The Meaning of the Silver in the Tabernacle


Each person, whether you were rich or poor, was required to pay the ransom money of pure silver, every man to pay his half shekel, clearly showing the way of salvation. And this is what's important; we don't pay to be saved; Jesus paid for us. But there's another part of this that shows you clearly each person had to come and bring their own, which means salvation, even for us, is an individual action, not a collective.

Now somebody, “My church, my group,” no, even here showing each person had to come and present themselves presenting their portion. We don't come and present a portion, but we're not saved by a group; we're not saved by a priest. It's individual. You must present yourself. That action of presenting that redemption money keeps that clear and distinct. ♪ ♪ Alright, so we are going to look at something a little bit, we're still within the tabernacle, but it's a little bit different. And this message is almost like a hodgepodge. It falls under one category, but you're going to see there's many subsections.

So don't think, oh wow, she went all over the map. There was thought in this, but it's almost like putting things together, connecting dots, if you will. So I'm starting right now in Exodus 35, if you wish to turn there. “Moses spake unto all the congregation of the children of Israel, saying, This is the thing which the LORD commanded, saying, Take ye from among you an offering unto the LORD,” key words here, “whosoever is of a willing heart, let him bring it, an offering of the LORD: gold, silver, and brass.” Interesting, gold, silver, and brass, those materials, obviously, as I've referenced, gold, the color of divinity or a reference to divinity; silver of redemption; and brass, usually of judgment. And then, of course, the colors, “blue, purple, scarlet, fine linen, goats' hair.” These are all the things that the people would bring, “rams' skin dyed red, badgers' skin, shittim wood,” or acacia wood, “oil for the light, spice, spices for the anointing oil, and for the sweet incense.” And if you keep reading, “And every wise hearted among you shall come, and make all that the LORD hath commanded; the tabernacle, his tent, his covering, his taches, his boards, his bars, his pillars, his sockets, the ark, the staves.” You just keep going and you'll get down to where it talks about even the clothes or the cloths of service; sorry, “and do service in the holy place, holy garments for Aaron the priest, the garments of his son, to minister in the priest's office.

And all the congregation of Israel departed from the presence of Moses. They came, every one whose heart stirred up in him, every one whom his spirit made willing, and they brought the LORD'S offering to the work of the tabernacle of the congregation, for all his service and for the holy garments.” And you could go on if you were going to read this in your own time straight through to the twenty-ninth verse, which it's kind of where I end here, “The children of Israel brought a willing offering unto the LORD, every man and woman, whose heart made them willing to bring for all manner of work, which the LORD commanded to be made by the hand of Moses.” Now there's something interesting in this chapter I just read and it's repeated several times.

You'll find it in the fifth verse where it says, “Whosoever is of a willing heart,” and if you read the Hebrew of these words, lev is “heart,” but the word for “willing,” nâdiyb, Strong's 5081, if you're interested you can look it up. But the definition there in the concordance, “free, liberal, noble, prince or princely willing (hearted).” And this word comes from another word. It sounds like nâdab, like one of Nadab and Abihu, the same word, right, from the same root, “to volunteer (as a soldier), to present spontaneously:━to offer freely, to offer, (to make or offer oneself).” So “princely generosity,” if you will, can be found in these passages over and over again. God starts this way. Remember I've been referencing this Exodus 25, “Speak to the children of Israel, tell them to bring Me,” and He specifically, God calls it His offering. He doesn't say it's the priest's or it's the people.

He says it's His offering, but He says, “Speak to the children of Israel, tell them to,” and fill in the blanks. So I'm going to actually flip this, this narrative for a second and show you something in the New Testament. You don't have to turn there. I'm just going to talk about it to show you that a lot of times when we read the Old Testament we get locked into, “Yes, but it was the law”" Well, the law had not yet been given. Now by, by this point that I just read out of, yes, we have, we'll call it the first law had already been given, but in the attempt when God says, “Speak to the children of Israel,” they did not know what the law was.

So I think a lot of times when I mention willful giving in the Old Testament, people automatically assume, “Yes, but they were under some form of a prescription.” No, here it's just basically willful heart, but so that we're clear on what willful heart looks like, it's not under coercion, but it can be under an order. God can say, “I want you to do this,” and the people would still have a choice to not do it. The choice of not doing it probably would result in death, just FYI. But in the New Testament, for example, just don't turn there because they're stories we're familiar with, of what I'd call princely or willful giving. The first one, of course, is probably the most famous one, the woman with the alabaster box, and she pours that gift of the most precious ointment upon Jesus, placed upon Him.

And if you think about it, the commentary that goes around this act, “Why this waste?” which is how the world normally perceives giving: “It's wasteful,” or “Somebody else will do it,” or “Don't give that much.” And we tend to, we'll call it minimalize that gift because the, what the contents of that box would have been very costly, probably the most expensive thing that she owned.

And yet it's poured out upon Jesus, and if you think about it, obviously, as it's poured out upon Him, the same person that would, by the mocking hands of a mocking crowd, bear a crown of thorns, she was pouring this out on Him basically in preparation for His death, with a vision I'm not quite sure that she fully or completely understood. Nevertheless, what she did is memorialized, and it's free, willful, I would even put it as princely giving. There was no rhyme or reason to the world looking on, yet.

She pours this ointment upon Him and somebody might say, “Well, if He's going to die anyway, or He's going to go to die, why would you waste it there?” right? You could do something else with it. That's the world. So very much misunderstood, when we talk about willful giving, princely giving, generous giving in the church, it's always grossly mischaracterized or people will put some spin on it, but God sees the heart. God looked upon that act and she's memorialized for that act in the New Testament. The other one is a nameless widow who Jesus was observing the people casting their money into the treasury, if you will, and many rich that gave; it's not as though He memorialized the rich and said, “Look at how much they've given.

Look at such a great gift they've given.” But to her, He memorialized her giving. She gave the two mites she had basically out of the money she needed. And again, somebody might look at that and say, “Well, you know, that's not real smart or that's not real bright,” but somehow a nameless woman is remembered for her sacrificial giving that's willful; she didn't do it under duress or coercion. And if you think about it, God who looks on the heart sees there was no reservation on the part of this woman to cast what she needed. Not; she didn't have excess, she cast what she needed into the pot, if you will. So when we start to look at princely giving, and I use these New Testament examples for a reason there; we're not applying any law, yet I want you to think of something.

These two individuals I just spoke about, there was also a law in place, right? The law that was the law of the people and the religious law was in place. It, you don't read that either one of these events is marked by somebody saying, “You must.” And I point that out because when we look at the children of Israel, it's easy to think, “Well, but all of these events eventually are going to sound mandated.” Even, you'll hear me talk about this later, even the redemption or ransom money that would have to be paid, the shekel or half shekel; I want you to think carefully about this because we tend to think, “Well, God said, 'I want every man of a certain age to bring this money.'” Do you read anywhere that anybody showed up and didn't? Hmm? Right.

So even though, even when God mandated something, we still have free will. There could have been people saying, “Hell no, I ain't bringing no shekel tax,” right? “And hey, let's see what happens,” right? So there's a point there. Even when there may be a prescribed amount, there still may be the willful submission in obedience to bring it. And I'm sure there was consequence━we don't read that there's consequences for not, but I'm sure that there was. So with that being said, the big question is asked, these people were slaves in Egypt. And okay, we know that livestock can reproduce very easily, right? That's not like; it doesn't take a scientist to figure that out unless you have “they” and “them” problems. But animals multiply, right? Okay, good. So we're on the same page there. Never know these days. So the big question is, when it says, “Take silver and gold and brass and all of this stuff,” they were slaves in Egypt. So you have to go, and I'm doing this for the benefit of people who say, “Well, you know, where did they get all this stuff?” It's; the Bible says where they got it.

You read in Exodus 12 and verse 35, on their way out, “And the children of Israel did according to the word of Moses; and they,” the King James says, “borrowed”━“they borrowed of the Egyptians jewels of silver, jewels of gold, and raiment.” There you go, silver and gold, “And the LORD gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they lent unto them such things as they required. And they spoiled the Egyptians.” Now, I, you know, I, I sometimes do criticize the wording of this. I don't think that they exactly “borrowed,” and I don't think they exact, exactly “lent,” but probably the word “spoiled” is, is pretty close to what we'd, we'd want to figure. So if you're asking, “Where did they get this stuff”" Think about this. If they were slaves in Egypt, they did have some possessions. We're not talking people who were possession-less, but the possessions they had wouldn't have been that great. Now they maybe would have had some livestock, and they may, may have had certain things, but not in the volume that we're going to read required to make the tabernacle.

So a couple of things are, there's the first lesson here that I want to point out. And this one is kind of important because we can read this stuff and never make an application to ourselves, and they want this one to be applied. We always say Egypt and the bondage of Egypt represents sin and the world. So the children of Israel got these riches from, essentially, from the world. The riches came out of the world to be used for the things of God. And you know, you can read this and you can say, “Well, how does this apply to me?” I just gave you an application. We live in the world. We make money in the world. And if you think about it, you can make money and you can worship money, or you can apply the principle that there are things we do out in the world to be applied to God's work.

And this is exactly the same thing. They basically took what God ordered them to do, basically “Get it from where you came from. You're going to 'borrow' from these people, and it's going to be used for My work, the tabernacle where I shall dwell, where you shall worship.” So if you can't make an application right there to Giving 101, because too many people, again, day in and day out, will talk about giving in the church and it always comes back to the same thing, “Well, you know, I don't know how this all applies.” I just told you, money taken from the world applied to the work of God.

The second thing we come across is, obviously, willing hearted, but it says, “Men and women: bracelets, earrings.” And I'm not going to say all bracelets and all earrings, but a lot of these were symbols of their former life as slaves. So they took from the world and the slavery of the world to become, essentially, whether you think of it or not, they're under, they will be under the law, but they will become free by God's liberation.

So God says, “I want you to use these things.” Now whether these earrings and bracelets fully all represent, maybe some of them were decorative and some of them were; but I guarantee you a lot of these represented their former life. So just kind of put that in perspective when we start talking about how the work of God is supposed to function. The next thing we read about, in Exodus 38 there is a reference to; let's see, 38, 38:8 regarding, you remember I just mentioned to you “gold, silver, brass.” And this is to make the? laver, “And he made the laver of brass, and the foot of it brass, of the lookingglasses of the women assembling, which is assembled at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation”" So a lot of these materials would have been used for the self. So here's another one of these that I think is very important. If you want to talk about application of spiritual, worldly, and spiritual things, these people had a choice to love self and to look at, or love looking at oneself, or to be looking at the laver of cleansing, which had a much greater significance.

One is flesh and one is spiritual. It still took, still took these women, I don't think too many men had lookingglasses back then. My, how things have changed. But the women gave up their mirrors, and try again to see there is a concept there of not worshiping self, but worshiping God. So these materials, you know, imagine if you didn't have a mirror, even the brass that they would have looked in would not have been that great of a mirror, okay? You can kind of see, kind of not.

But imagine now you're not going to see anything, but you might be actually able, think about this, if you could even approach that laver of cleansing to see yourself in the reflection of the water, which represents more of the things of God, the cleansing of God than it does of the admiration of self. So there are concepts even within the tabernacle, the, we'll call it the elements that are to be brought, to be offered that carry significance, specifically what I'm talking about is giving here. Then of course, as I was referencing the, the gold, and there's a passage back there in 35, Exodus 35:22, I believe. It has a very strange wording in the King James; 35:22 says, “And they came, both men and women, as many as were willing hearted,” it's being repeated over and over again; I don't know how you could miss that, “and brought bracelets, earrings, rings, tablets,” and now, we're not talking about computers, “all jewels of gold: every man that offered,” this is what's worded strangely, “that offered,” in your King James has an italicized “offered an offering of gold unto the LORD”" If you read that in the Hebrew, very interesting because what it says there in the Hebrew is they basically presented their gold as a wave offering.

You don't read that in the English, but it was a wave offering. And that may not really sound that big of a deal except that there were other things offered and done in wave offering fashion. And I can't help but think that this would be along the lines of, think of it, what's the most precious material even back then that a human could hold in their hands? Gold. Waving that before God, showing God the, we'll call it the value or the greatness of it, and in God's eyes looking down, it representing the divine nature.

Now maybe these people weren't informed of that just yet, but the two colliding together, the act of what it says here that “every man that offered offered an offering,” they were offering as a wave offering. The expressly showing it before God, however you want to say that, has a significance which I think if you want to say whether God was looking down to see what was being lifted up to Him. Now if we were talking about the offerings, which I probably will get into eventually, there's greater significance in detail, and I don't want to get burdened down here, but just to say it's important to recognize there are some nuances here we're not reading in the English that make these just a little bit more special in terms of how they were brought, what was brought and how it was offered.

So as I said, gold, divinity; silver, redemption; brass, judgment, and these are instances of the offerings that I've just kind of read to you. Now gold we know, we're going to find a lot of gold in the tabernacle, a lot of things are overlaid with gold, and there are a couple of items that are pure gold as we discovered going through some of the furniture. Silver is a little bit more interesting and I say a little bit more interesting, there's a lot more diverse pieces of information to put together, so two instances in the Bible where silver is exchanged for life. One of them is Joseph, right, the 20 pieces of silver, Joseph. And the other one is Judas with his 30 pieces for Jesus. It's kind of interesting, silver being the color or the metal of redemption, and only two places where we read about exchange for life, and yet it is peppered through the tabernacle.

The silver that was used in the construction of the tabernacle was taken from the atonement money. Now, I know, please don't go, “Where'd they get the money?” right? I don't want to deal with that one just yet. But write these down, I'm not going to read them, write down these Scriptures, Exodus 26:18-25, Exodus 36:23-30, Exodus 38:25-28, and in the first chapter of Numbers fills in the details of some of the ways that this temple tax or shekel was━not temple tax, that's later, that the silver shekel or redemption money was collected. There would be a census of the people. So the number of men that paid the ransom money, ransom for one soul as the Bible describes it, would have been 603,550 each paying a half shekel, so the total would have been 3,000; sorry, 301, 775; 3,001; 301,775, bleh. All right, most of this silver; you might say, “Well, what's the issue with the numbers?” I'll tell you in a minute. Most of this silver would have been used to hold up the boards. And remember I used in one of the messages back there, I used the word “socket”" or “ankles,” okay? So each board on the exterior wall of the tabernacle would be supported by two ankles, if you want to call them that, of silver.

Each ankle would have been the contribution of 6,000 men, making each board supported by 12,000 men's redemption money. Why is that important? Of course, I'm, I like to mess around with numbers here, so I was looking at that and there, there is something remarkable there. If you take the number of 48 boards times 12,000 gives you 400-and; 576,000, but more importantly, if you divide that by 4, it gives you 144,000, which is an important scriptural number. We'll come back to that maybe. A little dangle there and we move on. All right, so there were 100 talents forming 100 sockets and that would be 171,775 shekels. Each socket, as I said, would bear the ransom money of 6,000 men, so 12,000 holding up for each board. And then if you look at the numbers again, this is why I said it's inescapable, the numbers, the material. So we know 6 being the number of man, 12 if you want the number of divine government, or 6 being the number of man multiplied obviously in the tens, so 1,000, and/or times 2 making 12, adequate witness.

However you want to add it up, I don't care. What's important is at the bottom of everything in this structure, the symbol is redemption, the bottom of this complete structure. Remember, God said, “I want you to make Me a house where I'm going to dwell among you.” And that's awesome. That's amazing that God would deign to condescend to dwell among men, but the whole premise of the Tabernacle, the whole perimeter is routed in one simple concept: at the foundation, redemption, the whole thing.

So it's inescapable. In other words, underneath it all, God can say, “I'm going to come dwell among men,” but it was necessary for this whole thing to be presented for a purpose. God could have said, “I'm going to dwell among men,” but we are unholy, we're unclean, we're━keep adding to the list. So this representation is pretty powerful. And yes, I know in the New Testament we read what Peter says, we're not redeemed by things like silver and gold, but by the blood of Christ. And there you go; if you start looking at it, they didn't have that yet. So you've got the concepts of redemption, the vicarious sacrifices that would be offered. And he goes on, by the way, Peter, to say the, the traditions received from your fathers.

In other words, they could never redeem, but they were pointing to something. And I don't know if I can say this enough and it could be understood enough, but what's sad is that even the New Testament writers, there was no Christianity while all this is being written. Yes, they were followers of Christ, but the faith itself had not yet come to be what we know it today. So the writers, the writers are steeped themselves in Jewish tradition. That these writers could turn around and say, “You're not redeemed with these things, but rather,” it's almost like saying, “For the rest of you, can you not hear what was being said?” And I guess not, right? But anyway, that's a story for another day. So the whole tent itself, you've got the concept of sacrifice, you've got the concept of redemption.

We see that God was not going to miss any opportunity to teach how our approach would be. Remember I said to you, you've got to come to the door, and the door for us is Christ. And from the moment you pass through the door or you're looking at the door, you're confronted with the holiness of God and what's rooted in the ground, which is redemption, silver. So these lessons, you, you kind of, like I said, everywhere you turn, you're confronted with them. Each person, whether you were rich or poor, was required to pay the ransom money of pure silver, every man to pay his half shekel, clearly showing the way of salvation. And this is what's important; we don't pay to be saved; Jesus paid for us. But there's another part of this that shows you clearly each person had to come and bring their own, which means salvation, even for us, is an individual action, not a collective.

Now somebody, “My church, my group,” no, even here showing each person had to come and present themselves presenting their portion. We don't come and present a portion, but we're not saved by a group; we're not saved by a priest. It's individual. You must present yourself. That action of presenting that redemption money keeps that clear and distinct. Now, I mentioned that Hebrew word as I said, nâdiyb, or nâdab, both of those words, “to volunteer as a soldier” is another one of these definitions if you look up the word. And I think this is interesting because these people who paid the redemption money to kind of be encamped around God, God being at the center of everything, I want you to think about this, they also ultimately became part of God's fighting force.

They became; their payment before God didn't make them that, but the word carries the connotation of a soldier, someone who signed up for duty. So just by virtue of them participating, if you think about it, how they encamped, they weren't having a camping trip. Eventually they were going to have to go in as soldiers, as we'll call it the army of the Lord to get rid of the people out of the land. They were fighting or, or designed to basically fight as they went into the land. So don't think they were just camped out there. So the Hebrew word carries meaning just way beyond the act of giving the ransom money. And for us, how that would be applied if for them being encamped around and God is at the center dwelling; Christ becomes the center of our life.

And we read and pick up in the New Testament how basically we are supposed to by faith, one of the passages talks about being a good soldier. That is the warfare that we ensue. We're not here to, I think how some people have depicted Christianity as this, it's like a caricature of what they did in the wilderness. They all got together and they had a Bud Light; just joking. No, they didn't do that actually, but just checking to see if you were asleep, by the way. Some of you are sitting there going, but much like when we come to Christ, or Christ finds us and Christ is at the center of our life, like the center of being in the camp, there is a sense if you're really connected to the word that there's a battle, an ongoing warfare. And that kind of puts every Christian in the framework of being a soldier. So that word nâdiyb in the Old Testament is very much applicable both ways, both for the giving, the presenting, the willful heart, and also as someone who basically is now enlisted or part of a company of people that belong to the fighting forces of God.

Now one more thing about the ransom money that we find in Exodus 30; in Exodus 30, beginning at verse 11, which is where if you read it says, “A Tax for the Tent,” kind of interesting the way that's worded. “The LORD spake unto Moses, saying, When thou takest the sum of the children of Israel after their number, then shall they give every man a ransom for his soul unto the LORD, when thou numberest them.” You know what I find remarkable about this? That word where it says “ransom” is a cognate, if you will, or close relative to the word we looked at last week for Kapporeth, “covering” when I talked about the mercy seat.

This is, that word is attached to that. So it's very interesting that everything that really would pertain to redemption had a connection to this Kapporeth, even in the language. We don't read it in the English that way, but the Hebrew is very clear. Those words are connected, the Kapporeth, kappor, they're all connected. So “every man a ransom for his soul unto the LORD, when thou numberest them; that there be no plague among them when thou numberest them. They shall give, every one that passeth among them that are numbered a half shekel after the shekel of the sanctuary: (a shekel is twenty gerahs:)” or gerahs, “and a half shekel shall be the offering of the LORD. Every one that passeth among them that are numbered, from twenty years old above, shall give an offering unto the LORD.

The rich shall not give more, the poor shall not give less than half a shekel, when they give an offering unto the LORD, to make atonement for your souls. And thou shalt take the atonement money of the children of Israel, and shall appoint it for the service of the tabernacle of the congregation”" I cannot repeat that enough. See, again, I really didn't intend for this to be a message on giving. I wanted to talk more about silver, but everywhere you look, you see it clearly. The money collected, there's a purpose for it: “shall appoint it for the service of the tabernacle of the congregation; that it may be a memorial unto the children of Israel before the LORD to make an atonement for your souls.” And that money, as I said, would have been used primarily for things within the construction of the tent, specifically, as I just referenced, those sockets or ankles at the bottom.

There are other silver items that I will probably reference in a little bit here, but I just think this is pretty amazing, because even here where God says they are to do this, they are to “give an offering unto the LORD, to make an atonement for your souls,” I'm not reading this the way I might have read this 25 or 30 years ago: This was a mandate. Yes, it definitely is, that's what they're supposed to do. But the reason why I say I can't really look at it as a mandate is if God said, “This is so that you might live,” you'd be pretty dumb to not go, “Okay,” right? It's kind of a no-brainer.

And I think that's why we're not reading that somebody said, “No, I'm not bringing my temple tax. I'm not bringing my money,” okay? And this is part of the problem of how we approach the things of God today. There's too many people; remember what I started with; too many people thinking, “I make money out in the world and that's my money,” and they use all these phrases. And yes, that's the way the flesh speaks. But God gave a pattern that what you do out in the world, there should be a purpose for that. We can't, we're not able to live apart from the world. We are, that's, we're surrounded by it. And most of us go out into the world and make our living in the world, but you are to make that living and then you come back and you're looking at the things of God, how to manage your household in a godly way, all the things that can be applied that way.

The same thing is true of things that can be applied to self and the worship of self and self-deification versus those very same things applied to the house of God and the work of God. And again, here, somebody might say, and this is the argument that I, I tell you, I kid you not, if I could just have a recording where I could press and give the answer because it, it seems like every single week there's somebody who will say, “Well, but, but, but, well, the tithes and offerings, that's, that's Old Testament.” And you're completely missing the point.

God said, “I made you.” You know, I love that people say, “Oh, freely give, freely receive,” and everything's, we're just a bunch of hippies. Tell me what was free in your salvation, because it costs something somewhere. It may not cost you, but it costs something somewhere. That's how God says, “This is My way.” And if you can't understand that, I don't even know why you're even bother. When people say, “Oh, you know, well, God wants to bless you”; He does want to bless you. I believe that there are people that come into the church or they come into some good fortune or whatever it is, but they never come to learn the lesson. God will bless efforts. God will bless your hands. God will bless your heart and your mind to be able to be the best at what you do.

But those blessings also come with, do you turn around and recognize God in those things, or is it just about, “I was in Egypt and I got the stuff of Egypt and I left Egypt and while I was on my travels in the desert, you know, I was really blinged out and I had a lot of nice clothes and everybody's complimented me on the way I looked.” And, or when it came time for the service of God, I recognize that these things were granted to me for that purpose. That's always the missing ingredient with modern day giving, people don't get that; and all the arguments that I've talked to you about over the years. So anyway, there's something very unique about this, this ransom of the soul. And that is something that's taken up in the New Testament which can be confused to something else. But I want to show you even where something can be slightly confusing how to make these connections.

Turn with me, if you will, to Matthew 17. It's a passage that people will not understand clearly. And you read it and there's some stuff in there that bears really looking at closely. So this is right after the experience, if you will, of the Mount of Transfiguration, all right. So, I want you to keep in mind that there's a fresh revelation in Peter's mind about who Christ is or what he saw. It says, “When they were come to Capernaum, they that received tribute money came to Peter and said, Doth not your master pay tribute?” Now some people think that that's taxes like Roman taxes, but hold that thought for just a minute. “He saith, Yes.

And when he was come into the house, Jesus prevented him, saying, What thinkest thou, Simon? of whom did the kings of the earth take custom or tribute? of their own children, or of strangers? And Peter saith unto him, Of strangers. Jesus saith unto him, Then are the children free. Notwithstanding, lest we should offend them, go thou to the sea, cast a hook, take up the fish that first cometh up; and when thou hast opened his mouth, thou shalt find a piece of money: that take and give unto them for me and thee.” So a couple of things to note here, and I'm sorry, there's a lot of sub-things that I have to point out, but it, you missed the message otherwise.

So the first thing is, don't think that this is some Roman regular tax. By virtue of Him saying, “Lest they be offended,” two things, “Of whom do the kings of the earth take custom or tribute? of their own children, or of strangers?” And the answer of Peter, “Peter saith to him, Of strangers.” That tells you kind of cryptically, we're not talking about some state tax. This goes back to some, something if you want to call it of a religious nature, and I'm sure that the tax probably morphed over time and became something, this would be the temple tax, but I want you to pay attention to a couple of things here. The first thing is, look at, in verse 25, look at how Jesus replies to Peter, “What thinkest thou, Simon?” Every time that Jesus goes back to referring to “Simon,” it's usually Simon who slipped back into the flesh. Remember we're talking about his name being Cephas or being known as Peter. So it's interesting that this, in the, in the verse above it says, “They came to Peter.” But when Jesus replies, He says, “What thinkest thou, Simon?” And there's, the questions that are asked almost as if to say, “What were you thinking when you answered them? What was your thought process?” Now, it might not be clear abundantly, but there are two things that, that come to my mind when He says, “Go and get the money and take it and give it unto them for me and for thee.” Now, if it, if we were talking about tax taxes, it would have been “Render unto Caesar,” where He says that somewhere else, but He says, “For me and for thee,” that has to be a religious tax.

That's number one. Number two, as I said, pointing out Jesus addresses him by his old name several times over where he slips back into the, we'll call it the fleshly dumb, “Uh, why are we here, Boss?” mode, okay. He addresses him in that way. And then there's something else that I find kind of interesting, because Jesus replies to him “of strangers?” But listen carefully. Then He says, “Then are the children free.” Well, that kind of makes me think of what Jesus said somewhere else when He says, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father.” It means anyone who has seen Him who has seen the Father would make you a child of God and not a stranger anymore. And He says, “You go pay the tax, strangers pay the tax. You go pay the tax for me and for you.” So what makes this kind of crazy, Paul explains this a little bit better, and I know this may be a little bit choppy, but bear with me. Paul says, “If we have known God, or rather we have, or we are known of God, we are no longer aliens or strangers, but children and heirs.” So Jesus was making a point here, “Go on and do what you need to do, lest anybody be offended.” But on top of all that, there's a message within the message, which is when He says to “Go, cast a hook,” basically the first fish that comes out, up out of the deep.

Poetically in the Bible, poetically, you see, you'll find it in places like Micah and other place, the depths of the sea is sometimes represented as teeming with life, but also representing death. So out of the depths of the sea, which in this case is being presented as analogous to death, comes the money, the redemption money, or the atonement money, or the temple tax money to redeem. And that's kind of interesting because think about it, the Lord could have just said, at a wave of a hand, “Here's the money, go take it and go.” But the exercise in and of itself almost has a picture attached to it. Why? Because the few verses before this happens, Jesus is talking about His death and Resurrection. I don't think it's an accident when you step away in a bird's eye view to see that when He says, “Go get that money,” coming out of the depths of the sea, being brought up, that that money will be used, what would be analogous to ransom money for the soul, even though Jesus did not need to be ransomed; He was our ransom, as a type showing something in a picture way.

So we can paint all of these pictures, but when you go back to look at the redemption money, even where its placement to the ground, something that had to be in the ground to come up, always is painting the same picture over and over again. It's inescapable that something must be to the depths in the ground, must die, must come up to be redeemed, even in this short, brief picture that Jesus exchanges with Simon Peter. So it's kind of interesting. I like the, the ideas here, but if you go back to look at the temple; or I'm sorry, the half shekel ransom money, it's important to understand something. They had to bring this money, and the money would be turned into something else. And no one would say, by the way, you wouldn't have anybody saying, you know, at the base here, there's the sacrifice of 12,000 men on one board. So you think anybody would walk by those boards and say, “What part of my action contributed to the picture of redemption?” You wouldn't be able to.

It's all put together. It's all blended together. The same thing, we have no part in that. It's all Christ. We come. He lets us come, but we have no part in the action. Now, I know people say, “Well, it breaks down. They had to bring the money.” That's true. God had to start somewhere teaching the lesson. And He does it very well in the tabernacle. Now, if we go back, I need to talk about one more item of silver. And this one doesn't have anything to do with giving. It doesn't have anything to do with a willful heart, but it does have to do with the concept of, we'll call it soldier or presenting oneself.

But it ties into the silver, because I wanted to spend enough time talking about this. So if you want to turn with me, we're going to look at the silver trumpets, because that's a thing that's left out a lot. Let's see if we'll go first to Numbers 10. You remember, I said to you that in Exodus, we have the collection of the shekel, or the half shekel, which undoubtedly would be used for the construction of the tabernacle. Well, we have another census that's taken up. If you want to read that in your own time, which occurs in the book of Numbers, don't turn there. I'm just telling you where it is in case you want to look it up later, Numbers 3. The firstborn males of Israel were counted and numbered. The number of those was 22,273, but something very weird happens. God says, “I'm going to substitute out, minus the 273, instead of it being the total camp, I'm going to put this number towards the Levites,” which is very strange, a very strange substitution, if you will.

And God goes on to say that each of these will be redeemed at five shekels each, after the shekel of the sanctuary, which is shekel is twenty gerahs or gerahs; five shekels each. Kind of interesting, I don't know why there's this drop or this difference, but I suspect, because it is within the book of Numbers, that this collection was used to make the trumpets. We don't read of it, we don't read of them before. So I, I really believe that this is the connection to these trumpets.

Now, this is kind of very interesting. We're looking at people having to bring things, so again, silver is brought and trumpets will be made. Numbers 10, “The LORD spoke unto Moses saying, Make thee two trumpets of silver; of a whole piece thou shall make them: that thou mayest use them for the calling of the assembly, and for the journeying of the camps.” And you stop right there, because He starts out with basically giving the general reason. There are actually two right there, the calling of the assembly and when it's time to get up and march; to assemble at the door and to march.

And then there's going to be four categories additional to that broken down. But why is this important? And I have to do this here so it, it, you make the connection with me. First of all, please do not make the mistake that a lot of people have made when I peruse things, books and articles, people homogenize the shophar, the ram's horn with the silver trumpets. They are two different instruments used for two different purposes, so do not conflate them. For example, we read about the shophar, I think the first time we read about it is in Genesis. This is not a ram's horn. I just read to you, it is two trumpets of silver, and they actually have two distinct Hebrew names.

In fact, if you really want to be technical, there are three different blowing instruments in the Hebrew Bible that are the most prevalent, and they each serve a particular purpose. So this one is spelt out and the question then is asked, are these trumpets, are these the trumpets when we read about in the New Testament, the trumpets for example in the book of Revelation? And the answer to that is, yes, and most likely, but they tie together in a greater picture. So you're going to find, for example, the apostle Paul writes things like, “When the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable,” or 1 Thessalonians 4:16, which basically says, “Once the trump is blown, and then first the dead in Christ shall rise.” So let me talk about our application to the trumpets, not to be confused with shophar. Our application here is anytime the silver trumpets are being referenced, one has to think they are representational here in Numbers.

They're representational for us in a New Testament appropriation to the proclamation of the gospel, a sounding of the horns is a declaration of the word of God. Now I, I'll explain to you why in a minute, but let me break down the four categories because as you break down the four categories, it becomes clear as to why I would say that. Verses 3 and 4 of that same chapter that we looked at, chapter 10 of Numbers, “And when they shall blow with them, all the assembly shall assemble themselves to thee at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation. And if they blow but with one trumpet, then the princes, which are heads of the thousands of Israel, shall gather themselves unto thee.” So stop right there and recognize one thing. We have here people gathering, that the trumpet, if you will, being the heralder for people to gather at the door before God's representative. We, someone who's preaching Christ, is putting out the clarion call of God for people to gather and assemble.

It doesn't mean that it can only be done through that method, but this application takes you there. So in other words, then God's representative appears and will speak and that's the heralding. Now we can say at a future time, the trumpets being sounded and the people who have not yet heard, they will appear at the door. That means they will appear before Christ. There's all of these applications to be made, make no mistake. Otherwise it sounds like a little bit of a nutty exercise of Doot-doot-da-doo! all right. Even the writer of Hebrews makes clear, “The congregation shall be assembled to this glorious temple not made with hands.” So it's kind of important to kind of tie all these together.

We read then in verses 5-8 that the, the sounding of the trumpets would also be a call to worship and a call to march. Let's see what it says: “When you blow an alarm, then the camps that lie on the east part shall go forward. When you blow an alarm the second time, the camps that lie on the south side shall take their journey: they shall blow an alarm for their journeys. But when the congregation is to be gathered together, ye shall blow, but ye shall not sound an alarm. And the sons of Aaron, the priests, shall blow the trumpets; and they shall blow; they shall be to you for an ordinance for ever throughout your generations.” So here we have two things, a call to worship and a call to march. And I can say again, think about this in this initial depiction, the trumpets in the New Testament realm right now, the sounding of people basically to walk according to the word of God and the same thing is true in worship.

Why do we gather if we're not opening up the word of God? So there's this constant connectivity, if you will. If you want to go down to the point of where it's going to talk about going to war, which is in verse 9, “And if ye go to war in your land against the enemy that oppresseth you, you shall blow an alarm with the trumpets; and ye shall be remembered before the LORD your God, and ye shall be saved from your enemies.” I want you to think about this for a second. We don't operate in the same fashion, but if you think about it, we do. Ephesians 6 says, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers,” the things that are immediately around us, but not necessarily visible, those fighting and opposing forces that, if you want to put it this way, are even able to beguile some of us.

We are not fighting the war like these people were. And in fact, very interesting, there are two recorded episodes only, where the trumpet was sounded at the hand of Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the priest, as a thousand from each tribe went forth to avenge themselves against the Midianites, that's the one. The other one was Abijah and Jeroboam, where the trumpet is blown for war. Abijah was still trying to stay true to the worship of God, and Jeroboam was busy with his idolatry. And the trumpet is sounded, the priest cried out, and the Lord smote Jeroboam. And my, I just wish that God was doing a lot of stuff today like that and I told you, you know, if God would just do one thing for me in my lifetime, He's done so much, I'll never asked for another thing because I've received so much.

But if He'd just open up the earth just for like a millisecond, because there's some people I'd recommend, “You know, you've got to go look at this. That's a nice vacation spot down there. Go check it out.” Whoosh! Okay, so, you know, what's interesting is yes, there will be a day, as Paul describes, where the sounding of a trumpet will summon those, and the dead in Christ shall rise first, and there will be a period. You read it in the book of Revelation, I believe starting at the seventh chapter, where you've got seven trumpets that will be sounded and they all bring about some other dimension of, we'll call it tragedy upon the earth, or punishment, or judgment, sounding, warning.

You know, the word of God is twofold. It's, it is a clarion call to those who will hear, come, receive, and it's also judgment and warning. You don't receive it, you don't hear it, you don't want to know about it. The same word brings life to them and death to others, and that's just what the Scripture says. But what I believe in looking at this passage as we've looked at it, okay, so the silver will be the call of the redeemed. Those trumpets will call, and the people who have heard, and the people who have yet to hear will be gathered. All of these applications, by the way, you could say, well, you know, some of this is a little bit confusing, because, now today specifically, I kind of mixed a lot of things together, but there's one thread that goes through this whole message that is inescapable. As I said, if we're Christians and we are following Christ, or we're described as little Christs, or Christ followers, and the pattern is set, then I'm looking at all the ways that God has described actions, mindset, activity, from summoning the people to take from the world, to bring it into the church, or to the tabernacle, from people saying, “Quit,” God saying to the people, “You can either look at yourself, or you can have yourself cleansed” and be a part of God's program.

Right down to the last of the greatest Sacrifice of all times, which is Christ laying down His life that someone like me might live and have eternal life. So what I'm going to tell you is this picture of the tabernacle with all of its silver, gold, brass, all the colors, all the values, keep me coming back to the same essential message: Christ is at the center of it all. He was always at the center of it all. And to the, to brothers and sisters that I know who are, they can't connect the dots, as I said, I'm praying for you to see the light. But for those who do, go back and read and parse even verse by verse to see how this applies. Last but not least, if you read that in the tenth chapter, it says, “Also in the day of your gladness, and in your solemn days, in the beginning of your months, ye shall blow with the trumpets over your burnt offerings,” those, what's called a Holocaust offering, fully offered to God, “and over the sacrifices of your peace offerings; that they may be to you a memorial before your God: I am the LORD your God.” Even on the occasion of offering, the trumpet was blown, as if to say, these two things have never been anything but tied together, the declaration of the good news of the gospel and people's memorial, sacrificial, day in and day out, weekly or monthly, whatever you do, giving.

It's right there. So for all those people that like to say, “I don't see it,” I can't help you. But for those who do who can see all the dots connected, and we've got a lot more to dig into, but at least today you've got another dimension of the tabernacle, specifically focusing on silver, and the concepts attached to it. And I hope that somewhere somebody says, “Yeah, I'm beginning to see the dots being connected,” but I'm going to keep still working on those who can't just yet quite see it, because I believe once you do, you can't un-see it.

That's my message. You have been watching me, Pastor Melissa Scott, live from Glendale, California at Faith Center. If you would like to attend the service with us, Sunday morning at 11am, simply call 1-800-338-3030 to receive your pass. If you'd like more teaching and you would like to go straight to our website, the address is www.PastorMelissaScott.com.

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1 Corinthians 15, Luke 16 – Don’t Fear Death


foreign [Music] one day we're all going to be dead period I will be dead too everybody has a time I don't care what science is coming up with in fact I'm a firm believer that if the world keeps going the way it's going some of the Fulfillment of the Book of Revelation sang a third of the earth Earth's population has to die maybe even started already I don't know if that's part of it or not I can't say I don't want to speculate just saying so somebody who doesn't want to talk about death and I've met people like oh God I can't talk about that it means the resurrected life and understanding of the resurrected life has not penetrated into your soul what do you mean I'm saying exactly what I mean here go back to the disciples their beloved master who foretold of his death multiple times over and of course while he was alive no no no be it far from me no no this can't happen right they didn't understand but how is it that after he died Rose and ascended they were able to go out and talk about his death they talked about his death in light of the Resurrection the Ascension and his return and the scriptures abundantly clear Jesus was the first goer the first of his kind which means anyone who calls himself a Christian following Christ will follow in his footsteps which means when we read death has no more sting over the believer that's what it means it doesn't mean that losing a loved one is not going to hurt it will that's the flesh part and trust me I know there are a lot of widowers in the sound of my voice it does not take away the sting it does not take away the absence or the void it does not but what it does do is it lets you look at the reality that person devoted to Christ Christ is not a liar if Christ said basically I am the first goer and you're following him you too shall follow as he did that means you too will enjoy the resurrected life now somebody who has not got the mindset I don't care what you think there isn't some playing tiddlywinks when the end comes let me show you something I know I haven't opened up the scripture very much but let me show you something that has an impact for me in Luke 16 the passage about the rich man and Lazarus and and if you read this with the eyes I'm speaking about it'll really make sense to you a certain rich man clothed in purple fine linen fared sumptuously every day and there was a certain beggar named Lazarus which was laid at his gate full of sores Desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man's table moreover the dogs came and licked his sores it came to pass that the beggar died and was carried by the Angels into Abraham's bosom the rich man also died and was buried and in hell he lifted up his eyes being in torments and seeth Abraham afar off and Lazarus in his bosom cried saying Father Abraham have mercy on me send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue frame and torment in this flame but Abraham said Son remember that thou in thy lifetime receiveth thy good things and likewise Lazarus evil things just for a little footnote Lazarus received evil things what does that mean it means probably that he suffered he probably didn't have money he probably grappled with a lot of things that we grapple with that's evil things whatever that is but now he is comforted and thou art tormented in other words you spent your time here on Earth pleasuring yourself with the pleasures of this Good Earth but not paying attention to God and what comes next is what I want you to focus on and besides all this between us and you there is a great Gulf fixed so they so that they which would pass from hence you cannot neither can they pass from us basically if you understand this and all the other things that are said about heaven and hell there is a Great Divide there is a chasm the resurrected mindset fixed on Christ understanding we too shall rise that there are sometimes we'll call them mild or light afflictions which Paul talked about which are only for a Time don't think because Something's Happened to you that God isn't with you actually it usually might be a sign that God is with you that he's letting certain things buff at you just like he did to many of the people in the book but it drives home the point there is a Great Divide between those who have a changed mindset towards death dying in the resurrection versus those who may have heard it but are indifferent don't care couldn't be bothered by it Great Gulf fix so you know you might say well that's pretty terrible but if you think about it and if you believe the proofs Jesus is the tangible proof and so many times in the book it says to him that overcometh death so you know I'm thinking to myself there is something to be said there in our understanding you are either fearful of that it brings about fear it brings about the shiverings that's the flesh the spirit says when is my time I'm going to go be with the Lord I don't exactly know 100 what exactly that's going to look like but that's what I'm told multiple times over that makes for good doctrine that makes me stand on that rock to say that's that [Music] [Music] said goodbye coming to this house

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I’m Changing My Lifestyle…


so um I'm on vacation right now so today is actually going to be a really different type of video of me kind of doing something totally new because that's kind of what I've been doing on this vacation um I do want to warn you guys that before I really start the video that I've been here for like a couple of days so you know it's Florida so it's kind of like out of the Sun and I've unfortunately got a pretty burnt like my legs were a little bit firm but I think like luckily they're not ending up being nearly as bad as my arms it seems like they kind of settle down but my arms especially they're like super red especially my left arm to the point where like I think I'm even getting like swelling yeah for sure so if any of you guys notice like the swelling or the you know the redness that's what's that from hurt my shoulder too it's like not good but anyways um yeah so what are we kind of doing here guys like it's kind of like camping like that kind of thing it's really nice camping here but yeah like very new for me so it's kind of kind of show you guys what I'm up to and I just couldn't do it and everything so yeah all right you guys so right now I'm actually just walking over to a boat I'm about to do something pretty cool I'm going to show you guys when I get there such a pretty camping view here so here we go guys all right guys so right now I'm actually just walking over towards a boat um I'm about to go on a boat ride and today I'm going somewhere pretty cool yeah I will show you guys when I get there so yeah it should be fun all right guys so I'm heading oh it's a little windy out but I'm about to head on the boat just like some people getting off we've been doing kind of a lot of boat rides do you want to say hi Mom there's my mom we've both been doing like you've been loving the camping right Mom I think so yeah so we've been um you know doing a lot of these boat rides here we love the boat and yeah I'm about to get on the next boat ride on board yeah hopefully not drop my camera in the water um but yeah oh roads are very nice they're very peaceful relaxing you know so yeah I'm walking on the boat right now okay look at how cute this boat is ah I'm on the boat right now Daddy's boats are really really cute so anyways um to get where we're gonna go we have to take a boat over to Magic Kingdom and now we're gonna take the book like we're I'm actually going so yeah I'm just kind of waiting for everyone it's really pretty here it's like really pretty water really nice boat ride I love it um so yeah look how pretty everything is yeah so pretty good awesome super pretty um yeah so you and I guess we're gonna be now fried bow it's gonna be great I love the boat so all right guys so I'm here now at this kind of like camping section of Disney never actually been here before so should be fun it should be a new experience and um yeah um we're about to go try to find something pretty cool you guys are gonna see soon but it's pretty cool here they have like these little cute tables there's like this cute little beach they have like a volleyball thing pretty cool and yeah we're trying to figure out where something is which you guys will see I don't know if I should surprise you guys they also have a playground over there I literally have no idea if you guys can see the playground but you have a cute little playground there with like swings and slides and yeah it's pretty cute they got golf carts they got these cute golf carts behind me yeah pretty cool stuff oh guys so this is where I said I was gonna go I thought I would surprise you guys sorry oh they're kind of hard to see through the gates but I wanted to come visit these horses so yeah guys at this really cute kind of like camping section a Disney um they have like really cute horses and stuff it's really cool a lot of like carnival music that's cool but yeah I had to come see these horses because they're just like in Little cages oh it's Disney music just what we love um so yeah they're so cute and sweet I love horses so I just had to come see them I've never done this while being in Disney so yeah this visit it's been fun I've hadn't been doing some things that like kind of don't normally do here so it's been a really fun time um also over here guys look at this apparently this is like a um like horse carriage that Waltz like had to buy when he was like you know doing like buying Disney things and yeah it's just like it's so pretty oh my gosh it is like the most beautiful horse carriage here's the cute little cards look at like the workmanship guys that is beautiful and they even all have names sorry if my camera's boring at all you guys can see it says Skyler and then Clydesdale I don't know if that's where he's from or what but super cute hi Skyler oh I know we got Brutus over here oh like a different kind of different colored horse he's so sweet and cute too and then we have Grady oh my gosh there's this is like a white one oh he's so beautiful it's like eating his hay so sweet he's doing like a mukbang video for you guys just kidding but yeah he's so cute and yeah you guys like you know you'll see these like in Magic Kingdom and places like that like you'll see the like the really beautiful horses not positive because I've never gone to visit these before but yeah Disney literally always has like the most beautiful horses so it's really cool like kind of getting to come here oh and just like spend more time with them and just get to like really see them so yeah so nice oh my gosh because Ponies are like my faves I love ponies look at these cute little ponies these are like the really small ones they're adorable we were talking to some of the ladies that work here they're really really nice everyone who works at Disney's so nice they were telling us like weddings and things like that these are some of like the Cinderella ponies and stuff I had to film some of the ponies for you guys and hi Samson guys this one came over you guys just missed it but he just came over to say hi to me sadly I kind of just turned filming but I promised you guys it happens he's such a beautiful horse this is Samson hi Simpson they are so beautiful you guys where's rat oh rat I know red is a big one that's amazing red is beautiful they're all beautiful horses so yeah guys this is a really cool experience I've never done this while being in Disney so it's been like very very nice love to see these horses oh and this is cool too you guys so they have a bunch of like Walt pictures and Disney pictures just kind of showing some of these horses super cool I don't know why everything's so bored today sorry guys but yeah what what I don't know if you loved horses so much it's so cool oh my gosh because look at Skyward Skyler is beautiful look at his eyes they're so blue oh my gosh he is so beautiful you guys he's so beautiful he is like one of the most beautiful horses he's looking at us we love you Skyler his eyes are so pretty they're so blue I know look at his ears he's just like this thing's so cool what a nice horse his eyes are amazing my mom's loving this yeah it's okay I think it's starting to rain so it's like everyone is we love them yeah we had a [ __ ] bye we had to show you guys Skyler because like in all of them but like I always get such pretty eyes oh my gosh all right yeah Brutus oh hi Brutus Curtis is like right up front here great all gravy's leaving oh oh so beautiful amazing oh my gosh they're gonna walk by us oh that is so amazing wow you guys that was amazing it doesn't get better than that doesn't mom that is amazing we love these horses they are great very magical amazing and these cute ponies we love them Leo and Desi oh hi Cheetah cheetah oh that's so cute he is so cute with his uh forehead you can put him on his neck just not on his mouth [Music] uh just not his mouth it's not his mouth lots of shampoos and conditioners and hairsprays and you name it we got it there and only the best for these guys [Music] look crazy you reminded me that I had it over there I don't know what I'm doing that's okay which one is Leo right Leo Leo I've never felt one before very soft Leo you're beautiful you are beautiful Leo [Music] oh my gosh now he stays the size so this is a little bit he is full grown that's amazing I love them me too oh my gosh this is the best day you have a look at the break's amazing that's so beautiful helps keep them cool and it looks really cute it doesn't look so cute I can't thank you enough yeah thank you so much so here I am here so there's this like beautiful kind of like rustic camping Bridge so you know I'm just gonna kind of go over the bridge just get that like nice kind of rustic feel sorry again guys I know my arm is like destroyed [Applause] right yeah [Music] yeah I love those guys they're so cute yep going over this lace Bridge here yes all right here I am Yellowstone National Park here we uh [Music] [Music] all right guys so thank you guys for watching me basically have a whole new experience today kind of doing a camping Vibe kind of thing it's kind of waiting for the boat back from like kind of camping section right now and it's been a great day here so yeah um if you guys like the video subscribe like the video all that all right I love you guys see you guys another video soon bye

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6 Things Cuddling Does to Your Mental Health

  Narrator, Hello, Psych2Goers welcome back to our channel When’s the last time you hugged someone Whether you realized it or not, that good hug or cuddle probably came with some great benefits besides just making you happy. So when are those benefits Here are six things.   Cuddling does to you Number one: It helps reduce stress, Had a stressful day, Go hug, someone Give your sibling or a best friend a good old hug, and you made us feel a bit better.   Why, When we hug or cuddle with someone, the hormone oxytocin is released.   Oxytocin can help lower levels of anxiety and stress, making us feel a bit better in the process.   According to statistics, only a small percentage of you who watch our videos are subscribed.   If you’re not subscribed yet and you enjoy what you see do consider hitting the subscribe button.   This encourages YouTube’s algorithm in promoting more of our mental health content to more people out there.   Two, It can help your immune system, While you may not want na hug someone.   While you’re sick, you could always hug people.   You love in your life, often to help boost your immune system. As mentioned before, hugging someone can reduce our stress levels.   Making us feel happy, Feeling loved, and safe, which often happens from sweet hugs can help our immune system.   Stress, depression, and anxiety can take a toll on our immune system.   Having a weak immune system can mean you’re more prone to getting an infection, So go cuddle with a loved one.   Every now, and then Your immune system will.   Thank you later Number three.   It relieves pain Need a bit of pain.   Relief.   Oxytocin has some benefits Hugging once again releases oxytocin, Holding someone’s hand can make you feel a bit better.   So if you need some pain relief, try, cuddling Cuddling is sure to release a lot of oxytocin enough to even relieve pain. If not simply distract you from some Four May help lower the risk of heart disease, Catherine, A Connors, a holistic, therapist and stress management coach explains in an article from Shape that Hugging, kissing, or more physical acts of touching increases oxytocin levels, which is a bonding hormone.   This chemical reaction can help to reduce blood pressure which in turn reduces the risk of heart disease, but it can also help to reduce stress and anxiety If your heart has less stress, it may not work as hard When we’re stressed our body releases adrenaline, Which means a higher blood pressure and heart rate A lotta.   This can increase one’s risk of a heart attack.   So when you have time, take a deep breath and ask your loved one for a hug Number five Improves a mother’s bond with a child.   Here we go with oxytocin again.   This hormone has some magical effects.   When a mother cuddles their newborn child, they receive a boost of oxytocin.   Due to this, she will not only feel happier, but her stress and anxiety levels will drop as we learned before Skin to skin contact with a mother’s baby after they’re born, can help them bond and keep both mother and child calm and happy And Number six can help reduce social anxiety.   Do you struggle with social anxiety? Well, it’s time for some hugs, Maybe not the first thing you want na do when at a party with a group of strangers.   But if you have a friend who loves to greet people with a good old hug, then you may just have an easier time. Socializing Not only can oxytocin make you feel happy, but your thoughts will be helpful, positive, and hopeful.   This means, if your friend hugs you when they see you at a party and, as we know, hugging helps release oxytocin you made it get a positive boost in your confidence and view of the event.   Suddenly, this social gathering doesn’t seem to intimidate you as much.   Maybe your stress levels have decreased, even if it’s just for a moment that sparks a bit of confidence in you.   So right before you start the party hug, a friend or two, when you greet them, You may just feel a bit more confident and happy.   So will you hug others more often, Who will be your cuddle buddy Share with us in the comments below? We hope you enjoyed this video and, if you did don’t forget to click the like button and share it with a friend Subscribe to Psych2Go and hit the notification bell icon for more content like this, And as always, thanks for watching. As found on YouTube The Destroy Depression ꆛ System-Cure Depression Naturally YOUR DEPRESSION HAS BEEN IN CONTROL LONG ENOUGH. It’s Time to Fight Back ☂🗯 “Depression Sufferer Of Over 20 Years Reveals His Simple 7-Step System That Gives You The Power To Destroy Your Depression, End Your Feelings Of Sadness And Hopelessness, And Get Your Life Back.” “This didn’t just change my life, it saved my life.

Remind Yourself This One Thing Every Hour #shorts

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fG417j_d8lw   Sadhguru, What is the biggest thing in your life? You’re alive right now, So you’re still on tomorrow morning, just one smile, Wow, 8, o’clock in the morning, Wow 8, o’clock still alive. Few laugh Every hour.   Just do this exercise.   Okay, Every hour just remind yourself to check On it.   Please understand this: if you think about God, you will become hallucinatory Only when you are conscious of your mortality.     Will you want to truly know the nature of this life? When you know you’re on right now and tomorrow morning, you may be poof gone now.   You want to know What the hell, What is this? As found on YouTube The Destroy Depression ꆛ System-Cure Depression Naturally YOUR DEPRESSION HAS BEEN IN CONTROL LONG ENOUGH. It’s Time to Fight Back ☂🗯 “Depression Sufferer Of Over 20 Years Reveals His Simple 7-Step System That Gives You The Power To Destroy Your Depression, End Your Feelings Of Sadness And Hopelessness, And Get Your Life Back.” “This didn’t just change my life, it saved my life.

Watch This If You’re Struggling With Your Self-Worth

  Lily, Hey Psych2Goers, and welcome to another video. Thank you all so much for the love and support that you’ve given us enabling us to make yet another exploration into everyday psychology.   So let’s begin.   Loving yourself may sound simple, but we all know how hard it is.   Sometimes it can be a roller coaster ride between being happy with yourself and wishing you could change.   There are so many things that affect your image of yourself, and some of them may not be good Things such as the media set false expectations and ideals.   It can be a long journey to accept this, but it’s worth it.   We made this video to remind you that you should never give up on loving yourself because you deserve it and you’re worth it.   So here are 12 things that do not determine your self-worth Number one.   Your achievements.   Can you relate to loving yourself so much when something goes well, but the second something goes wrong? Your self-worth immediately takes the plunge Whether it’s your grades, your job, or a sport.   It’s easy to base your worth on what you accomplish, but how much you’re worth does not depend on your achievements, especially when it comes to competitions.   You can’t control your competitors, so you don’t need to blame yourself when things don’t go your way.   You are more than just a bullet-point list of all of your accomplishments.   You’re a complex person with a personality hobbies and so much more than your achievements, And it all makes you worth it Number two, your income and job.   Are you second-guessing your career? Do you often think of switching your job While your job plays a big part in your lifestyle? It does not determine your worth.   People who have less money, aren’t lesser than others like society and the media sometimes portrays Your job and income are sometimes the result of your situation.   There are so many factors that influence them like location, the economy, and competition, So they aren’t a reflection of who you are Number three, is your childhood.   Do you avoid thinking about your childhood? Do the memories make you uncomfortable? Your childhood may shape a lot of things about you, but it does not determine your worth.   It’s a phase well on its way out and you mustn’t. Let it overwhelm you Your rough childhood does not define who you are.   After all, you have no control over who your parents are, and you’re not responsible for their choices.   It may take some time to accept this, but your past does not define you Number four, your level of education, Much like your income, your level of education is also the result of so many factors, One of the biggest factors when it comes to deciding whether to Go to college, and where is how much money your family has? You can’t change, how much money your family has or the location of the schools you want na go to.   Therefore, you don’t need to feel bad.   If you don’t have a higher level of education, it doesn’t mean you’re, less intelligent or worth less than those who do Number Five.   How do other people view and treat you? Do you constantly stress about how others see you? Are you constantly trying to live up to their standards? Other people have no way of knowing who you truly are, While family and friends may have a good idea of it.   Only you fully know yourself, Knowing this your self-worth: isn’t based upon others, limited and sometimes biased opinions of you.   You cannot control what other people think or how they act.   Similarly, don’t base your value upon something completely up to others.   Trying to please others will ultimately lead you to be miserable, so try not to stress yourself out with other people’s opinions, even if it is difficult. Number six.   Other people,’s achievements.   Do you compare your achievements to other people?’s? It’s! Okay, because everyone does that occasionally – And it’s so easy to look at what you’ve done and compare it to someone else.’s achievements, especially when the internet gives you access to everyone.’s.   Amazing lives.   It may be hard to internalize.   But what do other people do? Doesn’t define you, You can’t control others.   So the only thing you can do is try your best, Regardless of the result trying your best is enough.   After all, everyone is different with varying skill sets and experiences, so it’s no use comparing two unique people.   Number seven is your appearance.   Are you unhappy with some physical features of yours? Is there anything you wish you could change about your appearance? Chances are, the answer is yes, Almost everyone wants what someone else has, which is the sad truth, especially living in today’s, society. It can be so easy to compare yourself to other people and all the gorgeous models on TV, But try to remember that what you look like doesn’t determine how much you’re worth.   You’ve probably heard it before, and we know how hard it is to accept and internalize, but it’s.   True You don’t need to feel bad because you might not look the way that people on TV do, because everyone is beautiful in their unique way.   Number eight, your relationship status.   Are you still looking for the one, But it seems like everyone.   You know is getting hitched Nowadays, there’s so much pressure to have a significant other and a picture, perfect relationship.   It can feel as if you constantly need to be pursuing someone out of fear of being a desperate lonely single.   However, there’s nothing wrong with being single.   Doesn’t make you less of a person because it means you’re, taking more time to focus on yourself and what you want na do You will only go for it when it feels right.   While a relationship may be nice, it’s, not something you need to have to be valued Nine, the number of friends you have Do you value quantity, over quality when it comes to friends, Or is it difficult for you to keep up with your circle of Friends Having more friends, doesn’t matter what kind of person you are, If you only have a few it doesn’t mean you’re, not sociable or kind, but it means you have a specific taste in people which isn’t a bad thing. You’re invested in finding friends who understand and care for you.   On the other hand, having more friends doesn’t mean you’re shallow and only interested in popularity.   It means that you’re friendly and open to new people.   The number of friends you have doesn’t say anything about your worth.   Rather it’s the quality of your friends that matters 10, your social media status.   Are you an avid scroller? Do you, post on social media habitually or occasionally With the amount of emphasis? The world seems to revolve around how many likes you get.   There is so much pressure to have a picture-perfect, aesthetically pleasing life.   However, your worth is not measured by how many people, like your posts, Social media, is for sharing parts of your life and forming connections with people It’s allowed getting likes.   May give you the satisfaction it doesn’t determine your self-worth.   Social media should be fun and uplifting, not a tool to gain validation. You are valid and worthy regardless of your social media status.   Number 11.   Your age, Both old and young people, are often judged due to their age.   People may think all young people are reckless and selfish, while all older people have their whole lives figured out, But your age, doesn’t control your personality, hobbies, likes dislikes and so much more It’s, not a reflection of who you are so it does. ‘t determine your worth After all Age aint, nothing, but a number Number 12.   Your decision to have children There’s a lot of societal pressure to have children to contribute to society, But having children is completely your own decision Not having children.   Doesn’t make you less worthy than others who do because it’s a major decision that affects you most of all, so it should be up to you Remember your decision is valid and valued either way.   In the end, you’re the only one who determines your self worth Cliche, but it’s, true, Not anyone or anything else, whether it be money, family, or friends.   It may be hard, but just try to remember that you are more than any single aspect.   We hope we were able to give you insight into some of the things that you should, ‘t base your worth on.   Do you use any of these things to measure your self-worth? If so, that’s – okay, we’ve all been there before, and we’re here for you Leave a comment down below and share your experiences and thoughts you have as well. If you find this video helpful be sure to hit the like button and share it with those out there still struggling with their self-worth, Don’t forget to subscribe to Psych2Go and hit the notification bell for more new videos.   Thanks for watching – and we’ll see you soon, As found on YouTube The Destroy Depression ꆛ System-Cure Depression Naturally YOUR DEPRESSION HAS BEEN IN CONTROL LONG ENOUGH. It’s Time to Fight Back ☂🗯 “Depression Sufferer Of Over 20 Years Reveals His Simple 7-Step System That Gives You The Power To Destroy Your Depression, End Your Feelings Of Sadness And Hopelessness, And Get Your Life Back.” “This didn’t just change my life, it saved my life.

The NYU Training Program for Psychedelic Psychotherapy – Jeffrey Guss

  It is an honor and so much fun to be here and it’s been a lot of fun preparing this talk Each time I give this talk, things change and I learn more about the training program. You know I’ve been a psychiatrist for 25 years and when I first trained, I did an anxiety disorders fellowship and I started teaching about anxiety and anxiety disorders.   And that was a hard topic to like get a big picture of and to do in an interdisciplinary way.   And then I started working with addictions and teaching about that, and then gender and sexuality, and each one had its challenges in terms of how to teach residents and fellows about how to practice in some way.   That was not just a cookbook, and you know cookie cutter about.   This is how you treat this problem in this way, but I think that psychedelic, psychotherapy training has been the most challenging thing that I have ever undertaken and it continues to teach me a lot about doing therapy and being with patients and in teaching.   So I’m going to try to cover several different topics.   In my talk today, I want na ask the question: What is psychedelic psychotherapy And in particular, What is psychedelic psychotherapy that we do at NYU with our participants in the cancer anxiety study?   I answered this question by looking at who was doing psychedelic psychotherapy today, who actively participates in offering and consuming psychedelic therapy, and also with some of the methods and techniques that are important, even if psychedelics are not involved.   I’m gon na show a little bit about what it is that we do with participants that are in our study, and what kinds of experiences they undergo when they go through the work with us.   I’m going to talk to you about how we train our therapists, what kinds of experiences we put them through, what kind of teaching we do, and how it is that we conceive of their going from one place to another. I want na ask the question: Why do we call it therapy a theme that you’re gon na hear me address throughout the talk today is why this is therapy and why we are not guides or monitors or sitters, but we are therapists who are Doing therapy with patients We call them participants or subjects, but for the clinical work that we are doing, it is therapists who are very well trained, who are sitting with human beings that are suffering, and we’re doing a short term therapy that has Psilocybin Sessions that are part of it – And I’m gon na close by asking What are the goals of our training program? What do we hope to accomplish in training people to work in the study? So what is Psychedelic Psychotherapy? It is a collection of psychotherapeutic processes that are facilitated by psychedelic agents, So the important part here is that psychedelic therapy has, as its basis a therapeutic process that already exists in the mind of the therapist and in many ways in the mind of the participant when They come in all of the experience all of the training that they’ve, had that patients or the participants experience in therapy.   All of this comes to bear on what happens to people when they enter our research project in this way, it’s distinct from psychedelic agents as neuroscientific probes, into the function of the brain and the mind, and it’s also different in some important ways from psychedelic journeys that are undertaken for a recreational purpose or a spiritual purpose, or artistic creativity or individually.   So this is a very specific therapy that’s done with people who are suffering from a certain condition.   So what we do is not shamanic healing.   It is not neo-shamanic healing.   However, it does absorb many of the core teachings and the wisdom that come from those traditions.   Psychedelic therapy is deeply embedded and inextricably embedded in the knowledge systems of the subject and the guide.   Here we see Copernicus looking at the sky with a very primitive telescope and what Copernicus saw was the data that he gathered and how he interpreted.   It was all very much based on what he knew about the heavens and what he thought was going on in the heavens.   Now he may have seen things that surprised him that caused him to revise what he thought. But basically, what happened with that? Telescope was profoundly influenced by what he expected to see what he was surprised by and the basic knowledge base that was going on in his culture at that time.   300 years later, we have a much fancier instrument looking at the sky, but it’s more or less the same sky and more or less the same kind of instrument.   But the way the data was gathered, the questions that were asked the way the data was manipulated and interpreted and the kinds of impressions that were drawn from it were very different.   However, the same kind of instrument and the same kind of sky, So this shows how deeply it is in the mind of the observer and the looker and the person that’s participating in the experience that the catalyst or the technology which in our case is psychedelics.   You know has to be understood, So I want to reintroduce the idea of psycholytic therapy.   Psycholytic therapy is much referenced, but not that much talked about anymore.   It’s a kind of therapy that was done in the Fifties and Sixties.   It existed more in Europe than in America, although there was quite a bit of psycholytic therapy that happened here, in the modern psychedelic research Renaissance, there’s much more emphasis on psychedelic therapy, which is if you want na, be – and this is quite reductionist, Though, to say that psychedelic therapy has ego death brought about by the agent followed by a peak, spiritual or mystical experience, So this tends to be more unitary in the concept that is it’s more or less the same for everyone, and in fact, all of you Have probably seen the nine the list of nine criteria that define the mystical experience and in our study, we like to measure people to say how many of them they’ve accomplished.   You know: do they get three or four or five, And if they get nine, then they’ve had a complete, mystical experience.   So in this way, the idea is towards a kind of universal experience, and this is seen as having somewhat magical properties to heal. It brings about decreased death, anxiety, and transformation in character, which is seen, and it’s sort of a goal that people look for in research.   However, it is a goal that is deeply bedded in contextualization.   It’s more likely to happen with someone who’s prepared for it and who knows how to experience it.   It’s not like it never happens in unprepared people, but in our study, people who have experienced meditators and have worked with ego death as it occurs in meditation retreats.   That kind of person is more likely to experience ego death, followed by a spiritual or mystical experience, And this quasi-religious preparation is, you know, more likely to bring this about for this kind of individual, And in this case, the therapy supports the medicine experience.   So the goal of the therapist in the context is to support this profound and shattering medical experience.   Psycholytic therapy, on the other hand, is more biographical and more psychodynamic.   It’s more individualized and has more to do with that individual’s, time on the earth and their experiences in childhood and adulthood, and it’s also deeply embedded in the relationship with the therapists who are in the room.   In this way, the medicine supports the therapy experience and there’s a lot of writing that happened about psycholytic therapy that advanced whatever kind of therapy that patient and that therapist were doing in the Fifties and Sixties if they were Jungian therapists, if they were Freudian Therapists or Rogerian or relational therapists, the psychedelic experience used in a psycholytic manner advanced that particular kind of therapy.   In our study, we measure and look for a mystical or spiritual experience, but many people have a combination of a psycholytic and a psychedelic experience, and some people have only a psycholytic experience, and this falls then, of course, to the therapists to interpret this and help. The patient, the ah participant works with it in a meaningful way To make this point one more time.   Ana s, Nin said We don’t see things as they are.   We see them as we are.   So why is this point so important? Why do I hammer away at this point? Because when you teach a certain kind of therapy, you’re called upon to explain much of the basis of that therapy. How it works, why it works? What you’re doing, what distinguishes it from other kinds of therapy – and these are very difficult questions to answer about psychedelic therapy.   For many reasons, One is that it’s not been done very much in the last forty years in an overground above-board way.   And secondly, because there are so many different forms of psychedelic therapy.   But when you want na teach something, especially in a rather traditional setting as we have at NYU, you have to have a matrix or a structure in which you’re setting out to teach a body of knowledge to therapists who don’t have it.   So you have to decide What is the body of knowledge? What are we doing? Why are we doing it? Most people would agree that we are opening up something inside.   So What are we opening up to with psychedelics? Why are we opening up to this? Why do we think it’s a good idea to unleash or open up these kinds of restrictions that happen in the brain, naturally, for a period of six or eight or ten, or twelve hours? Why was it closed in the first place? What are we looking for And are we instead opening up to something outside the self rather than inside the self? And these are all questions which it’s easy to ask.   But when you teach it, it’s important to have some answers, and yet these are answers. We don’t have immediately at hand So an important question: How do we develop new narratives out of being involved in the study? That is How do the people who come to us for help come away feeling better feeling, like their life, is more meaningful, less afraid of death, and deeper engaged with the life that they have and able to know and experience that and speak of it? What can help these changes become long-lasting? All of these are questions that go into teaching psychedelic therapy and they’re questions that I wouldn’t say that I have all the answers to which makes it especially hard to teach And when you work at NYU or any academic setting, you have To make certain that what you’re doing fits into quite a traditional model of education, So part of the goal that we’re grappling with is how to develop a coherent model for teaching psychedelic-assisted therapy to conventionally trained therapists.   All of the people that have been through our training program are trained and have extensive experience in working with patients, either as psychiatrists as psychologists, nurses, social workers, or family therapists.   So they’re all fully trained therapists.   And how do we teach this additional method? Or this additional kind of intervention, Or how do we teach therapists that know how to work with patients, then to use this new kind of experience using their unique skills and abilities and in some way trying to bring about a coherent treatment? Because if you’re saying This is psychedelic psychotherapy, you’re, defining it as something specific.   You’re saying This is a certain kind of therapy.   This is what it is, and this is what it is, ‘t and that kind of boundaries are problematic, if you think about things in a holistic way or a nondual way, that isn’t the way that psychiatry works.   You know if you’re, defining a certain kind of therapy and you want na say have a fellowship in psychedelic psychotherapy.   Then the chairman is gon na say Well.   What is that, And how do you know it’s something, And how do you know when someone’s doing it, And how do you know when someone’s doing it well, And how do you know if somebody’s not doing it, but it Looks like they are, And these are all questions that you have to have at least practical answers to You also wan na answer, questions like Who can become a psychedelic therapist Who should become a psychedelic therapist And who shouldn’t.   We tried to answer the question: How is our work different from the psychedelic therapy that’s done by underground workers, Of which hundreds? If not thousands, of sessions, are, ah, you know happening every year? And how do we integrate our training with the therapist’s existing approaches, And how do we bring our responsibilities, as you know, trained professional therapists to the psychedelic therapy setting? So this is the title of our study: Effects of Psilocybin, Assisted Psychotherapy on Anxiety and Psychosocial Distress. In Cancer Patients, This therapy occurs in a very specific context.   It occurs in Manhattan at NYU.   This is our research center in the upper right-hand, corner of the Bluestone Center for Clinical Research.   People walk around with white coats on and stethoscopes around their necks, and so the people who come are, for the most part, very mainstream individuals who have cancer.   Some of them quite advanced cancer.   Some people are not too ill, but many people are quite ill and they’re involved with traditional cancer regimens with scans radiation chemotherapy, and these are the patients who come to us and enter our study by and large.   These are the members of the NYU team, Steve Ross, who I think might be here in the room Steve Over there And Tony Bossis, who spoke on the first day of the conference, Gabby Agin Liebes, who might be here also over there And Carey Turnbull.   Ah, director of development, Alexander Belser, who might be here, Alex No and Effie Nulman, another consultant and somebody who helps us with development – And this is an overview of our study for those of you who aren’t familiar with what it is we are doing.   I thought I would show you what it is that the therapists do in our study and what it is that we’re preparing them to do.   There are two dosing sessions: Dosing A and Dosing B. They’re, separated by seven weeks Before Dosing Session.   There are three preparatory sessions.   These are about two hours long.   Then there’s Dosing Session, A which is either a placebo or an active drug.   No one knows not the participant or the therapist or the PI or anybody.   The only person who knows is the compounder who makes up the pill on a milligram per kilogram basis and puts it into a special envelope and then a special bottle and it’s all a very special audience.   Laughter After Dosing Session A there’s a seven-week period and then there are integrative psychotherapy sessions Now if the person received a placebo or it appears to everyone that they got a placebo, then those next three sessions tend to be more continued preparation, because the experience With Psilocybin is the high point of the experience, so they either have in essence, six preparatory sessions and three integrative or three preparatory and six integrative sessions, And there’s a subtle.   Well, you know not so subtle, dynamic differences that happen when a person is disappointed if they didn’t get an active drug first, but everyone knows that by the end of the study, they will have received a dosing session in both conditions.   So, after the Dosing Session B, then there are about four weeks or five weeks during which there are three more integration sessions.   So we have nine therapy sessions and two dosing sessions. Who are the psychedelic therapists of today To think about what we needed to learn, what we needed to do? I asked myself the question Who is doing work with psychedelics and who is doing work that feels related to psychedelic therapy, I came up with four categories: The Shaman, the Neo Shaman, the Meditation Adept and the Palliative Care Therapist, and the Psychodynamic Therapist of today, And I’m going to go through each one and talk a little bit about what we learned from them and what I think we needed to incorporate from these different disciplines.   The shaman is the earliest and longest-lasting longest known psychotherapist in recorded history.   A core of shamanism is communication with the spirit world.   This occurs quite concretely.   It’s, not a metaphor.   It’s, not an aspect of the mind.   It is a literal communication with spirits and the ability to work with unseen and mysterious forces and to intercede for the benefit of the sufferer is a core activity of the shaman.   The shaman enters a trance state voluntarily, either with or without psychedelics, and experiences their soul or spirit, leaving the body or journeying or traveling on behalf of the individual, who is suffering The shaman interacts with spirits and will command intercede or commune with them in some way.   To bring about a benefit for the individual who is in the ceremony or for the tribe or community as a whole, There’s quite a similarity between shamanic training and psychoanalytic training In both the individual by definition, suffers from some kind of malady.   Some kind of unhappiness, frustration or fear, or anguish, some kind of suffering, which is both defined by and treated by a particular knowledge system. To become a psychoanalyst, you have to be, you know, upset neurotic troubled in some way by audience laughter seek treatment with an analyst, and undergo a genuinely therapeutic psychoanalytic process, And anybody who doesn’t do.   That is probably not going to be very much good.   As a psychoanalyst, enthusiasm for the method is a requirement for practicing it effectively also you learn a great deal about what it means to be a patient and what it means to be a therapist from working with your analyst.   So the analyst, as well as the shaman, suffer from some kind of malady, and often both are, you know, marked at a very early age as headed towards a particular career.   This is true for many therapists, And so this malady is cured or ameliorated in some way by shamanic practices or by psychoanalytic practice, and this is the embodiment of the wounded healer paradigm, in which the person who’s conducting the ceremony or conducting the analysis is Not expected to be perfect or flawless, but is expected to be someone who lives with a spirit wound and is working at healing it or has had it healed in some way and developed compassion and a unique ability to relate to other people.   As a part of that process, Part of the culmination of a shamanic quest – and this is quite different from psychoanalytic training – is a confrontation with death.   This confrontation with death, which often is accentuated in psychedelic experiences, is a catalyst for moving to a different stage of being without the encounter with death and the experience of dying either in a trans state.   You know nonpsychedelic induced or with medicine the reaching out the hunger, the need, the expansion and extension of oneself to find a new way of relating to life to oneself doesn’t happen, And so it is this very terror and reaching through the sense Of groundlessness and shattering that transformation and rebirth can occur, And this is one of the things that is most important, I think for therapists to be able to work with participants in this study And to approximate this, we have a great deal of emphasis in The training process on confrontation with one’s, own mortality, fears about death and experiences of death and mortality in friends and family and patients The shamanic practitioner may take medicines and, as I’m sure everyone here knows, the practice may be that the shaman Takes the medicine and not the seeker or sufferer in their culture? That is not what happens in our study.   It is the person with cancer anxiety who takes the medicine and the therapists in the room with him or with her are quite sober, although there is sometimes a kind of contagious experience of entering a trance with them, but we’re all sober pharmacologically speaking And in Shamanism psychedelic plants are considered gifts of the gods.   They are mediators between the gods and humans and may carry special communicative potential, and it is also believed that it is the plant itself that is the god or the plant, contains the spirit power Mushrooms are found widely available in nature. If you know where to look – and you know when to look, They are not secreted away and they are not expensive.   You just need to know what to do with them, where to find them, and how to use them In research.   The molecules of Psilocybin are considered to be inert and to not have spirit within themselves, and yet they’re considered to be very dangerous and we had to install a very expensive and huge safe to protect a relatively small amount of Psilocybin.   It’s weighed every day and there is some kind of danger that exists with the human beings around the Psilocybin because it needs this much protection.   So, while these mushrooms are available growing in cow dung in certain places, when they arrive at First Avenue and 25th St, we need a big safe to keep everybody feeling.   Okay, about it audience laughter.   Now the shaman is a person who exists at the margins of society, but that doesn’t mean that he or she is a counter-cultural agent, because those who exist at the margins are very much a part of culture a part of society.   The center can’t define itself if there isn’t a margin against which it can say.   Well, we are not that, but we’re glad that person is here, because we can find what we don’t have in ourselves in them or we can hate them or we just need them in some way, But the shaman, perhaps a person marginalized in Society is a very well known and respected and valued person in society, so there are culturally bound narratives of illness and healing that the shaman knows and that the other members of the community know So even before a person goes to a shaman.   What’s wrong? How it gets better, all these are cultural narratives that exist. You know as a part of the culture.   There’s a highly ritualized training process, with a strong respect for tradition.   So, although working with psychedelics is counter-cultural and edgy and kind of outlaws in the underground circles in the Western world, I think within indigenous cultures it’s not that way at all.   There’s a training program.   There’s an apprenticeship which I’ll talk about in a little bit and it also may be a part of the shaman’s job in a ceremony to reinforce pro-social values and social regulation and it’s.   This function that’s thought to be significant in the ways that certain psychedelic-based religions facilitate recovery from alcoholism and other addictive disorders.   Okay, so we’ve covered the indigenous shaman.   Now I want to move on to the Neo shaman or Psychedelic Sitter.   The training and practice for the Neo shaman are much less well defined.   The practitioner may know of yoga may have a meditation practice, may do Chinese medicine or acupuncture, and uses intuition and many concepts from Transpersonal Psychology that are brought together as part of his or her method for doing psychedelic sitting or guiding The neo-shaman is generally naturally Emergent or self-selected A person says I would be willing to sit for you, and I believe that I have the credentials to do that or an individual may say I want you to do it And there’s little training or apprenticeship program that empowers the Sitter or the guide to know what they’re doing, except their own direct experience and reading and observing other people. The neo-shaman again has direct contact with the spirit world and enters into spirit reality through altered states and often in neo-shamanism.   You see skepticism towards monotheistic religions, allopathic medicine, especially psychiatry, and overvaluation of the scientific method which is known as scientism, which is the irrational over belief in the scientific method and the belief that scientific knowledge is somehow harder or firmer or more powerful or more important or more Reliable than other kinds of truth, I’m not sure why this is capitalized.   It shouldn’t be Neo.   Shamanism is a descendant of the ideology of American Transcendentalism, which I’ll talk about in just a minute.   Another distinction – and this is, of course, a generalization that shamanism there is generally a greater emphasis on searing pain, hardship, and terror than you see.   You know by and large, in Neo shamanism, The Neo, shaman theory and methods are generally prohibited, prohibited discourse in medical circles.   You know when you are talking to oncologists or nurse practitioners at the cancer center, and you start using the language of shamanism.   You can see people start to roll their eyes and glaze over and stop listening to you, And so, since we’re trying to persuade them to refer patients to us and to take what we’re doing seriously.   You know this whole discourse is prohibited, even though it may have a great deal of value in communicating with the subject in the study And so is the Neo Shaman.   This discourse is not preferred in medical science, PET scans are preferred, And yet we have many people who are bridges, Stan Grof, famously bridged, psychiatry and Neo shamanism and no course or lecture on psychedelic therapy would be complete without giving credit to James Fadiman. Who’s written this extremely useful guide? The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide and Neal Goldsmith his book, Psychedelic Healing, and numerous others, So the mindfulness adept? Ah, it was clear to us early on that many of the practices and teachings within meditation are important for us, as practitioners, and for the participants to know how to do.   Meditation is a technique for developing the skill of mindfulness, focusing on self-regulation through careful attention.   Focusing on immediate experience and developing curiosity, openness, and acceptance, One of the underlying themes that happen in existential anxiety is that there’s little context to speak about the terror rage and disappointment that occurs after the development of a cancer diagnosis or cancer treatment and the looking Away the encouragement to cope the encouragement to fight the encouragement to be positive.   All of these draw attention away from the most difficult, painful searing, hard questions and processes that need to occur, and this capacity of curiosity, openness, and acceptance of what is that is central.   Mindfulness is something that I thought was quite important: to bring to training.   Mindfulness and meditation are established techniques for entering altered states of consciousness, with the idea that entering them can be inherently transformative and bring about an improvement in outlook mood, and connection to other people Nonjudgemental.   Radical self-acceptance is also important in meditative practice, something which we bring to bear with each person as they prepare for their psychedelic experience And Psychodynamic Therapist.   There are many many things that we could say about what a psychodynamic therapist knows how to do, but much of it is embedded in his or her training.   One thing that I think cuts across all schools of psychotherapy is that we help the patient, develop, alternative meanings and narratives about life.   We do that in different ways. We do that in different with different techniques, but we all hope to help someone have a better sense of what their life means and how they can speak to themselves and understand themselves in it, and in particular, here.   Cancer, illness, and death Narrative therapy is a particular form of therapy, in which truth is not just something that is discovered objectively.   It is something that is constructed in the development of a narrative between the speaker and the listener, and this is a theme that I think comes up again and again when trying to understand how to use psychedelics in working with cancer-related anxiety, Like the shaman and The neo shaman, the psychodynamic therapist, believes in unseen forces.   We don’t call them spirits or ancestors that exist in the spirit world.   We call them the Ego, the Superego, the Id internalized object, relations, and internalized schemas.   Many many of these metaphors, I believe, are for the similar processes that occur, But again, the psychoanalyst and the psychodynamic therapist are trained to work with these forces and just like the shaman to intercede on the patient’s behalf.   To try to make things better Within psychodynamic therapy, there is a deep commitment to a personal healing journey, and extensive work toward self-knowledge, and understanding of transference and countertransference.   All of these are invaluable in working with patients in our study And there’s a long history that’s not hidden from the people who are here in this room, but certainly hidden within traditional psychiatric and psychoanalytic circles of using LSD and other psychedelics to Facilitate psychotherapy – and here are three books – This one in the right-hand corner.   I’d never seen it before, and I was kind of intrigued to see it showing up in my Google Images search My Self and I, with its nice 60’s graphics.   Now, psychodynamic therapy is very consistent with Western norms, medical ethical norms, and standards, so it fits in comfortably with what we’re trying to do. So before telling you about the structure of our program, I want na do one more theory-based excursion and talk about the set and setting.   We often think about set and setting as the set being the participant’s intention and the setting where the therapy occurs in some ways, this is our setting Manhattan streets Bluestone.   This is the couch that the sessions occur on, but I’d like to suggest that two other contexts are deeply influential in the work that we do, and these are existential psychotherapy and American Transcendentalism.   In particular, we work with Victor Frankl’s, Logotherapy Logotherapy, I’m gon na try to reduce it to just a few soundbites as its core that life has meaning under all circumstances, even the most miserable ones, and this biography of Frankl, showing this concentration Camp march at the top, and then this very thoughtful image of him as a young man, I think, says volumes about how he came to develop this philosophy.   He believes that our main motivation for living is our will to find meaning And that, when the search for meaning is blocked, there is psychological damage that occurs According to Frankl.   We discover this meaning in three different ways.     Earlier today, Steve talked about meaning-making therapy, which is a kind of practical technique for bringing these philosophical ideas to bear in the clinical situation.   So the meaning is discovered in three different ways: by creating a work or doing a deed.   By experiencing something or encountering someone or by the attitude we take So by creating experiencing or taking an attitude, Frankl says that everything can be taken from Man, but one thing: the last of human freedoms: to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.   This is his famous book Man,’s, Search for Meaning – and I want na point out now that Logotherapy is not a psychology of the mind. It’s not about the Id.   The Ego.   Psychology internalized objects, relations, developmental stages, and perinatal matrices, It’s not about.   Oh, if you look, this is what we find like you, ‘re making a map.   It is a therapy of action about the creation of meaning the intention choice and the creation of meaning And Irving.   Yalom can’t be left out.   American Transcendentalism is a philosophy and a form of literature that had its origins in the 19th century and some ways, lives on today.   In the New Age movement, American Transcendentalism holds in the inherent goodness of both human beings and nature.   Now this is quite different than Freudian psychology of the late 19th century and 20th century which said that the inherent nature of human beings is filled with steaming, cauldrons of Id and rage and libidinal energy that needs to be modified and modulated to fit with The demands of society, It’s quite different than American Transcendentalism, which says that the individual is pure and it is society that is corrupting American Transcendentalism is an inherently optimistic philosophy.   There is a great deal of belief in the self and the self-identity, in creativity and infinite possibilities of the human soul. There’s a belief in spiritual progress and the interconnection of all beings, the immense grandeur of the soul, and that the interior is a source of goodness and wisdom.   So I’d like to come back down to Earth now and tell you about the structure of the training program that we have, and this is the structure that we have used just in our last year of training, which is the third cycle of training that We’ve offered.

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This is Shira Schuster, who is soon to be a Ph.D. and has been my co-instructor in the course for this year and has been a tremendous help and creative force in putting the training program together.   So there are three core aspects to the training program: a one-year mentorship with one of the three investigators in the study, Steve Ross, Tony Bossis, or myself, a didactic series and work with two study subjects.   This is the schedule with which we began last year.   It unfortunately, was blown to bits by Hurricane Sandy, but by about February we started to recover and get back on track to all the papers that we wanted to discuss, and I’m going to talk about the didactic first.   I don’t have all of the didactic papers here summarized, but just a few of them.   We start with this fabulous paper by Matt, Johnson and Bill Richards, and Roland Griffiths on the safety and basic medical knowledge of psychedelics.   This paper covers what ten other papers would be needed to convey the information about who is eligible, and who shouldn’t be taken into treatment. What are the risks? What are the basic techniques? It’s a great paper and offered a tremendous amount of information in a quick, ah, not a quick, but in a concise way to people who were going through training.   The next is a wonderful article by Alison Witte, no relation to Stephen who’s organizing our conference today. This is a paper that I found in a journal on holistic nursing.   She worked with nurses, who had worked with people who were seriously ill in Eastern Kentucky in Appalachia, and she looked at who had spontaneous mystical experiences while they were in the hospital and what contexts led to their arising.   What nurses did that facilitated people being able to have mystical experiences being able to talk about them and what kinds of things the nurses learned about? How to help the person utilize that mystical experience in their life afterward? She also, interestingly, talked about the impact on the nurse that was doing the listening and participating in the creation of this shared experience.   So this is a really useful article, nothing to do with psychedelics, but is really about how you occasion a mystical experience. What do you do that enhances the likelihood of that happening? We did some historical papers looking at LSD, assisted psychotherapy, and the human encounter with death by Bill, Richards Stan Grof, and others, and Pahnke’s groundbreaking article on the transcendental mystical experience in the human encounter with death.   We studied contemporary scholarship in psychedelic research, Roland Griffiths et al 39, s paper on Psilocybin, occasioning, and mystical experiences, and we took a crash course in Yalom and Frankl by studying this paper by Bill.   Breitbart Psychotherapeutic Interventions at the End of Life, A Focus on Meaning and Spirituality.   So here I think you’re hearing again the ongoing theme of the establishment of meaning as a core process, that we encourage our therapists to bring to people in the study, So that’s the didactic series.   If you want a copy of it, I’d be happy to send it to you by email.   The next part I want to describe is the mentorship program.   The mentorship program is defined as just that, and not as supervision. We used the idea of supervision at first but decided that mentorship is better for several reasons.   A mentor is more of a guide, a friend, and a supporter.   There’s more equality in a mentoring relationship than in a supervisory relationship, And since all of the people that are trainees in our program are fully trained therapists, we felt that they were enhancing or developing or extending their skills rather than learning something from scratch.   So we use the term mentorship.   Also, there’s a certain amount of teaching that comes back the other way that can be quite profound, and I’ll tell you a little bit more about that later.   The mentorship relationship is confidential.   The mentor doesn’t say anything and holds the material found in the mentorship sessions, with equal confidentiality to what you would hear in therapy.   The intention of the mentorship is an integration of all aspects of the experience.   The trainee is encouraged to discover new aspects of himself or herself and others through the relationship.   In other words, How does my existing identity as a therapist change grow to transform? What do I leave away? What do I do more of? How am I changed in this experience? In learning how to work with psychedelic therapies And a core part of the mentorship is dyad training. Now, when you work with two study subjects, which is a third part of the program, you work with your mentor for at least one of the sessions, So each therapy team each therapy dyad – has to do dyad training And the dyad training, which I’m, going To tell you about in a second is the central part of the mentorship relationship at the beginning, So you meet for these six two hour sessions, doing dyad training and by that time usually, you’ve gotten started working with your first patient, Your first participant So At that point, you’re doing clinical work.   You’re talking about what’s going on.   You’re talking about what’s happening in the reading, But the dyad training is a central way that the mentor and the trainee get to know each other.   The dyad sessions occur six.   There are six of them, They’re about one to one and a half hours, and only the therapists are present, so it’s a group of two and what happens in there also is confidential.   Each session has a defined theme, even though you’re encouraged to do free-flowing discussion and talk about anything that arises that you think is going to be relevant to working together as a dyad team, And we used to have supervision after the third and sixth Sessions, but I think that’s pretty much fallen by the wayside, So the goal is the establishment of a close relationship.   If you’re going to be a dyad team, you have to know one another as therapists.   You have to understand how somebody thinks about life, death suffering, and when I first picked this picture, I thought that it was just kind of cutesy, but I realized that one of the times I’ve, given this talk before that there, something quite similar Between this tin can string telephone and that’s that you either are listening or speaking and to change, you have to change your position And the dyad sessions occur in the same way when you’re speaking, a person is expected to say what They have to say to describe their experience and the other person listens.   It’s, not a therapy session.   You’re not expected to ask questions to deepen the experience, But it’s a practice of a certain kind of meditation. Listening The first session early memories and contemporary experiences of death and losses, Family members, pets, friends, and patients that have died, Each person is invited to talk about their life from their earliest memories to the present time of what death and mourning has been like for them.   This is also the time to talk about early memories of awareness of your mortality and thoughts and feelings about your death and the death of loved ones.   The second dyad session is an invitation to talk about profound, mystical, or spiritual experiences, including experiences with entheogens.   So confidentiality is also a part of the protection of this because speaking openly about entheogenic experiences or psychedelic use in a context like this brings about certain kinds of ethical and legal anxiety in people.   So only with confidentiality, I think, are people free to speak openly about what they’ve done, what they’ve, not done, what it has meant to them, and the part of them that they’re going to bring to their dyad work, which is The work with the participant that relates to their own experience or lack of experience with entheogens.   They can speak about their experience as a sitter and as a guide with shamans or guides or meditation teachers that they might have had.   And this allows a basic kind of groundwork to be established between the dyad, as they’re, getting ready to sit with someone who’s going to enter into a state which is rather unpredictable in terms of what they’re going to be confronted with.   Holding The third session involves looking at pain and suffering in family members, friends, and patients and experiences with cancer or other terminal conditions, including experiences in working with patients who are disfigured and whose bodies are failing, and the impact that this has ten minutes.   Okay, so session.   Four near-death experiences Session, five audience laughter beliefs regarding heaven and hell and religious history Session, six extreme states in psychotherapy, but actually by session six, everybody’s pretty much done and we’ve talked about everything there is to talk about So that’s, The one-year mentorship and I’m – going to skip over that and talk about the study and what happens during the sessions. So I presented this slide before, but I’m going to go over it again.   You’ve got three prep sessions.   A dosing session, three more sessions, a dosing session, and then three more So there are nine therapy sessions and two dosing sessions.   The three preparatory sessions: this is the study room.   This is what it looks like.   This is a model pretending to be in session and the first prep session.   So during the first prep session, it’s divided into two parts: there’s education to the participant regarding goals, the purpose of the study, time tables expectations, and education regarding the range of possible effects of the medication side, effects, rescue medications that we have On board what we’re going to do to try to help them through a difficult experience, and after that, then we do a history during which we take a psychosocial history, in particular a cancer narrative.   We talk about family relationships, hobbies, work, political, social, and religious affiliations, the experience with psychedelics, meditation practice, and anything that you would want to do to get to know somebody and develop a trusting relationship with them.   The second session is a life review.   In this, we do a rather structured exercise, which I’ll show you an example of in just a minute, but you go over much of the same material you go over where you were born growing up where you went to school when your dad transferred to Another state: what happened when your grandmother died? You know if you had to go into the service like whatever these important turning points are in your life. We talk about them literally on a timeline and examine the meaning of those events in the individual’s life to see how their life has come to have meaning how events were made, the meaning of how catastrophe or disappointment or anger or exaltation moments were Given meaning and came to structure the way their life worked, In particular in the life review, we look at the cancer narrative, which has to do with how you reacted to the diagnosis, what the diagnosis meant and the relationship between cancer spirituality and how the individual found, Meaning So this is a life review exercise on the left hand, the side you can see birth about two-thirds of the way across you can see.   Now this is a man in his late forties and on the very right-hand, side.   He writes his death, So you can see between birth and now there’s.   Many many events and I’ll give you a closeup in just a minute and about halfway through.   You can see that he didn’t leave enough space, which is like the proportion wasn’t right.   So he wrote a little.   U going down to write in some more information, And this is a close-up of what he wrote At the bottom.   He wrote his regrets loss of friends.   He had to care for his mother when he had pneumonia.   He was mean to Scott when he was a kid and did well in school and became a quarterback. All of these were things that he felt were important and just getting this information writing it here and taking this time was a profound experience for him each person that we work with says You know I’ve never done anything like this before and It’s quite illuminating to have these memories sought in this relatively structured way, And then the third is taking a spiritual history.   To take the spiritual history, we use these two mnemonics, HOPE and FICA, and I’m gon na skip over this because I’m running out of time.   But these you know information about these is easily available online, The spiritual history.   What are your beliefs More about the spiritual history more about the spiritual history, The dosing sessions? Now I’m not going to say a great deal about the dosing sessions, because what we do is not vastly different than what is written about quite extensively.   How do we handle people in various kinds of situations, what do we expect, what do we invite them to do, and how do we handle crises? This is quite extensively covered by many many people and what we do.   Isn’t different from it.   We have headphones with music.   The therapists take a supportive role and respond actively if necessary.   We have an opening ritual that focuses on internal direction and immersion in the inner experience.   The therapists are invited to watch, listen and be attuned and very careful. Listening to the first post-journey, narrative, usually around two or three, the person sits up, takes off their headphones and eyeshades, and starts talking about what they’ve been through, and this first narration of the experience is quite important, and listening to it Carefully, I think, sets the ground for how you’re gon na work with it in subsequent sessions.   Then you have a closing ritual So the integration sessions.   These are the least well-defined part of the process, and they vary considerably from one dyad team to another, and while there is an effort in academic research to have uniformity and to have a manualized approach to things, I think that these integration sessions are a place Where it’s going to be quite a challenge to do this, because what the person brings, what happened to them in their session and who the therapists are and the bond that they’ve tied the bond that they’ve made.   The tie that’s happened among the three of them is going to define what happens in the integration sessions So again making meaning of a psychedelic experience and incorporating that meaning into one 39.   S perspective on yourself and in the world is an essential part of what we’re trying to do Now.   This is Reverend Mike Young, and this is a slide that I didn’t know about this quote, and it was Cody Swift.   That turned me on to this wonderful quote, and this is in some ways the idealized experience in which the ego, which is constructed by memory and determines what we think under Psilocybin.   You transcend this ego.   It’s not who I am, and the loss of self is not as distressing as it was before.   So this is kind of the idealized experience and this is a picture actually of Marsh Chapel, where the Good Friday experiment happened, and people praying in that very same chapel. But not everybody has this full experience.   Some people have a much more biographical experience and I don’t think I’ve read a description of what you need to do better than what came forward quite recently in this lovely small monograph by Torsten Passie.   Describing what kinds of things can happen in a session – and I don’t think that much of what’s here is going to be new to anyone here, so I’m not going to go through this in the interest of time and again.   Well, one point that I wanted to make about this is that Sometimes you hear you know when people are talking about Katherine MacLean’s report on openness that 14 months later, openness was found to be increased by a single psychopharmacological event, And when that phrase is Used it reduces the experience to the drug itself and I think that the mystical experience is sometimes seen as kind of like the magic that brings about some kind of transformation without being contextualized in a certain kind of therapeutic process.   And I’d like to suggest that it really isn’t quite this way and that, even when a full mystical experience occurs, the way that it is held, the way that it is worked with the way that it is applied and connected to the individual.’s, life is very much a part of a therapeutic process that occurs So what have we learned from working with our trainees? This came out of a discussion that I had with Steve Ross and Tony Bossis a month ago, and I’ve got nine points that I want na make and that will bring me to the end of my talk.   For today.   There is a complex relationship between spiritual states, the cancer narrative, and experience with altered states.   Now we hear these words – and these words are said a lot, but sitting with people and trying to figure out what their cancer narrative means to them, what their life meant and how life has meaning, how cancer affected the meaning in life and the relationship of Those two to this one psychedelic experience: these are like bridges that need to be made and they need to be made actively Just sitting back and saying.   So what was it for? You are not going to bring about a very powerful connection unless it’s.   Already happened So this complex relationship, I think, has much to be found and discovered about it, but it’s quite important. Secondly, that there’s a great variety in the way that spiritual distress and existential anxiety present themselves In general, the greater the mystical experience, the less active integration is needed.   So this is what you know.   Some of our mentors have felt that when there’s a more full mystical experience, the integration sort of happens on its own or kind of happens.   Naturally, When it’s less and there’s more of a biographical or psychodynamic, then more dynamic work is needed.   Number four involvement, as a therapist in a study, brings about deep personal changes in the relationship to cancer, death, and therapeutic stance.   For me, this had to do with facing patients who were dying and talking about dying.   Looking at my feelings about death, illness, pain, cancer pain, and my mother,’s, death from cancer.   All of this got activated in me and I realized how much I had been living.   You know once or twice removed from these very deep existential issues, because when you work with addictions, you’re almost always working with somebody who’s going to have a new birth and a new life in sobriety, and there’s much of a hopeful Perspective so this reduction in lifespan and the threat of dying from cancer brought about a change for me.   On the other hand, I work in my therapy dyad with somebody who’s been working in cancer care for 15 years, and her attunement to defenses denial around cancer, anxiety, diagnosis, anxiety. The way that somebody hears or doesn’t hear information that they’ve got is very, very refined for her imagining this new technique.   This new way of helping a certain kind of suffering that she was so familiar with was quite different for her.   It is like What is a psychedelic experience for this particular patient, going to do for this very familiar form of cancer care that she’s done?   Number five – and you know this – is like beating a dead horse.   The centrality of the construction of meaning healing existential anxiety due to cancer.   Core processes that were necessary for the therapist are the cultivation of authentic presence, meditative attention, and balance between overactivity and overinvolvement, usually caused by anxiety in the therapist or detachment, which can be caused by an overvaluation of a certain kind of calm or a certain kind of meditative Observation when a more engaged or forward-leaning approach might be helpful and the skills helpful in bringing about a mystical experience Each therapist’s.   The trajectory is embedded in his or her past and path and there’s a great value.   When you’re doing short-term therapy like this, to know how to work with patients to know about transference and countertransference and skill about what to open up what to leave closed, how to work with things that emerge how to work with crises that arrive, how To handle the subtle and important things, that you might not recognize, or you might not notice, if you weren’t well trained there’s a great deal of value in being a well trained, therapist And number nine.   The unquestioned value of personal experience with entheogens in working with integrative sessions, especially in working with difficult passages during dosing sessions.   So I’m going, to sum up with two slides, So I want to talk about the goals of the training program. There are two sets of goals: One is the goals for the therapist, so you know the goals that go in, and the other is goals that go out.   The goal of the training program for therapists is to develop the capacity to support spiritual and mystical experiences in the subject and to relate these to illness and mortality and existential anxiety So to conduct short-term therapy, work that integrates spiritual experiences and facilitates psycholytic work.   So these are a lot of words to encapsulate what I think is the core task of what we’re trying to do, and that is to be both psychedelic therapists and psycholytic therapists and short-term dynamic, psychotherapists.   The therapist’s goal is to become safe, skilled, and knowledgeable in all aspects of the process, meaning patient selection, patient preparation handling the session, and whatever occurs in the psychedelic session and the integration that happens afterward, whether that’s three or six sessions or For several years, which can occur, you know one of the people who were in our research study stayed in treatment with her dyad for several years, because it was just clinically the best thing to do So being able to know when to do what is a very important part of adding this kind of technique to your work And, lastly, to support each therapist’s, talent, maturity and individuality and to practice therapy that is creative, adventuresome and unknowing.   And by that I mean where the therapist is comfortable with not knowing what’s going to happen, not knowing what should happen but having an open mind and an open heart to be ready to respond to what does happen And the external or the far-reaching Goals for the training program: these are out for the community First to define a training process and evaluate its effectiveness in an ongoing way.   So we had to develop a training program before or you know, without any training ourselves and without actually having done very much psychedelic psychotherapy in this particular context.   So we sort of hit the ground running and now by the third round of training, and we’ve done twenty-five subjects in the study.   I’m starting to have some preliminary ideas about what’s effective in training.   What’s important? What’s not so important, So creating a training process was an essential part of what I was trying to do, and to do this, I just started with one that I thought up and did and said: Okay, how is this working? What’s important and what’s not The next is to provide education and normalization of psychedelic discourse within the highly traditional medical setting.   So in this study, the information goes out to departments of psychiatry departments of oncology. We have a journal club, the PGY 4 39.   S sometimes comes to our lectures and the fellows in addiction, psychiatry, and in other fellowships, are invited to attend.   So there’s a place where psychedelic medicine is being taught and talked about, and when we go to the cancer center.   We talk about this.   So, even though only twenty-five people have enrolled in our study and received dosing, hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of people in the NYU area have heard about the study and are seeing psychedelic medicines being taken seriously and being studied in a rigorously academic way.   Thereby creating a conversation for reintroducing these agents into our discourse.   The third is to prepare the needs for a Phase III study in which we would be doing two or three or even four hundred subjects in the study.   So we’d need a lot of therapists for that and third to establish at least one model for a post-rescheduling world.   In other words, if we were going to have Psilocybin offered as a form of therapy and therapists were going to offer it, how will they be trained? What will that therapy look like? How will we know when someone’s a good psychedelic therapist and somebody’s not pulling their weight or not doing a good job, And with that we’ll bring it to the end.   Thank you very much. As found on YouTube HUMAN SYNTHESYS STUDIO 👀🗯 Attention: Have Real Human Spokespeople In Your Videos Saying Exactly What You Want In MINUTES! REAL Humans, REAL Voices, With A NEW Technology That Gives STUNNING Results Choose Your Human + Voice Type What You Want Them To Say Render your “Humatar” What You Are About To See Is Unbelievable…

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) Skills and Counseling Techniques with Dr. Dawn-Elise “Doc” Snipes

  CEUs are available for this presentation at AllCEUs.com/CBT-CEU Hi everybody and welcome to today’s presentation on cognitive behavioral therapy skills. Like the other the presentation we did on assert not assertive community treatment acceptance and commitment therapy, which is also based on just providing information about skills that can be used not providing an evidence-based practice we couldn’t cover that in a full hour or just an hour so over the next hour we’re going to define cognitive behavioral therapy and its basic principles a lot of us are familiar with this but it’s going to be a good review and it also may highlight some nuances that you didn’t know about will identify factors impacting people’s choice of behaviors explore causes and impact of thinking errors and identify common thinking errors and their relationships to cognitive distortions so why do we care well as therapists we want to help people figure out the best way to live a happy healthy meaningful goals-driven life for some people that’s going to mean using some cognitive behavioral interventions that can be in addition to mindfulness that can be in addition to a lot of other things but it’s important to help people understand that the way we believe things to be the way we interpret things is going to affect our reactions so for example think about a situation you know you’ve walked into and maybe you walked into it with a small child and it was a different situation it was a new situation but you know it was no big deal you walked in it was not a threatening situation to you because you were like hey I got this the little kid walks in and goes oh wow there are a lot of people walking around here, this is the really scary same situation as two different perceptions you probably didn’t have much of a stress reaction going on whereas the little child probably had this fight-or-flight thing going on grabbing onto your hand like please don’t let go Atlanta Airport is a perfect example if you’ve ever taken a little kid through Atlanta Airport it gives you an idea about how people can perceive things differently and when you enact that fight-or-flight reaction you’re going to have all those stress hormones you’re going to have all either anxiety or anger or whatever that goes with it it may serve to exhaust the person and leave them feeling hopeless and helpless so what we want to do is help people see that but we also want to help them see that when they’re depressed when they’re tired when they’re sick things are going to seem a lot worse a lot of times because they don’t have the energy to perceive it differently I mean when you’re sick it’s overwhelming to think of going through Atlanta Airport so this is what we want to help people start understanding is it’s two sides of the same coin they interact if one is you know kind of going wonky is going to affect the other one the good thing is if one’s going really good the other one’s going to go good if you’re having positive thoughts you’re probably going to feel pretty good there’s an activity and I think we’re going to talk about it later it’s called the coin flip activity and I asked client clients to flip a coin in the morning and in the morning if it turns heads then they have to be the most positive Pollyanna all day long look for the silver lining and everything smile walk with their head up hold those nonverbals up and see how they feel at the end of the day besides a little sore because there are muscles they’re using they haven’t been used in a while if it lands on tails they can just be their normal selves which generally if they’re seeing me means that they are depressed anxious stressed out angry about something in the negative realm then we talk about how did things seem different on the days when you were feeling better when you were walking taller when you were smiling even our nonverbals it doesn’t even have to be sickness it can be our nonverbals that can make us feel or make our body feel heavy and tired and make it seem like it’s a whole lot harder to deal with life as a person who perceives the world generally good and believes they can deal with challenges as they arise that good old self-efficacy will be able to allow their stress response system to function normally so if they’re like you know what I can deal with whatever life throws at me I’ve got it and maybe I need help with it maybe I’ll need to ask for support but I’ve got it it’s not going to completely overwhelm me with people who see the world as hostile unsafe and unpredictable you know for a variety of reasons whatever happened to make their scheme as such that they don’t believe that people or the world is trustworthy are predictable they are always on guard they’re always kind of like a hamster in a cage that has Have you ever had a hamster hamsters don’t recognize you and go hey that’s my own or human contact score hamsters go run under their little house and you just kind of open the cage and stick your hand in there and flip over their house and you’re like come here and give me cuddles and you’re like you know 200 times bigger than they are so the little hamster is like freaking out this is what it’s like for people and obviously, I’m exaggerating but this is what it’s like for people who have a negative perspective a negative view or a hostile view of the world so kind of keep that little hamster in your mind cognitive behavioral therapy we have core beliefs those things that are in our hearts when I talk with my clients about honesty step one and that’s what they’ve got to do to start recovery is get honest with themselves first and then other people we talk about head heart and gut honesty do you think it’s right does it seem like the right thing to do does it feel right in your heart you know does it make you happy it doesn’t make you feel good and then the spidey senses is your gut saying and or is your gut fine if one of those is saying this might not be the right choice and we need to think about what’s going on so we have those core beliefs and I put them in the heart just because that’s the middle of the head heart and gut but you have core beliefs about yourself whether you’re good with you’re bad whether you’re effective at certain things yada yada you have core beliefs about other people same thing good bad effective predictable and you have core beliefs about the future and a lot of that goes with the locus of control but also your past experiences if the world in the past is seemed unfriendly and uncontrollable and you’ve perceived it that way then you’re going to expect the future to be uncontrollable so what we want to do is help people look at their schemas and their core beliefs about themselves others in the future and figure out kind of what they want it to look like these schemas are going to affect your behavior and your thoughts and your feelings and you know you can pick wherever you want to start it doesn’t matter because all three inter interface with one another so if you haven’t let’s start with negative thoughts if you have negative thoughts then you might feel anxious angry stressed dysphoric which will affect the behavior you’re going to do different things than if you have positive thoughts about something you feel excited and energized you’re going to have different behavior the best thing example I can give you is if you’ve ever done public speaking or had to present something some people detest public speaking it’s just terrifying for them to get up in front of a group of people so their thoughts am I going to trip up I going to forget what I’m going to say I’m going to make a fool of myself I’m going to you know it can go on forever that when you get on a roll you can get on a negative roll and go on forever or positive hopefully get on that roll with those thoughts you start holding onto those thoughts remember as we talked about in a CT the other day when you hold those thoughts and you kind of mush them around in your mind and you come to believe them that you’re going to make a fool of yourself and it’s going to be awful you’re going to start feeling terrified likely which is going to likely affect your behavior if you go out on the stage and you’re terrified you’re going to probably stutter you’re probably going to get foggy-headed you’re going to have that fight-or-flight reaction so there’s an the adrenaline rush and you start sweating and you can’t focus and you can’t concentrate you want to away as opposed to somebody like me who loves public speaking and I’m just like cool I get to go out there and try to engage however many people are in the audience it’s a game for me because when I can see your faces I enjoy trying to figure out and make eye contact with people and figure out what it is that they’re there for what is it that’s going to make them tick what resonates with them so my behavior as you can kind of see right now when I go out there I’m excited and I want to engage people and it’s a fun experience for me again just like the airport the same experience for two different people and two very different interpretations and reactions to it so what effects I don’t like the term rational but when we’re talking about CBT irrationally comes up a lot I like to replace it with helpful because every behavior in its weird sort of way is or probably was rational at one time that being said we’re going to get back to that stress affects our behavioral choices if we’re under stress we can have negative emotions negative emotions will affect our thoughts if we’re feeling sad we’re probably going to look at the dark side if we feel sad we’re going to look at the bottom falling out if we’re happy we’re probably going to look for that silver lining physical factors if you’re in pain sick sleep-deprived poorly nourished so your body can’t produce the neurotransmitters it needs to or heaven forbid intoxicated you’re probably not going to make the same decisions as you would if you were comfortable healthy well-rested nourished and not intoxicated any of those things can go impact how you perceive a situation or how you react in a situation, especially the intoxication whereas in your non intoxicated State in your sober state, you may think that you want to do something but then you’ve got that filter that goes not not a good idea in an intoxicated State or even in a manic state if you’re you know if you have somebody with bipolar that filter kind of goes away so the behaviors that someone may normally not do because they have a rational filter that goes you know punching this guy outs probably not the best idea right now the filter goes away when you’re sleep-deprived you’re less generally people are less patient generally people don’t have as much of a filter thing about watching your children if you have children or your grandchildren or even yourself I know myself when I’m sleepy I am giddy as all get-out and things I wouldn’t normally say because they’re you know stupid I’ll just come out and say anyway and my kids just roll their eyes or the mom you’re overtired could go to bed, uh but that’s okay you know I’m okay with that in that situation now if I acted that way at work it would be a worse thing environmentally if you’re introduced to a new or unique situation and you perceive it as stressful because the unknown we know can be stressful then you may not make as rational of a choice or as helpful of a choice because you maybe trying to escape the same thing as exposure to UNPROFOR bellowing for a the word here but UNPROFOR ball is the best I could come up with we all prefer certain situations some people as I said would rather do just about anything then get up in front of a lecture hall of a hundred and fifty people and talk but if they have to do it then they’re going to be under stress which may affect how they do things so we want people to understand that their perception and their feelings are affected by a lot of other things not just you know an emotion here or a particular memory there’s a lot that goes into it and social if peers your family convey irrational thoughts as necessary very standards for social acceptance people may tend to cling more to it to those unhelpful thoughts and unhelpful behaviors you know in CBT they say irrational because quote nobody wants to associate with those people you know who are those people and why can’t we associate with them there are a lot of things if you think back think high school you know high school is pretty rough if we’re going to talk about having irrational thoughts and cognitions if you have to be part of this particular group to be accepted you have to do this you have to do that but do you do those kinds of all-or-nothing statements are cognitive distortions and while they may have served a purpose in some way shape or form in the past we need to encourage our clients to take a look at them now and go are they still helpful ways of thinking is it still helpful for me to think that I am only successful if I live in a million-dollar house in a gated community and do this that and the other or can I be can I define success a different way or do I define success differently and lack supportive peers to buffer stress so we had those peers that caused stress by talking about the half dues and categorizing and lots of attributions but then there’s also not having somebody to go you know does this make any sense because sometimes we are our own worst enemies and if we go to a friend and we go you know this is what I’m thinking and I think I have to do this in order to be acceptable to be loved or you know whatever the case may be most people are not going to use those exact phrases a good friend is probably going to listen and go yeah you’re right or no no that’s way off so supportive peers are essential to reminding us to consciously regularly check in with our cognitions to make sure that they are hopeful and rational so a note about irrationality and this is mine this is not from CBT the origins of most beliefs for rational and helpful given the information, the person had at the time and their cognitive development their ability to process that information so concepts and schemas and core beliefs that people formed when they were five are probably going to be very egocentric you know the person is going to feel like everybody sees it my way because this is how I see it you know just like a five-year-old does a five-year-old doesn’t think well you know let me take Johnny’s perspective is no he assumes that Johnny sees it the same way so it’s going to be egocentric it’s probably going to be focused on only one aspect of the situation because small children can’t focus on multiple aspects and it’s probably going to be dichotomous it’s all-or-nothing Mommy loves me mommy hates me and it could be personalized you know everything a lot of kids think that everything has to do with them so if something happens something bad happens many times children will take it personally or be afraid it’s going to happen to them again you know if hurricane katrina hurricane Andrew those sorts of things you know we saw a lot of trauma in children and they developed very real fears about thunderstorms and hurricane season and if you’ve watched Florida hasn’t had a notable hurricane in years now but there’s a lot of stuff that goes into that but young people during some of those really bad hurricane seasons perceive those situations differently okay so we need to help people understand that if we especially if we use the term irrational those thoughts you formed when you are knee-high to a grasshopper and they made perfect sense to you back then but now that you’re an adult you’ve got more experience and you’re able to take different perspectives your brain is more developed let’s take a look at it and see if you can look at different perspectives and come up with something a little more helpful maybe a different way of perceiving this situation the irrational irrationality or unhelpful Nosov Fox comes when those beliefs are perpetuated without examination so something a belief that you formed when you’re five you’re still holding when you’re 35 and you’ve never questioned it you’ve never gone you know does this make sense is this is helpful to get me to where I want to be most of us don’t know we form these attitudes and beliefs when we’re you know growing up when we’re in elementary school middle school high school from watching TV to being around our peers from being around our family in our community and we get all this input of the way things should be and a lot of times people don’t stop to question and go and go well does this make me happy is this really what I want and they can be irrational if they continue to be held despite causing harm to the person so the person continues to hold this belief even though it is causing them general emotional cognitive harm is making them miserable we need to look at why what’s motivating them to hold on to that belief why is that belief so important and how can we make it so they can live a happy values-driven life emphasis on the happy how can we make it less harmful sometimes it’s more productive for clients to think of these thoughts as unhelpful or helpful instead of irrational sometimes when I say irrational to clients and you know I’m the same way if somebody says you’re being irrational I’m like oh I’m not it elicits this instantaneous defensive reaction it’s like when you tell them they’re being resistant they’re like I am NOT rien resistant so helpful or unhelpful and then we talk about why it is unhelpful in getting them toward their goals basic principles of cognitive behavioral therapy we teach or help clients learn to distinguish between thoughts and feelings I can think something is scary I’ll probably feel it but if I have an automatic you know feeling I walk into Atlanta Airport and I see yeah I went to an airport in New York I can’t even remember which one it was because my plane was diverted and I got off and I walked out there and I have never seen so many people packed in his place like sardines before in my life I was just completely overwhelmed that was kind of an automatic feeling now that was a feeling based on you know who knows it was overwhelming to be surrounded by that many people so then I had to separate the thoughts and go okay what am I thinking that’s making me feel so overwhelmed and at that point you know I didn’t know how to get to my gate and all that other sort of stuff with traveling I don’t travel well but encouraging clients to stop and go okay why am I feeling this way what are my what thoughts am I having that are contributing to these dysphoric feelings CBT helps people become aware of how thoughts can influence feelings in ways that are sometimes not helpful we have hecklers in our gallery the automatic tapes that we plaything memories that we have whatever you want to call them that when you try something when you are just going through daily life you hear these voices in the back of your head and not real voices but that is saying you’re never going to make this or if you would have just blah blah blah then you’d be a the better person helping clients become aware of those thoughts and how they’re negatively influencing their feelings and keeping them kind of stuck is a huge part of CBT we help them learn about thoughts that seem to occur automatically without even realizing how they may affect emotions again those thoughts from they’re saying you’re not good enough you’re not smart enough and nobody’s gonna like you where did that come from and do you believe it you know maybe it came from somebody when you were in high school so was that a valid source maybe it came from somebody yesterday on Facebook was that a valid source taking in those thoughts and then figuring out is this something I’m going to hold because it makes me happy or is this something that I’ve got to deal with because I’m having a negative reaction constructively evaluate whether these automatic thoughts and assumptions are accurate or perhaps biased the other thing to remember is a lot of our clients not all of them but a lot of them hold themselves to a standard there’s like up here and they hold everybody else to a standard that’s down here so they are a failure if they don’t achieve this but everybody else is successful as long as they achieve this so encouraging them to take a look at how accurate and biased or unbiased are the thoughts and like I said they may be their thoughts they may be telling themselves these things evaluate whether the current reactions are a helpful and good use of energy or unhelpful and a waste of energy that could be used to move toward those people and things important not impotent important to the person road-rage you’re in the car you’re driving somebody cuts you off okay natural reaction fight or flight reaction you’re just like slam on the brakes and do whatever you got to do aversive maneuvers you’re good so you could let it go at that point ago got Lucky on that one and keep driving most people not all but most they found that 80% of drivers have reported incidences of road rage which is a high number but most people will start getting all fired up and irritated and grumpy and we and just rageful and so my question would be I hear that and I hear that it made you angry in retrospect did screaming at the person as you pass them at sixty miles an hour in your car with the windows rolled up does any good did it do any good at all what else could you have done with that energy if you wouldn’t have expended it all yesterday we had to wait for the vet to come by and my daughter just completely wore herself out worrying about when the vet was going to get there what he was going to say about her donkeys and was beside herself so by the time it got to evening and it was time for her to go to her martial arts class she didn’t have the energy to go she’s like um wiped out I just want to go to bed in retrospect we’re looking back and saying okay now tell me what it was that you were so stressed out about and let’s talk about whether that was a realistic and helpful line of thought to perseverate on all day long and what could you have done differently because she didn’t bother to mention any of that to me yesterday and then developed the skills to notice interrupt and correct these biased thoughts independently causes of these thinking errors information processing shortcuts when we form schemas and we encounter a situation that reminds us of something in the past like when I go to my grandmother’s house I have a schema I have a belief system I have you know stuff that I know about my grandmother’s house so when I go to my grandmother’s house it’s kind of a shortcut to knowing what to expect when I walk in and how to behave how to do different things and it helps me plan and predict if you’re using outdated or dichotomous all-or-nothing schemas it may cause thinking errors because you may be now incorrectly processing current events mental noise some of us have it a lot of us have it not everybody thinks about trying to focus and study for a final exam in the middle of a really busy sports bar okay this is a cause of thinking or you’re going to miss important things you’re not going to be able to focus you’re not going to necessarily attend to the correct things because there’s just so much else going on your attention is drawn in 17 different directions and or the brain’s limited information processing capacity due to age we talked about that before young kids think all or nothing they think dichotomously egocentric ly middle school-aged kids and older start developing the ability for abstract thinking, by the time we get older, you know as adults theoretically we’re able to you know think pretty well and think pretty clinically about different events but if we’re in crisis when someone is in crisis and it could be like what we think of clinically as a crisis or it could be they’re just completely overwhelmed and burned out and have been burning the candle at both ends for three months they’re not going to process information quite as well they’re not going to take in all this stuff because they’re just like shell-shocked have you ever seen teachers in the hallway of like an elementary school Oh at the end of the second nine weeks they just kind of stand there with this blank look on their face they’re not processing as much as they were the first day of school and you know God loved them they have a lot to deal with but we need to help our clients understand that there are some times that they are going to have to really stop and focus write things down so they can remember or they can make decisions a little more my guess is most of us have times in our life when we’ve been able to think through complex problems but then there are other times where you just can’t keep it all in your head and you’ve got to put it on a whiteboard maybe that’s just me but we want clients to understand that they are not broken they’re not faulty they’re doing the best they can with the tools they have and the knowledge they have and our job is to help them see where some of this might have gone a little awry other causes of thinking errors and emotional motivations I feel bad therefore whatever I’m thinking must be bad if I’m scared that means whatever it’s coming on the other end of the phone is bad news moral motivations I did it because it was the right thing to do and that can be an excuse for doing wrong behaviors as well it can also be you know you can argue on the moral one social influence well everyone else is doing it so it must not be bad set that again a lot of times and this is where the frames approaching the motivational interviewing is helpful f stands for feedback about the reality of what’s going on is everybody doing it let’s look at statistics you know not subjective information let’s look at objective information so the impact of these thinking errors makes people want to fight or flee when they get upset and we use upset as a kind of this all-encompassing garbage term emotionally they get depressed or anxious we don’t want to feel that way anxiety and anger are flee or fight fight or flee it’s our body saying there’s a threat you got to do something depression is your body going I give up I just don’t I don’t even have the energy to do it anymore behaviorally some people withdraw because they shut down we all know people who get frustrated when they get overwhelmed when they start feeling hopeless or helpless they just kind of withdraw from everything and everyone’s addictions numb that out so they don’t have to feel the dysphoria sleeping problem and changes when we start being on that constant fight-or-flight hyper-vigilant sort of thing going on in the body is always sort of turned on which means you’re not going to sleep as well then the circadian rhythms get messed up which starts causing exhaustion and lethargy and then everything seems harder because you’re sleep-deprived and then you start thinking more negatively and more hopelessly you see where this is going it’s a downward spiral and eating changes some people eat a lot more because they’re eating comfort foods some people eat a lot less because their stomach is so torn up from the stress they can’t even think about holding anything down physical stress-related illnesses fibromyalgia gastrointestinal problems headaches neck aches backache you know the whole the gamut of it when you start feeling bad when you start hurting generally it gets frustrating after a while and that frustration makes it kind of raises the the bar brings you up a little bit so you’re that is much closer to kind of just kind of being overwhelmed you don’t have as much of a cushion as you would if you were happy healthy well nourished not in pain and socially a lot of times we will get irritable or impatient with other people or withdrawal when we’re having these negative cognitions these thinking errors that are keeping us in a dysphoric state these effects of thinking errors contribute to fatigue and a sense of hopelessness and helplessness which intensifies thinking errors this is an important concept that I want my clients to understand and I want to drive home in this presentation so thinking errors what are they emotional reasoning feelings are not facts and we want to help people to learn to effectively identify feelings and separate them from facts so if somebody says I’m terrified okay that is a feeling what are the facts supporting that feeling why are you are terrified what is the evidence that you are in some sort of danger right now you know and danger may not be the right word for your client at that a particular point in time but what’s the evidence that there’s a threat in what ways is this similar to other situations maybe it’s triggering something from the past that was scary or you know you were too little to be able to handle it but you can handle it now and how if you dealt with similar situations like this, in the past, we want to help people just step back and get some distance between their feelings and their thoughts and try to figure out you know which thoughts are helpful and productive and even if a sought makes people anxious or angry it can be helpful it may be telling them hey dude you need to get your butt up and get out of there if it’s helpful it means it’s moving them toward where they want to be happy healthy safe and values-driven life so happy and helpful developed a stress tolerance skills when people use emotional reasoning they feel emotions which then they start attributing finding the facts to support those emotions instead of looking at all the facts we want to help them learn to tolerate their distress so they can kind of let that subside for a second they can accept their feeling they can name they can say I’m scared I’m stressed I’m angry and whatever but they don’t have to act on it right then they can tolerate the distress for a minute without having to try to make it go away and emotional regulation skills they can feel a feeling without having to make it go from zero to 120 you know if they feel sad they go I feel kind of sad instead of grabbing onto it and going I wonder what I feel sad about I must feel sad about all these sad things now I’m going to be sad and devastated so we want to help people learn how to regulate their emotions identify them accept them whatever word you want to use and tolerate them because feelings are there for a reason they’re there to tell you your brain thinks something’s going now thankfully we have that higher-order cognition stuff going on so we can contradict our brain and we can go you know maybe that’s not true in this situation cognitive bias negativity mental filter whatever you want to call it people who focus on the negative they walk in they get up in the morning and they look outside and it’s partly cloudy they get to work and they said instead of saying there was it was very light traffic they said there was a fair amount of traffic everything is always the flip side of what somebody who’s optimistic would say so asking them what’s the benefit to focusing on the negative in what ways is this helpful to you you know some people say well it keeps me from getting disappointed because I know it’s going to end up negative anyway so we can trap challenges that know that whatever it is they think they know and see if there have been exceptions when it hasn’t turned out that way what are the positives to this situation I give the example a lot of you know I wash my car or it rains and maybe I wanted to go out on a run that day but I can perceive it I can look at the positives you know the rain washed my car for me so I don’t have to do it now score it watered my garden all the better it knocked down some of the pollen out of there even better I can find and I can encourage people to find positives in a situation yes there are negatives there are negatives to every situation if you want to find them you’re going to find them but if you want to find the positives you can too which takes us down to what are all the facts there’s the positive and the negative and the neutral I told you earlier about the coin toss activity having people toss a coin on the heads days they act like it is just the greatest day to be alive and see how things are different when they do their journal because you know I have my clients do I’m sort of a mindfulness check-in in the morning and in the evening and preferably at lunchtime how are they feeling what’s their emotional state what’s their energy level on the happy days a lot of times it can be less and sometimes they need a little coaching throughout because some of those old patterns kick in but I want them to start challenging some of their automatic thoughts that we’re going to talk about in a minute disqualifying or minimizing the positive most of us can probably say we’ve had a bunch of clients that do this they are more than happy to tell you about all the things that they mess up but then when they do something right they minimize it encouraging people to hold themselves to the same standard they would hold everyone else to and I know I talked about that earlier ask them things like would it minimum would you minimize this if it was your best friend’s experience your best friend came to you and said I just got into such-and-such college would you say awesome or would you say anybody can get in there how would that go ask them what is scary about accepting these positive things that you might have had an accomplishment for some people it means that it might mean other people expect more of them for other people they just don’t know how to accept the positive they don’t know how to accept compliments they don’t know how to be the center of attention and they don’t like it and then we want to look at why that is sometimes we disqualify the positive because it fails to meet someone else’s standards so as people might that be true here you know I know when I was growing up and going through college and going through school and everything got my doctorate but I will always be ever and always being not a real doctor because a Ph.D. is not an MD and I’m like really so is it somebody else’s standards or can I feel good about having a Ph.D. egocentrism my perspective is the only perspective I’ll being egocentric but it doesn’t work most of the time so encouraging people to take alternate perspectives maybe you’re texting with someone and they say something that is not that you interpret as not the nicest thing and this happens in text messages a lot and they get upset now an egocentric thinking error would say that purse is just grumpy today someone that’s taking other perspectives would stop and go back and read the text and go I wonder if maybe this could have been taken some another way you know cuz their reaction is not what I intended so egocentrism if you hold on to that I don’t understand anybody else because you know I don’t see a problem with anything personalizing and mind-reading this is when you assume that everybody’s frowning because of something you did your boss walks down the hallway and looks at you and grimaces and continues to walk on oh I must have done something wrong no maybe he just got out of his senior management meeting that was five hours long and he’s got to go to the bathroom you know there could be a hundred different explanations for why that happened so encourage clients to ask themselves what are some alternate explanations for this event that doesn’t involve me you know why might this have happened if they hold on to that, I must have done something wrong but as soon as their boss calls them up and goes hey can you come to my office for a second you know where their thoughts are going to go I’m getting fired I’m going to get laid off I don’t know what it was that I did wrong but he walked by me two weeks ago in the hallway and grimaced and I’m just I’m the worst person in the whole world but where did that come from so encouraging people to not necessarily assume they know what’s going on in someone else’s mind and not automatically attributing every person’s negative behavior to something they did how often and then ask them how often has it been about you now think about the last 10 times you’ve taken something personally how many of those 10 times has it been about something you did versus something with the other person then the availability heuristic remembering what’s most prominent in your mind so asking clients what are the facts ah the most obvious one that we talk about is plane crashes you know it is way dangerous to fly on a plane because you hear about all those plane crashes well yeah you hear about A few planes crash but you don’t hear about the 20,000 every day that land safely so you remember it and it seems more dangerous because that’s what is in your mind that’s what is available to you that’s what you’ve based your thought processes on because maybe you didn’t know that 20,000 planes or more fly and land just perfectly every day this can also be true with people remembering what’s most prominent in your mind sometimes and this can be very very true in domestically violent relationships if somebody falls in love with someone and that person is just the greatest person since sliced bread for the first four months and then the cycle starts and there’s this little tiny a sliver of the honeymoon period after the battering cycle and the person’s like that’s the person I fell in love with that’s what I remember and they try to focus on that that’s most prominent in their mind and they ignore the rest of the stuff so we need to encourage people to look objectively at the facts magnification are you confusing high and low probability outcomes what are the chances that this is going to happen how many clients have we worked with that have gone to the doctor and gotten in a physical or get a test run and then the doctor had to call them back and this could be true for you too and the doctor had to call them back two or three days later when the tests came back from the lab and that whole three days they were just in a panic because they were afraid they were going to get some terminal diagnosis so thinking about high and low probability outcomes another instance or example of magnification is somebody that thinks this is the end of the world whatever it I think I’ve told you before my little story about um tripping when I was walking down the hall at work and falling and yeah it was embarrassing my folders went everywhere and yeah but in that big scheme of things will it matter that much from now you know are people gonna think oh she is such a clutch she must be a ditz too no I mean they may have thought that at that time I don’t know but you know in six months nobody’s going to remember and then ask them in the past when something like this has happened when you’ve had to get a test done and you’ve had to wait on results or if you’ve done something that was embarrassing and you didn’t think you thought everybody was going to remember it forever.

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How did you tolerate it how did you learn to deal with it building on those strengths that they already have all-or-nothing thinking errors these are things like love versus hate I love them or I hate them it’s all or nothing she does this all the time or she never does it if I’m going to do it I’m going to do it perfectly or I’m not going to do it at all thank you all good intentions or all bad intentions you know sometimes we do things with good intentions that have some bad repercussions so did we do it with all bad intentions are all good intentions and the answer is neither most of the time life is kind of in that middle-ground gray area encouraging clients to look and find examples where something hasn’t been one of the polls when having they do something that they’re proud of that wasn’t perfect or when again when has somebody else do something that they were proud of that wasn’t perfect remembering that with availability heuristic remembering how often something happens and how long it’s been since you’ve seen that behavior and remember that sometimes good times are amazing but how frequent are they compared with the bad times another thinking error is a belief in a just world or a fallacy of fairness I just asked clients to identify for good people you know who’ve had bad things happen and in reality we all have bad things happen good people do bad people do in between people do attributional errors and this is a pet of mine you know labeling yourself is not a behavior so global versus specific and I am stupid versus I’m stupid at math I don’t have good math skills it’s not about me it’s about the skills I can change skills stable I am and I always will be versus it’s something I can change it’s something I can learn internally it’s about me as a person versus it’s about a skill deficit or something I could learn or change and there’s you know lots of information on attributions out there on the internet if you need a refresher on it but we find that a lot of people who have dysphoria have negative global stable internal attributions so questions for clients remember the beliefs equal thoughts and facts plus personal interpretation another way of saying it is reality is 10% perception is 10% reality and 90% interpretation so what are the facts for and against my belief is the belief based on facts or feelings does the belief focus on one aspect or the whole situation does the belief seem to use any thinking errors what are alternate explanations what would you tell your child or best friend if they had this belief how would you want someone to tell what would you want someone to tell you about this belief so if you’re telling somebody about this what are you hoping they’re going to say in return and finally, how is this belief moving you toward what and who is important to you or moving you away from what or who is important to you now they can do a worksheet and have all of these or you can pick one or two of these questions that are most salient for your clients but they can have kind of at their fingertips so as they’re going through the day and something happens they can ask themselves ok what’s an alternate explanation or you know whatever it is this is salient for that client’s irrational thoughts about how to do these thoughts impact the client’s emotions health relationships and perceptions of the world you know this is what we want to ask them how is this thought impacting you globally how may this thought have been helpful in the past where did it come from how does it make sense from when you formed it in the past when you’re dealing with it ask the person if the thought is bringing you closer to those that are important are there any examples of this thought or belief not being true and how can the statement be made less global less all-encompassing so it’s about a specific incident a specific situation less stable which means you can change it and less internal which means it’s not about who you are as a person but maybe something that you do or a skill that you have so we’re going to go through some of these thoughts real quickly here mistakes are never acceptable and if I make one it means that I’m incompetent well never is kind of stable and I am incompetent is kind of global, that’s also that extreme all-or-nothing thinking so you can see where these cognitive distortions end up leading to unhelpful beliefs when somebody disagrees with me it’s a personal attack well there’s personalization if I ever heard it before maybe it’s not about you may be they’re having a bad day and you just happen to be the unlucky target or maybe they’re disagreeing with you because they have a different point of view and it’s not a personal attack it’s just their point of view if someone criticizes or rejects me there must be something wrong with me personalization all-or-nothing thinking global stable and internal something wrong with me as a person to feel good about myself others must approve of me now this is one we’ve talked about external validation before and we can’t control other people to feel good about yourself how can you do that besides necessarily requiring other people to approve of you to be content in life I must be liked by all people Wow I’ve never met anybody who’s liked by all people I’ve never even met anybody who’s been hated by all people but it’s important to help clients see how this is dramatic to say all people and for them to be content then everybody has to like them I mean I like to be liked but if everybody doesn’t like me you know that’s pretty understandable my true value as an individual depends on what others think of me I would challenge this one this is all you know also, very personally internally I would challenge people to look at and say it so your child’s value as an individual depends on what other people think of he or most people would say no but the perspective thing nothing ever turns out the way you want it to okay all-or-nothing thinking and probably availability heuristic if something bad just happened then they may be focusing on that which causes them to focus on all the other bad things in the past that have happened not to focus on that is okay you know bad thing happen but look at all these good things I won’t try anything new unless I will be good at it this fear of failure fear of rejection it just really paralyzes a lot of people when they get stuck with that thinking the area that they have to be perfect I am in total control of anything bad that happens is my fault well that’s egocentric and personal if they think they’re in total control that’s their perception of how the world are they think if they’ve got everybody on marionette strings anything bad in the world that happens is their fault how powerful are they I feel happy about uh if I feel happy about life something will go wrong it happens sometimes but let’s look at times when you’ve been happy that something hasn’t gone wrong you know let’s get rid of that all-or-nothing thinking it’s not my fault my life didn’t go the way I wanted could be true but it seems like that’s making you unhappy so what do we do about that if I’m not in an intimate relationship I’m alone no, again that’s pretty extreme I’m either in an intimate relationship, or I am alone and a loner and you know it’s just me and my 17 cats which follows with there’s no gray area so encouraging people to look at what these beliefs are saying important thoughts impact behaviors and emotional and physical reactions emotional and physical reactions impact thoughts and interpretations of events so if you do something and it’s pleasurable and you have a great physical reaction you know let’s take bungee jumping or skydiving if you go out there and it’s scary but you do it and you’re just like whoa what a rush your interpretation of that is probably going to be good which means you’ll probably do it again if you go out there and it’s just the most horrible experience you’ve ever had you’re probably not going to do it again and your interpretation of it is going to be not good which is going to make it hard to understand why other people would do it irrational thinking patterns are often caused by cognitive distortions so let’s just look back at some of those because there are a lot fewer cognitive distortions or general ways of thinking about the world then there are thinking errors because there are lots and lots of thinking errors cognitive distortions are often schemas which were formed based on faulty inaccurate or immature knowledge or understanding and by identifying the thoughts of the hecklers you know the automatic tapes that are maintaining our unhappiness the person can choose whether to accept those thoughts or change them   As found on YouTube The Destroy Depression ꆛ System-Cure Depression Naturally YOUR DEPRESSION HAS BEEN IN CONTROL LONG ENOUGH. It’s Time to Fight Back ☂🗯 “Depression Sufferer Of Over 20 Years Reveals His Simple 7-Step System That Gives You The Power To Destroy Your Depression, End Your Feelings Of Sadness And Hopelessness, And Get Your Life Back.” “This didn’t just change my life, it saved my life.

How to Release Fears and Traumas with Hypnosis

  Alright, we are living. Welcome, guys. Welcome to the journey within It’s a journey of deconstruction and reconstruction of death and rebirth and today, I’ve got a very special hello hypnotist the founder of Twin Ravens Hypnotherapy and Research J Robert, Parker, In The House. Thanks for having me, man. Thank you. Thank you, dude. I think this will be a fun conversation cuz I mean, we. Absolutely. We both study hypnosis and I’d be very interested to get your perspective, you know, and how you got into this. So, um yeah, if you can share a little bit about who you are, how did you even get into this strange world of hypnosis? Uh, that’s an odd story. Um so, previously before the pandemic had been working as a chef uh that restaurant was actually where I met my partner. We did the stereotypical line cook ends up with the waitress thing. Interesting. And uh the the pandemic hit. And I had kinda seen the writing on the wall long before it had an effect. Long story short, you’ll say we both ended up out of jobs and it failed me to kinda pull something out of my bag of tricks to make money.   I live in a very, very small town and there’s not a lot of ways to go about that. So, I ended up reading tarot cards professionally. And I was making a pretty good living doing that. And I noticed that I was reading people’s fortunes so to speak. And more using the archetypes of the tarot cards. Uh reframe their problems to them and help change their perspective And I got a lot of satisfaction out of that.   And I started looking into what is a way that I can do only that. Uh and of course in an abnormal way. That I can do that cuz why not? And the Facebook algorithm. uh that one random point but HMI in front of me. previous to that, I hadn’t had any experience with hypnosis. I wasn’t even sure if it was real. I was in that camp And I talked to someone from admissions and they intrigued me. I figured why not give it a shot? This seems very interesting. And I think I was about two classes into 101 before I got my mind blown.   The first time I saw the physiological responses of hypnosis. The things that can’t be faked. That is just reactionary. it just blew my mind. And then eventually I got to perform hypnosis and then, eventually, I got to experience it and that was a profound thing because uh going to that school, taught me a lot about myself and one of the things I came to learn is uh a lot of what I considered to be unusual behavior in myself. Uh wasn’t and a lot of what I consider to be unusual behavior in others, was it? I was just very extreme on one end of the suggestibility scale and I remember in class, they were explaining the traits of the intellectual suggestible of it’s like, oh, cool.   That’s me and I took the suggestibility test and I scored like, eighty-two, my first time I wanna say. Jeez, man, that’s such an interesting thing because you’re, I mean you’re so rare and for you to be in hypnosis and experience hypnosis, uh I’m curious like who hypnotized you and how do they do it, right? Because you’re like the hard type. it was actually in a practice and it was with somebody I mean, I guess I should mention, this guy named Paul Villa Real and he’s since graduated, I believe. And uh, I told them what my suggestibility was and he said, cool. Can I try something? And he did what’s called an auto dual induction and that was the first time that it happened to me and that got me. It got me well enough that the next day, I wrote my custom version of that script uh based upon what worked for me and that was a very unusual thing because Previous to that, II did most of my experience with trance with self-hypnosis.   Like, I can kinda help people along whenever they’re practicing on me because I was very aware of that state in myself and where I’d been there in the past, all that stuff. but in terms of outright just being hypnotized by somebody, uh that was the first time, and uh That was profound. Uh, the things that I learned and saw in that first time still kind of uh guide a lot of what I do for my clients. Because one of the things cuz I don’t remember too much of what was addressed. But one of the things that stands out to me as I was introduced to the future version of myself like 5 years in the future or so And that was profound to me. And that person that I saw kind of sticks out in my head and every day I think about what I can do to get to that point.   And I have used that to a very great therapeutic effect with certain clients. Uh, I got the specialization in transgender hypnotherapy And one of the things I found with my transgender clients is that that class made me realize so much that it wasn’t just a psychological thing that it was a it was a physiological thing. And in that, that means that your brain is telling you that you look one way.   And what you’re seeing in the mirror is telling you something very different. What if you were able to meet who you know you are? What if you were able to meet the person that looks how you know you’re supposed to look? And I find that having that, giving that to that person is substantial to their sense of self and their sense of well-being. Interesting. So, that does sound intriguing for so for someone who is, you know, they’re looking to meet their future, you know, 5 years from the future self. How how can we do that? Um, do you do that through self-hypnosis? Is this a visualization? Um. Um. Visualization. Visualization. I tend to use the LAL. Uh the uh for anyone listening that doesn’t know what that is. It’s a type of hypnotic induction or deepener where you start at a certain floor on an elevator and go down. The elevator opens and you meet this person and I make no attempt to describe this person.   It is simply you in advance and II tell you to notice how this person looks, how they hold themselves, how they smell, like how, how they and depending on your suggestibility is kind of how profound that experience is. I um I don’t get hardly any visualization. Uh, I get weird flashes. Uh, I can’t smell anything. I don’t get anything auditory but I get a very heavy kinesthetic response. Uh. Interesting. Fuel things. Yeah. In imagination, right? In hypnosis. It’s not like you can’t smell things right now. Yeah. In the context of hypnosis. Right. Um. feel like if you tell me to walk downstairs, I will like to feel the stairs under my feet and things like that.   That’s fascinating. Okay. So, uh for people who are listening, they’re like no idea like suggestibility type, intellectual, physical, you know, you know. Maybe like. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Cuz like we know, we know exactly what we’re talking about cuz we’re from the same college but um I mean, you break that down and uh yeah. Yeah, just go from there. Okay. Well, you’re the host. Why don’t you explain suggestibility to your audience? I’m Good, man. I could, I could. So, I was like, yeah, why not and you can critique me. But I’m not the one So as you, like you were saying, right, we’re all, first of all, we all can go into hypnosis. That’s a very, very natural state.   And um, we, but we’re just on this kind of this uh, scale of suggestibility and some people do better with certain suggestions. versus others, and I lean towards kinda where, where you’re at, where it’s like, we do the, the indirect stories, and then on the other side is the very more paternal, hey, you’re gonna feel this, this is gonna happen, you are now in hypnosis, X, Y, Z, right? And that still does, that can work for me and you know, for others, but, not honestly for you, right? Cuz you’re, you’re very objectively something. If you are literal with me, you just hit a brick wall. Yeah. So I mean like go ahead. Go ahead. I respond very well to stories and um that is so my entire life like I literally when I was a teenager my friends used to text me and just say tell me a story. I just make something up. And to this day if you tell me to make up a story, I can.   Like, just off the top of my head. And I uh, a big revelation and it was initially thanks to the man that uh ended up being my mentor. uh, Joe Burns. Oh, dude. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, and he told me, to throw the script away. Don’t work off script and I took that to heart because it’s much more intimate and so now, that’s what I do. I make up stories. Those same stories that I used to make up for my friends. I now just make up for clients that a lot of the paperwork that I have them do uh for their life history and the um the questions that I ask and the initial consultation and session are kinda getting to know like what story you wanna be told, how you want your story told, and for example, I have a client who recently came to me and this person is a software engineer.   Uh a somnambulistic software engineer nonetheless and II just decided because this came at a time in my career I become very frustrated with pre-written scripts. Like I had thrown one away in the middle of a session. Hm. And those three sessions that I had that day I told myself like I’m not gonna prepare a script. I’m gonna figure out my inductions. I’m gonna ask some questions. And I’m just going to make myself go. And I did. And those were three of the best sessions I’ve done. And what I end up doing with the software engineer is I spoke to them with metaphors of code, visualizations of computers, and debugging.   And um, Sure enough, that that that safe place in their head was represented as a computer bank. what the way they perceived that computer bank uh mandated where I took that therapy. Just to kind of adjust their visualization. And that’s had fantastic results. Right. So, it’s like when we tailor the therapy to the individual client who’s gonna have, you know, a different background. They’re gonna have different metaphors and um now, this is good cuz um the way I explain like the unconscious and the conscious is that the unconscious is just the realm of metaphors and emotions and it that that seems to be the reason why uh we humans love stories. It’s all. Yeah. Metaphors. Exactly and I ask people.   One of the examples I give is, have you ever watched a movie and gotten angry or sad or happy? Uh based on what was on screen. Of course, the answer is inevitably yes. Yeah. So, yes, why? You consciously, logically know that you are watching a falsehood. You know these things aren’t happening. So, why do you feel these emotions? And the answer is that. Your subconscious does not differentiate fact and fiction. It’s a metaphor. It’s a and that’s all it sees that’s well, everyone but the high physicals. Uh, the high physicals don’t tend to dig the metaphor or anything like that. You just gotta tell them how they wanna be and it’s fine but uh for everyone else, it’s and at this point, because of this mentality I’ve taken with my I guess be hypnotic storytelling. Every time I watch a movie now or read a fiction book. I start noticing ways that I can retell that story for different applications or specific scenes.   One of the most amazing movies I’ve seen recently is uh have you ever seen that Disney movie Inside Out? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Uh. Yup. Have you seen it recently? No, that was like, wasn’t that like a decade ago? Yeah. You should rewatch that. Uh mental health professionals helped write that movie and it is still used in the mental. Well, that makes so much feel today. Yeah, that makes so much sense, dude. Yeah. When you rewatch it, with knowledge of the subconscious and metaphor It’s it blows your mind. So, okay. There’s that scene where they enter the subconscious and the critical mind is represented by those two idiot guards.   And how do they pass by the critical mind? They confuse it. That’s my hat. No, that’s my hat. Wow. They do a confusion abduction to get rid of the gatekeeper of the subconscious. And more than, when they’re actually in the subconscious, and this speaks to a lot of what I say about fear. One of the first things they see is a giant vacuum cleaner. Um because the way that girl’s subconscious remembered that is because the way we remember our fears is in that moment in time. Frozen at that moment in time. So to that fear and that perception. That’s a giant vacuum cleaner because she was very small when she got that fear. And that has a lot to do with how I address fears and hypnotherapy. Because one of the things I stress is when we have a fear or a trauma which I argue is the same thing because we’re not afraid of something and we as we’re traumatized by it and if we’re traumatized by something, we have a fear.   And what I it’s all where it happened at the time. For example, if you became afraid of a vacuum cleaner as a baby or a very small child, the vacuum cleaner would appear much larger because according to your memory and your perception, which cannot be changed until it’s addressed in hypnosis, that thing’s giant or maybe you were bitten by a dog when you were a child and you remember it as just Kujo, some giant, hell hound that almost tore your ankle off because it was so intense and traumatic.   Where and hypnosis, maybe it’s just a Jack Russell Terrier that bit your ankle. Hm. When you were 6 years old and you had the emotional intelligence of a 6-year-old. So, you’re going to retain that memory as a 6-year-old until you readdress it and allow that person to uh gain a new subconscious understanding and association of that event. So, I’m gonna try to play advocate here and say, okay, I get it that, you know, when we were six, maybe we’re scared of a vacuum cleaner cuz it seemed very big or a dog or whatnot and we had to distort perception, right? But now that we’re adults and that we have developed our prefrontal cortex and our reasoning and now, we can go and we can experience that, you know, dogs are generally safe for the, for the most part, and happy and man’s best friend, or the vacuum cleaner, you know, it’s fairly harm is.   Right and so uh why can’t we just maybe um do a little bit of exposure therapy, a little bit of cognitive behavioral therapy, and just say, hey, this is uh, this is false, this, you know, you can, sometimes. Um, and it depends on how traumatic the memory is. And really, a lot of the way that fears are addressed in hypnosis has to do with uh, desensitate, desensitization, that the same things you would do in the physical world you can do mentally. If you were afraid of dogs rather than go so far as to address that fear live and in person with the dog you could go through that same process of consciously and realize that you have control over that emotion. There’s uh as you know there’s something called circle therapy. Where in hypnosis you are presented with a fear or an anxiety and you are asked to recall that fear and the emotions associated with that fear. Consciously. So, you bring it up on purpose. And then it’s at the same time you tell them to bring it back down. And the purpose of this is for one, every time you tell them bring it back up.   It’s a little less. But they gain the understanding that your emotion and your reaction is under your control. The way that you choose to react to this fear is 100% under your control. And once there is that realization, fear tends to fade. or it’s not yours. Uh, that’s an interesting thing I’ve encountered before. What do you mean? Oh, it’s not yours. just that. Um so, I did uh a podcast couple of months ago. Uh about fear. It was called fear. It’s run by two clowns and they were interviewing a German spy who had a fear of heights. And I uh and this is on my website by the way. Everything I’m about to say you can listen to this interview. But this person, this man, um not the shy away from it. He’s a government killer. Like he is what he did. He was in special operations. He went into places he couldn’t talk about and did things he couldn’t talk about.   He was afraid of heights. As unusual as that is. And uh this was all done in about twenty minutes. I transit him. I took him back to that moment on the plane. Cuz he got that fear from his first training jump when he was seventeen. And in the process of just walking him through that moment. He realized something. That he had forgotten about until that moment in hypnosis obviously, this person was a very high physical. So, they said they could feel the vibration of the engines.   They could smell the gas on the plane. They were there. Um, the kid that jumped before him screamed in terror and he went from being fine and calm to terrified. But he didn’t remember that. And so at this moment, he realized that this fear he had been carrying for decades wasn’t even his and I called him out of a trance, and within 5 minutes of that, he was hanging off the side of a balcony. Saying like, I don’t feel a thing.   Huh. So, yeah. This is all in hypnosis. Yes. Um. And not the balcony thing. Yeah. That’s what’s interesting. So, he remembered in hypnosis the um. The other kind. Where’s my cause? Just got scared. And it wasn’t even his fear that that kid’s fear transferred to him and before he had time to process it, he was kicked out the door. So, this entire time, he’s been perceiving this event as his fear when as you know, if we’re around someone afraid or scared or happy, if but for a short moment, we feel that before we process it out as not ours but what if you didn’t get that chance? What if you feel that fear and before you could be like, man, that kid was scared.   Somebody’s grabbing you by your collar being like, your turn. and he just perceived that as his fear. So, yeah, fear didn’t belong to him. Wow Yeah. So, I’d be curious um on your philosophy when it comes to trauma, right? So, for that particular case, I guess he just, he was able to kinda remember and and and bring up that unconscious material and then, oh, hey, this is not my fear.   Um but do you think for trauma? Before we even get to that, what do you mean when you say trauma? Trauma is any event. leaves an impression later down the line. Usually negative. Uh, I guess it should be specifically negative. Um, something that leaves an imprint, something that uh like, okay, this would be just seen in the movie Inside Out. Trauma is when a negative memory becomes a core memory. that that it becomes a core memory is an aspect of your personality. So, it’s. Oh. Whenever something negative becomes a core aspect of your personality.   Because of course, we all go through negative things but what if that negative thing is so extreme or its perception is so extreme that it formed every opinion and perception that you had after that event because it was a core part of your personality? Hm. That’s why that movie’s so good. Like, dude, I need to rewatch. You do. I took notes. I’ve got notes somewhere on that damn movie. Well, yeah. I feel like I’ve matured so much since then and then with the knowledge of hypnosis and now, parts therapy. So, I don’t know if you ever heard of uh internal family systems or any kind of parts therapy. I’m sure you, I mean, we, it’s, it’s been mentioned here and there in the college. Yeah. But um yeah, it’s so amazing now that I’m in like parts therapy and I’m sure it would, you know when you see all the different emotions like, oh, that makes so much sense.   Like, yeah, we have all these different parts of us that sometimes different things and it gets into conflict, you know? So. One of the things that I’ve really kind of come to realize through doing this work and that I tell all of my clients is we are all at our core children. We are all scared eight-year-old kids. We’ve kind of got that cuz that’s when we form our core beliefs from zero to eight. So, by the time we’re eight, that’s our core self.   Yeah. And that, that you, all exist and that what it means to be an adult is to learn how to parent yourself. How to parent your inner child. And that’s a perspective that I ask a lot of my clients to take. Because II asked them especially the ones that have children. Like the way, you talk to yourself. When you talk to your child like that. Yeah. But is that the way your parents talk to you? if you didn’t like that, why are you continuing to treat yourself like that? Why, why don’t you give yourself that same understanding? Because what, think about it. We all wanna stay up later than we should. We all wanna eat **** that we shouldn’t but we have that voice in our heads. Like, no, you have obligations in the morning. You have to get up or you know, that’s gonna upset your stomach or whatever have you and it’s the same things you tell a child but you have to tell yourselves.   So, the way that you speak to yourself in that regard is very important. Yeah. Um what I’ve realized at least for myself, is that there’s even more than one inner child. Yeah. You know, there are lots of parts of us um that that have different goals and different perceptions and might get, you know, yeah, might get into fights or something. Um and so, it’s not even just the inner child but like, how do we parent all the different parts of us and realize that there is no bad part? You know, you wouldn’t call a child bad. You just would. Exactly. You know. Um, re-educate them. I heard something. I can’t remember if it was in class or in something I was watching. But it said that everyone has good intentions. Yeah. Everyone. No matter how evil or messed up. If anything there are always some manner of good intentions at their core. Yes. It could be wildly misperceived. It could be a mental illness.   there are always even, even crimes of hate, even when somebody murders someone else, they’re trying to satisfy something in them. They’re trying to make something in them go away. So, they’re trying to take care of themselves. Yup. Or they feel some weird obligation to fulfill. It’s all manner of reasons but all all of these things boiled down to. They are for themselves or someone else or whatever have you. It’s good intentions. Just like your subconscious Yes. Always has your best intentions in mind. Even with traumatic things. Even with bad reactions. It is still just trying to protect you. Yeah. Just trying to preserve its homeostasis. It’s normal. yeah. Now, that’s powerful. And I think when we understand that, you know, I think sometimes we can like vilify the subconscious or vilify these different behaviors but they’re all serving some kind of purpose.   So, you know, if you’re, if you’re traumatized, it’s trying not to get you into that painful situation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, if you have crippling anxiety, it’s you’re subconscious, it’s your mind trying to protect you. You just have this fear reaction that’s out of control. And It’s there’s a lot to be said in terms of healing just for the awareness of that. So much of my work and especially my breakthrough work with clients has been through subtle changes in perspective. And that’s it. It’s not much more than that. It’s sometimes there are some changes to behaviors or thoughts changes. But a lot of it has to do with um the way you look at a situation, how you perceive it, why you think this way, why you think this way about yourself Although it’s stereotypical in therapy, I find myself asking the question, why are you feel that way? Where does that come from? A lot.   Right. And there’s always something. There’s always another layer deeper until you get to that aha moment. And you can tell whenever something has left their mouth that even they didn’t think of. They’d never even made that association before. And just by having that come into their conscious mind by being able to consider that logically. You’ve already gone so far in that healing. It’s like when we raise our awareness and take different perspectives, then, behaviors start to shift. Well, it’s like uh I’m not a big NLP guy but there are some aspects in neuro-linguistic programming that I like and one of those is the mindfulness aspect. The idea of being aware of what you’re thinking. Uh taking control over your thoughts. I thought Joe did a very good example when he talked about how he was crossing the road and he started getting this perception of these men in this car at this crosswalk about how they wanted to do him harm and he started getting anxious about this imagined situation and he stopped himself and he forced his thoughts to something ridiculous.   I forgot what he said he pictured those guys in this car doing but immediately changed his thought pattern. Yeah. And he was able to just walk away and he looked back and he said, they’re just both on their phone doing nothing. And that’s right. He’s told me that story too. That’s right. Yeah. And II love that story. It’s hilarious But it’s a very good example. Because so so often we let our thoughts kinda run out of control. And it does us some good to stop and think like why do you think that? Why are you thinking that way? Why? Why do you believe like there’s something to be nervous about in this situation? Where is that coming from? Hm. All your trail back. Figure out why you’re nervous. So we’re so for somebody who likes you asked them that like oh why are you nervous? Why are you afraid? And they’re like I don’t know. No idea. Well. What? How did you ask? Mhm. What makes you nervous? How do you feel when you’re nervous or afraid? Um did you, were you always afraid of this? If you weren’t always afraid of this, when’s the last time you remember not being afraid of it? When is the first time you remember being afraid of it? most time in my experience, people haven’t taken that logical path back.   They just stop with, I don’t know. They it’s that self-examination is difficult. Um, a good example of this is I had a client that said that They wish that they were able to perceive themselves as others perceive them, as strong as others perceive them and I said, well, why don’t you think you’re strong? got into a car wreck and I felt like I could have done better and I felt like I failed. Why do you feel like you failed? Well, because I couldn’t be there when my grandfather died. and there was just this dawning realization when they said that.   And I was like, you never said that out loud, have you? No. There you go. So, that is currently on the table for the next time and uh it’s just a good example of just keep following the path back. If you do, there there’s always a reason for the behavior. It’s never an I don’t know. There’s an I don’t want to remember. There’s uh I choose not to know but. Yup. There’s not a mystery. There’s always a reason that Could be had through questioning, figuring out when and where, and all of that. Yeah. Yeah. So, I’m curious cuz there are different schools of thought and not even hypnosis but in therapy that maybe, hey, don’t go back to the cause.     You know, that’s just bringing up things that um that don’t necessarily need to be brought up or you can retraumatize people. X, Y, Z, focus on the solution, focus on the future, and more of like the positive thinking kind of approach. Um, I’m curious about what your thoughts on that are. It depends on the trauma Uh if it’s something like that they view as very grievous, it is something bad. I don’t ever ask people what their traumatic thing is.   Like, you can just tell me that something bad happened in 2,000 seven. And that’s all I need to know. Uh, beyond that, all I, with, with that, I will, there’s a couple ways. But you, there’s no direct reexperience. You don’t take them back and make them live through it again. It’s antithetical to the goal. What you do is you take away that association. You make that not a core memory. They don’t focus on the events. They focus on the resolution. And the letting goes after that resolution. There’s a method that I very much enjoy that involves having them perceive this event on a screen. And they fast forward and rewind and fast forward and rewind until all that exists before the event and after the event. that that association is. And then after you establish that, you let them let go of that memory, of that association. And Trauma is very dependent on what happened. And uh sometimes it’s dependent upon um my referral. Because many times whenever it’s complex trauma uh I’m speaking to them on referrals from a mental health professional.   Mhm. And a lot of it has to do with my communications with that mental health professionals. Whatever you learn. You know you’ve done. What do you need to be done? Um, it’s very important if you do find yourself working with uh medical doctor or mental health professional to get on the same page with them. Like involve yourself in that client and have them help you, help them, help that client. It’s a team effort at that point. It’s so dependent because II work with people with combat PTSD. I have uh postpartum depression. It’s just a matter of where this trauma and negative behavior come from. Often, uh with the combat PTSD, it’s always really heartbreaking to do those and I’m very happy that I get a chance to work with those men and women. there’s a lot that’s, for example, like what they’re not allowed to feel. Because you’re expected to, I literally soldier on. Hm. And there comes a time that that’s not a thing anymore. That you have to address what has happened to be able to heal.   And I see a very similar thing in combat veterans that I see in people who suffer from trauma. they’ll go back to the closest safe save point in their head Uh it’s usually sometime when they’re a late teenager or soldier. It’s generally seventeen, or eighteen. And they’ll start adopting the traits that age. because they have all of these traumatic memories from older when they were older. So, it seems like psychologically, they just go back to the last time they were safe and untraumatized because it’s no longer safe to be an adult and I see that repeated time and time. Yeah, it’s. Wow. Interesting yeah, it must be very, very difficult to work with.   Yeah, people who experience extreme, extreme trauma. Mm-hmm. So. I’m glad you are. But it’s one of those things like, once I realized what hypnosis was capable of and what it could do I kinda felt obligated to offer my services to them because it doesn’t matter what you think politically. It doesn’t matter what you think about war or the war or soldiers, the government, or anything like that. It has to do with these are deeply traumatized people who not getting the care and resolution that they need. I just feel obligated that if I have this toolset that allows me to give them that resolution, I should, that it doesn’t matter anything at all if I’m anti-war, pro-war, anti-government, pro-government, none of that.   None of that matters. It’s just people. It’s just men and women who have seen things and done things that no one should be asked to see or do. And that’s it. That’s all it is. I’ve had a chance to see a wonderful change in those people because so much of it is it’s just difficult for them to deal with that, to face that. Whatever it is that they see. to do that is profound. To give them a safe place to do that. That is guided and secure. And it’s an interesting thing that for some reason people are hesitant to seek out psychotherapy.   I have no problem with hypnotherapy. That. Really? Yeah, and I don’t know why that is. it’s fine and generally, I will encourage someone that if this isn’t something that they’ve seen a therapist for and they need to in the process of things, just be like, okay, now that we’ve kind of helped you through this, you need to consider bringing on someone else as well.

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And therapy isn’t the cure-all. It’s great for a bunch of things but sometimes you need other stuff. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, like, the way I see it is to attack it from every angle. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Yeah. There’s no reason not to bring in everyone who could help. Yeah Perfect. So, uh I’m just going back to um you know, how you got into hypnosis and you talked about, you know, self-hypnosis and I’m sure that that has helped you and I mean, it’s helped me. I think it can help a lot of people where they can just utilize this modality, get over, get over some fears maybe, you know. Absolutely. I’m curious how, how you do self-hypnosis and what’s worked for you. So, that’s changed recently Longest time I did it as we were trained.   And uh one of the things I’ve started to focus on recently. my self-hypnosis work and with my clients is nostalgia. This weird thing that exists in our minds seems to be separate from everything else. And what I do to self-hypnotize now is II focus on one of my far-off memories. Like one of my distant distant nostalgic childhood memories. Now form that as solidly as I can and just start doing breathing exercises. And focusing on that nostalgic moment and gets me right into a trance every time.   Interesting. And do you think that would work with other intellectual suggestions? You know, high E note? Uh, I have clients that nostalgia has started to become a major part of our work. Because, um, I don’t even know how to define it. It doesn’t exist in a space like other memory. It’s it’s different. It’s more intense. It’s standard memory. It doesn’t have that feeling that’s associated with it. And I don’t know what that feeling is. Um actually, that’s one of the things that I want to focus on the most with research as that’s what nostalgia is and what its uses are about hypnosis. Yeah. Um and it’s, I’ve already started using it with a few clients, this notion of focusing on intense nostalgia to facilitate trance and I’ve had very good effects. Yeah. Well, that’s that reminds me of Erickson and I’m sure you know his story by the way, for people that are watching that and not familiar with Eric’s uh Milton Erickson, he was one of the greatest hypnotherapy of all time and did very indirect, artfully, vague, lots of metaphors and stories and god just brilliant results as a genius and um you know, when he was younger, he had polio, couldn’t move, thought about a memory of when he could and then all of a sudden 30 minutes later, he found himself Maybe.   Well, that’s why a lot of the clients that I’m working with nostalgia are my clients that have self-perception issues and self-confidence issues Because nostalgia exists in a point of pure happiness. You don’t have negative nostalgic memories. Really? And yeah. This nostalgia by its very definition is positive. Huh, and it’s it may or may or may not be true because memory sucks but it doesn’t matter because your perception of that memory is nothing but positive. Nothing but happy. And so by recalling these memories, you’re able to recall this happiness. Uh, one of the more interesting bits of homework.   That I’ve given my clients is uh sometime between now and our next session. Go on YouTube and look up an hour of old commercials or old cartoon intros from your childhood or something Like that. Um. Cartoon Network. Yeah. Something. I’ve uh I spent like 2 hours one night just watching intros to cartoons from the nineties. Like that’s it.   And I’ve kind of become very focused on it. I very much love that sensation of nostalgia. I think it’s important therapeutically. That’s kind of why I put so much effort into exploring it myself. Yeah. Uh, Anytime I have like a nostalgic memory or thought, I kind of try to capture that and examine it and like figure out what I could do to bring myself back to that time and just that ponder ance alone has a hypnotic effect And I don’t know what it is about where nostalgia exists in the memory. it’s its present. there is an odd field of science. That’s kind of coming up now. That’s the quantum sciences. And there are some individuals doing work right now. or up to it including hypnosis that are fascinating. Um, the main person I’m speaking about is this guy named Doctor Dean Raiden who is the head of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. And yep I heard of them. Uh, he wrote a book called Real Magic. That is the scientific research and analysis behind certain processes. Like ESP whatever have you. Um, and it’s done strictly from the view of science and research.   And These things are related to hypnosis because if the institute can be said to have any goal or direction, it’s consciousness research. Why? What are we? Why are we? I kind of think. Yeah. And the book doesn’t answer any of those questions but this book does provide uh an interesting indication of the direction of science and what we’re looking at in the next twenty years. One of the most fascinating things uh about living in this time certainly isn’t the plague or climate death but uh there is a concept called the singularity and there’s a version that exists in AI and there’s a version that just exists as humanity and the idea of the singularity in terms of humanity. Are that human technological eras exponential? That to get from the bronze age, the iron age was like two 2,000 years from the iron age to the industrial age like a thousand. Industrial age. It only lasts two hundred. Then, you get to the point now that the internet age only lasts twenty years. So. Oh, we’re not, are we, Oh yeah, you’re right.   Uh-huh? I was just trying to think like, well, yeah. And. Previous to that, the computer age only lasted like fifty And so, now we are approaching this point in human evolution and development that um progress. The human era can no longer be measured. That each human technological era begins to overlap itself. And that progress became becomes foreseeable by the organic mind. we have a date for that. And it’s twenty-forty-five. Uh between twenty forty-five, 2055 is when the singularity is supposed to occur. And what? So what is that what is that mean exactly? That means human technological progress becomes infinitely fast. Every day there are new technological breakthroughs. Every day there is more progress. Um.   How does even determine this state? Do you know? Well. I don’t know. Smarter men than me have done this math. Yeah. But it’s you see it evident in human evolution. These cuz there’s there were times in our history when thousands and thousands of years were spent the same. centuries were spent the same. There was no real development. It was just kind of an age. Living in the era that we live in now, it becomes very difficult to conceive of that. Because even if you’ve been around for twenty years, you’ve seen insane amounts of progress. And that simply just didn’t happen. Previously. Right. Ever since the industrial age for better or worse, we’ve sprinted towards this exponential progress, and as to what singularity looks like, oh no.   Uh, I surely just hope it’s not a new iPhone a day. Uh, I’m hoping it’s not the AI, you know, um. Oh, god. Take me over the world and. The matrix. I uh. I’m kind of opposed to AI. Kinda not. Because to get AI, we have to first solve the consciousness problem, and we solve the consciousness problem. Good luck. That pretty much unlocked the singularity right there. But at the same time okay, let’s say if we unlock consciousness, let’s say we’ve created an artificial intelligence. We have created a thinking, feeling machine. The feeling of what? How do you know that consciousness implies emotion? What, how do you know what that emotion is? Right. Right. It’s defining consciousness. Mm-hmm. Which is the tricky part. So, and then one of the interesting questions I’ve, it’s been posed to me is does emotion evolve? Are we more emotionally intelligent now than we were 500 years ago? You gotta remember 500 years ago, what was considered fun was watching the local heretic gutted in the public square.   So, I have to think that, yeah, we have grown. I, I do think we’ve owned in some ways, and at the same time, you know, there’s always going to be some kind of watching people get, you know, it’ll be a violent movie. Um. Yeah. Yeah. US, UFC, you know, we I mean II remember. Yeah. I don’t know how old you are but. I’m almost forty. There was a show on in the 90s called America’s Funniest Home Videos. That’s right. And it was hosted by Bob Saggett for some reason.   And uh there used to be a rule. But it first came out. That no one could get hurt. And the video. It was an explicit rule. What? no1 could be injured. Yes. Well and then the dude getting hit in the nuts by a football One 3 years in a row. And they realized their entertainment value. Exactly. Cuz when I watched it, it was like 80% of people getting hurt. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And uh that’s an interesting aspect of humanity that to my knowledge, only the Germans have attempted to quantify.   Uh, they have a word called uh Shodden Freuda. Which basically if I remember right, translates to the sad joy. And it is the pleasure that you get from other people’s pain. It is you who laugh at someone falling downstairs. It’s the reason you laugh at anything like that. Though the Germans have a word for it. It is Yeah. It exists Universally. And that is the very reason that um that that things like America’s funniest home videos or **** exist. Yeah. And it has to be II wonder really what is it psychologically that makes us like that? Is it a survival aspect of that ain’t me? Yeah. Yeah, I don’t know. Well because one of the weird questions I’ve never heard answered is uh why do we laugh? Like what even is laughter? Right. What is humor? Yeah. Uh-huh. and um because it wouldn’t exist for no reason. Laughter has to have a function the most interesting notion that I’ve heard is it was made as a diffused mechanism. The whole idea of why we find humor or awkwardness humorous.   Because of like let’s say you were walking around the pack way back in the day. And you heard the Bush’s Russell. And everyone gets scared. You see the rabbit jumps out, so you laugh. And that signal which creates a neurological response in any human that hears it Is a way to signal the all clear. And maybe it’s a way to signal that hey that wasn’t me that just slammed into a **** curve on a bicycle or something like that.   Like I don’t know what that is. I don’t define what humor is or why we laugh, to begin with. Right. Difficult question. And then you make it even more complex by the fact that some animals laugh. Really? Uh. Huh. Rats will laugh. Horses will laugh. Um, horses have displayed complex humor. Rats will laugh. Rats, you could tickle a rat. It’ll laugh. Giggle. That is so strange. Wow. They’re hyper-intelligent. Um, A horse. There’s some search horse prank on YouTube and you will get nothing but videos of horses taking revenge on people and laughing about it or playing a prank on their handler or something. it’s pretty.   That’s always been the strangest thing to me because that implies very complex emotional intelligence to have humor. Yeah. Well, we’ve strayed. This is a very interesting topic for sure, man. Philosophical, psychological, like cultural, uh what’s called anthropology, anthropological questions. Um kinda tying it back to hypnosis. Well, I mean and you were talking about singularity and consciousness. Was that, were you going somewhere that in terms of hypnosis? Who knows? Um well, probably where I was going with that. Um if not, where I’m going now is that what we do is going if it’s not already it is going to become vital to consciousness research and what it means to have that type of increased development that we can analyze ourselves and others in ways that we haven’t been able to in the past. I’ve heard some theories that the notion of metaprogramming. Being able to actively change our thoughts and behaviors is uh an evolutionary step that is not something we’ve always had.   That this ability to change everything about ourselves to suit our purposes is evolutionary. And I will take that one step further one of the things that I propose in many of my interviews is we don’t have free will. If everything of what we do is a product of association and learned behavior. How is that in any way an expression of choice? Now where free will comes in is when you choose to alter that behavior to suit your life when you choose how you want to view something. When you choose how you wanna act and react to something. Right, but aren’t those also dictated by past programming, by culture, um your knowns, so to speak? Yeah. You know. Could be. But it is the conscious choice of say if you have anxiety and you wish to resolve it. That is a conscious choice. Um. Right. Another example of a guess is if you don’t like a certain food, well, it stops.   Like it. But you can’t. Okay, well, what if you could make that choice? What if you could just choose to make a certain food or like reading or like something in particular? What if your association was different? And that’s where the change comes in. That’s where the choice comes in. At least I think. That’s just uh the logical quandary that I like to present to people. Yeah. You know, this whole free-will discussion, man. That’s above my pay grade. I do mean on most days, I lean towards, you know, there probably is in free will but What I will say is I think it’s important for us to believe that there’s free will even if there’s not. Just to function in society and for mental health and yeah. Um, there are a lot of things like that that you don’t have time to get into today but it exists for you.   You just have to play along to function. The biggest landmine in thought projects I could think of is simulation theory. Because you can neither prove it nor disprove it. So you could just continually fall that rabbit hole. So what is simulation The idea that we live in a simulation? Okay yeah, the matrix. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah yeah. There is no way to prove it. There’s no way to disprove it. Yup. And I have no couple of people that fell far down that hole. Yeah. So, now, this is not a lot of quantum physicists, okay? And obviously, I’m not anywhere near that realm and intelligence but from what I’ve heard and read and understand as a layman is that there is an interpretation that will lead to us being in a simulation, there are some quantum physicists who would say that, and um. Uh, who’s the deal? That it is. Yeah. Statistically more likely that we’re in a simulation than not. Is it? Yeah. Yeah. And it the singularity comes into that because it assumes that any civilization that gains enough technology to run a simulation will do so simply to gather information and that given our technological progress, it is more likely that we have reached that point and we are in a simulation, then, it is not.   So, wait, maybe the similarities are just when our when our holes pop open and we all get to come to to play in the real world. You know what? I think this ties nicely into hypnosis. Yeah. Okay. Because our beliefs, our core beliefs, a lot of them, are just BS. Yeah. It’s all perception. Reality is perception and as hypnotists, we can help you change that perception. Yeah, I don’t know if you, if you’ve been part of like a stage hypnotist show, hypnosis show? No, I’m opposed to stage hypnosis. What? Uh. It’s something I’ve to develop and like, yeah, I get that reaction a lot but speaking to clients and speaking to podcasters doing interviews, Stage Hypnosis is responsible for 90% of the misconceptions and falsehoods about hypnosis.   And I could say To me, hypnosis and hypnotherapy is a very, very, very powerful tool and it needs to be regarded as such and if we’re up on stage using what is supposed to be a powerful tool to make people stand on their head, that doesn’t allow people to view it with the, the gravity that they should because, to them, it becomes this, this parlor trick this and more than that, I’ve encountered people who’ve had negative experiences with stage hypnotists. Uh because of what they’ve experienced on stage, they would never get hypnotized again.   I’ve thought about that a lot. Would I ever do stage work? And I think at this point, the answer is no. Uh, I would do parlor work within a small setting like Transing one person in front of a small group just as a demonstration. That’s fine but doing it as a spectacle in front of a crowd. I think personally, this is only my opinion that it robs hypnosis of some of the dignity that it deserves. Hm. And I understand why it exists cuz yeah, it’s a neat thing But like, given how important I feel that hypnosis is to, in the understanding of it is to our health. Did damages its capacity to do so, by it being a stage show. Here, here’s my kind of argument. Um, because if show somebody that, you know, hey, I can make you bark like a dog, cluck like a chicken, uh via the power of hypnosis.   Imagine what it’ll do therapeutically. Imagine how easy it is for you to quit smoking or lose weight or you know. How many are to go to anxiety? Going to be convinced with that versus how many people are going to be convinced that it’s fake or that? Yeah, I know I get a process or that it’s mind control. Yeah. And that’s the contribution to the negativity that comes in. And the media doesn’t help because every time you see a movie where hypnosis is involved outside of uh black magic, that one movie from the forties. Um, it’s all **** Like it’s all just weird. if that’s not actually how that works. But it makes people believe it. That’s why you ask someone to imagine what a hypnotist is. The first thing they think is that. Yeah. I have one somewhere. Hey, it’s a legit induction man. It works.   I know. That’s the whole reason I dug mine out is because like man if I’m a hypnotist I wanna trans someone with a pocket watch. Exactly. That’s why I got it too. Just for that. Yeah. Yeah. I got you. Oh, I feel like this might be a good stopping point, man. It’s been a fun conversation. I don’t know if there’s anything that you.   Yeah, man. Thank you for coming on and um uh is there anything maybe you wanna end with before um you know, ask you how people can find you and work with you? Um well, one of the things I always like to end with, you’ve already mentioned that hypnosis is natural. It’s normal. It’s not a metaphysical thing that this is a natural function of the human mind and that there’s no reason not to utilize it for positive change.   It’s there anyway. We’re not adding anything. So, it’s something that I believe anyone can benefit from But if anyone wants to get a hold of me, uh like I was so enthusiastically introduced, my name is Jay Robert Parker. I own Twin Ravens Hypnotherapy and Research LLC and you can get a hold of me through my website at WWW dot Ravens dot ORG. Very nice. And you are doing group hypnotherapy as well. Oh, yes. Um I, if you go to a meetup, uh meetup .com and search for twin ravens hypnotherapy.   I have a bi-weekly group hypnosis that I’m starting up. Uh, just kind of as an experiment, see how well it catches on but it’s just uh every other week, just doing some general relaxation, motivation, just basic stuff, and way. Anyone that wants to be able to experience hypnosis gets the opportunity. It’s not the same as one-on-one but your results may vary. Some people get a very profound experience. Some people likely do but you always get something.   You let them know what it is. Yeah. And awesome. Great talking to you man. Absolutely. And I just wanna vouch for Robert’s skill and his compassion and passion in this work cuz I’ve been in one of those group uh hypnotherapy sessions. And it was very powerful. So I recommend anyone who wants to experience the power of hypnosis, to change their lives, to go with, to with Robert and you’re in good hands. So, thank you, man. Thank you for coming on. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Alright. Peace out, guys. As found on YouTube HUMAN SYNTHESYS STUDIO 👀🗯 Attention: Have Real Human Spokespeople In Your Videos Saying Exactly What You Want In MINUTES! 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Study with me 24h before my FINAL EXAM (med school vlog)

  Hello Kermamedic friends here, and welcome to a new potion… Finally, here it is! In a previous video of my Oski exam in the Faculty of Medicine, I announced a major event in the future. Today is tomorrow!! Let me show you something. That’s what the last two weeks have been about. And tomorrow is Oski’s day. This is Oski’s final week in medical school. The biggest, hardest, most notorious, anxiety-inducing test. … Is tomorrow…And I want to tell you that I have lost the will to live as well as the desire to study for this exam. I am okay You’re done, boy. You’re done. So well, honestly, those last two days have been a solid, rigorous study and I got through it and that’s why I don’t plan on doing that much studying today at all.   I have a list of a few things that I still need to reconfirm and after I’m done I have to go through this list I just want to go over the 4 main exams, abdominal scan, cardiovascular, respiratory, cranial nerves, and motor exams of the upper and lower extremities because they are very likely to Come on the exam so I’m going to do it one last time to be in the best shape I can and well and that’s pretty much it after that I’m going to the gym for gym and then I’m going to play video games with my sister and I’m going to rest and relax because I’m over it and I’m almost done I want to…. ah ah Scream, this is what we’re going to do. We’re not going to think, we’re just going to stop thinking I’m going to study another day and I’m going to start studying today and I’ve got some delicious strawberries and I’m about to get some coffee, and let’s do this.   Well, let’s do this, put the phone on silent. And we throw him on the bed again, like the last time I was preparing for OSCEs in the fourth year, and if you haven’t seen his fluke I advise you to see it I like it very much and I will put it for you here and I use this book and it is my main and it is completely falling off let me show you as you can see All the pages are falling off and I’ve used and benefited from this book very well so the first thing on my list and I’m going to learn about it are decisions and directions that you can make in advance about your treatment in case of future aphasia and not being able to make those kinds of decisions on your own so I’m going to read this and then Moving on… { …………. ……………… } Today is Mother’s Day in the Arab world so we sent my mom some The flowers and the card she had just received… and I’d run back to her..and say, “Have a nice day.” Anyway, we’re back at work.   So I spent about an hour studying. It’s all over for that first little sticky note here. I’m just going to get rid of it and throw it away and now I have this second sticky note with things on it that I didn’t know would make it into the exam until my good friend Georgina told me about it yesterday. This is what we will study now. One of those things is a C spine imaging or C spine X-ray. I’m going to see a random YouTube video about that if you’re wondering what this thing is right here on the side screen on the iPad here. This is a video game that I’ve been running in the background doing something very weird, not necessarily fundamental so I can stay sane here and make my time at this desk more enjoyable. It’s kind of like an incentive for me to sit here and study and every 10 minutes or so I click here a little bit, play a little bit of this game and that’s what’s kept me up for the last day. It is what it is.   Anyway, without further ado let’s watch this video and take some notes Honestly, I can’t stress this enough. If there’s something you don’t understand or something you’re learning for the first time, I find watching YouTube videos to be the best way to do it. These are the people who have already learned the thing you are trying to learn and are now trying to explain it in an easy-to-understand way with all kinds of beautiful pictures, maps, locations..etc. This is often much easier than your 50-minute lecture I’m sure many 50-minute lectures cover cervical spine X-rays but you know a lot of detail is going to come out and a lot of research and history coming to where we are now I want to know how to interpret C spine X-ray and spine X-ray.   So this is what I need… Well, I’m going to present this as if today is the exam I’m looking at the spine C and the x-ray of patient John Smith a large man of fifty-five years old who was coming to the hospital OK the patient history record and communication is two parts of the Oski exam. We also have things like exams, procedural skills, and assessment stations. So it all involves doing hands-on things with our hands talking to patients and examining them with things like a stethoscope and a tendon hammer also and please avoid everything you see here the exam is tomorrow I don’t want to clean my room right now.. if you recall, inside some of my previous vlogs was We have Sonic the Hedgehog, this big damn game that I can check out and it was actually really useful but I just threw it in the trash. So that’s why it’s gone but instead, what we have is Mr. Chair, oops let me get a patch I found ok Mr. Chair so Mr.   The chair is 24 years old and he presented to the emergency department with severe shortness of breath. So I’ll check it out and mark the screen and hope I don’t miss anything. Practice exam skills. What’s funny about this, my friends is that: when we first started preparing for the OSCII exam in year 2, in fact, you probably already knew this if you were watching my videos at the time, I used to complain a lot about the six-minute timer we have to complete these exams is too short and how can we do All we need to do in the six minutes they give us and now when we practice for these exams as final year medical students we only pass it in one minute and sometimes even a minute and a half depending on the exam it’s terrible when you think back on it but I think it’s a testament to show That practice makes perfect.   Keep working on something..you’ll get better at it, etc..so let’s get started, and study for the exam Hello good morning, my name is Nasir and I’m a final year medical student in the emergency department I’m going to confirm your name and age please my name is Mr. Chair, I’m 24 years old Hello Mr. Chair, nice to meet you today. I’m going to check your lungs. This would include looking, listening, and examining your hands, your face, and your chest. Is that OK? Yes, sure, well, thank you very much, just to explain a few things to the examiner with me first, if that’s possible.   Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Thank you very much. So, we have a minute and a half left on the timer. Assuming I haven’t missed anything major which is always possible. Let’s go to the marking chart and have a look at, the introduction – patient details, cones, screening of cervical lymph nodes aahhh check the lymph nodes in the back of the patient and feel for the supraclavicular nodes here……   Then we go to the submandibular salivary gland in front of the ear note; Don’t forget to check the lymph gland ooh oh yeah Fremitus Vocal 99 99 99 When you are listening to the patient’s chest in all the different areas you are supposed to listen to him again and ask him to say 99 99 99 99 99 This is a test called Acoustic Fremitus. And if you have coherence or a lump in the chest, then the sound will travel better, so you’ll hear 99% louder over the areas where there is reinforcement versus those where there isn’t, so this test!! Well, I remembered almost everything pretty much I didn’t do a fremitos audio 99 99 and check the lymph nodes and in my humble opinion this would be easy with the station and then of course you have to summarize your findings and you have to report this to the specialists etc.   And if you forget these two things. It’s okay, it’s not the end of the world. Well my friends, what’s the deal? With every check I do, it is expected that I will forget some things that are OK. But I have to reduce the number of things I forget. And that’s why we do the exercise. This puts in the big picture. Missing a few things on an exam is expected. It won’t be the end of the world. It certainly won’t let you down. But I want to forget as few things as possible. Hours later, we’re about to get to 1 pm. I have just written down in my diary all kinds of major steps and special tests that are done in all the musculoskeletal, shoulder, ankle, hands, and then also peripheral arterial and vein disease examinations and I feel ready. I feel good. Honestly, I don’t think I would do anything else.   Study wise for the rest of the day I’m going to ask Kenji and Georgina if either of them is rehearsing history to rehearse for a day earlier and later, but other than that I think I’m done with a very nice sunny day today so I’d like to enjoy that at least a little bit. I want to go to the gym, and maybe also play some video games with my sister in the evening.   Just relax, take a break, and calm down before the est date. So I’ll get some food, get some lunch, and yeah, we’ll get on with the day. I try to relax and take a break, and tomorrow is tomorrow… When testing, we have to look our best and that means clean shaven and then some formal wear with a shirt. Then confirmation. I have to get all that fluff out and trim those lines a little bit. Let’s do it I don’t know why I would, if I would wear a mask all the time.   It won’t make much difference but if you look good, you feel good and it generally gives you confidence. Therefore, I think it is worth it. I am surprised that this camera has not fallen so far, as it is a bit of a miracle. Well, we’re all done. Let’s get some food. Good. We’ll make ourselves lunch. And we’re going to watch the new episodes of Top Boy it’s awesome and as you all know, this is my favorite eating stand that just brings things together and makes everything so much more convenient. It makes me look like a grandfather..That’s the way it is. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.   By the way, bye to the moderators, not to spoil the show. Hello my friend how are you? Good, and you? I feel like your laptop will fall off the table, not that it is fixed with a stand on the back. Hello, Massad Al-Khair, my name is Nasir Kharma and I am a doctor here. Can you say your name and age, please? My name is Paul and…………!! Well, on my way to the gym, look at the beautiful weather we had here last week. Alas, I have been confined at home studying and preparing for the exam but I kind of went to take advantage of this once the exams are over anyway let’s start with the exercise step the stress of sweating just to rest and rest my head and I’ll see you in peace oh well this is well first day one of my friends, I’m just waiting outside the site which is a very nice place I got myself a quick coffee and my general plan is to get in at the last possible second. To listen to my music as often as I can.   That’s what I’m going to do for five minutes and then I’m going to the hall for the exam and I have to take the electronics so I can get in afterward And I’ll see you after that Peace….Oh my God Oh my God Well day one is done I’m not going to lie It was a lot more complex than I thought It wasn’t as straightforward as previous OSCE systems. I believe they deliberately tried to deceive us when going to the Respiratory Check Station, which later turned out to be the ATP Station. Well, then there were other stations where the wording was completely unclear. A lot of students complained about misunderstandings, what they wanted us to check, or what they wanted us to do, and they came and took feedback from all of us on how to change the wording moving forward. So you could have done a better job. But that’s okay, I wasn’t feeling great about two of the six stations we had today.   Then there are six more stops tomorrow. But once I get the written feedback from the examiners, I guess it kind of puts me at ease. The comments there were much better than I thought I did I’ll be fine. Anyway, that’s it. The first exam is over and another one is tomorrow. We have to start at 8 am and we have to stay until 11 am and then we do the exam and we are quarantined again until 1 pm until other students are counted in other universities around London and so we stay in quarantine and so that the information is not shared outside I think that’s good I think it good. I think it’s good. This is the end of my walk after the exam… I’m going home, I’m going to do some prescribing practice for today only, it’s possible to take one exam like this and nothing more than that I’m going to sit with Nour, it was very fun yesterday Anyway, see you my friends, peace…   … Hey my group (my friends) I’m home on the couch, just chill out and relax a bit. I m going to call Kenji and Georgina just to debrief about the stations we had today and the exam, talk about it a bit and get it off the chest and then maybe do a little practice description. I think I’ll finish it there I’ll pick up the camera again When I start calling it aits me that this is almost over as if medical school and university are finally almost over.   Mad madness, well see you in a little while..well, to PDF H 32 or 32, Article 32 or Page 32? Article 32….! Well, let’s say guys, last said before, more studying today won’t make any difference for today. And I think more study won’t make any difference at all for tomorrow. So we’ll end it here. It’s five in the evening, I’m going to rest and pack my bags. I’m ready to fly on Thursday early in the morning. So I can go out and celebrate tomorrow evening with everyone and I won’t have to pack for travel, and yeah, that’s what we’re doing for the day..almost done.   See you guys in a little while, Hello, Alright, so I’m going snowboarding tomorrow, not the day after tomorrow with about 10 of my friends from high school to celebrate finishing medical school, hopefully finishing medical undergraduate and all is well Alright tomorrow (let’s grab the wood) But let’s get started Time is running… Well, I’m packing up. It’s pretty much there. I just need to put some last things in tomorrow. Now it’s time to sit down with Noor… and play an episode of Eldon for a few hours. To relax and enjoy the night and that’s it. I’ll see you, my friends, tomorrow morning. Good morning and welcome to the day of the second OSC exam… I will be in a different location today, I am on the train and they separate us in different locations as Kings College London students so that we can see different examiners with different groups and things like that. It’s very popular this video of me releasing it tomorrow I put it on Instagram now I’m simply trying to relax as much as I can for a bit, before the exam I come early and I have some time, …   Hello … oh still filming … we are back on the youth campus. I guess today didn’t work as well as yesterday. I think there were a couple of stations that I found challenging and I don’t think I got the intended diagnosis in the end. But I hope my communication skills and everything else in history taken away will make up for it. But anyway, I wouldn’t think about it. I just had a meal with Aaron and Georgina I’m going to put the picture here..now I’m going to go to a coffee shop there and meet some friends to rest and breathe it’s been almost a week since I last logged in I forgot to close the blog and I just realized I hadn’t done it yet during this time I went skiing In Austria I came back..and surgery started this morning, I get up at 5 am everything was so crowded, but that will be another day for Flock.   I just want to thank you for taking the time to watch this video. I hope you enjoyed it. And if you enjoyed. it…. please don’t forget to like it and subscribe to my channel for more content to come in the future. And I’ll catch you on the next one, …..Peace…….. I’m done…. peace…… Hello friends Next peace, What’s up guys You’re right. As found on YouTube The Destroy Depression ꆛ System-Cure Depression Naturally YOUR DEPRESSION HAS BEEN IN CONTROL LONG ENOUGH. It’s Time to Fight Back ☂🗯 “Depression Sufferer Of Over 20 Years Reveals His Simple 7-Step System That Gives You The Power To Destroy Your Depression, End Your Feelings Of Sadness And Hopelessness, And Get Your Life Back.” “This didn’t just change my life, it saved my life.