a loving wise being of some kind that knows you well and that cares about you and you have a conversation with it you tell it what's been going on and then you ask it for some guidance or advice and you listen and it'll tap you into areas of your brain that you may not have been using because we tend to kind of go over the same tracks over and over it'll tend to open up your perspective and then the third thing is what I call emotional strengthening or emotional modulation and that has to do with the technique I'm going to share with you today because this is the usual thing that we use imagination for the Ziggy here he this is the figments of my imagination are out to get me this is the more common use of imagination and we can so the bar is set pretty low and we can actually learn to use our imagination some of you are looking at your slides and I think in these slides this may work out well for you because these slides may actually be the slides that were printed out for you and I changed this whole lecture around so you imagine my surprise when I see this one which I wasn't expecting to see I didn't put the new one on so stress and relaxation in health I have a good friend and partner we used to lecture a lot around the country David Bresler he's a professor of psychology at UCLA and we would go around we would do this little dog-and-pony show where one of us would make we would switch off and one of us would make the case that stress and relaxation have everything to do with health it's like the most important thing to do with health and you know worry is the most common source what they call type to stress is exhausting did anyone talk to you about type 1 and type 2 stress very simply type 1 stress is the kind that we think the stress response was designed for the saber-toothed tiger the mugger the acute threat to your life where you get pumped up your blood all goes to your muscles your heart beats fast your blood pressure goes up your blood clots fast there you're ready to you know to fight the tiger to the death or escape run the fastest two miles you ever ran and then again in a half an hour it's all over the body goes into a compensatory relaxation response and if you've survived that stress you sit around the campfire for the next 20 years telling about how you ran away from the tiger how you killed the tiger you know that's type 1 stress type 2 stress is the kind that comes from constant worrying and listening to the news and taking it to heart and you know doing it uninterrupted all the constant worries the mortgage the college education the health issues the family issues the war that this that the global warming it's what comes from that constant lower level arousal where your body is frequently and sometimes always in a state of arousal but doesn't have anything it can actually do to solve any of those problems you know at least with the tiger you can either fight it kill it or you can run away from it and escape it or it'll kill you those are the three outcomes okay and in all three of those outcomes there's no more stress you know it's like you've burned and you've burned up the chemicals running fighting or dying I guess so your body is burned up all those huge those that adrenaline and all the stress chemicals but in type 2 stress this daily nagging worry fear unsettled anxiety that we often carry around the body doesn't get to dip into those restorative relaxation kinds of periods that's where the that's why it's important and it's exhausting over time one or two of the doctors showed you in the earlier lectures that acute short-term stress actually boosts your immune system a little bit you know it's part of getting ready to survive this attack but when it's chronic and prolonged and you're living in it your energy just goes down your immunity goes down you're you know when you're fighting a saber-toothed tiger it's a good thing that your blood would clot faster if you got wounded maybe you wouldn't bleed to death when you're living over you know thirty years of working in a corporation or wherever you're working or you're an independent worker and worried about your income all the time thirty years of having your blood clot too quickly your doctor won't like that you won't like that your cardiologist doesn't like we don't want our blood to be sludgy and cloudy on an ongoing basis that sets us up for things like high blood pressure cardiac disease stroke and so on and so forth so it's not how we ideally want to live there have been studies that show that 80% of serious illnesses are preceded by very high stress levels in the year to year and a half before that that used to be a really meaningful statement to me I think now it's almost silly because I don't know anybody who doesn't live with high stress levels on a constant basis anymore maybe you do is there anybody here who doesn't good sign him up for next year for the lecture because yeah there's but it's an exception you know one guy out of a hundred at a stress lecture so these are you you know you are people who want who are interested in doing something about and probably already have some skills so it's a hugely stressful time and with is the information flow and so on and so forth without some kinds of practices and tools to work with a lot of people live in those in those levels all the time so I'm so everyone's going to have that I think it's going to be rare to not have somebody like that and we would like to tell our medical audiences you know that Vernon Riley was a physiologist back in the 50s and 60s at University of Washington did some startling research the one that sticks out in my mind was they raise little little mice that were genetically bred to develop breast cancers so that they can use them for research so they and the average situation 80% of these mice will develop a breast cancer and then they can use them for research Riley did research on him where he took half the mice and stress them by giving them intermittent electrical shocks in their cages where they didn't know it was happening you know these are we won't get into that discussion but at the time it wasn't an issue so over 90 percent of those mice develop breast cancer so somewhat more of them than the average mice develop breast cancer the really startling thing was that he took half the mice and had the lab attendants befriend the mice and really love him up really good and they would take him out of their cages and they would stroke him and they would coochie-coo them and they'd give him and they'd let him visit with the other mice they let him out of their cages and I mean they just really treated these mice these mice were in Mouse heaven and fewer than 40 percent of those animals develop breast cancers even though they were genetically bred to develop breast cancer now isn't that a startling fact and now they're mice and we're not but death there's a lesson to be drawn from that I think so and it may be mediated through the immune system and there may be other other because what's up it's the type of reaction to stress one is it's just one single event that you deal with the other is that it's ongoing because your mind is full of it that's what type-2 is it's the constant warrior yeah so then the other one of us would make the case that stress has nothing to do as stressing relaxation has nothing to do with health and what that's about is most of what you've been hearing that it's stress tolerance it's how you respond that really is the difference it's not necessarily I mean there are events that happen to people that would crush just about anybody and even with those events there are people who respond to those events in ways that are inspiring and mind-boggling and they end up making something out of them and they end up not being crushed and not collapsing and not succumbing to it I don't even know how they do it you know you know I think of a woman a black woman in the south who lost something like three or four children in a church fire that was started by bigots you know and then dedicated the rest of her life to tain't a bigotry education and to building new churches that where churches had been burned down into healing wounds in terms of race relations I mean that's just blows my mind I don't I I'd like to think that I could do something like that but I doubt it but some people can so it's the way you respond that makes a difference in terms of stir I don't know if anyone talked about Susanne ku cabassa she's a researcher from University of Chicago and she studied you know what years ago maybe 15 years ago AT&T or used to be the biggest company in the world and they disbanded it was about 15 to 20 years ago and it was a huge stress that affected hundreds of thousands of people so smart research psychologists like dr. Cabasa you know decided let's see what happens when these hundreds of thousands of corporate people are subjected to a huge stress which is the threat to all of their jobs and what she found was that there are about seven to ten percent of people who just died within the next year and generally with things like heart disease and stroke and so on and things that probably have something to do with stress she also found on the other end of the scale about the same percentage of people who thrived after this corporation got dysregulated and she started to study them with the idea of saying what what is it about those people that allowed them to thrive in a time these are high-level executives and she came up with with her hypothesis of the three C's what she found with these people is that when faced with a big stress like this they responded to it as a challenge they saw it as a challenge they felt that it was important and they were committed to trying to do something about it and they also felt like they could make a difference that they had some modicum of control and the people who had that as a personality type actually rise to the top in situations where there's high levels of trust they feel they rise to the challenge they're committed to doing something about it and they feel that they could do something about it those will mitigate stress reactions and turn stress into something that can actually be used for energy rather than something that crushes people now we don't all have those things question is can we develop those things can we cultivate those responses and so the technique that I want to share with you here is one way to help expand your capacity to deal with it with a stress that you may not have been but we want to do is cultivate hardiness or health we want to change situations that are changeable we want to change our response to the situation if the situation isn't changeable I know dr. Cabasa talked to I think it was her about the serenity prayer one of the great pieces of wisdom you know to know the difference between what you can change and what you can't change and the and the wisdom to know the difference except the things you can't change change of things you can have the wisdom to know the difference has a lot to do with this or change your perspective in relation to it which actually has the effect of having a bit of it of both changing the situation in response and that's what I want to give you a chance to experiment with so when I think about you know just sort of the basic laws of cultivating hardiness or cultivating health given whatever your genetic capabilities are they're pretty simple you know if you make time to sleep and rest enough you know have some kind of physical activity in your day even if it's just walking eat good food on a regular basis and not too much of it make sure that you get good quality water try to balance your expectations and capacities don't ask too much of yourself or too little of yourself at this point you know sometimes what I say to my patients is if especially if they have that how many of you have pets how many of you have dogs especially not that many dogs are great I don't have a dog but people who have dogs understand this right away is like if you take care of yourself the way you take care of a dog you'll be doing 98% of what you can do to cultivate good health okay if you don't feed the dog junk food you feed the dog good food you make sure it has access to fresh water when it has to go to the bathroom you let it take its time you know and when it's tired you let it sleep and then you take it for a walk twice a day and then you let it play with the other dogs and hopefully you pet it and tell it you love it and play with it and if you did those same things as I was your basic health plan you would be doing most of what's possible to do to make a difference in your own health so those things then we have other things like that we don't know if dogs have a sense of humor but people certainly do that's and that has a lot to do with our perspective and being connected with other people being connected with something you believe in you know having a philosophy thinking about what your faith is thinking about how do we deal with life which is a really strange situation you know the Buddhists say that life is like getting into a rowboat heading out to sea knowing for sure that it's going to sink and how do we live with that kind of knowledge so most of us try to avoid that knowledge most of our lives and that doesn't always work really well because somewhere in us we know it so there's there's got to be a greater depth especially when we get to some of the hard parts of life like health issues with ourselves and others that we love so I talked about changing the situation and if you're stuck in one place the inner advisor inner wisdom inner guide meditation how many of you have ever done something like that it's kind of a variation on talking to yourself but in a good way you know it's kind of like you know you've got a good friend who's got a problem and you listen to their problem and you usually will give your friend good advice won't you they usually won't take it but you usually give good wise loving it to your friends and it's easier to do because you're not bound up in the emotional anxiety and angst that they are when they've got a really serious problem and this is kind of a way of getting out of your own way and accessing your own wisdom and strength and that's a very it's not what we're going to do today but that's a very useful thing whatever you call it your intuition your wisest self your inner self your inner guide at the bottom you know it's what would Jesus do what would the Dalai Lama do what would whoever you like do okay what would somebody walk genuinely wise and loving do in this situation and what it does is it helps you shift especially if you do it in imagery and you take the time to really imagine that that such a being is there it shifts you out of the place you're in which is usually very anxious worried fearful and somewhat regressed into what would this look like if I was in a place where there was wisdom and compassion which sometimes will reveal pass it or there before okay so that's or we can change our response and I talked and other people talked about the relaxation response and imagery again for my two sentences the simplest way that I know to evoke a relaxation response it's daydreaming on purpose and you just decide to daydream yourself to a place it's beautiful and peaceful and loving and again you can you can check that out from the website or we can change the perspective so let me tell you a quick story about how this can work and then we'll do the then we'll do the imagery and all so a woman called me Emily I'll call her she's a nurse she had been a patient of mine some years prior she'd had breast cancer she went through the process with as most people do with a great mixture of emotions and stresses that's a very stressful situation she was one of those people who went through her cancer eventually looking at it as a wake-up call not everybody does and I'm not saying it is but that was her response to it that that lots of things when her in her life route of balance and this was a wake-up call and she was going to respond to it in that way not only by doing the surgery in the radiation and she didn't do chemotherapy but not only doing the conventional medical things but by looking at her whole life her diet her nutrition her relationships or work everything and she got immersed in it and did very well through her treatment and came through her treatment a genuinely changed person as people who do that this well they what they don't just come out as survivors of treatment they come out as changed people people who have learned something and she had been doing great for a while this was about four years afterwards and I get a call from her and I get on the phone with her and she's sobbing uncontrollably and can barely even talk and finally you know I got the I figured out between her sobs she said she's at her oncologist office she's getting her four-year checkup and she's just been told she has a recurrence and she's completely devastated she's back even worse than she was when she first got diagnosed maybe because she had sort of done everything right you know and was kind of sailing along and in her nice new life and here she gets a blow that she's got a recurrence that's not that's a difficult thing to do it so she's sobbing and so why don't you come over at the end of the day and she came over and she's still sobbing she's bent over sobbing so hard that that she can barely speak and the only thing she can say that I can hear is I can't I just don't think I can do it I don't think I can do it again I just can't do this again I can't go through it again by the time she said that about ten times I finally got it and and I said Emily and this is the key question in this technique of the evocative imagery which is what do you feel you're missing that would allow you to do this what do you need more of in order to do this and she took a minute or so and she said I just don't know if I have the strength or the courage to do this again so I said would you be willing to do some imagery because she had done a lot of it when she was first diagnosed and she was of course willing to do it and I introduced her to this technique and it was it's simply this I I said she did a little breathing I said let yourself go back in time in your memory to some time in your life when you felt you had what you need now go back to some time when you felt that you had the courage and strength then after a while she added clarity she said courage strength and clarity which is what you needed so go back in your life to some time when you felt that you had the strength and courage and clarity that you're looking for now and just let your mind go back and see what comes to mind and what came to mind for her was a time about 20-25 years beforehand when her mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer and Emily was a young nurse just out of school and she said I'm in my mother's living room my mother is sobbing and bereft and overwhelmed like I feel now and what you do is you go back and you I asked her to talk about everything in Kerr in present tense I said talk about it as if you're there again where are you I'm in my mother's living room what do you see I see the sofa I see the doilies I see the screens on the windows I see the afternoon Sun coming in the window what do you hear I hear my mother sobbing crying hysterical I hear my sister in the other room on the phone to my aunt she's crying and screaming and hysterical I said what do you feel in yourself she says well I'm holding the center there's nobody else I'm strangely calm and clear and I'm the one who's holding the center so that we can do what needs to be done okay so then I said now what does that so what does that feel like in your body where do you feel that in your body and Chicago says I feel it kind of mostly here in my heart and so now notice what it feels like in your heart and notice what it feels like in your body if you really let yourself feel that and calm the the holding the center experience that you have now and she's got her eyes closed she kind of sits up her posture changes I say and notice what does it feel like in your face to feel that quality of clarity and calmness courage and her face gets very composed and and then we go through a process that you can do in your imagination so now if you like let yourself just let that feeling get larger and stronger and expand and flow through your body and I wonder if you like imagine that it's flowing down your arms down to the tips of your fingers and your palms and we did the same with their legs down to the bottom of our feet and we go through some imagery suggestions like you know imagine that that feeling of calmness and clarity and courage is reaching every cell of your body from the deepest cells of your bone marrow out through all of your muscles and all of your conductive tissue and you're out to the outermost cells of your skin and every part of you is full of clarity and courage and calmness by now she's very still and calm and quiet and then we say now if you like imagine you have a control like you have on a radio and you can turn this up as large as you imagine that you're overflowing with these clarity and courage and calmness we repeat the names of the qualities a lot while you're doing this and you're filling the space around you for two feet in every direction and then if you like turn it up so you're filling a bigger space and a big you get the idea you can fill the whole room with it or the whole world with it and then adjust it to what feels comfortable for you and then she comes back and it takes about 10-15 minutes to do that she comes back she's composed she's clear she says you know I can do this I do have what it what I need I just couldn't get to it and that's very often true that when we're really stressed and really scared and really emotionally upset we sometimes can't access our strengths and the imagery will allow us to shift and access so she still had a recurrence she still had things to deal with but now she's got a tool where she can connect with these with this clarity and courage and calmness which will help her go through them and she would lose it from time to time but she would go back to this method and be able to react cess that feeling and when I saw her I'd say I saw her once a week for the next few weeks but by sometime in the third week she said to me should you know this evocative imagery it's really like emotional body building isn't it I said I never thought of it that way but it's really true because she says the more I do that the more I feel the clarity and the calmness and the courage and I I actually feel it in myself it's not and what's neat about the imagery is that it gives you the experience it's not just patting someone in the back and saying oh no you're you can do this which is helpful but when people actually experience it as I hope you'll have a chance to do it it's a whole different thing then you actually know that you have that thing inside you okay so what I want to invite you to do if you want to experiment with this for you so how many of you have done guided imagery in some form or another before okay how many of you done relaxation or meditation okay you've all done guided imagery before has anyone ever seen a movie in here television show advertisements it's all guided imagery okay ninety-nine point six percent of your daily life is guided imagery believe me once you start to okay but we're going to do therapeutic guided imagery okay and what I want to invite you to do is think about a situation that's stressful for you if you have one and if not maybe the person next to you has more than one and they would loan it to you but if you have a stressful situation going on or something happened recently that was very stressful that you had difficulty dealing with especially a stressful situation that you may not be able to do anything about and that you're having trouble or coming to terms within yourself just think about that situation and think about what you would equality or a couple of qualities that you would like to have more of as you deal with that situation so this could be patients it could be humor it could be kindness or compassion it could be assertiveness it could be courage it could be faith it could be something else but think of a quality or two that you feel like if I had more whatever I could deal with this more easily and give the quality a name and it can be up to it's a one two three qualities that you would just like to feel more of if you don't have this ongoing stressful situation great I'm glad to hear that and just think of a quality that you would like to experience more vividly for a few minutes now so it could be happiness it could be joy it could be whatever and by the way you can change that as you go inside if something comes to mind you can change the quality and now if you're comfortable with it go ahead and close your eyes and you can it's just easier to do imagery with your eyes closed but you can open them at any time and look around and at any time if you're uncomfortable with anything just open your eyes and look around the room and bring yourself out of your inner world but if you're comfortable going to your inner world close your eyes take a nice deep breath and just going to let your out-breath be a letting go kind of a breath and just do that a couple more times one at a time you breathe in imagine that you're breathing in some fresh energy and the oxygen flowing through your body and as you let the breath out invite any tension or distraction or discomfort to flow out with the breath and just invite your body to soften and open and feel free to shift and be more comfortable at any time and as you breathe and let yourself relax let your mind get relatively quiet and just think about those that quality or qualities you'd like to experience more of and let yourself go back in your mind just ask your unconscious mind to take you back to some time in your life when you experienced yourself having those qualities in you or if you never experienced those qualities when you witnessed somebody expressing those qualities but just let yourself think of a time in your life when you had those qualities you experienced having experienced that quality or qualities in you and then imagine that you're there again now as best you can and look around as if you're really there and notice a few things that you see or imagine seeing and notice the colors and the shapes and the objects and people or whatever's there notice what you see as you look around in your inner world as you're beginning to feel this quality or quality in yourself and notice what you hear in that place and notice that you can hear my voice and things from the room at the same time but in your inner world notice what you're hearing as you're in that place experiencing yourself having that quality or qualities and notice what the air or atmosphere is like if there's an odor or an aroma or a fragrance or particular quality of the air in that place where you are and notice what time of day it seems to be day or night and then start to notice in your body to kind of gently scan your body with your awareness and notice where you feel was quality or qualities most strongly in your body scan up and down like a radar beam so in our beam and notice if you feel this quality or quality's more strongly in one area of your body or another it seems to center somewhere your chest or your abdomen or your pelvis legs or your head and Zoar arms or maybe it's all over and as you start to notice what it feels like to feel this quality or these qualities in yourself notice what it feels like in your body let the feelings get a little bit stronger so you can really feel the that particular quality or qualities and let it grow a little stronger if you're comfortable with it and notice what it feels like in your body and notice what your posture wants to be like as you're feeling this quality or qualities and notice what your face feels like and what the expression on your face wants to be as you feel this quality or qualities in your face and if you're comfortable with it let the strength of the qualities grow larger and stronger you can imagine you have some kind of a volume control like you do on a radio or television you can turn it up or down and imagine that you just turn it up so that it begins to fill the whole space of your body and as if that quality or qualities could be radiated and filled all the way down your legs to the bottoms of your feet all the way down your arms to the palms of your hands throughout your hips and back and pelvis abdomen chest head and neck and imagine that that quality it's as if it could be radiated out so that it's touching every cell in your body from the deepest cells in your bone marrow to your bones your ligaments connective tissues organs lair under your skin all the way out to the very outermost skin cells as if every cell of your body was touched and filled with this particular quality or qualities and if that's a pleasant experience if that's a good experience for you go ahead and turn it up even higher as if that those qualities could overflow your body and fill the space around your body for a foot in every direction and if you want to you could just be soaking it up like a sponge and if you want to you can turn it up so you're filling the space for 3 feet in every direction or 10 feet in every direction just imagine that there's an abundant source of this quality or quality so wherever it comes from you could fill the room with it if you wanted to could fill the world with it if you wanted to but then adjust it to whatever is most comfortable for you and whatever is most comfortable for you is perfectly alright it's like listening to music all by yourself whatever is most comfortable and pleasing to you however big or small however strong or subtle you'd like this quality to be just adjust it so that it's most comfortable for you right now and let that be alright and now as you're experiencing yourself in touch with that quality or qualities look at the stressful situation again that you thought about from that perspective and just notice if it seems any different to you in any way where if your relationship to it seems different in any way it may or may not just notice notice what it would be like if you were dealing with that situation while being in touch with this quality or qualities in yourself notice if anything seems to be different or go differently notice if anybody including yourself seems to react or respond differently and just imagine that you have as much of what you need just imagine you have as much of what you need and just see if it looks or feels or seems the same or different in any way if there's anything you would do differently about it or not if you would feel any differently about it or not just take a few moments with that and then when you're ready just start to gently become aware of the room we're in together and let go of the images and start to notice what you hear or experience in the room here and now and as your attention comes back to the outside world just bring back with you anything that you've learned anything that seems important or interesting to you and take your time and when you come back take a couple of minutes just to write down anything that you'd like to remember about this experience or any questions you have about this experience and I'm going to give you just a few minutes to come all the way back and come back feeling more relaxed and refreshed and awake than you were before take a few minutes to write down anything you'd like to remember or that seemed important or interesting or any questions you have about this experience for later I'll give you a few minutes and then we'll begin again we'll have a chance to discuss this if you want to discuss anything about it I have a few more things to talk to you about about how many people were able to access a feeling of equality or qualities that you wanted to feel more about doing that good so half to two-thirds of you it's good if you didn't you know to skill doesn't nothing it doesn't it's like hitting a baseball or typing or something and something it's pretty natural but you learn to do it so if you didn't have a homerun experience this time don't berate yourself or give up on guided imagery it's you know some of you may have fallen asleep some of you may not have been able to relax those things happen all the time but you know a good number of you are able to access that and how many of you having accessed the quality or qualities you chose for how many of you was the stressful situation did it look different or feel different or seemed different to you in some meaningful way I'm curious about that so probably about half of those people who access the quality so that's interesting in itself isn't it I think one of the great things about this approach is is that you know because if you're stressed you're depressed you're anxious you're feeling bad people tell you to cheer up you know keep your chin up I could have patted Emily on the back say no you're strong you can deal with it you dealt with it before you'll deal with it again that would have been somewhat helpful okay just like I could Pat each one of you on the back and say no you can you know you can probably deal with that but when you go inside and you feel the feeling then you know that you can deal with it in another way that goes way beyond me telling you that that's one thing the other thing is is when you're not feeling well and you're feeling stressed and overwhelmed and depressed somebody tells you to feel you know just buck up and you know keep your chin up and think a happy thought you know I don't know about you but there's something in me wants to go for their neck you know so and the cool thing about evocative imagery is it doesn't start out by negating what you're feeling it starts out by acknowledging what you're feeling so you're not saying jeez I'm feeling overwhelmed I'm feeling anxious I'm feeling depressed and instead of saying don't feel depressed go to a happy place and feel happy which is something you can learn to do and is useful it starts out by saying I know that you're feeling stressed and overwhelmed and anxious what would what do you need more of in order to be able to deal with this better so then it asks you about what are the resources that would help you and you start right away to draw on thinking about why I need more energy I need more patience and even more courage I need more assertiveness I need more stick-to-itiveness whatever those qualities are and then it it by accessing it and going to an inner world felt experience it actually shifts your emotional state when you shift your emotional state you shift your physiologic state so something actually happens a felt shift happens inside you which is different than just thinking I know I should be thinkin better thoughts which often serves as another reason to kind of get down on yourself I do this all the time I know I should be thinkin better thoughts and I'm not so I'm even a bigger schmuck than I thought I was so you can just take that write down your negative thinking let me get to that oh man so some of the resources that can help you practice who into those 2000 are things like CDs CDs are inexpensive you can listen to them anytime you want there's a whole variety I'm going to give you four different websites you can get CDs from 40 from half a dozen different people that are all experts in the field that can help you practice and explore and learn how to work with everything from relaxation to the inner advisor inner wisdom kinds of meditation to evocative imagery to healing imagery so on and so forth to dealing with specific illnesses and health kinds of issues so CDs are cheap you can practice with them anytime you can download them if you're tech savvy you know you can download them onto your iPod or your mp3 player and you can find things that are anything from five minutes long to 15 20 minutes long and get kind of a tech assisted meditation you know if your mind is very busy if you're a medical student or nursing student or professional student or you know mine's going 100 miles an hour it's a moth and much easier to listen to somebody else guide you through the process than it is to try to learn it from a book you can learn it from a book I wrote a book called guided imagery for self-healing I recommend it and you know it's full of why this works and the science and case histories and the scripts and so on and so forth but it's a lot easier to kind of get the theory in the background from that kind of thing and then listen to good guided imagery CDs and processes that will just take you through it and with repetition you start to learn how to do it like anything else that you learn classes and groups there's more and more classes and groups around you can look at support centers like the friend Cancer Support Center Millberry Union you know go online there's lots of ways to begin to learn these kinds of things especially in our area we're in an area that has a very rich supply of resources that way and for things that are really naughty and thorny I mean sometimes this can be can bring up serious issues that haven't been dealt with issues of abuse issues that are just too big for self-care I think of you know the CDs and the classes and the books and so on our kind of over-the-counter strength and it's they're very useful for a lot of things but if you've had psychiatric illness if there's serious depression if there's you know if there's a history of post-traumatic stress from any source that may be too much to do on your own and you want to get a professional to work with that also knows what they're doing and I'm going to give you a web site for training academy that has so trained and certified quite a number of professionals and who know how to use this in those kinds of prescription-strength situations so the healing mind org that's my website we've got books and CDs by me by colleagues Ken Pelletier Gina de Burgh that's one place for a variety of different health and stress related issues the Academy for guided imagery dot-com the Academy is a professional training academy and has a roster of about 800 health professionals around the country and actually about 20 international that have been through a hundred and fifty our certification program to learn to work with people with one-on-one interactive guided imagery it's a very powerful approach to learning and growth and and therapy and again that's prescription strength health journeys calm Belarus Napper stuck is a social worker from Cleveland who has a wide variety of really wonderful guided imagery in music CDs and tapes for all kinds of medical and psychology related situations and Emmett Miller is an MD and lives up in Grass Valley who virtually invented sort of guided imagery on tape used to be audio cassettes and now CDs and downloads and he's at dr. Miller comm and all of these are very high quality and you may like one voice better you might like music you might like not music and so on so it's a whole world that you can kind of explore in pretty inexpensively and find and explore resources that allow you to use your imagination more skillfully to help yourself with stress that's it for that we'll have a little discussion if anybody wants to contact me this is a an email address that will get to me I also brought brochures that are on a back table for the healing mind that give you some idea of what we've got and let's take a little time it's about 8:20 so we've got about 20-25 minutes if we need it do you want to stand up and stretch for a couple minutes and then sit back down and then let's see if you have questions or comments things you want to share concerns yes sir they have there been comparative studies of comparing different religions in terms of the way they deal with stress it's you know it's an interesting question it's not my field of study and I kind of I kind of doubt it but I've never really looked into it and you know I would think that they would all say that they're the best way generally that's what they do yeah but I don't think there's been any particular strategy and my guess is what would show in those ideas is that is that if you have a religion that is meaningful to you and that is congruent with your beliefs and your experience and your life and that brings you comfort in times which are difficult and that that's the religion that's going to do it for you and if it and whatever it is doesn't matter and whether you're a you know a neo-pagan or a Catholic or a Muslim or a Hindu or a Buddhist I mean I think in some sense that's what religion is about what what is a way of what is a way of living in this life that can allow me to live with dignity and allow me to live with grace and allow me to live with courage and calm in the face of of some things that I really wish would not happen I'm going to summarize what you said that that you know a common common cause of stress is having too many things on your plate trying to do to more than you can actually do that's and that's where planning an organization comes in and I went through that kind of quickly but that's where trying to be as realistic as you can about what you really need to do prioritizing things what you can do what you can't do and letting go of some things is a really important part of stress management because that's because you can end up it's very simple to end up I can't tell you how many times I've had this feeling I come back from a day practicing in my office I may have seen 15 or 18 people if I was fortunate I may have been able to help some or a lot of them dealt with a lot of serious issues kind of come home you know there's the one my wife my children my friends my parents my this my that and so you can end up there's just not enough time there's not enough capacity in one way of looking at it in another way of looking at it you could say well we deal with things as they come along but it's very easy to reach the end of a day like that when you may have done a huge amount of good for a whole lot of people and been a pretty good doctor and a pretty good fruit wife and a pretty good husband and a pretty good dad and a pretty good son and you know and end up at the end of the day just feeling like you haven't done any of those things well you know I haven't been a good enough mother I haven't been a good enough doctor I haven't been a good enough husband I haven't been a good enough father I'm not a good enough son I'm not good and you know you just want to put a gun in your head it just is not a good way to live so something's out of balance there I mean assume in how do you balance that out how do you come to accept that what's good enough and how can you let it be the kind of good enough day and I used to I learned a big lesson about that when I was a freshman medical school at a summer job in Detroit I went to University of Michigan and I had a summer job where at the coal plant the coke plant where they burn coal and turn it into coke to melt iron into steel so this is a place in Detroit called Zug Island it's an island in the middle of this river and the darkest most dreary part of Detroit Michigan which is pretty dark and dreary and I work a eight-hour day shoveling coal coke which is a hundred and forty degrees in the middle of summer it's 95 degrees out with a hundred percent humidity and the job is that this stuff is trundling up a conveyor belt in a little house and it's falling off the conveyor belt and my job is to shovel it and put it back on the conveyor belt and so after an eight-hour day and it covered with black soot absolutely covered exhausted trying to get up enough energy to go home and the foreman comes along he says who's rossman listen I'm Roslyn he says you're on the night shift I said okay I'll be here tomorrow night he says no you're here tonight so now the second job is I'm up in this house where 12 different conveyer belts come from these things all going in different directions all loaded with this 140 degree hot coal falling off you were special boots because it's about two feet thick on the floor and the job is to shovel it back on to the things I'm a good ddung medical school shuttling shoveling shoveling constantly shoveling constantly falling out the regular guy comes in who's about a 50 year old guy wonderful guy black guys and doing this stuff for 25 years he sets out his mat over in the corner it's out his newspaper gets out his coffee thing gets out his lunch lays down takes a nap 20 minutes later he's up gets up he shovels about three things ago back on the belt goes over and screws his mug pours himself a cup of coffee breaks out the sports section reads the paper 20 minutes later he's out there he shovels at three four times this goes on half the night I'm shoveling shotlink shelling and he says to me and like nicest place he says you know son he says you do understand you're never going to get this job done so there's a lot of wisdom in that and you know he figured out a way to live with that and that was wise that was a bit of wisdom that I've been grateful for and so so sometimes I think about that room and I think about I'm never going to get it all done and I just have to do the best I can on it and maybe there's some of that stuff I don't really have to do anymore and I can unload it what else yeah there's a lot of imagery in all kinds of interactions and in medical interactions there is a lot of imagery either implicit or explicit and and part of the implicit imagery in the way that we approach medicine as a culture is that diseases are separate from us and in being separate from us it takes away our power to do anything in relationship with them if that makes any sense to you so the idea that lupus or rheumatoid arthritis or this or that or the other name disease it's like a thing in itself it's like it has its own life it's actually very much like a next it's like a discarnating that comes and grabs you out of the blue for no reason at random and you have no power in relationship to it your main chance is to root for the doctor and hope that you have a good doctor who knows what they're doing and it's extremely disempowering okay it doesn't mean that you made it up and it doesn't mean that you brought it on yourself but to be able to have an experience like this woman shared with us where you know everything you read about lupus it's incurable it's chronic it goes this way it goes that way as if it exists in a vacuum and I have a problem with that you know how come all these diseases have Institute's you know they have huge foundations and institutes for the diseases I don't have them for the people who have the diseases now that may be cutting here's a little bit but it's also there's a certain truth in that okay because it's like the disease's live on their own I've never seen any of these diseases without a person attached and the way that a person responds to those diseases can on a daily level make a huge difference in how the person experiences that disease and sometimes can make a huge difference with how the whole process Falls and people can learn from illnesses and so on and so far I've had that happen many many times I really appreciate you sharing that but something that's almost completely unexplored in our approach to medicine which is very everything separate everything is out of our control we don't have a relationship to it you know we completely ignore the healing you know we ignored the fact that there's something inside every one of us that made us from nothing and when you stop to really think about that that statement that there's something that made you from nothing that's pretty powerful and that has helped you heal and recover or cope with everything that you've experienced thus far in life otherwise you wouldn't be here it's a very powerful system you know whether you want to call it our healing system or balancing systems our coping systems and this kind of this way of getting quiet looking inside and connecting with it the imagery is the most direct way that I've ever found yet to connect with that and to make sense of that and to kind of learn to work with the healing abilities of your body in relation to whatever it is that you're dealing with be it an illness or a stressor your brain is the greatest pharmacy in the world there's your brain creates molecules that we only dream about replicating you know there are the endorphin molecules the pain relieving molecules that your brain makes some of them are thousands of times more potent and morphing and you know if you can just find a way to get one drop of that stuff out I can take care of a whole lot of pain they're also regulating of a lot of a lot of signals so there's a we believe there's a brain chemistry that probably shift there's certainly a nervous system balance that's just when you shift from that sympathetic fight-or-flight pattern - I can let go now it's safe I can let go there's nothing out there to worry about because when you're immersed in the imagery you're not even thinking about what there you're completely inside so there is in both a nervous system shift and autonomic nervous system shift and I think also a brain chemistry shift and it's real at tends to be very relaxing and it tends to be refreshing when people do meditative techniques relaxation techniques with imagery without imagery I do I just love imagery because it's so quick it's easy it's non secular it's compatible with almost every religion and philosophy it's day dreaming it's natural it's easy to learn you know and you know if you can do that dip in and out of that deeply relaxed state once or twice a day your whole stress thermostat starts to starts to shift and your tolerance goes up and your confidence that you can just get out of it periodically really helps and it can be very very powerful and you know the interesting thing about this guided imagery in relation to what you said which is it feels like you took a valium or a tranquilizer is that I never used the word relaxed once in that there was no there was nothing about even relaxation in that just shifts you automatically to more comments or questions and then we will adjourn I believe the way that I think about meditation meditation which is normally a process of focusing on something whether it's your breath whether it's your tip of your nose your bellybutton a mantra a picture of Jesus a candle flame an imaginary candle flame whatever you want is kind of the anti imagery right so meditation is a step towards saying instead of following out all these worrisome and scary images that the brain may be full of instead of following those you learn to bring your attention back to a tethered place whatever it is and it can be your whether it's any of those things I mentioned so that you take five or 10 or 15 or 20 minutes and you bring your attention back to a neutral or a pleasant kind thing okay if you incorporate your breathing that kicks in a whole other physiologic part of our relaxation because the breathing is breathing's like those dual control some driver training cars you'll automatically breathe enough to live but if you breathe more deeply and more abdominal II it has a physiologic effect where it starts to shift you into that more relaxed parasympathetic autonomic state so the combination of the deeper breathing and not following out all those images and worries rely you know results in a relaxed state - it's kind of the default position is relaxed and comfortable that's the default position okay if I sometimes joke you know if we all had imagined act amis okay so if we just went in had our imaginations taken out that's sort of Labette that's what a lobotomy is you would have almost no stress people who are lobotomized have no stress whatever's happening around them because they don't react emotionally because the connect the emotional connections have been severed so they're pretty happy pretty consistent not worried they don't create stress they don't worry about things in the future they don't even know there is a future so without imaginations we would have almost no stress you'd have to be actually literally confronted with a direct threat to your life - India encounter a stress response and that's why it's important to learn how to do something meditation to me and are you know there are different spiritual meditations that have different intentions and are used in different ways but the basic process of one point meditation is just let's stop imagining for a while let's just come back to the breath or come back to the mantra or come back to the belly button or come back to you know the guru or whatever it is and if you do that if you do nothing but that for 10 or 15 minutes your brain slows down your autonomic nervous system balances your blood pressure goes down your heart beats lower your blood doesn't clot so easily that's the default position but because of the way we live and all the information flow and all the things we know and learn and think about we have to actually do most of us have to do something active to allow the default position to come back in and then from that default position then there's a lot of other things you could do with your imagination like think about what might stimulate healing or what you can learn from this problem or gather other resources and so on and so forth does that answer your question so thank you all I'll hang around if there's any individual questions appreciate it

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 281,360

Rating: 4.8143234 out of 5

Keywords: stress, mental health, integrative medicine

Id: FOQKMiD5QJI

Length: 88min 30sec (5310 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 15 2010