Coping With Stress - Imaginative Solutions for Stress Relief

This program is a UCTV presentation for educational and non-commercial use only, so how many of you have been here for two or more of the other conferences? Well, most of you, so I couldn't be on them, but I reviewed the slides. and talks from the other conferences and I see that you have had a very thorough education on

stress

and the physiology of

stress

and sort of the mind-body aspects and medical aspects of stress, in fact, if any of you who have been here throughout from those lectures they have a much better education than most doctors in stress physiology and how to deal with stress.

How many of you are health professionals? Are there any of you who are also health professionals? Well, well, as I travel the country and talk about the art and science of mind-body medicine and talk to physician groups, etc., one of the first things I often ask you is: do you know how many of you think that Are mind-body interactions critical factors in the health and well-being of your patients? Without a doubt, doctors' hearings, what do you think happens with doctors' hearings? How many of them do you think raise their hands? Yes, 100% immediately, without thinking about it, without looking around for the approval of others or seeing what others are saying, everyone just. raise your hand and then I ask you: how many of you have received any education or training to teach your patients how to use their mind-body connection to reduce stress or help them with their issues related to their health or illness and about The 2% of people raise their hand at that moment and many of the things they have seen or heard in this series are, unfortunately, education of a higher nature than what many medical professionals receive or use on a day-to-day basis, so what I hope to do tonight is take 30 to 40 minutes tops and review some of what I consider to be sort of stress management 101 and there will be some of this that will be repeat.

I don't feel like I have to delve into it because of what you've already heard, but rather review it and frame it from a primary care physician's perspective because I'm a general practitioner. I've been practicing for close to 40 years and practicing as a doctor and acupuncturist and as someone who's trying to integrate mind-body health into my practice and then what I'd like to do is offer you the opportunity to experiment with some guided exercises. imaging technique that I have found very useful. I'm going to talk about some other ones that are very useful that you may have been exposed to, but I want to share one with you that not many people know about and that I think in many cases is one of the most useful approaches that I have learned and I will give you the opportunity to explore it and experience it for yourself and then get some feedback from me about it and then have plenty of time. for us to talk and for you to ask questions or share your experiences etc, so let's see if we can make that happen.

Since you've heard it in different ways, you know that we used to talk to a lot of people. We talk about stress as what happens to us and certainly there are many things that happen to us that are stimuli for the stress response, but now after attending the other conferences you know that stress is actually a response to what happens. It is a term that refers. to what happens within us in response to events that happen and it is quite variable, you know, there are people who experience enormously challenging threats, accidents, illnesses, losses, etc., who respond to it in such a way that They don't find it so stressful. physiologically as it is for another person who might deal with daily discomforts or things we would consider minor stress with huge dramatic responses and so it's not just about responding to what happens to you, but how Yuri responds, the response to the Stress often called fight or flight response, you've heard that term before, prepares us for an acute, short-term threat to our survival.

The saber-toothed tiger attacking us outside the cave makes us feel very charged and more likely to survive that attack. meet dr. Folkman called it general adaptation syndrome and it's a state where a part of your autonomic nervous system, your sympathetic nervous system, which has nothing to do with being sympathetic, is highly charged and prepares you to face some kind of acute challenge. , so here you have a guy who is not having a great day and is reacting to stress in a particular way, with a lot of anger reaction and without going through all the physiology, you can see that from his brain in the middle of his brain There's the hypothalamus, which kind of is the primary driver of the autonomic nervous system's fight-or-flight responses, sending lots of messages to your vital organs and your muscles and your heart and your blood pressure control and your digestion your bladder and colon and so on and so on it's all connected, it's a system-wide response that makes us prepare to survive something that is immediately threatening, so why do we want to learn to manage stress better?

I think that's a no-brainer from a medical standpoint, teams like the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health give us numbers like this that are truly astonishing: Between 75 and 90 percent of all visits to primary care physicians primary school in the United States are closely related to stressful events and the types of reactions people have to them. Because we react physiologically, stress is not a mental event, it is a brain body event, it is a complete event. Your system changes and that change, especially as I hope to show you over time, creates patterns that can make us more vulnerable to disease, on the other hand.

On the other hand, better stress management can help us become tougher and more resilient to these types of things, so that we don't necessarily have to go to the doctor for stress-related events, which is generally not a very good place to go. to go because doctors only treat two percent of the cases. The doctors are truly trained and know how to help you manage those stress-related events. What they will do is try to rule out that you have some horrendous illness and then you can eliminate it from your stress chart and I can do It's a good argument for this statement that almost all illnesses are related to stress because, and I don't mean to say that not caused by stress, but they are caused by stress or cause stress or are aggravated by stress, you know, so there are almost no serious consequences. or a major medical event that doesn't also have a major stress-related event that can amplify it or if you have tools that can help you put it in perspective and manage it and reversing or reducing the physiological response can help you prevent amplification. the severity or difficulty of the situation and then the third important thing that I'm not sure I've seen addressed too much in other conferences was that what I call toxic

coping

adds fuel to all this fire. ways that we try to manage stress and live through it and get through the night when things are really stressful and they tend to be things like overeating or eating too much of the wrong thing or drinking too much alcohol or smoking more cigarettes or causing problems for ourselves and getting involved in matters and you know, doing stupid things and losing our jobs and things like that, I mean, it's just things, how can I get through the next hour?

How can I get through the next day? So what can it do to me? Temporarily feeling better when we are, especially if we live in high-stress situations for a long period of time. It's natural for us to seek comfort and a respite from stress, but there are many early-learned ways to reduce it. stress that does not serve us well in terms of our health again eating among them other habits like drinking and smoking and so on getting angry with your husband or wife things like that that release you and give you some

relief

but cause more problems in your body , in your family and in your relationships, in your work, that's what I mean by toxic

coping

and then it just goes around and starts to form a vicious cycle.

I'm going to deal with this the best I can, somehow these things. I completely missed Mexico and we'll see how this goes, so I'm going to talk to you about images tonight and give you the opportunity to work with an image process because I can also make a pretty good case that it's the human thing. The mental function that is most intimately involved with both stress and stress

relief

is imagination. Generally it is not the intellect that creates stress or resolves it. It is usually imagination and the simplest example is the most common source of ongoing stress.

It's the imagination. It's worrying. Okay, so we could all be right now taking a nice walk on a nice beach or on a mountain or on a beautiful sunny day here in the beautiful Bay Area and it could be the most beautiful day in the world and if we just looked at what was There is nothing dangerous going on around us, it's okay, it could be very pleasant, you could be with friends, you could be with someone you love and you could be so depressed that you don't even want to look up and in your head We are worried about what what will happen if this happens and what will happen if that happens and I regret that I did that and you could be living and regretting, you could be living worried and so just because we have the ability to remember and I imagine that we can create a huge and stressful perspective to live on that day sunny and that is a function of imagination, it is a function of it is a bad habit for many people.

I mean, we all worry sometimes and worry is helpful in solving problems to some extent. but sometimes we develop a habit of worrying where just when we finish worrying about one thing we move on to worrying about the next thing and we always live in the future and the future and the future that is filled with things that we were worried about and the problem with that. is that the brain where that worry occurs is sending alarm messages to that part of your brain, that deeper part of the brain that is actually just listening and transmitting messages to that central part of the brain. that I showed you in heaven, it just listens and sends two messages, one is everything is fine and the other is beware of danger and when it sends the danger signal it is the stress response and when it sends the signal it is fine, everything is fine That's what some people call the relaxation response, and you can create a good signal even in the midst of all that worry by learning to use your imagination on purpose more skillfully instead of constantly letting your imagination run away without learning.

How to use your imagination skillfully is like having a very energetic horse or a wild animal that simply has an enormous amount of energy and enormous potential to help you, but without training and without learning how to communicate with it and use it skillfully. it could be dangerous and just drive you crazy and go crazy this is the most common thing humans do with their imagination we worry we're so sick we go crazy you know we usually learned from our moms, you know, but they learn from their moms and this is what is adaptive to some extent it is useful to think about what will happen in the future that is what makes humans the most powerful animal on earth that is the difference between a human being and any other organism we know is the ability to thinking about the future and planning and creating and manipulating the environment now the big question is whether we will be wise enough to use this ability before we destroy the environment, that is what is happening now and I am hopeful that because when you think in it outside of God and nature, everything that exists on earth that was not created by God or nature, whatever your favorite term is, was created by the imagined human imagination, began in someone's imagination, all these buildings, computers, rockets to space, diving bells to the bottom of the ocean.

It started in someone, someone imagined it and then there was a lot of work to get from that imagination to the real thing, but it first entered this world in someone's imagination, so it's enormously powerful. tool and learning how to use it, so I don't blame mom because it was mom's job to protect me and so it was a good thing in terms of mites and thank God for my wife who cares about the things that my daughters should take care of. and again it's really good and adaptive and survival is adapted for survival to a certain 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 worry and fear and threat and all physiological arousal all the time without interruption and that triggers the physiological soup that I think interacts with our health because the images that are basically thoughts with sensory qualities are thoughts that we are actually seeing or hearing or smelling, you know, very few people sit down. there and they worry with their eyes closed and their fingers, you know I'm going to worry a lot now, but if you worry like that, what you will find is that you will really enhance your worry, you will get that, in fact, you couldscare the mess, you know, taking well, I wonder how we're going to do that and then actually sit there and think about it in full color, sound in Technicolor sensory mode, so I don't recommend it, you know, and in the same way Take that time, for example, just to say, "Okay, I'm just going to take ten minutes.

I'm going to go somewhere that I love to be. I'm going to daydream about somewhere that's beautiful and peaceful and safe and where I feel comfortable." I feel relaxed and comfortable and God is in his heaven and all is well in the world and I will imagine what I see and what I hear and what I feel there and what the temperature is like and 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 readings, images that are the coding language of imagination, sensory thinking, okay and we're going to do a. different exercise, let's go to the simplest and most direct way to experience the effects of images and you could continue later.

I'll give you a website address. It's the Healing Mind organization. It's my website. There is a free service I call. It is a stress buster that you can download at no cost, it is a short 12 minute trip to your house, it is beautiful, safe and calm, and it will take you through the sensory modalities of your senses and you will be able to see for yourself what speed and ease can take you from a place of relative stress to relative relaxation and that is just a gift to you and the thing about sensory thinking is that it not only has emotional effects but also physiological effects, so as you learn through your senses, what we know.

We have been doing this for years and people who do hypnosis have been doing this for many years. Now we know that we can look at the brain with these amazing machines called fMRIs where you see some images of what fear looks like and what parts of the brain are activated is 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 activates and when they imagine smells and smells, the part of the brain that smells lights up, so You can imagine now that as you go through all your senses, you see, you hear, you smell, you feel that you are activating more and more part of the brain. cortex, the thinking layer of the brain and now it sends messages to that hypothalamus, the head of the autonomic nervous system, and says it looks like a beautiful, safe, peaceful place, it sounds like this, it smells like this, it feels like this and that autonomic nervous system The system sends the signal that everything is fine and then your body automatically relaxes and when you relax physiologically there is a lot of what I call clearing the pain, fixing the repair processes and restorative processes, replacing the chemicals, the body goes into a kind of facilitated repair and healing. state because when you are in the stress state you are busy looking very alert how can I deal with an external threat to my health when you are in the relaxation state?

That's the place to restore, renew, replenish and fix things and many times we don't have those punctuation breaks in our days unless we decide to. If we were more primitive people alive, what we would find is that many of the days, if you look at the few primitive tribes that still exist and you look at our closest relatives, like chimpanzees and apes, they have intermittent stress because of the way they nature looks the way they designed it, they have leopards that come, they have humans, they have tribes of other apes and chimpanzees that come trying to get their food and they steal their women and their babies and things like that, but it happens relatively infrequently and when it happens, they beat their chest and scream and climb trees and go and you know they're in big trouble for a while, but then it's a time where it's usually pretty over. quickly half an hour by hour and no matter what happens, even if the worst happened in the leopard took one of them, they all go back to what they were doing before, which is practically nothing, it's as if they were eating their fleas to each other they are playing with their children they are making love they are playing they are fighting they are sleeping that's what they do probably 80% at a time okay, men do it more than women, you know, in the tribes Primitive women are doing more work, but even so in primitive societies you know that there are enormous tensions, famines, droughts, animals, wars and things like that, but they are quite intermittent, what they don't get is that they are not receiving everything in their ear.

The bad things that happened on the face of the earth in the last hour on television, on the Internet, on the radio, in the newspapers all day and sometimes all night, they don't receive it most of the time. They're eating, they're biting 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, so you have to make time and in those moments of inactivity they have. They have plenty of time for their physiology to do these restorative and reparative things. You 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 trying to do it even when you're very stressed, it's just that it's much more efficient and effective when you're not very stressed, so there are a lot of different ways that imagery can help, they tend to focus on relaxation, it's one thing to just rate your day with a relaxation technique once twice a day say: I'm leaving the world just because I decide I don't need any other excuse alone or if you have a health problem this is your excuse it's okay it's just that I just need to turn it off for a while just like you have to charge your cell phone, if you charge your iPod, you have to charge your computer, you have to charge your brain, if your body is tutored and the equivalent of plugging it into the charger is distracting yourself with something pleasant, safe and beautiful or use something like a meditation where you simply focus on a neutral point that turns off the constant worry and then your body will do the rest, which is another great thing.

The functions of images are imagination, it is the royal path to perception, there is a wonderful and very complex world within each of us, it is as complicated, rich and interesting as the outside world and it is where dreams come from, intuitions, creativity and problem solving. There are ways to use images to help us solve problems. You know, one of the ways we use is that people invite people to go to that beautiful, peaceful place where you're nice and calm and relaxed, and then if you have a problem, I haven't really been able to solve problems with their ways. common problem solving methods.

Something interesting we can do is we call them inner wisdom meditations, so you go to a quiet place and imagine that you have a friend there who could be a human being. An animal could be a spirit, it has two characteristics, it is very wise and very loving, right, and you, and that could be a real person that you met, a mythical person, a religious figure, or it could come in any form except you. just imagine that you are there with a wise and loving being of some kind who knows you well and who cares about you and you have a conversation with him, you tell him what has been going on and then you ask him for guidance or advice and he listens and he will connect you. with areas of your brain that maybe you haven't been using because we tend to go over the same cues over and over again, it will 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 that I am going to share with you today because it is the usual way we use imagination for Ziggy.

Here he is, these are the products of my imagination that come to catch me. This is the most common use of imagination and we can do it, so the bar is pretty low and we can learn to use our imagination. Some of you are looking at your slides and I think on these slides this may work well for you because the slides may actually be the slides that were printed for you and I changed this entire lecture so you can imagine my surprise when I see this that I didn't expect to see. I didn't put the new one in, so stress and relaxation. in health I have a good friend and partner, we used to do a lot of speaking engagements around the country, David Bresler, he's a psychology professor at UCLA, and we'd go around, do a little dog and pony show where one of us would do He'd tune out and one of us would argue 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 stress is exhausting. I talk to you about type 1 and type 2 stress in a very simple way. Type 1 stress is the type that we think the stress response was designed for the saber-toothed tiger, the raider, the acute threat to his life that gets his blood pumped. your muscles your heart beats fast your blood pressure rises your blood clots quickly there you are ready to you know fight the tiger to the death or escape run the fastest two miles you've ever run and then again in half an hour, that's all the whole body goes into a compensatory relaxation response and if you have survived that stress you sit around the campfire for the next 20 years telling how you ran away from the tiger how you killed the tiger you know that is type 1 stress type 2 stress is the type that comes from constantly worrying and listening to the news and taking it seriously and you know, doing it non-stop all the constant worries the mortgage the college education the health problems the family problems the war that this this global warming is what comes from that constant level of lower arousal where your body is frequently and sometimes always in a state of arousal but has nothing it can do to solve any of those problems, you know that at least with the tiger you can fight it, kill it or you can run away from it and escape of it or it will kill you, those are the three results, okay, and in the three results there is no more stress, you know, it is as if you have been burned and you have burned the chemicals that run fighting. or dying, I guess then your body is burned out, all those huge things that adrenaline and all the stress chemicals, but in type 2 stress, this daily, persistent worry, fear, unstable anxiety that we often carry around body, does not manage to immerse itself in that restorative relaxation. types of periods, that's where it's important and it's exhausting.

Over time, one or two of the doctors showed him in previous lectures that short-term acute stress actually stimulates your immune system a little. You know it's part of preparing to survive. this attack, but when it is chronic and prolonged and you live in it, your energy just decreases, your immunity decreases, you know, when you are fighting a saber-toothed tiger, it is good that your blood clots faster if you were injured maybe you will not be you would bleed to death if you live more than thirty years of working in a corporation or wherever you are working or you are self-employed and you are worried about your income all the time thirty years of your blood clotting too quickly your doctor won't like it that you won't like that your cardiologist won't like that we don't want our blood to be continually muddy and cloudy, which sets us up for things like high blood pressure, heart disease, strokes, etc., so don't It is how we want to live ideally.

There have been studies that show that 80% of serious illnesses are preceded by very high levels of stress in the year or year and a half before what we used to have. to be a really meaningful statement to me, I think it's almost silly now because I don't know anyone anymore who doesn't live with high levels of stress on a constant basis, maybe you do. Is there anyone here who is not good at signing up? for next year for the conference because yes, but it is an exception, you meet one guy in a hundred at a conference on stress, so these are you, you know that you are people who want, who are interested in doing something and probably already have some skills, so It's a tremendously stressful time and with the flow of information and so on, without some kinds of practices and tools to work with, a lot of people live at those levels all the time, so I think everyone will have that.

I think it will be strange not to have someone like that and we would like to tell our medical audience that you know that Vernon Riley was a physiologist in the '50s and '60s at the University of Washington and did some amazing research, which stands out in My opinion was that they breed little mice that were genetically bred to develop breast cancer so that they can be used for research, so they and the average situation, 80% of these mice will develop breast cancer and then they can be used for research. Riley did it. An investigation on him took half of the mice and stressed them by giving them shocksflashing electrics in their cages where they didn't know what was happening, you know, we won't get into that discussion, but at that time it wasn't like that.

One problem is that more than 90 percent of those mice develop breast cancer, so slightly more of them than the average mouse develop breast cancer. The really amazing thing was that he took half of the mice and made the lab assistants become friends with the mice and really love him a lot. and they would take him out of his cages and pet him and pet them and give him and let him visit the other mice, let him out of their cages and I mean just They really treated these mice, these mice were in mouse heaven and Less than 40 percent of those animals develop breast cancer even though they were genetically bred to develop breast cancer.

Cancer is now not a surprising fact and now they are mice and we are not, but death there is a lesson to be learned from That, I think so, and it can be mediated through the immune system and there can be others because what is above is the type of reaction to stress one is just an event that you face the other is that it is continuous because your mind is full of that that's what type 2 is the constant warrior yes then the other of us would argue that stress has nothing to do with it since emphasizing relaxation has nothing to do with health and what It's about is most of what you've been hearing which is stress tolerance, the way you respond, that's really the difference, it's not necessarily, I mean.

There are events that happen to people that would crush anyone and even with those events there are people who respond to those events in ways that are inspiring and mind-blowing and they end up doing something with 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 started by fanatics, you know, and then dedicated the rest of her life to his life to not contaminate an intolerant education and to build new churches where churches had been burned to heal wounds in terms of race relations.

I mean, that blows my mind, doesn't it? I'd like to think I could do something like that, but I doubt it, but some people can, so it's how you respond that makes the difference in terms of agitation. I don't know if anyone talked about Susanne ku cabassa, she is a researcher. from the University of Chicago and studied, you know, about 15 years ago, AT&T or used to be the largest company in the world and they broke up about 15 or 20 years ago and it was a huge stress that affected hundreds of thousands of people. people as intelligent as research psychologists like dr.

Cabasa decided to see what happens when these hundreds of thousands of corporate people are put under enormous stress that is a threat to all their jobs and what he discovered was that there are about seven to ten percent of people who just died within the term. the following year and generally with things like heart disease, strokes, etc., and things that probably have something to do with stress, you also found at the other end of the scale about the same percentage of people who thrived after of this corporation being deregulated and she began to study them with the idea of ​​saying what it is about these people that allowed them to prosper at one time, these are high-level executives and she came up with her three C hypothesis, what she found with these people is that When faced with great stress like this, they responded to it as a challenge.

They saw it as a challenge. They felt it was important and they were committed to trying to do something about it and they also felt like they could make a difference. They had a minimum of control and people who had that type of personality actually come out on top in situations where there are high levels of confidence, they feel like they are up to the challenge, they are committed to doing something about it, and they feel like they can do something about it. respect that mitigates stress reactions and turns stress into something that can actually be used as energy rather than something that weighs people down.

Now we don't all have those things. The question is: can we develop those things? Can we cultivate those responses? The technique I want to share with you here is a way to help you expand your ability to deal with stress that you may not have had but what we want to do is cultivate resilience or health. We want to change situations that are changeable. We want to change our response to the situation if the situation cannot be changed. I know, dr. Cabasa talked to her, I think it was her, about the serenity prayer, one of the great pieces of wisdom that you know to know the difference between what you can change and what you can't change and the wisdom to know the difference except the things you can't change change things, you can have the wisdom to know that the difference has a lot to do with it or change your perspective in relation to it, which actually has the effect of having a little change of the situation in response and That's what I want to give you the opportunity to experiment with, so when I think of you, you know the basic laws for cultivating resistance or health, given whatever your genetic capabilities are, they are quite simple, you know, if you take time to sleep. and get enough rest, you know, do some kind of physical activity during the day, even if it's just walking, eat good food regularly and not too much, make sure you get good quality water, try to balance your expectations and abilities , do not do it.

Ask yourself too much or too little right now. You know, sometimes what I tell my patients is yes, especially if they have that. How many of you have pets? How many of you have dogs? Especially not so many dogs are cool. I don't have a dog, but people who have dogs understand this right away that if you take care of yourself the same way you take care of a dog, you will be doing 98% of what you can do to cultivate good health, Is it okay if not? You don't give the dog junk food, you give him good food, you make sure he has access to fresh water when he has to go to the bathroom, you let him take his time, you know, and when he's tired, you let him sleep and then you take.

You take him for a walk twice a day and then you let him play with the other dogs and hopefully you pet him and tell him that you love him and you play with him and if you did the same things that I did was your basic health plan you would be doing. most of what is possible to do to make a difference in your own health, then we have other things like that, we don't know if dogs have a sense of humor, but people certainly do and that has a lot to do with our perspective and being connected to other people being connected to something you believe you know having a philosophy thinking about what your faith is thinking about how we deal with life which is a really strange situation you know Buddhists say life is like entering a rowboat heading out to sea knowing for sure that it's going to sink and how 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 very well because somewhere in us we know it, so there has to be a greater depth, especially when we get to some of the difficult parts of life, like health problems with ourselves and others we love, so I talked about changing the situation and if you are stuck in a place.

The Inner Counselor Inner Wisdom Inner Guidance Meditation How many of you have ever done something like this? It's kind of a variation of talking to yourself, but in a good way, you know it's like you know you have a good friend who has a problem and you listen to their problem and you usually give your friend good advice, right? , they usually don't accept them, but you usually give good advice and love to your friends and it's easier to do because you're not tied down. in the emotional anxiety and distress that they feel when they have a really serious problem and this is kind of their way of getting out of their own way and accessing their own wisdom and strength and that's not what we're going to do. what to do today but that is something very useful whatever you want to call it your intuition your wiser self your inner self your inner guide deep down you know what Jesus would do what the Dalai Lama would do what whoever you want would do what would he do someone?

Walk genuinely wise and loving into this situation and what it does is help you change, especially if you do it in images and take the time to really imagine that being is there, it takes you out of the place you are in. in which I'm usually very anxious, worried, fearful and a little regressed to what this would look like if I were in a place where there was wisdom and compassion, which will sometimes reveal, pass it or there before, okay, so we can change our response and I spoke. and other people came back to talk about the relaxation response and the imagery in my two sentences.

The simplest way I know to evoke a relaxation response is to daydream on purpose and you simply decide to daydream in a place that is beautiful and peaceful and loving and again you can do it. You can check it out on 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 pictures and everything so a woman called me Emily. I will call her she is a nurse she had been a patient of mine a few years before she had had breast cancer she went through the process like most people do with a great mix of emotions and stress that is a very stressful situation she was one of those people who went through her cancer finally see it as a wake up call, not everyone does and I'm not saying it is, but that was her response that many things when she on the path of balance in her life and this was a wake up call. attention and she was going to respond that way, not just doing the surgery under radiation and not doing chemotherapy, but not just doing the conventional medical things, but observing her whole life and her diet. your nutrition, your relationships or your work, everything and you dove into it and you did very well during your treatment and you came out of your treatment a genuinely changed person, because people who do that so well, what they don't, they just come out as treatment survivors.

They come out as changed people, people who have learned something and she had been doing very well for a while, this was about four years later and I get a call from her and I get on the phone with her and she is sobbing uncontrollably and she can barely talk and finally You know I understood what I discovered between her sobs, she said she was at her oncologist's office, she was having her four year checkup and they just told her she has a recurrence and she is completely devastated, it has come back even worse than when she had the first time. diagnosed maybe because she had done everything right, you know, and was navigating her nice new life and here she gets hit that she has a recurrence, that's not a hard thing to do, so she's sobbing and because?

Don't you come at the end of the day and she came and she's still sobbing, she's bent over and sobbing so hard she can barely talk and the only thing I can say that I can hear is I can't? I 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 this again when she said that about ten times I finally understood it and I said Emily and this is the key question in this technique of evocative images: what do you feel you are missing that would allow you to do this?

What do you need more to do this? It took about a minute. 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 pictures because she had done a lot when she was first diagnosed and of course she was. She was willing to do it and I introduced her to this technique and it was just this. I said she breathed a little. I said, let yourself go back in time in your memory, to some point in your life when you felt like you had what you need now.

Go back to some time when you felt you had the courage and strength and 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 where you felt you had the strength. and the courage and clarity that you are seeking now and just let your mind step back and see what comes to mind and what came to mind was a moment 20 to 25 years earlier when his mother had been diagnosed breast cancer and Emily was a young nurse who had just left school and said: I'm in my mother's living room, my mother is sobbing, heartbroken and overwhelmed how I feel now and what you do is you come back and I asked her to talk especially in Kerr in the present tense I said talk about it as if you were there again where are you?

I'm in my mother's living room, what do you see? I see the couch I see the rugs I see the window screens I see the afternoon Sun coming through the window you hear I hear my mother sobbing crying hysterical I hear my sister in the other room talking on the phone with my aunt she is crying and screaming andhysterical I told her what do you feel in yourself she says well I am holding the center there is no one else, I am strangely calm and clear and I am the one holding the center so we can do what needs to be done, well then I said now what does it mean that, how does that feel in your body, where do you feel that in your body? and Chicago says: I feel it mostly here in my heart, so now notice how it feels in your heart and notice how it feels in your body if you really allow yourself to feel that and calm the experience of holding the center that you have now and she has. eyes closed, he sits down, changes his posture, I say, and notice how it feels on your face to feel that quality of clarity and calm, courage and his face becomes very composed and then we go through a process that you can do in your imagination, So now, if you want, let that feeling get bigger and stronger, expand and flow through your body and I wonder if you like to imagine that it is flowing down. your arms to the tips of your fingers and your palms and we did the same with his legs to the bottom of our feet and we went over some image suggestions like, you know, imagine that feeling of Calm, clarity and courage are coming to each cell of your body from the deepest cells of your bone marrow through all your muscles and all your conducting tissue and you are reaching the outermost cells of your skin and every part of you is. full of clarity, courage and calm now she is very still and calm and silent and then we say now if you want imagine that you have a control like you have on a radio and you can turn it up as high as you imagine you are Overflowing with clarity, courage and calm , we repeat the names of the qualities a lot as you do this and fill the space around you for two feet in each direction and then, if you want, turn up the volume so that you are Filling a larger, larger space, you get the idea that you can fill the whole room with it or the whole world with it and then adjust it to what you're comfortable with and then she comes back and it takes her 10-15 minutes to do it. that she comes back, she's composed, she's clear, she says, you know, I can do this, I have what I need, I just couldn't make it and that's very often true, when we're very stressed, very scared and very emotionally.

Annoyingly, sometimes we 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 has a tool that she can connect with them with this clarity. , courage and calm that would get her through them and she would lose it from time to time, but she would go back to this method and she could react to that feeling and when I saw her, I would say I saw her once a week for the next few weeks, but in Sometime in the third week she told me that you should know these evocative images, it's really like emotional bodybuilding, isn't it?

I told her I've never thought about it that way, but it's really true because she says the more I do it the more I feel the clarity and the calm and the courage, and I actually feel it in myself, it's not, and The nice thing about images is that it gives you the experience that it's not just about patting someone on the back and saying oh no, you can do this, which is useful, but when people actually experience it, like I hope you get the chance to do it, it's something completely different, so you know you have that in you, okay?

So what I want to invite you to If you want to experiment with this, how many of you have done guided imagery in one form or another before? Well, how many of you have done relaxation or meditation? Well, everyone has done guided imagery before. Has anyone ever seen a movie? Here, TV show ads are all guided imagery. Okay, ninety-nine point six percent of your daily life is guided imagery. Trust me once you start feeling good, but we're going to do guided therapeutic imagery. Well, what I want to invite you to do is think about a situation that is stressful for you if you have one and if not, maybe the person next to you has more than one and would lend it to you, but if you have a stressful situation or something happened recently that was very stressful You had difficulty dealing with a particularly stressful situation that you may not be able to do anything about and you are struggling or coming to terms with yourself.

Just think about that situation and think about what you would equate or a couple of qualities that you would like to have more of when dealing with that situation so this could be patience this could be humor this could be kindness or compassion this could be assertiveness this could be courage this could be faith this could be be something else but think of a quality or two that you feel that if you had more of whatever, you could deal with this more easily and give the quality a name and it may be even one, two, three qualities that you would like to feel more of if you didn't. you have it. having this stressful situation continues 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 come in, 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 easier to create images with your eyes closed, but you can open them. at any time and look around you and at any time, if you feel uncomfortable with something, just open your eyes and look around the room and go out of your inner world, but if you feel comfortable going into your inner world, close your eyes. eyes, take a deep breath and let your exhale be a kind of release breath and do it a couple more times, one at a time, inhale, imagine that you are breathing in some fresh energy and oxygen is flowing through you. your body and as you let yourself exhale invite any tension, distraction or discomfort to flow with the breath and simply invite your body to soften and open and feel free to move and become more comfortable at any time and as you breathe and allow yourself to relax, let Let your mind stay relatively calm and just think about those qualities that you would like to experience more and go back to your mind, just ask your unconscious mind to take you back to some time in your life that you experienced. you yourself have those qualities in yourself or if you never experienced those qualities when you witnessed someone expressing them, but simply allow yourself to think of a time in your life when you had those qualities that you experienced after you experienced that quality or qualities in yourself and then imagine that you are there again now as best you can and you look around as if you were really there and you notice some things that you see or imagine you see and you notice the colors and the shapes and the objects and people or whatever there are there, you notice what you see As you look around in your inner world, you start to feel this quality or quality in yourself and you notice what you hear in that place and you notice that you can hear my voice and the things in the room at the same time , but in your inner world. world, observe what you are hearing while you are in that place, experience it as having that quality or qualities and notice what the air or atmosphere is like, if there is a smell, aroma, fragrance or a particular quality of air in that place where you are and notice what time of day it seems to be day or night and then begin to notice in your body how to gently scan your body with your awareness and notice where you feel that there is a 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 more strongly in one area of ​​your body or another, it seems to focus somewhere in your chest or your abdomen or your legs of the Zoar's pelvis or his head and arms or maybe it's all over and when you start to notice what it feels like to feel this quality or these qualities in yourself, notice how it feels in your body, let the feelings become a little stronger so that you can really feel that particular quality or qualities and let it grow a little stronger if you feel comfortable with it and notice how it feels in your body and notice how your posture wants to be as you feel this quality or qualities and notice how your face feels and how The expression on your face wants to be how you feel this quality or qualities in your face and if you feel comfortable with it let the strength of the qualities grow stronger and stronger.

You can imagine that you have some kind of volume control like you have on When you listen to a radio or a television, you can turn it up or down and imagine that you just turn it up so that it starts to fill all the space in your body and as if that quality or qualities could radiate and fill up your legs, from the soles of your feet to your arms to the palms of your hands, along your hips, back and pelvis, abdomen, chest, head and neck, and imagine that quality is as if it could radiate so that it touches every cell in your body from the deepest cells of the bone marrow to the bones, the ligaments, the connective tissues, the organs hidden under the skin to the cells outermost skin, as if every cell in your body is touched and filled with this particular quality or qualities and if that is a pleasurable experience, if it is a good experience for you, go ahead and turn it up even higher, as if those qualities They could overflow your body and fill the space around your body for a foot in each direction and, if you wanted, you could just be. absorbing it like a sponge and if you want, you can raise it to fill the space of 3 feet in each direction or 10 feet in each direction.

Just imagine that there is an abundant source of this quality or quality, so wherever it is. it comes from: you could fill the room with it if you wanted, you could fill the world with it if you wanted, but then adjust it to whatever is most comfortable for you and whatever is most comfortable for you is perfectly fine, it's like listening to music. for yourself, whatever is most comfortable and pleasant for you, no matter how big or small, no matter how strong or subtle you want this quality to be, just adjust it so that it is most comfortable for you at the moment and let everything be okay now that you are experiencing. yourself in touch with that quality or qualities look again at the stressful situation you thought of from that perspective and simply notice if it seems different to you in any way, if your relationship with it seems different in some way, you may or may not simply observe what it would be like if you were Dealing with that situation while you are in touch with this quality or qualities in yourself notice if anything seems to be different or going differently notice if anyone, including you, seems to react or respond differently and imagine that you have everything you need. , just imagine that you have everything you need and just see if it looks, feels or seems the same or different in any way, if there is something you would do differently about it or not if you wanted to.

Whether you feel differently about it or not, take a few moments with it and then when you're ready, gently begin to become aware of the room we're in together and let go of the images and begin to notice what you hear or experience. in the room here and now and when your attention returns to the outside world, just bring with you everything that you have learned, anything that seems important or interesting to you and take your time and when you come back, take a couple of minutes. To write down anything you want to remember about this experience or any questions you have about this experience, I will give you just a few minutes to come back and feel more relaxed, refreshed and awake. than you were before take a few minutes to write down anything that you would like to remember or that you found important or interesting or any questions you have about this experience for later I will give you a few minutes and then we will start again.

I will have the opportunity to discuss this if you want to discuss anything about it. I have a few more things to tell you about how many people were able to access a feeling of equality or qualities that you wanted to feel more by doing that. well, so about half to two thirds of you it's well if you didn't know, you don't know how to do anything, don't you, it's like hitting a baseball or writing or something, it's pretty natural, but you learn to do it, like that If you didn't have a home run experience this time, don't berate yourself or abandon guided imagery.

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 can access that and how many of you had access to the quality or qualities you chose, for how many of you the stressful situation looked different or felt different or seemed different to you in some significant way. I'm curious about that, so probably about half of people access quality, so that's interesting in itself, right? I think one of the best things about this approach is that you know, because if you're stressed you're depressed.

You're anxious, you feel 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 candeal with it, you dealt with it before you dealt with it. Again, that would have been some help, okay, just like I could pat each of you on the back and say no, you can, you know you can probably deal with it, but when you come in and feel the sensation, then They know they can deal. deal with it in another way that goes far beyond telling you that one thing is the other, when you don't feel good and you feel stressed, overwhelmed and depressed, someone tells you to feel like you know, just cheer up and keep your chin up and think in a happy thought, you know, I don't know about you, but there's something in me that wants to go for your neck, you know, and the good thing about evocative images is that they don't start by denying what you're feeling, they start by acknowledging what you're feeling. , so don't say, God, 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 it is useful.

He begins by saying: I know you feel stressed, overwhelmed and anxious. What would you need more to be able to cope with this better? then it asks you what resources would help you and you immediately start thinking about why I need more energy. I need more patience and even more courage. I need more assertiveness. I need more perseverance, whatever they are. the qualities are and then by accessing it and by going to a felt experience of the inner world, it actually changes your emotional state, when you change your emotional state, you change your physiological state, so something actually happens, a felt change occurs within from you, which is different than just thinking, I know.

I should have better thoughts, which often serves as another reason to get discouraged. I do this all the time. I know I should have better thoughts and I don't, so I'm even more of an idiot than I thought. was so you can take that and write down your negative thoughts let me get to that oh man so some of the resources that can help you practice who's in that 2000 are things like CDs. CDs are cheap, you can listen to them whenever you want. All the variety I'm going to give you four different websites, you can get 40 CDs from half a dozen different people who are all experts in the field and who can help you practice, explore and learn to work with everything from relaxation to inner . inner wisdom advisor, types of meditation, evocative images, healing images, etc., to dealing with specific illnesses and health problems, so the CDs are cheap, you can practice with them at any time, you can download them if you are an expert in technology, you know?

You can download them to your iPod or your mp3 player and you can find things that are anywhere from five minutes to 15 or 20 minutes and get a kind of technology-assisted meditation. You know, if your mind is very busy, if you are a medical student. or nursing student or professional student or you know mine goes 100 miles an hour, it's a moth and it's a lot easier to listen to someone else guide you through the process than 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, the case stories, the scripts and so on, but it's much easier to understand the theory. background on that kind of thing and then listening to good CDs of guided imagery and processes that will just take you through it and with repetition you will start to learn how to do it like anything else you learn classes and groups there are more and more classes and groups A Around you you can look for support centers like the friend Cancer Support Center Millberry Union. You know, go online.

There are many ways to start learning these kinds of things, especially in our area. We are in an area that has a very rich source of resources. way and for things that are really naughty and prickly. I mean, sometimes this can bring up serious issues that haven't been addressed, abuse issues that are too big for self-care. I think you already know the CDs and the classes and the books, etc., they are our kind of over-the-counter strengths and they are very useful for many things, but if you have had a psychiatric illness, if there is severe depression, if there is, knows if there is a publication history. -traumatic stress from any source that may be too much to do on your own and you want to hire a professional to work with who also knows what they are doing and I will give you a website for a training academy that has There are a large number of professionals trained and certified that know how to use this in those types of prescription situations, so the Healing Mind organization, that's my website, we have books and CDs from my colleagues Ken Pelletier, Gina de Burgh, that's one. place for a variety of different topics related to health and stress guided imagery academy dot com the academy is a professional training academy and has a roster of approximately 800 health professionals across the country and actually around of 20 internationals who have passed one hundred and fifty our certification program to learn how to work with people with interactive guided imagery one on one is a very powerful approach to learning, growth and therapy and, again, that is the strength of the prescription quiet health trips Belarus Napperstick is a Cleveland social worker who has a wide variety of really wonderful guided imagery on CDs and music tapes for all kinds of situations related to medicine and psychology, and Emmett Miller is a doctor and lives in Grass Valley, who practically invented a kind of guided imagery on tapes that used to be audio cassettes and now CDs and downloads and it's on dr.

Miller comm and these are all very high quality and you might like a voice more, you might like music, you might not like music, etc. so it's a whole world you can explore fairly inexpensively and find and explore resources that allow you to You can use your imagination more skillfully to help you with stress. That's all. We'll have a little discussion. If anyone wants to contact me, this is an email address that will reach me. I also brought brochures that are on a back table. for the healing mind, that gives you an idea of ​​what we have and let's take a little time, it's around 8:20 so we have 20 to 25 minutes if we need it.

Do you want to get up and stretch for a while? a couple of minutes and then sit back down and then let's see if you have any questions or comments, things you want to share, concerns, yes sir, comparative studies have been done to compare different religions in terms of the way they handle stress, you You know it's interesting. The question is it's not my field of study and I kind of doubt it but I've never really looked into it and you know I would think everyone would say they're the best way overall that's what they do yeah but I don't think there is There was no particular strategy and I guess what those ideas would show 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 that are difficult and that that's the religion that will do it for you and if that and whatever doesn't matter and if you're a neo-pagan or a Catholic or a Muslim or a Hindu or a Buddhist, I mean, I think in a sense that's what the religion is. religion, 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 bravely and calmly in the face of some things that I really wish didn't happen.

I'm going to summarize what you said and that you know that a common cause of stress is having too many things on your plate trying to do more than you can really do, that's where planning an organization comes in and I did it pretty quickly, but that's where you try to be as realistic as possible about what you really need to do, prioritize things, what you can do, what you can do. Not doing and letting go of some things is a really important part of stress management because that's because you can end up. It is very simple to finish.

I can't tell you how many times I've had this feeling that I come back from a day practicing in my office, I may have seen 15 or 18 people, if I was lucky I may have been able to help some or many of them deal with many serious problems, returning home, you know, there is my wife, my children. my friends my parents my this my that and then you can end up there's just not enough time there's not enough capacity one way of looking at it another way of looking at it you could say well we deal with things as they come up but it's very easy to get there at the end of a day like that when you have done a lot of good for a lot of people and you have been a very good doctor and a very good fruit wife and a very good husband and a very good father. and a pretty good son and, you know, and at the end of the day you end up 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 all you want to do is put a gun to your head, it's just not a good way to live, so that something is out of balance, I mean, I guess how do you balance that, how do you come to accept what is good enough and how can you allow it to be the good enough kind of day and I used to do that. I learned a lot about that when I was a freshman in medical school at a summer job in Detroit.

I went to the University of Michigan and had a summer job at the coal plant, the coke plant where they burn coal and turn it into coke to smelt 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, dingiest part of Detroit, Michigan, which is pretty dark and dingy, and I work eight hours a day shoveling coal coke, which costs one hundred and fifty. forty degrees in the middle of summer it's 95 degrees outside with one hundred percent humidity and the job is these things go up a conveyor belt in a little house and they fall off the conveyor belt and my job is to shovel them and put them back on the belt transporter and so, after an eight hour day and covered in black soot, absolutely covered, exhausted, trying to gather enough energy to go home, and the foreman comes and says who is Rossman, listen, I'm Roslyn, he says that you is. on the night shift I said, "Okay, I'll be here tomorrow night," he says no, you'll be here tonight, so now the second job is I'm in this house where 12 different conveyor belts of these come out. things, all going in different directions.

Loaded with this 140 degree hot coal that falls out, they were special boots because it's about two feet thick on the floor and the job is to shovel it back onto things. I'm a good ddung medical school, coming and going, shoveling, shoveling constantly, shoveling constantly falling. The normal guy comes in, he's in his 50s, a wonderful guy, black, and he's been doing this stuff for 25 years, he puts his mat in the corner, he's already out, he takes out the newspaper, he takes out his coffee, he takes out his lunch, he go to bed, take a nap. 20 minutes later he gets up he gets up he does about three things with the shovel he goes back to the belt he goes over and screws his cup he pours himself a cup of coffee he leaves the sports section he reads the newspaper 20 minutes later he's out there he shovels three four times This goes on half the night I'm shoveling shot link bombings and he tells me and he likes the nicest place, he says, you know, son, he says, you understand you're never going to do this job, so there's a lot of wisdom in that and you I know that 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 that's why sometimes I think about that room and think I'm never going to finish it all. and I just have to do the best I can and maybe there are some of those things that I don't have to do anymore and I can download them.

What else? Yes, there is a lot of imagery in all kinds of interactions and in medical interactions. There are a lot of images, whether implicit or explicit, and part of the implicit images in the way we approach medicine as a culture is that diseases are separate from us, and by being separate from us, it takes away our power to do anything. in relation. with them if that makes any sense to you then the idea that lupus or rheumatoid arthritis or this or that disease is like a thing in itself it's like it has its own life it's actually very similar to a following it's like a disembodiment that comes and grabs you out of nowhere for no random reason and you have no power in relation to it, your main chance is to support the doctor and hope you have a good doctor who knows what he is doing and is extremely Okay, no It means that you have invented it or caused it yourself, but to be able to have an experience like the one this woman shared with us, where you know everything you read about lupus, it is incurable, it is chronic.

It goes this way it goes that way like it exists in a vacuum and I have a problem with that, you know how all these diseases have institutes, you know,They have enormous foundations and institutes for diseases, I don't have them for the people who now have diseases that can be cutting here is a bit, but there is also a certain truth in that, it's okay, because it is as if the disease lives for Yes, alone. I have never seen any of these illnesses without a person attached to them and the way a person responds to those illnesses on a daily level can make a big difference in how the person experiences that illness and sometimes can make a big difference in how the whole process goes down. and people can learn from diseases and so on and so far I have If that had happened many times, I really appreciate you sharing it, but it is something that is almost completely unexplored in our approach to medicine, which is very separate, everything is out of our control, we don't have a relationship with it, you know, we completely ignore healing.

You know, we ignore the fact that there is something inside each of us that created us from nothing and when you stop to really think about it, that statement that there is something that created you from nothing is quite powerful and has helped you. to heal and recover. face everything you have experienced so far in life, otherwise you would not be here. It is a very powerful system. You know if you want to call it our healing system or balance systems, our coping systems and this kind of way of calming yourself down. looking inward and connecting with it, imagery is the most direct way I've found so far to connect with that and make sense of it and learn to work with your body's healing abilities in relation to whatever it is. that you are facing, whether it is an illness or a stressor, your brain is the largest pharmacy in the world, your brain creates molecules that only we dream of replicating, you know that endorphin molecules exist, the molecules that relieve the pain caused by your brain, some of them are thousands of times more powerful and transform, and you know if you can find a way to get a drop of that stuff, I can take it.

They deal with a lot of pain, they also regulate many, many signals, so we think there's a brain chemistry that probably changes, there's certainly a balance of the nervous system that's just when you shift from that sympathetic fight or... flight pattern: I can let it go now it is safe I can let it go there is nothing to worry about because when you are immersed in the images you are not even thinking about what is in there, you are completely inside, so there is in both a change of the nervous system and a change of the autonomic nervous system and I think also a change in brain chemistry and it's real, it tends to be very relaxing and it tends to be refreshing when people do meditative techniques, relaxation techniques with images without images.

I do. I love the images because they are so fast it's easy it's not secular it's compatible with almost all religions and philosophies it's daydreaming it's natural it's easy to learn you know it and you know if you can get in and out of that deeply relaxed state once or twice a day throughout the day The stress thermostat starts to change and your tolerance increases and your confidence that you can get out of it periodically really helps and can be very, very powerful and you know what's interesting about these guided images in relation to what you said . feels like you've taken a valium or a tranquilizer is that I never used the word relaxed even once in the sense that there was nothing about relaxation in the sense that it just automatically switches you to more comments or questions and then we'll raise the session, I think the The way I think about meditation, meditation, which is normally a process of focusing on something, whether it's your breath, whether it's the tip of your nose, your navel, a mantra, an image of Jesus , a candle flame, an imaginary candle flame, whatever you want is a kind of anti. correct images, so meditation is a step to say, instead of following all these worrying and scary images that the brain can be full of, instead of following those you learn to bring your attention back to a bound place, be it whatever and it can be your It's any of those things that I mentioned, so you take five, 10, 15 or 20 minutes and refocus your attention on something neutral or pleasant.

It's okay if you incorporate your breathing, which activates another physiological part of our relaxation. Because breathing is like those dual controls on some driver training cars, you'll automatically breathe enough to live, but if you breathe deeper and more abdominally II, it has a physiological effect that starts to get you into that more relaxed parasympathetic autonomic state. , so the combination of deeper breathing and not following all those images and worries depends on, you know, results in a relaxed state; it's kind of the default position, relaxed and comfortable, that's the default position, okay, if I joke sometimes, you know, if we all had imagined it. we acted well, so if we just went in and they took away our imagination, that's kind of Labette, that's what a lobotomy is, you'd have almost no stress.

People who are lobotomized have no stress, no matter what is happening around them, because they do not react emotionally due to the connection. the emotional connections have been severed, so they are quite happy, quite constant, they don't worry, they don't create stress, they don't worry about things in the future, they don't even know that there is a future, so without imagination we would have almost nothing . stress, you would actually have to literally face a direct threat to your life. India finds a stress response and that is why it is important to learn how to do some meditation for me and do you know that there are different spiritual meditations that have different intentions? and they are used in different ways, but the basic process of one point meditation is let's just stop imagining for a while, go back to the breath or go back to the mantra or go back to the navel or go back to knowing the guru. or whatever and if you do that if you do nothing more than that for 10 or 15 minutes your brain slows down your autonomic nervous system balances your blood pressure goes down your heartbeat slows down your blood doesn't clot as easily that's the default position but Because of the way we live and all the flow of information and all the things we know and learn and think we have to do, most of us have to do something active to allow the default position to return and then from that default position . position, then there are many 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, etc., does that answer your question?

So thank you all. We will stay if there are any individual questions, we will appreciate it.