Healing Times Radio Archives: What is Verbal First Aid?

Verbal First Aid – The Power of Words, Images, and Stories to Help and Heal

Airdate: July 1, 2010 11am-12pm (PST) at OpenMindRadio.com

You will be fascinated and entertained as Dr. Prager and I explore the power of words to impact beliefs and engender healing. Learn about the power we all have within to transform not only our own lives but the lives of others. Everyone has the opportunity to create miracles by choosing carefully the words they use and how they speak to others (and especially themselves) in calm times as well as in high-stress situations.

We will examine some of the ideas presented in her very popular book, Verbal First Aid Helping your Kids Heal from Fear and Pain – and Come Out Strong, as well as in her newly released book, Owie Cadabra – Verbal First Aid for Kids. Then we will learn some simple ways to turn a scare into a comfort, a hurt into a healing, and a potential trauma into a memory of courage. You will hear some valuable perspectives on major life challenges and learn how to transform crisis situations into positive, empowering experiences (by adjusting your attitude through your self-talk, changing the images you hold in your mind, and the stories you tell yourself).

You will be especially charmed by the beauty and wisdom of her approach to communicating to children, especially in emergency situations. Make sure all the parents you know get to hear this one.

Dr. Prager will share her observation that far too many of today’s hospital-born babies are quickly taken into sterile nurseries and hooked up to beeping machines. Her suspicion is that, instead of bonding with the mother, this generation of newborns is bonding with machines.

And, most of all, you will get to meet a woman who is truly a healing spirit, her mission – to help create a better future where we are all aware of the energy field around each of us, and between all of us.   This energy field is so easily enlightened or shattered. Just to experience her positive energy makes this interview worthwhile.

You don’t want to miss this one!

Listen to us Thursday, July 1st, 2010

11am-12pm PST at OpenMindRadio.com

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Out of the Box Compassion – Transformational Thinking (video excerpt)

This is an excerpt from Dr. Millers Workshop/Lecture Series, Healing Yourself Is Healing the Planet, Seven Steps to Personal and Community Transformation.

To find out more and to REGISTER for the event visit http://drmiller.com/events/index.html…

A Vision of Love for Our Future

Historians are fond of naming periods of time according to the most important inventions and tools of that era. So, we have the Age of Reason, the Age of Enlightenment, the Industrial Age and we’re now in the Information Age.

When historian John Galbraith was asked how our era would be known in the future, he said that it would be known as the time “when the Buddha came to the West.”

If he is correct, then perhaps the ever-expanding interest in Buddhism and Buddhist thinking, highlighted by the current popularity of the Dalai Lama, is a sign of this.

This movement is, I believe, a part of a much larger movement that is flooding our Western culture with notions of empathy, forgiveness, compassion, egalitarianism, and love. They are burgeoning forth, spawning books, workshops, movies, TV shows, and websites.

Information on the healing power of these forms of Love has never been so available: personal, relational, and communal lives can be transformed. Even laboratory evidence shows we are happier, more productive, and can more easily ward off infectious disease.

We Are the Leaders We’ve Been Waiting For

In spite of this, however, we are engaged in an epic struggle – personally and collectively. Our planet is poised on the edge of an abyss. False leaders everywhere unwittingly conspire with a machine-dominated, information-processing environment to lead us headlong over the cliff, into a vast abyss of disintegration.

Environmental pollution, global warming, economic globalization, war, terrorism – Violence of all kinds create widespread despair, helplessness, and hopelessness.

Our Grand Narrative seems to have reached a critical chapter.  Soon we all will be able to see whether those forces of domination, greed, and insensitivity will push us over the edge into a global collapse – or if a critical mass of us will adopt the New Paradigm. If we do, we may be in time to strike a balance between creativity and destruction, between separation and unification.

The denouement of our story is not yet clear, but we are very near the tipping point. The potential to go either way is there.

The the good news is that we – the people of the earth – have the unprecedented access to the enlightenment of Love and new tools of global communication, (ranging from cell phones to the Internet and social networking,) to actually take part in writing our own script.

More and more of us are realizing that the change that needs to take place in the world around us, from our personal relationships to the actions of our nation, is exactly reflected by the change that needs to take place within ourselves.

Can you imagine that the peace, wellness and vitality we want to see in the world will emerge as we create it within? If enough of us can imagine that – and act on that – and develop the integrity to actually commit ourselves to the change we all say we want, we can definitely do it.

I can imagine it. People everywhere are feeling called to come into the present moment, release those aspects of the past that no longer serve, nurture inner wisdom and love, and awaken “the leader within.”

We are transforming our own lives and opening to the experience of shared values and meaning. Each of us is a neuron in the emerging global brain, and our networked communities form a basis from which collective intelligence and collective wisdom emerge to create a transformed world of peace, freedom and Love.

Now is the time each of us must choose. My vision is that we choose wisely. What can love lead you to imagine?

When the hand of utter stillness opens the heart, time ceases.

Then, love is possible.

A Gift of Love for Valentine’s Day

At the physical level, light;

At the mental level, consciousness

At the emotional level, love;

At the spiritual level God.

What is love? Hard to say. Plato believed that Love is the pursuit of the whole. In Our Culture on the Couch, I stated: “Although ‘love’ is an excruciatingly overused and abused word, there is a common factor involved whenever it is used. In every case, the active principle has something to do with togetherness, attraction, unity and unification, a joining together in some way – be it physical, emotional, philosophical, esthetic or otherwise.

This unification is obvious in the example of sexual loving, or in the case of the love between the mother and the infant, or the love of a worshipper for a Higher Power.

And in sports, (or war), we see the same phenomenon of unity that permits one team to win against all odds –athletes will often speak of the love they feel for their teammates. Whenever a certain quality of wholeness is maintained – whether it’s of a body, a relationship, or a racecar – it tends to give rise to enormous power, performance and survival potential.”

Love Is a Way of Being

You cannot “do” love. There is nothing that you can do that constitutes loving someone. There is no action that is of itself loving.  Love is a way of being.

Indeed, it is simply being — being with another person, however they may be – with no judgments, prejudices, or agendas. Nothing to demonstrate, no one to impress. You love when there is total acceptance of another’s being – born of your acceptance of your own.

Love (capital “L”) refers to the attractive force in our universe. It is the inner power and knowing that guides the carbon atom to share electrons with its neighbors, rather than steal from them.  It is the attractive energy that sustains the integrity of the membrane of the lowly paramecium and thus, preserves the life within.

Love binds together the cells and organs, and enables them to harmonize their functioning to produce health of the whole. Love makes birds of a feather flock together, and it inspires wildebeests to travel hundreds of miles in the spring. Love is the magic bond between lovers, between brothers and sisters, between dear friends – it is the key to empathy, compassion, and community.

The Love/Violence Continuum

Love is one of a contrasting pair of forces that lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, the Love (capital L) – Violence (capital V) continuum. If perfect Love is at one end of this continuum, then pure Violence is at the other end.

In truth, few of us will ever get to know perfect Love, (though sometimes the love of a mother for her infant comes pretty darned close), and fortunately, we will probably never know pure Violence.

But who of us have failed to experience people at different positions on that spectrum?

It is crucial to understand that the qualities of Love and Violence are not to be seen as “opposites” – that is, they do not “oppose” each other. They are simply extremes of a continuum that every one of us is on right now.

To the degree that we see the world through eyes that look for wholes, harmony, balance, peace and connection, we are using the both-and paradigm/worldview. This paradigm seeks to find the “we” in every situation.

On the other hand, those who see the world completely from a black-white, me-you, us-them paradigm overwhelmingly  tend to see a winner and a loser, a right and a wrong in nearly every situation.

Bringing Love into Our World

How can I become an instrument of Love? Cultivate it within until you are overflowing – then let it flow into the lives of those who are open to receive it. Remember, as Ann Morrow Lindbergh told us:

… never think of love as something you can give like an armload of flowers. Some people give love like that – they dump it down on top of you, a useless strong-scented burden.

You can’t give love; love is actually that force within that enables you to give other things.  “It is the motivating power.  It enables you to give strength and power and freedom and peace to another person.  It is not a result; it is a cause.  It is not a product; it produces.  It is a power, like money, or steam or electricity.” Love has value when you can give something else by means of it.”

The highest forms of inspiration come from people who are experiencing Love in some form. The inspiration of top music, writing, dance, art – you name it –involves the metaphoric breathing in of the spirit, the arising of the quality of wholeness and relatedness. In other words, Love.

Love is the essence of what I use in healing, and is what I teach in class, in therapy, in World Café meetings. I strive to make it the guiding light in my dealings with my colleagues and coworkers. Everything I teach is, in its purest form, simply another symbolic representation of love, a vehicle designed to awaken the power of love in others.

A Compassion Meditation – Rebooting Compassion Podcast

Pema Chodrun pointed out the paradoxical truth that “Being able to tolerate a broken heart is the medicine for the pain of existence.” Yet, with all the images that will be flooding our tv and internet screens, it is wise to strike a balance. We will almost certainly be treated to 24 hours of a long string of secondary disasters ranging from starvation and water-borne epidemics to violence and even deeper poverty. So it is wise to make sure you don’t overdo it.

•   •   •   •

Further explorations of the Principle of Compassion can be found in the following two articles by Dr. Miller:

•Why Bother Feeling Compassion? Compassion is Hard.

• Is God Punishing Haitians for the Sins of Their Ancestors?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Why Bother Feeling Compassion? Compassion Is Not Easy!

As we read of the tens of thousands who have died and the many more who are suffering at this moment, is natural to ask, “How can there be a positive side to a catastrophe such as this?”

Well, there is the cheap thrill of feeling generous by choosing to forgo a few lattes and squeeze 10 dollars through our cell phones by texting the word Haiti to 90999 to support Red Cross relief efforts in Haiti.

Beyond this, it offers us an opportunity to confront to grow as human beings. Our predilection for denial has led to one disaster after another, and an opportunity to learn how to face the challenges in our lives in a different way, in a way that gives us the courage to confront and change what we can change, while accepting what cannot be changed. And, especially, it is only by seeing the truth of what is that we can find the wisdom to know the difference.

We might also take this as an opportunity to grow spiritually. If we look deeply enough to see that, although no one could have prevented the earthquake, the poverty that has rendered the inhabitants totally helpless may be something that we could have helped prevent. Without much difficulty we can then begin to see the imbalances in our lives and in our world that are simply catastrophes waiting to happen, and begin to participate in a proactive way to start to transform this little planet while we still can.

So Why Bother to Feel Compassion

Why should we bother to feel compassion anyway? After all, as Pema Chodrun points out: true compassion is not very much fun, “It is very, very painful.  Compassion isn’t about seeing cute, dirty children in Latin America on a television commercial and then sending a check to a rip-off pseudo-charity.  It’s about actually imagining what the experience of a suffering person is like.  So to learn compassion one visualizes the American Indian dying of small pox, the Jew in the crematorium shower full of gas, the Tibetan Buddhist nun as she is being raped.”

Why bother? It is easier to identify with the aggressor, with the detatched privileged group who are free to pretend that “it’s not my problem.”

Or perhaps to retreat into the “victim” stance. “Gosh, I don’t have much power, what can I do. I’ve felt compassion before, and it hurt – real bad. Why would I want to touch a hot stove again?”

I Can Think Of Three Reasons Offhand:

1. Because to not do so would be to fail in our duty to the deepest part of ourselves (dharma)

The hardening of our hearts towards others must inevitably close even further the door of our heart that leads to our deeper spiritual selves. To the degree that we see ourselves as separate from those who have not been so gifted by fortune as ourselves takes us further from the deeper truth that we are all connected, and that what goes around comes around.

2. Because this would be to trade short term gain (denial) for long term pain.

As I have explored at length in Our Culture on the Couch, it is the Old Paradigm habit of dividing the world into the fiction of “Us” and “Them” that lies close to the central etiology of most if not all of our suffering – as individuals as well as as a global community. The healing we all need must come from a shift to the New Paradigm kind of thought, the integrative, “Both/And” approach instead of the “Either/Or” that is leading our planet to the brink of destruction.

In America we hardly noticed the near-genocide against the natives living on this continent. We were too busy to pay attention as the fruit of the African continent was rounded up and shipped off to the New World, where they would be kept as slaves, and denied the ability to better themselves or to be treated as equals. We managed to sustain an enormous amount of denial as the Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals were shipped off to the Nazi death camps. It all seemed so far away.

Now however the world has grown a lot smaller. Sept 11, 2001 has begun to awaken us. Then there was Katrina, then the Economic Meltdown. It’s a lot easier to ignore the homeless when they are black, and hundreds and thousands of miles away than when we have to step over them to get into the grocery store. Or when we are one of them.

All these issues stem from our inability to see the deeper connection we all have, and the responsibility to step beyond the superficial differences and acknowledge the Oneness that lies beneath.

3. Because it creates personal health at the mental, spiritual, physical, and emotional level.

Recent studies have shown that your compassion is not only good for the person(s) to whom it is directed, it also improves your health as well. Those who are high in measures of compassion show an increased antibody response when exposed to the flu, for example.

Stay Tuned

The story of Haiti is just unfolding. Stay awake and aware, and remember that we created all this, and we can change it. What will the outcome be? Are we willing to see and respond (response-ability) to the truth of the situation, or will we find a way to turn away and disengage? Stay tuned!

•   •   •   •

Further explorations of the Principle of Compassion can be found in the following two articles by Dr. Miller:

• A Compassion Meditation

• Is God Punishing Haitians for the Sins of Their Ancestors?

• Listen to the Software for the Mind Mental Reboot Series…This week Rebooting Compassion (Podcast)