Greetings!
As we round the corner of
the Summer Solstice, for most of us it is a time of ease and pleasure.
We are off from school, on vacation, celebrating Father's Day, and free
to frolic in the sun. Summertime . . . and, as they say, the livin' is
easy.
Finding that inner place of calm and joy is easier,
because the natural environment is much more supportive of our being at
peace and finding that nurturing center. So take the time to enjoy -
but remember to put something away for a rainy day. Devote a little
time for capturing as much of the spirit and essence of this experience
in a way that can help you find it again when the winter winds are upon
us. The best way to start is to go within, perhaps one halcyon evening,
and reflect within.
Who Are You?
Who are you? Really! What are
your gifts and talents, and how are you to share them? Or are you here
merely to use and consume? Does life owe you a living, or do you have a
responsibility? How do you want to employ the wealth and privilege that
have been granted you? (I am assuming you are not in a refugee camp and
probably do not live in Bangladesh or Somalia.)
Take the time to
journal, draw, paint, create music, or in some other way create a way
for you to come back and touch your center when the compost hits the
fan blades next. Intimate communication with a trusted friend is ideal.
Create reference memories that you can call upon to access inner
qualities such as Self-confidence, oneness, serenity, faith, love, and
so forth.
CDs that can assist you in this process include:
·Healing Journey
·Personal Excellence
·I Am
·Healing Our Planet
·Awakening the Leader Within
If this has been a
particularly stress-filled year, then you may find some difficulty in
letting go of the tension and clearing your mind of the detritus of the
past. In this case I would recommend, for restoring and maintaining
your inner balance:
Some of the programs that should help you do that are:
·Letting Go of Stress
·Abolish Anxiety
·10-Minute Stress Manager
Keeping these handy can be
of immense value in your quest for a healthier body and mind. You may
also find my article for this issue of value. It is excerpted
from my new book, Our Culture On The Couch, page 169.
Be well, enjoy
the warmth, and remember to give gratitude on a regular basis. And
especially, this month, remember your father and all you have received
from him that is precious, and seize this opportunity to express your
love.
Sincerely,
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Healer, Heal Thyself -- by Emmett Miller MD
Our first
responsibility is, of course, to our individual health and wellness.
"Know Thyself," said the Oracle at Delphi. And when you see imbalance,
dysfunction, conflict and Violence within, wisdom dictates that you
make it one of your priorities to apply the healing principles,
techniques, and interventions to your personal health - first, whenever
possible. Then, as you are becoming personally more healthy, balanced
and productive, you can also discover how to direct an appropriate
proportion of your energy in applying them at other levels of system,
such as family and community.
Try
this thought experiment: Imagine thinking of each individual person as
being, in many ways, like a single cell of a complex organism. Each has
a boundary - skin or a cell membrane - an inside and an outside. Each
has to take in food, process it, and excrete waste, balance internal
processes and maintain a certain kind of relationship with the external
environment.
In
addition, each must function (well or poorly) as part of a community of
similar others. We call this community an organ in the case of the
cell. We may call it a family, team or society in the human case. And,
just as the cell has the responsibility to maintain its health and
wellness if it is to perform well in concert with the rest of the
community, each person has a similar responsibility.
The
value of Self-knowing is clear here, since the highest levels of
health, wellness, and performance can be achieved only if you
understand your true value and purpose, and play your unique,
appropriate role in your family, team or community. Just as you want
the cells of your liver and brain to do a good job of serving their
function, instead of dying, or becoming cancerous, you cannot truly be
happy or whole until you are intentionally on the path to discovering
your deepest values and personal purpose. This is why greed, envy,
gluttony, narcissism and selfishness can never lead to deep and lasting
satisfaction, any more than Twinkies can provide the vitamins and
minerals your body needs, no matter how many you eat.
Higher Orders of Wholeness
In
other words, being a good citizen, a contributing member of the group,
is more than just a good way to assure sustainability, it is actually a
prerequisite for achieving the feelings of fulfillment that are the
ultimate goal of every one of us. So, once we have begun to attend to
our inner needs, we must begin to intentionally channel the appropriate
amount of creative energy to our fellow cells, or humans, to create
higher-level wholes (holons).
In
many ways, ontogeny does seem to recapitulate phylogeny. In much the
same manner as evolutionary theory suggests that more complex species
developed, we see an evolution that can occur in the personal lives of
each of us. Just as each of the first single-celled amoebas thought
only about themselves for a long time, until they began to realize the
extraordinary benefits of staying together and forming a multicelled
creature. This was a "shift of paradigm" for them. Instead of focusing
on differences, contrasts and conflict with their environment, with a
sole focus of individual survival and "thrival," they began to
sacrifice and contribute their energy and functions to the efforts of
the whole.
The tools
we will soon be exploring are systemic healing interventions, so they
can be applied immediately at the personal level, and as they are
learned they will prove to be just as useful at other levels of system.
So we will start with the development of inner wholeness of mind,
emotion, body and spirit (many aspects of which you may already be
attending to in your life. Following this we will explore means for
intentionally participating in the creation of wholeness at other
levels of system, from family through community and nation, and
globally as well.
At
the individual level there are two important functions I would like to
mention at this point, for they are central to all healing (recalling
that true healing means wellness and high levels of performance as
well):
· Identity: knowing yourself, having a center, and boundaries.
· Homeostasis: creating balance in a way that protects and nurtures self.
For further details on the process of individual healing, I would suggest exploring Deep Healing, the Essence of Mind Body Medicine.
Healing and Peak Performance: Family/Community Level
Healing,
that is, moving from dysfunction towards wellness and performance, at
the next level of the hierarchy, means applying the new paradigm at the
level of family, team or community. The crucial functions of healing
here are:
1. Creating and maintaining healthy personal boundaries
2. Reducing polarity, dispersion, and violence, and
3. Forming healthy, generative relationships with others, thus creating a whole at the next level.
These
functions have been particularly difficult for us in the US. We have
been so steeped in the philosophies of racism, nationalism,
individuality, and competition that we tend to view it as a potential
loss to our individual selves to consider making a sacrifice for the
whole, any whole, be it family, team, country or humanity as a whole.
Of course there are exceptions, but on the whole, sacrifice at such a
level tends to seem like the exception, not the rule.
It
has often been said that "war is how Americans learn geography." The
American culture has been insular and narcissistic, because it had so
many natural resources and was located so far from the rich warrior
nations of the world that we could virtually ignore that the rest of
the world exists. The downside of this is that we have not learned the
value of being good neighbors. We were spared the wartime devastation
that so many other countries have known; war was something that
happened "over there." So, in a sense, it is no surprise that we are in
denial about the real results of violence.
Actually,
up until very recently violence has paid off for us. The world has
changed, but like the rat who had been trained to expect a cheese
reward in a specific spot in the maze, we keep going down "tunnel
number 9," even though we are not getting the successful payoff that
always used to be there. For many in our culture, it is quite a leap
from enjoying the best lifestyle and consuming more than our share, to
considering fairness, equality, compassion, and integrity - and then
acting on it.
Domestically,
we are at the end of raw capitalism. In foreign policy we are at the
end of raw militarism. Philosophically, we are at the end of simplistic
dualism. The old myths that have supported these three pillars of
American faith, capitalism, militarism and dualism, are now diluted,
weak and unpersuasive. A revolution in thought will be required to
adjust to new realities. -Craig Barnes
The
challenge we face is to discover how incredibly important it is, at
every level of system, to honestly consider approaches to our problems
beyond the familiar ones of Violence and conflict, from our wars to our
daily relationships: to go beyond nonviolence to Love, and to discover
the many ways we can allow our lives to express Love, on a moment to
moment basis.
How we
can accomplish this process by awakening the leader within, and sharing
leadership in ever-higher levels of social system, will be addressed in
the next chapter. Clearly, we will need powerful tools indeed to make
this change, so far astray have we gone.
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Video of Our Galactic Center
and Solstice Musings (click here)
Elaborate structures were developed
by earlier civilizations to register those days when the sun was at its
nearest and furthest. Religious ceremonies of great importance were
frequently clustered around these points (Christmas and Hannuka at the
Winter Solstice, for example).
These may be viewed as
demonstrations of the importance of being able to step out of the
merely sensual involvement (or attachment) with the world of
experience, and to look at it from a distant point. From this objective
point of scientific accuracy we then collect the data we need to make a
wise decision. From this point, where we are free of the distorting
influence of raw emotions, and the denial, suspicion, anxiety, and
addiction they introduce into our thinking, thus making us unable to
see enough of the truth of the situation at whose brink we stand to do
the kind of measurements, evaluations, and analysis needed to enable a
wise decision to be made.
One lesson here is the importance
of letting go of excessive concern with immediate issues, at least for
a while, in order to allow yourself to experience what this perspective
enables you to see. We have, individually, nationally, and globally, been
far too nearsighted in the decisions we have been making - too focused
on "next Quarter's profits" while creating enormous long term debt we
are unable to see due to denial.
The consequence of this
is the series of bubbles, the Dotcom Bubble, the S&L Bubble, The
Housing bubble . . . we are running out of economic situations to
hyper-inflate. At a time like this, wisdom suggests that we remember
the old adage, that if we do not learn from history we will be
condemned to repeat it . . . and each time the price goes up.
And, considering the four trillion dollars or so spent on our recent
"bailout" experience, where we were forced to pay the bill for massive
amounts of debt accumulated by institutions that were "too big to fail,
the price going up higher than that suggests an enormously ugly
picture. Millions have lost jobs, become homeless, and suffered
enormous emotional trauma, while we distract ourselves over how much
torture is just the right amount. By keeping ourselves psychically
numbed and blind to the suffering of other human beings, we enable
ourselves to continue to live far beyond our means, to overconsume, to
pollute, and to abuse by proxy those at the very bottom of the economic
food chain.
To get a sense of the cost of this last
"bubble," consider that when you add up the total cost of the Marshall
Plan, the Louisana Purchase, the Race to put a man on the moon, the
S&L crisis, the Korean War, the New Deal, the Invasion of Iraq, the
Vietnam War, and NASA, the total, $3.92 trillion, is still less than
our recent bailout. And then there are the trillions going for the
economic stimulus program. And it will all be coming out of your
standard of living, and mine, even as it pushes others in our world
into homelessness, poverty and even starvation.
Psychic Numbing
Part of the psychic numbing has affected our relationship with our
selves, our self-image, and we regularly do things that are harmful to
ourselves, think negative thoughts and drive our bodies to the limits
of stress, then criticize, blame, and guilt ourselves into a kind of
creative paralysis. We have been too busy fighting imaginary alligators
to focus on our real goal of draining the swamp.
Human
civilization on this planet has reached a turning point. Fueled by
petroleum, we have multiplied our strength and destroyed much of our
planets life-supporting infrastructure - and we are witnessing the
passing of a kind of solstice. Every gallon of gasoline we burn in our
cars is equivalent to having more than 200 servants exert their energy
for more than eight hours working for us. What will supply that power
when the cost of a gallon has become unaffordable?
This
Solstice is an excellent time to pause, to take a step back, to look at
the big picture, and see clearly what it is time for you to do, for me
to do, for us to do.
Data provided by Bianco Research
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August 1, 2009
Providence Cancer Center at Souther Auditorium
Portland, OR
Co-Sponsored by Healing Journeys and Providence Cancer Center
Click here to find out more and to register.
Description: We have become more aware of the vast resources within each individual
that may work for or against healing or the achievement of wholeness.
In this workshop, Dr. Miller will explore the principles of
self-healing, current findings in psychoneuroimmunology (the effect of
thoughts on the immune system), and the process through which thoughts
and images become biochemistry. This workshop is an experiential
introduction to both the why and the how of tapping your inner
resources for awakening, promoting and supporting the healing process.
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Featured Products
Letting Go Of Stress
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"In
order to achieve genuine, lasting world peace based on compassion, we
need a sense of universal responsibility. First, we have to try
inner disarmament-reducing our own anger and hatred while increasing
mutual trust and human affection."
-Dalai Lama
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A Bit of Catskills Humor
It is remarkable how frequently we find vulgar language and swear words in today's popular comic routines. Cheap thrills.
On the other hand you may recall, if you are old enough, the Jewish Catskill comics of Vaudeville days, Red Buttons, Milton Berle, Henny Youngman, and such. Interesting how humorous they could be without a single cuss word. Here are a few classics you might use this summer - one-liners, so you don't work up a sweat :
* The Doctor gave a man six months to live. The man couldn't pay his bill, so the doctor gave him another six months.
* The Doctor called Mrs. Cohen saying, 'Mrs. Cohen, your check came back.' Mrs. Cohen answered, 'So did my arthritis!'
* Doctor: 'You'll live to be 60!'
Patient: 'I AM 60!'
Doctor: 'See! What did I tell you?'
* A doctor held a stethoscope up to a man's chest. The man asks, 'Doc, how do I stand? '
The doctor says, 'That's what puzzles me!'
* Patient: 'I have a ringing in my ears. '
Doctor: 'Don't answer!'
* I just got back from a pleasure trip. I took my mother-in-law to the airport.
* I've been in love with the same woman for 49 years! If my wife ever finds out, she'll kill me!
* Question: We all know the three words a woman wants to hear, but what are three words a woman never wants to hear when she's making love?
Answer: 'Honey, I'm home!'
And, finally:
* A car hit an elderly Jewish man. The paramedic says, 'Are you comfortable? ' The man says, 'I make a good living.'
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We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Save
20%
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Father's Day Special Discount with promo code
(Dads
Health09)
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Visit DrMiller.com and enter promo code on the checkout page
Offer Expires: 7/1/2009
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Video Highlights
- The Center of Our Galaxy
Data by Bianco Research
- Competition and Teamwork
Simple as this little film is, it has an important message. When will enough of us learn?
- Amazing Global Statistics on population, etc. 5 min
We live in exponential times. The world is changing rapidly, and to act wisely in it, increased awareness of the shape of these changes is most important.
- A beautiful presentation, We All Are One 10 minutes
- Michael Moore, Goodbye GM
This is an interesting read. "It is a sad irony that the
company which invented "planned obsolescence" - the decision to build
cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would
then have to buy a new one - has now made itself obsolete.
One more just for fun....
- Angelina Jolie Has A New Tattoo - Need I say more?
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Contact Us
DrMiller@DrMiller.com
PO Box 803
Nevada City CA 95959
Phone: 530-478-1807
Fax: 530- 478-0160
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