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Esalen Workshop: Awakening the Leader Within – Our Culture on the Couch

Springtime in Big Sur California, the hot sulphur baths hovering over the surf, beautiful flowers, and the freshest organic meals. You can’t beat it! The perfect place to discover how to bring your best to life.

Join me for this special presentation of the principles and experiences I wrote about in, Our Culture on the Couch – Seven Steps to Global Healing.

I began to teach my mind-body approaches at Esalen in 1970, and there is nowhere I feel more comfortable and inspired.

About the Workshop: Awakening the Leader – Our Culture on the Couch
May 14th – 16th, 2010
Esalen Institute
Big Sur, CA (view map)
Register now

What if it is true that there is a wise leader inside of each of us, and that all our problems result from our disconnection from this inner source of wisdom, power, and Love? What if you could take one step forward and enter a new world, where there is congruity between what you most deeply want and the actions you take?

In this highly experiential workshop we will apply the New Paradigm (Miller, Our Culture on the Couch, 2009) of Distributed Leadership. Through deep introspection you will touch your essence, inner wisdom, values, gifts, and talents, and awaken the leader within. Next we will explore the unique gift of our times, the opportunity for Humanity to replace hierarchical models of control and dominance with distributed leadership models based on justice, equality, and respect.

Our goal is to heal ourselves and heal our planet. (Recommended but not required: Our Culture on the Couch ebook or softcover at OurCultureOnTheCouch.com) and Awakening the Leader Within (CD or download at ShopDrMiller.com).

Individuals Combine Inner Wisdom and Social Networking to Create a New Type of Leadership

Emmett Miller, M.D., Pioneer in Mind-Body Medicine, Releases CDs to Awaken the Leader Within

(Los Altos, CA) January 14, 2008—Candidates running for president are spending millions on campaigns to demonstrate to voters that they are the best qualified to bring about change and lead the country to better days. But, to find true leadership that brings about change, individuals need to vote their conscience by first accessing their inner wisdom. By awakening the wisdom deep in the core of their being — their inner leader — they can guide thoughts and actions and use social networking to create a collective wisdom that brings healing change to themselves, communities and civilization.

Dr. Emmett Miller, an internationally recognized pioneer in the field of Mind-Body Medicine has released two CDs, Awakening the Leader Within and Healing Our Planet as a way to facilitate individual and global healing. Miller uses guided imagery to get individuals to relax physically, concentrate on breathing, quiet their minds and come into the present. In this state, they can access their inner wisdom and make new, intentional choices. It opens the psyche to connect deeply with others to accomplish distributed leadership. Once people use inner wisdom to guide thoughts and behaviors, they can apply this same process to behaviors in relation all of their surroundings and guide interactions with the people they connect with daily such as family, friends and co-workers.

“The concept of seeking leadership from within — as opposed to looking for it among politicians, business executives, religious zealots and others—is the outgrowth of my work in the field of Mind-Body Medicine,” said Miller. “For 35 years, I have helped people learn to access and use their deeper resources for self healing. This usually involves releasing maladaptive ways of thinking and behaving learned in the past, and developing wiser ways to interact with oneself and the world. I soon found that the same principles were effective in family therapy and in work with organizations and communities, up to the state level with California’s Self-Esteem Task Force. I also found this same wise guidance could be applied to each and every aspect of a person’s life and extend out globally.”

By combining inner leadership with social networking, people can create collective wisdom that  brings healing change to communities, organizations and civilization. Social networking enables those who are cultivating their inner leadership abilities to share their wisdom and passion with others on the same path using conversational models. For example, www.theworldcafe.com uses innovative social technology to enable communities of people throughout the world to explore issues and solve problems, then to share information with other such groups via the website.

What sets Miller’s approach apart are two things: the idea of looking inside for the leadership and collaborative community action that is so clearly lacking in so many areas of society, and the idea that external leadership can be traced to a lack of leadership within. The approach uses the same power tools that are used in therapeutic context to access deeper aspects of the psyche. Tools include deep relaxation, use of guided imagery, meditation and cognitive restructuring techniques.

Most people do not understand the principles of wise leadership of their personal lives, and thus cannot understand the principles of how leadership works in the world around them. They abdicate responsibility and choose poor leaders, which creates a vicious circle. The moment one discovers the leader within, the helpless stance begins to disappear, and people become aware of the enormous power they have to create the right leadership for themselves, their families, communities and the world.

“The purpose of my program is to access the wisdom to discern what needs to be done – but it goes beyond that, to turn a person’s intellectual knowing into a powerfully felt sense of commitment to carry out an internal revolution and seize control of his or her life.”

Miller’s approach also goes beyond the old paradigm that the observer is separate from that being observed, that we are separate from others and the environment. People have an important part to play, and their inner healing has an important effect on the world. No man is an island, and an important part of this program is to inspire us to connect with other similarly empowered people (kindred spirits) to heal the environment (physical and social and planetary).

According to Miller, few people are aware that they have the power to control their own lives. People have been suffering from a kind of cultural ADD, distracted by the pace of life, the demands and manipulations of the media. Individuals have been misled and distracted by the 24×7 infotainment channels, advertising, sexual hyper-stimulation and manufactured threats that keep people anxious. This preconditions people to accept conditions that, while falsely promising happiness and security, merely create wealth for a powerful few and cause great economic, physical, mental and spiritual suffering for the population at large.

This ongoing abuse  has sapped individual self-esteem and led to beliefs of not being good enough or powerful enough to change.  Additionally, people have been misled from within by addictions, prejudices, and stress. They haven’t been given access to the tools of self-awareness, self esteem and self-empowerment.

“Those who begin to experience leadership from within feel anything but powerless. They feel inspired, enthusiastic, and in love with life and the possibilities that abound. They see meadows, not minefields, stepping stones, not stumbling blocks. They see the incredible opportunities that lay before us to change the direction of our society and our planet, as well as our own lives. I have seen it happen thousands of times. This has been my life’s work. Now, with the advent of digital media and the Internet, I have found a way to publish it to the world. The time has come; the world is awakening to the need for change, and new leadership. I want to help individuals create individual and distributed leadership that brings about positive change for each and every member of society.”

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