1
If we can get
back to our essence,
I think that's where
we belong, that's home.
You've had all these
experiences in life
and yet, there's one part of you
that was there the whole time.
That same essence,
your same awareness,
your same consciousness has
been with you this whole time
and it's with you now.
We're still struggling
and stumbling.
Some people are
dying in the process,
some people are
sick unnecessarily
but eventually,
we've gotta get there
and we can change the paradigm.
We can do it.
Stress, it's a word
we hear every day.
People are stressed
out, work is stressful,
but what do we really
know about stress?
Before we can figure that
out, let's take a quick travel
back in time starting
around 70,000 BC.
Hunter-gatherers had to
be on high alert in order
to survive from other
predators in their environment.
Even though this seems like
an extremely long time ago,
we actually react to
stress in the environment
just like these early people.
Let's fast forward to
early in the 17th century
to see French philosopher
Rene Descartes
who famously said, "I
think, therefore I am."
He is also responsible for
the idea of mind-body dualism
which some call the
mind-body problem.
He theorized that if the
mind was a thinking thing
and the body was a
non-thinking thing,
that the mind could
exist without the body
but the body could not
exist without the mind,
which essentially
declared them as separate.
This paved the way for
many schools of thought
addressing this mind-body split.
Several decades later,
we hear the word stress
used by English natural
philosopher Robert Hooke
in engineering terms.
He was interested in
how man-made structures
such as bridges
could be made to withstand
heavy loads without collapsing.
He created what he called
the Law of Elasticity
which demonstrated how
something like a spring
could withstand a
certain amount of stress
before it reached
a breaking point.
This machine-like analogy
proved to be fertile ground
for future explanations of
how humans experience stress.
His rival at the time,
Sir Isaac Newton,
would soon introduce
his three Laws of Motion
which would continue
to point toward
a mechanistic view of the body.
He also held a grudge
against Robert Hooke
and is responsible for
why you've probably
never heard of him.
And now to jump ahead
to the mid-1800s.
French physician Claude Bernard
introduced the idea that
the internal environment
of living organisms must
remain fairly constant
in response to changes in
the external environment.
Based on this work,
in the early 1900s,
American physiologist
Walter Bradford Cannon
coined the term Homeostasis
to describe this neutral,
stable state that needed to
exist for the body to survive.
He also coined the
term fight or flight,
but we'll get back
to that later.
When it comes to our current
understanding of stress,
the man responsible
is Hungarian-Canadian
endocrinologist
Hans Selye, he is known for his
work studying what he called
General Adaptation Syndrome.
He would later coin the term
stress which is still used
to explain aspects of
the stress response.
This response is
directly responsible
for helping the body
return to homeostasis.
Which brings us to today.
Most people, when
they think of stress,
they think it's like they're
stressed out in their mind,
they're worrying about things,
they're obsessing about things.
The response part of
the stress response
is your body's response
to that stress.
So most of us walking around,
we don't put two
and two together.
When they layperson hears
something like stress response,
they know that stress,
they think that stress
is the cause of their problem.
But we teach them that stress
is actually an aggravating
factor over whatever
existing weakness they have.
'Cause we're all
stressed all the time.
One of the things we
wanna take a look at
is that people have
physical stress,
biochemical/nutritional stress
and mental/emotional stress.
People think, when
they think of stress,
it's whatever they're stressed
out about at their job
or their career or their family
or whatever's going on
in their life personally
but stress takes
many different forms.
So our goal is to make
sure that they know is that
all of these things
are equally important,
your mind and your body
are the same thing.
It's not some new age-y
kind of statement.
If you alter your mind,
it's gonna alter your body.
If you can address a
person's stress in their life,
I feel like that
should be number one
because we know that mental
stress will affect the body
in a physical way.
So many American's have
gastro-intestinal issues,
they have stomach issues,
their digestion's not great,
they bloat after
they eat and yeah,
there's a good portion
of that that's from food
but we also know that
so much of our stress
goes right to our
digestive tract.
And so I've found
with many patients
as I'm addressing their
food but more importantly,
it's also looking at what else
is going on in their life.
And it's amazing how when
they're able to digest more
of what's going on in their life
they're able to digest
their food better
and everything else in the
whole system starts clearing up.
The person who has
a heart attack today,
were they healthy yesterday?
Of course not, where they
healthy last week or last month?
Most likely not.
But there was something
that was going on
that led to that crisis,
that heart attack.
The emotions work they
same way, they accumulate,
they accumulate and then
something goes wrong.
When somebody's
under a lot of stress,
at least emotional stress,
a whole cascade of things
can be going on, from neck
problems to low back problems
to stomach problems
to anxiety to,
I've seen people go
through cyclical infections
to you name it.
Stress causes almost
every condition out there.
And if we can just take some
of that emotional pressure
off their system, at least
the chemistry of that emotion,
their body has a
better chance to heal.
When we're struck
by a stressor on a day
that our system is already
somewhat compromised,
it's just like, it's really
like adding, you know,
one more little, teeny,
tiny hair to the pile
and it just, everything just
crumbles in that moment.
And we're very adaptable
and we're very, you know,
our nervous systems
are very intelligent.
And it figures out a way to
kind of cope and get through
but what we often
end up doing is
developing coping
mechanisms that don't work
when we get a little bit older.
I often have patients
come in and say,
"Oh, I'm sabotaging myself,
"I don't know why I'm
doing this to myself."
And they are beating
themselves up
because these patterns
are coming into play
but what they don't
realize is that
these patterns saved
them as children.
These patterns are survival
skills that have just
gone a little wonky.
Where I find stress
is a really big deal
for a lot of people are
their own internal thoughts.
They beat themselves up.
They don't think
they're good enough.
They feel like they
have to be perfect.
And every time they
fail at something,
they stress themselves out.
And those are the
stressors which oftentimes
people don't think
they're stressed about.
So ask yourself this, if every
time you do something wrong,
do you beat yourself up?
If you do that, you're
stressing yourself out.
So what we try and do is
we help people recognize
those things so that
they can deal with them
a little bit more effectively
so that they don't
actually stress
themselves out internally.
Some people understand
that there's something
called a fight or
flight syndrome.
And in the fight
or flight syndrome,
that's looking at a part
of the nervous system
called the autonomic
nervous system.
The autonomic nervous system is
a science-y way of
talking about the
part of the nervous system
that isn't the central
nervous system.
So the central nervous
system is the brain
and the nerves
that connect down.
The autonomic nervous system
has two major branches,
so to speak, sympathetic
which we call fight or flight
and the parasympathetic
which we could call
relaxation and restoration.
When we're in that latter mode,
the relaxation/restoration
mode of our nervous system,
that's when healing occurs,
that's when the body
rejuvenates itself.
When we're in the
fight or flight mode,
we're actually getting
ready to ward off
something threatening so
we need that but we can't
be in it all the time
or it has negative
health effects.
You might be driving
in traffic and someone
cuts in front of you,
your life's not in danger
but your body gives
the same response.
And that ties back into
the stress response
because when you go into
that fight or flight
state of being,
your parasympathetic
calming nervous system
is turned off, that also
turns off all your healing
and resting and digesting
portion of your body.
And if we don't
find ways of breaking
that fight or
flight response then
the symptoms you see
of too much stress,
poor digestion, can't
sleep at night, make sense
because you have this activated
sympathetic nervous system
that, that's what
it's all about.
So it's kinda like, you know,
if you have a Ferrari and
you're going 140 miles per hour,
I mean, that's what
it's built for.
But if it goes 140 miles
per hour all day long,
24/7 and you never stop
and you never get a chance
for it to be garaged and
parked for it to rest,
that can be damaging to the car.
So that's much like
our body as well
if it's constantly in fight
or flight and stress mode
all the time then it can
lead to early breakdown.
We need to remember that
stress is not up here.
It's whole body.
And that stress is a
physiological phenomenon.
And I often will use, with
patients, the example of,
okay, you know, stress is
a physiological phenomenon
that is not necessarily
in your control.
It's not about the
rational response.
So it's kind of like when
you're driving down the road,
okay, I look at my
speedometer, my rational brain
is in front of me and it
says, "Okay, I'm going 55."
And then all of the
sudden you see sirens
in your rear-view mirror.
And what happens?
Patients always know,
they say, "Oh, well, yeah,
"I grip the steering wheel,
my heart starts to pound.
"Sometimes I sweat, my
tummy gets butterflies."
And with that it's like exactly.
That is the physiology of stress
because your rational brain
looks at your speedometer
and says, "Oh, I'm going 55."
But you still see
those sirens and think
I'm in trouble, it's a threat.
And it's a perceived threat,
it's not necessarily real,
it's the emotional reality.
And then the police
car goes right by you
and you go okay.
But you still feel the
physiological effects of stress.
The other part of
that is that people
are so used to that
nowadays that it's normal.
Neuroscientist and
pharmacologist, Dr. Candace Pert
made a breakthrough
discovery in 1972
when she discovered
the opiate receptor.
It was thought for any drug
to work in your system,
it had to first bind to
receptors in your cells.
But what made this
discovery so exciting
was that it meant that
the receptor must be used
for something
created by the body,
not just for external
things like drugs.
This led to the
discovery of endorphins,
our body's very own morphine.
These discoveries led
to what she called
the molecules of emotion.
That when you have an emotion,
it is the result of
physical molecules
known as neuropeptides being
released into your body
and attaching
themselves to receptors
in every cell of your body,
which means that emotions
are actually a
physiological phenomenon,
not a mental construct
as we had thought.
Candace Pert, the famous
researcher actually found
that there were
neuro-transmitter
receptors in our gut.
In fact, there's more
neuro-transmitter receptors
in our gut than there
are in our brain.
She taught us that the mind
is not just above the neck,
it's throughout the whole body.
And that's true,
there's intelligence
in every cell of the body.
Emotions, really, as it
turns out, are physiological
phenomenon not necessarily
psychological phenomenon.
So kind of how we say it is that
we use these words to
explain how we feel,
that we're stressed, that
is going on in my life,
to try and communicate
to our conscious mind
what we're experiencing.
The reality is is
that we all have these
what we would call
conditioned responses.
The concept of conditioning
came from the observations
of Ivan Pavlov, he was
a Russian Physiologist
who conducted the famous dog
studies in the late 1800s.
While they weren't the most
ethical of experiments,
at least we were able
to learn from them.
Every time he
would feed the dog,
he would ring a bell.
After doing this several
times, he simply rang the bell
without feeding the dog.
Even though there
wasn't any food,
the dog still salivated
as if food was coming.
This unconscious,
physiological response
is the result of conditioning.
Humans, we drool our
whole life away, right?
We have these different
metaphors that people use
like he really
pushed my buttons,
she really knows how
to pull my strings,
they did it to me, all
of this kind of stuff
to really explain our
experience of what's going on.
But it's really just a
conditioned response, you know?
And what we like to leave
everybody with knowing is that
how it works is what you
don't express in life
you'll repress until
it expresses as
disease or dysfunction.
It's kinda like Woody
Allen used to say,
"I never get angry,
I just grow a tumor."
Meaning, if I don't
get my stuff out,
it stays in until it comes
out as something ugly,
either a behavior or
a health condition.
Symptoms can show up in
the form of like anxiety
or depression and in
modern days I think people
are quick to try to take a pill.
And maybe the drug helps, it's
not to say that medication
isn't good once in a while,
but often it's just masking
or covering up a symptom.
And maybe it helps a
person through a crisis,
so it can be good,
but if we can get to
what is the underlying cause
that keeps getting
re-triggered, lives can change.
In Philadelphia,
exciting new research
is being done at the Marcus
Institute of Integrative Health
at Jefferson University, one
of the leaders in this field.
One of the critical
pieces of what we were doing
with our initial imaging
study is to expose people to
the various traumas
and stressors that
have really created
a problem for the person.
So they actually
listen to an audio file
of these very traumatic
moments in their life
and in particular we were
looking at cancer patients
who have struggled with
cancer and usually have
very traumatic part of
either the diagnosis
or the treatment that they
just can't get rid of.
All of these people
physiologically reacted
to thinking about
that stressful event.
Heart rate went up or galvanic
skin response changed.
And so what we had
were people who were
physiologically reactive
and subjectively distressed
by this event and it's been
going on for a long time.
So what exactly was this study?
Dr. Monti and his
team created it as
a randomized controlled trial.
All of the participants
had a distressing
cancer-related memory
that was associated
with symptoms of
traumatic stress.
These symptoms had been
intruding in their lives
for at least six months, and
for many of the participants,
it had been years.
Each one of them made a script
explaining the traumatic
events in their own words.
That script was then
read back to them
while they were given
a functional MRI
to measure the levels of
distress they were experiencing.
Since this was a randomized
controlled trial,
the participants had been
split up into two groups,
one group received Neuro
Emotional Technique, or NET,
and the others were assigned
to the Waitlist
Control Condition.
The results of those
who received NE were dramatic, to say the least.
But before we can go any
further, we have to head over
to Encinitas, California
to meet Dr. Scott Walker.
Some of my patients
weren't getting well.
Some of 'em get well over time,
some of 'em wouldn't get well.
The people that
didn't get results
had a look of tension
in their eyes.
This is just something,
I came from a town
of 500 people and I'm so happy
I came from a a small town
because I can see people
in different ways.
And the people that seemed
to be burdened, I think,
were emotionally burdened.
And they were the ones
that had less results.
And so I made up in my mind that
maybe they were having
emotional trouble,
that's not a new thought,
people have been
thinking that people,
emotional stress has effected
the body for some time.
But I didn't know
how to solve it.
But as it turned out, Dr.
Walker went to a seminar
where he met a
chiropractor by the name of
Dr. Jennifer Lamonica.
He learned that she would give
certain people an adjustment
and soon after, when they
would think about work,
that their spine
would be out of place
before they even
left the office.
Hearing this reaffirmed
his suspicion
that there had to be
something else going on.
The first patient on the
next day that I was home,
she had gone to work and gotten
in an automobile accident.
Now I'm still, my mind is not
in my compassionate heart,
my mind is in my mind
and I'm thinking,
maybe she had fear
in this accident.
This is a chance I can
work this hypothesis.
And I said, "Oh, you
were in an accident."
I said, "Did you fear when
you were in the accident?"
And she said, "Yes."
I said, "Oh!"
I'm sure I didn't do that but
that's the way I was thinking.
One of Dr. Scott's mentors,
Dr. George Goodheart,
correlated the primary
muscles of the body with the
major meridians used in
traditional Chinese medicine.
So you have these meridians,
they're kinda like channels
or what I like to describe
them as like freeways systems.
So they run from different
areas of the body,
from your head to your toe,
to your toes back to your trunk,
to your trunk to the face.
So they all travel
across the body
and they go even through the
deeper layers of the organs.
You know, the philosophy is
that if there is a traffic jam
or a blockage in any
of those meridians,
there's a disruption of
the vital force of the body
which is the chi, or the blood.
Even though traditional
Chinese medicine
has been using meridians
for thousands of years,
a recent discovery by
Auburn University Professor
Vitaly Vodyanoy is bringing
more scientific attention
to this system.
I didn't know all the
meridians and all the emotions,
but I knew fear
and I knew kidneys.
I said, "What I want you to do
is I want you to think about
"the fear that you had when
you were in that accident."
And she said, "Oh, okay."
And so she did and I
adjusted the sequences for
the kidney, which
is T1, T5 and T8.
And then I said to her, I
said, "How does that feel?"
I wanted to see if I
could get rid of fear.
And she thought I meant
how does her neck feel?
Well, of course, you know.
And she says, "Oh,
how do I feel?"
She goes...
"Yeah, that feels better."
And then I was ashamed because
I wasn't thinking
about her poor neck,
I was thinking about
this idea that I had
and maybe I could
get rid of the fear.
And so I said, "Oh, oh, okay."
"And how does the
fear feel now?"
She says, "Yeah, I don't feel
any fear about it at all now."
I said, "Yes."
Yes.
Any symptom that we have,
really, could have
a stress component.
And I think that's how
we came to develop NET,
Dr. Scott figured out
that, as a chiropractor,
he would help certain problems
and help spinal conditions
or painful situations
but there were those
certain cases that didn't
resolve all the way, so it
could be a knee or a shoulder,
a TMJ or a backache or a
stomachache or anything
and, what, 80% would get fixed
but what about those
20 that didn't?
It's really a
brilliant intervention.
I don't know how Dr.
Walker put it together,
given that there was
nothing like it at the time
and he just somehow put together
these different concepts.
It makes sense in hindsight
how he put them together
but it really required a
special brain to do that.
I knew I was onto something,
I knew, this is good.
There is the placebo effect,
you've gotta watch that.
I do not want to encourage
the placebo effect,
I want to discourage
the placebo effect.
So I made a pact with myself.
No more Mr. Nice Guy.
And I had this patient
come in one day, she said,
"You did that emotional thing
about this miscarried baby
"that I had, I feel so relieved,
"it was such a cloud over my
head that I lost this baby."
And I said,
"Well," I was trying
to write my notes
and she reached over and I
don't know what kind of shirt
I had on but she grabbed me.
And she put her face in
mine, "I said you helped me!"
And there I was,
I couldn't write, I was
nose-to-nose with her.
And she said very
forcefully, she said,
"I said you helped me!"
And I thought, my God,
what have I become?
That I can't celebrate
my patient's win?
That I can't celebrate
her joy with her?
What's happened to me?
I said, I'm gonna
leave the research
for the researchers, that's it.
Later, with the help
of fellow practitioners,
Dr. Scott created The
ONE Research Foundation,
they have privately funded over
30 research studies to date
which brings us
back to the present.
Meet one of the
participants in this study,
Dr. Jim Buckley.
And in 2014, I got a diagnosis
of non-Hodgkin's
B-cell lymphoma.
And it really took me by
surprise, I was shocked
that I had come down
with something like this.
I mean, I'm a
healthcare practitioner,
I'm not supposed to get sick.
But I did and...
I think I was spending
so much time taking care
of everybody else that I kinda
let myself fall by the wayside.
Conventional cancer
therapy was not anything
that I ever thought I
would use just because I
had strong feelings that
that was not the way to go
in terms of getting
healthy again.
But as it turned out, the
tumor that I had in my abdomen
was about as big as a football
and it was pushing on my
kidney and my intestines
and it was really
starting to cause me
an awful lot of
trouble so I ended up
doing what I said
I would never do
and getting chemotherapy.
And
during the process of
that I found out that
The ONE Foundation was
doing a research project on
the emotional effect of
hearing that you have cancer
and I was in that boat now.
First they kinda
questioned me about
what was the biggest impact of
hearing that you had cancer?
How did that impact your life
and what was the
hardest thing about it?
And I had to go down and list
what was the most
difficult for me.
What came up was the hardest
to leave my wife and daughters,
feeling like I hadn't
finished the work
that I was here to
do and felt as though
I was leaving them in the lurch
and felt a lot of responsibility
in terms of how I kinda had
fallen down on my self care
and was, as a result, you know,
potentially could lose my
life and closeness with them.
One of the things that I
heard over and over again
from participants in the study
was that these distressing
memories and experiences
would intrude or impact
on positive experiences
in the present day when
they least expected it.
So they might be chopping
lettuce in their kitchen
and be suddenly reminded
or flooded with feelings of
how stressful it was to be sick
or what it was like to be
retching over the garbage can
in their kitchen
all those years ago.
So just being in
the kitchen again
reminded them of
that earlier stress.
The passage of time
wasn't making it go away.
By the way, that's kind
of an old conception that
we found is incorrect, you know,
time really doesn't
heal all wounds
because emotional wounds
are in the part of the brain
where there is no sense of time.
Sometimes things
happen early in life
where we are in a
dangerous situation
or something is perceived
to be awful happening.
And the body is unable to
extinguish that response
on an unconscious level.
Years later, we find out
that that buried stress,
those buried feelings
that have never gone away
are still being triggered
in any situation
that looks the same,
sounds the same,
smells the same, feels
the same can trigger that
on an unconscious level
and bring the feelings back
even though it's a
different situation.
So whatever happened
to you at seven,
your subconscious still thinks
it's happening right now.
And even as a practitioner,
once I learned that,
it took me a long time to
wrap my mind around that
but it's the truth.
It's not gee, now it feels
like I was then, it is then.
There is no linear
time in that place
so it is exactly that
moment that they're feeling
and it's replicated just as
if it's happening right now.
What we were able to
observe in the brain
is where the distress was
being registered in the brain
when they listened to a
script of the traumatic event.
And that script has been
going on for a long time.
Again, I emphasize that because
it isn't a matter of time
healing this particular wound,
the time has been going by
and going by and going by
and the period of time of
the study was quite short.
All of the
participants in the study
who received NET were given
treatment over several weeks
and some of them had their
sessions all in one day.
The findings were then published
in the Journal of
Cancer Survivorship.
The main finding
that we really had
was that these areas
of the limbic system,
particularly the, what's
called the parahippocampus,
which is very involved in our
sort of traumatic memories
and emotional, our negative
emotional responses,
this was an area that was
far more active initially
and then after undergoing
the NET program,
suddenly didn't really
react very much.
It just wasn't there anymore
for most of those patients.
In fact, everybody
had some response
where there was far
less to no activation
of those areas in
the limbic brain,
particularly the
parahippocampal area
which is where
distressing memories sit.
The activation was
virtually gone.
So there was a 50% increase
in the neuron density
between the amygdala
and the frontal lobe.
Now the frontal lobe is
the front part of the brain
and that's responsible
for long-term planning,
thinking, complex reasoning.
That's the part of
the brain that says,
"Everything's gonna be okay,
I shouldn't be stressed
"about this, this is
nothing to worry about."
And my clients in and the
participants in the study
will say all the time, "I say
all the right things to myself
"but it just doesn't matter."
And that's exactly true
because the message
isn't getting through
to the emotional brain.
And we also know from this study
that every time a
really distressing event
gets reactivated or
there's a reminder of it,
that your nervous system reacts.
So when we looked
at the biofeedback,
we know that the autonomic
nervous system gets involved.
And when the autonomic nervous
systems gets hyper activated,
that has a negative
effect on health outcomes,
quality of life
across the board,
creates too much inflammation
in the system and so on.
We talk about sort of the
brain normalizing itself
and in many ways
that is reflected
in what these scans looked at,
that instead of having
this overreaction
in these limbic
areas of the brain,
the brain basically
said, "Okay, you know,
"it's just one of my
memories now and it's not
"a traumatic memory,
I don't have these
"horrible feelings
that come up."
And it's reflected in what
the brain looked like.
I was even surprised
that base-line mood,
base-line anxiety, all
of those things changed.
Like when you think about
it, the person's overall
quality of life was changed.
From three to five sessions
of an intervention.
That's pretty dramatic.
I can tell you that I felt
physically different after
receiving the treatment.
I had had a bunch of
different treatments
during my attempts
to treat the disease
but I really felt as though
after that treatment,
I really took a
turn towards healing
and it was physically evident.
That's just an example of how...
All the work that I'd been
doing for all those years...
To help other people
could actually
help me too.
It just, it reached
me in another way that
it had never reached me before.
Like how impactful and how
important this work is.
I know in my heart that this
treatment really helped to
shift how I healed.
It just felt like
I can heal this now
where before I didn't,
I may have thought that,
but I didn't feel
that in my body.
You can have all the positive
affirmations you want
and intend for different
things to happen
and that's all cognitive,
that's all your brain talking.
But this was distinctly
different in that
it was in my gut that
I felt different,
it wasn't just a thought,
it was I feel like
I can heal this.
There is an emotional
component that happens
from being sick for
long periods of time
or struggling with
physical illness.
Or watching someone you love
face a physical illness.
We're not floating heads,
there is a combination
that happens where the mind
and the body work together
and so when you have
a physical illness,
there is emotional component.
And when you're facing
emotional stress like depression
or anxiety, there's a
physical component to it
and that both of those
need to be treated.
Sometimes people don't know
and they need that tool of NE that utilizes not just
what's in the conscious brain
but what physiology is
doing that actually helps us
to get at what's a little
bit less than conscious.
But because NET uses
several unique components,
first being the muscle
testing which allows the body
to become its own
biofeedback instrument.
The body then
guides the treatment
by using the muscle testing,
it precisely and correctly
identifies what these
periods of distress are.
And what we're really
doing with the muscle test
is we're posing a concept and
then seeing if their body,
the patient's body, has
a physiological response.
We're not measuring
true and false,
we're only measuring
the person's personal
reaction to it.
So it's kind of like,
I over-simplified,
would be the amoeba moving
toward a bit of food
or away from a bit of poison
that's in the Petri dish.
And that's what we're
measuring with the muscle test.
The experience of
NET is far different
than what somebody
observing it can know.
We're run so much
by our subconscious,
at least 80%, probably 99.9%,
we're run by our
subconscious minds.
And therefore we're
kind of victim
to those subconscious minds.
Because our subconscious
mind is running
so much of the show,
it can be difficult
to break out of
our conditioning.
Dr. Scott explains that a
Neuro Emotional Complex,
or NEC, is when an emotion
gets stuck in the body.
In the NEC, we're shedding
the old perceptions,
we're shedding the feelings
that went with them.
And usually the NEC, of
course, has something
that is perceived by us to
be non-survival oriented,
it's counter survival, that's
the way we perceive it.
And so we're shedding that.
So most of the time what
happens is when people
come into my office, they've
had this issue for so long
that they start to
mistake the problem
that they're having as
it actually being them.
So instead of them
having anxiety,
they feel anxious and then
they start to attribute that
to them just being
an anxious person,
it becomes part
of their identity.
It's that feeling
of hopelessness
that's so corrosive, I think.
And the idea
for people,
the idea that there's
some hope out there
that they could actually
get to the heart
of why this is
actually happening
over and over
again in their life
and even return to the place
where it becomes something,
a condition that they have
rather than who they are,
that's a great start, okay?
And then move on from there.
People often ask me, "Well,
that event doesn't seem
"like it was so traumatic
or anything like that,
"so why did that come up?"
But I think that we are
just so bombarded with
processed foods and sugar and,
you know, lack of
sleep and the news
and everything that
we're exposed to
that our brain gets overloaded,
our nervous system
gets overloaded
with the emotions
it's trying to process
so something that seems
somewhat insignificant
may have hit us on a day
that our system was weak
and it just didn't know
what to do with it.
When one person,
years and years later,
is still suffering from
the death of a parent.
And then another person,
years and years later,
is suffering because
they didn't get ice cream
at a birthday party,
it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
The person who lost
a parent might've
actually adapted
better than the kid
who didn't get ice cream
at a birthday party.
Emotions have no logic,
they're just emotions.
If they were logical, we'd
all figure our stuff out
and no one would ever
have a health issue
or need to see a doctor or
therapist for any reason
'cause we would just
think about it, go huh,
and then we'd be fine.
Doesn't really work like that.
The memory stores
things, often inaccurately
as to what really happened,
'cause it's not about that.
And what it can do is it
can put associated memories
together so that when
you recount something
or retell a story, you
had pieces that really
didn't even happen just by the
way our memory stores stuff.
And it doesn't matter that
it's logically correct
or that they're overly
emotional or underly emotional.
If the body's having a
physiological reaction,
we can help connect the
different piece parts
and let the body come to
closure with that thing.
When we do muscle testing
we get the body's feedback
and we use that to
help the body heal.
So logic and reason
oftentimes are not involved
when we're doing NET,
we're just finding out
where the body is stuck.
And sometimes there's no
way that we would logically
ever figure it out unless
we use muscle testing.
Upon further
analysis of the data,
the team at Jefferson noticed
some very interesting changes
regarding the cerebellum.
This led to the publishing of
their second paper in 2017.
It's kind of
traditionally been taught
that the cerebellum
is primarily involved
in the coordination of our
motor activity so when it comes
to emotions, it's
not that relevant,
it's not really helping
us with anything.
It's really just helping
us to move our hands
and to move our legs and to do
that in a coordinated fashion
but a growing number
of research studies,
as we came to find as we
started to look at it,
we started to see well, gee,
there's some interesting
studies that show
that when the cerebellum is
activated that has something
to do with the laying down
of traumatic memories.
According to a scientific
paper published in 2015
titled "The Emotional
Cerebellum", imaging
experts revealed,
"The cerebellum is activated
during mental recall
"of emotional personal episodes
"and during the learning
of a conditioned
"or unconditioned association
involving emotions."
Even though the cerebellum
is relatively small,
it's just kind of
these little balls
in the back of the
brain, it has five times
the number of neurons as the
rest of the brain combined.
And then we started
to realize, well,
you know, this is all
starting to make some sense.
If this part of the brain
normally is involved
in the coordination of motor
function, maybe it's also
involved in the coordination
of emotional function.
And if that's the case, then
perhaps what we're seeing
is that as a result
of going through the
Neuro Emotional Technique
and the various elements
that are involved in
it, that we are having
a direct impact on
how that cerebellum
is able to regulate
the emotional, or
help in the regulation
of these emotional
centers of the brain.
This is one of the reasons
to get up and go to work
as a medical researcher because
you don't get to see these
kinds of results every day.
But it also opens
up the door even more
in terms of the field of
cognitive neuroscience
and emotions and
psychiatry and psychology
because it helps us to
understand that the cerebellum
may be a very critical
area of our brain
that is very much related
to our emotional selves
and not just how our body moves
but how our body is
moved emotionally.
Even the people on my team
who knew nothing about NET,
they're just
analyzing, you know,
doing the quantitative analysis
of the MRIs pre and post
are like, "What is this?
"What was this intervention,
what's going on here?"
Everybody was just really
thrilled and so happy
for the patients.
And of course, that's
what it's really about.
Even though the study
was focused on people
with traumatic stress from
cancer, the traumatic stress
of going to war is an
equally important issue.
On his third deployment
to Afghanistan,
United States Marine
Corps Corporal
Rory Hamill sustained
serious injuries.
It was February 13th, 2011,
it's almost seven years now.
Took the minesweeper
off my point man's back
after he received
some information
that there was an
improvised explosive device
on a compound by our location.
And
we got about three quarters
of the compound swept
and as I was nearing
the end of my search,
I stepped on a little
metallic pressure plate
which detonated homemade
explosives five feet behind me
to the right and the
explosion and the blast force
came from my right side,
sheared my right
leg off instantly,
clipped the back of my left leg.
Flew 10 feet in the air,
hit the ground on
the back of my head.
My Marines saved my life, they
instantly rushed right in.
There could have been a
secondary IED in there
but they didn't care.
They dragged me out
of the blast zone,
worked on me, stopped the
bleeding, stabilized me.
Unfortunately, on the helicopter
to the shock trauma unit,
I flat lined for two minutes
and I was
resuscitated, worked on
and began the long journey home.
Took about a week
for me to get home
'cause they need to keep
you stable when they put you
on a plane and I wasn't
quite stable enough
but eventually I made it
back to Washington, D.C.
where I began my rehab.
It's very common with amputees,
we get phantom limb pain.
That's where your body is
firing of synapses and trying
to remap, you know, where the
nerves are and it realized
that there was a huge
chunk of nerves missing.
But that can translate into
phantom pain, phantom sensation.
And one of the things that we
worked on at the office was
we tried using a mirror,
it helped out a lot.
In a sense, it kind
of tricked my brain.
I'm looking at this,
I have my left leg
and I'm looking at it and
in my brain it made sense
and it helped, you know,
with a combination of
the actual treatment
it helped get a lot of that
stress away from my body.
And the phantom pains
and sensations became,
you know, very less frequent.
Obviously I still have
challenges every single day.
It's very, very hard and over
the past almost seven years
I have a gotten a lot mentally
and physically stronger
but NET has been an
integral part of that.
What I feel, what I've
seen with NET is it's,
it really is a mind/body
type of therapy.
And I can personally attest
to normally, you know,
if you have a physical thing,
go to a physical doctor.
You have a mental thing,
you go to a mental doctor.
With NET, it hits both of
those at the same time.
And I really, really feel that's
why there was such a huge,
you know, wave of emotion
released initially
and all the subsequent
appointments afterwards.
The doctor didn't tell me
that I was going to be cured
of my ailments or anything
like that, it wasn't,
but he did tell me that it
would help stabilize my body
and help me get back
to a sense of normalcy
in my everyday life, which it
did, hands down, immediately.
And it only got better
with the next few sessions
and, you know,
subsequently after.
It helped me a lot.
It helped me out
of a dark place.
You know, that with the help
of family and friends as well,
it's just, it was an
amazing supplement to,
to my regimen, to
everything that I needed.
When the doctor's ego is there,
it reduces the capacity
for healing in the patient.
Too often we get an idea,
a preconceived idea about
what's going on
with the patient.
And how could we
possibly do that?
Because we've only
lived our own life.
We haven't lived
that person's life.
We don't know what's
going on with them at all.
And so, well known by
the psychologist is
people project,
people project their
loves and their hatreds.
As a practitioner, you can't
allow your stuff to interfere
and as humans, it's very
easy for that to happen.
We even have seminars
that they're designed
to address the
practitioner's needs
so that we don't have those
needs getting in the way
of the therapeutic relationship.
There are
numerous seminars every year
allowing practitioners to learn
and improve their technique.
As of 2018, there are more
than 10,000 practitioners
in over 30 countries.
Whether they're small
distressing events
that just aren't
resolving themselves well
or the big, big ones,
they all affect us.
And they affect our
quality of life,
they affect how we're
functioning, how we're feeling
and whether or not we're
thriving in the world
the way we want to be.
And where, 30 years ago,
it was different thinking,
I think the whole face
of healthcare is changing
and people are more open now
that what you think could
affect how you heal.
What you eat, how you exercise,
meditation,
yoga, all that kind of stuff.
And NET's just a tool but I
think it's a perfect time for it
because I think the
consciousness of
people in general
is real open that
maybe I have something
to do with my health condition.
And if we can help unlock
what was stuck in there
then all those other things
they're doing as well
work better too.
It pays it forward in
so many different ways
because if one person
can be less stressed
when they go home
to their family,
when they, you know, go
into work, when they are
on the phone as a customer
service representative,
then all of the sudden
we have a better world
cascading, cascading, cascading.
This is a really good
time in history to be there.
It was so wonderful
in the very beginning
because we didn't know
where we were going
or what we were doing
or if it was gonna work
or if it wasn't gonna
work but right now we feel
very confident that every
single research study
that we done, every
single condition
that we've thrown this
as has been improved.
We haven't found anything
that it hasn't improved.
We don't know where
the limits are.
It would be nice if it
was a mechanistic world
and we just tightened
a bolt here and there
and then it worked but that's
not, we're way more than
a piece of machinery and
I don't think we've begun
to touch on the energy
of what runs the body
or even, dare I say,
the spiritual piece.
I never wanted it to go
into a spiritual direction
but really, I don't
know how you can stop it
when you start analyzing
what's going on in this world.
I think the other
interesting piece about this is
healing, healing is so
interesting to me in that
we put on these layers and
layers and layers of protection
of things that happened to us.
And then a person will
come in with a problem
and we'll start
peeling off the layers
but what's totally
interesting to me is the issue
won't come up until the
body's ready to deal with it.
And I know, personally,
I lost my mother
when I was six years old.
And, I'm sure, you
know, I've had issues
and over the years we've
done a bunch of NE and would often go back to
me being a six year old,
of course, which is
when my mother died
and we would check the
concept of my mother dying,
committing suicide,
and it wasn't there,
for almost five years,
it would be something else.
It'd be that I had to
go stay with my aunt
or that it was my
father was so upset
or this or that.
And then, interestingly,
five years into it,
on a Mother's Day,
believe it or not,
I had an issue come up,
goes back to age six
and this time I was ready
to deal with the death
and suicide of my mother.
So I think that is so wonderful
and it gives a level
of safety to realize an
issue's not gonna come up
until you're ready
to deal with it.
Probably the most
interesting thing that happens,
that has happened for me
as a practitioner is that,
person comes in,
maybe for migraines
and you start doing NE on them for the migraines
and then they start to
tell you the other things
that are getting
better in their life,
their relationships are better,
they're happier,
they're sleeping better.
And you didn't even take
care of those things.
Which, again, just illustrates
the amazing healing power
of the body if you
give it a chance.
If you take some of
these stress factors,
you reduce that load that
the body is carrying,
the sky is the limit
as to what it can heal.
The one thing that we really
are hoping people become
is to become more
comfortable in their own skin
because if we're
comfortable in our own skin,
things are a little bit
less stressful in life.
We're able to handle
things better,
we love ourself more.
And with that, there's nothing
that money or anything else
can buy except that peace
of mind with yourself.
Imagine how the world could be
if we could actually become
more aware of our stress
and its impact on not only
our own body and ourselves
but those around us.
And be able to hold
a space of acceptance
and allow each of us to
reach our full potential
and be true, authentic selves.
I wish that more people
were aware of this work.
Because the miracles that we
as practitioners get to see
every day...
Are amazing and people
don't even realize,
there's so many people
out there in this world
that don't even realize
it's a possibility.
As a result, as a side
effect, a wonderful side effect
from doing NET, I
started to practice yoga
and meditation
understanding and teaching
this idea that your mind
is very powerful and it
can help you or harm you
and it's always your choice.
I mean, I would probably
be, I would probably be
an emotional wreck.
If I never had NET, I would
probably be a mess, honestly.
And I used to be,
I used to be like,
my emotions would
just go up and down
and a lot of that stuff also
correlates with your diet.
So just learning about that
stuff was a game changer for me.
But
it's helped so
much in every way.
Comments through your life
are stored up in your body
and it's bringing
that emotion out
and to attack that emotion,
almost, and release it
and diffuse it
from your body is,
it's the biggest freedom.
We want people to prosper,
we want them to be better,
we want them to be healed and
we can change the paradigm.
We can do it.
I thought,
just 20 years ago,
I thought that
those of us that
believed in the power
that made the body, that's in
the body can heal the body,
and that the body
was natural healing
and that's what works and
nobody was listening to us,
again, you know, what's new?
And I just thought, yeah, I'll
just be one of the dinosaurs,
I'm gonna die off, but what
I'm gonna do while I'm alive,
I'm gonna keep this principle
that natural healthcare works.
So much of
our cultural narrative
revolves around the
stresses of life
and it can make
us feel powerless.
Struggles with anxiety,
depression and chronic
health problems are becoming
more and more common.
Every one of us has been through
traumatic events in our life
and it's something that
should bring us together more
instead of disconnecting us.
There are little to
no treatment options
for people suffering
from traumatic stress.
If you're not
diagnosed with PTSD
or any other major
traumatic condition,
it can seem confusing
on how to get help.
These findings are
about more than NET,
it's about helping our
society to become more aware
of our emotions and how much
they actually affect our life
and the people around us.
The mind and the body
are intimately connected
and the more we
can embrace that,
the more we can take
control of our health
and ultimately take
control of our lives.
Part of why brain
imaging is so valuable
is that it shows the
physiological basis of things
and we always sort
of joke about how,
you know, you could
parade 100 people
in front of a
group of scientists
and they all say, "This
made me feel a lot better."
But if you throw up one brain
scan picture and you say,
well, this is what their
brain looked like initially
and this is what their brain
looked like afterwards,
they say, "Oh, okay,
something happened.
"I get it, I understand it."
Because the subjective
experiences that
people describe,
you never really
know and, of course,
in a very cynical world,
every advertisement,
every group is trying
to make their product,
their approach, their
ideas sound great
so of course there's
a million testimonials
and every testimonial
always says this was great,
it changed my life,
I feel fabulous.
So that's one thing
but to have actual data
and to be able to do
in a controlled trial,
a randomized controlled
trial, and to be able
to sort of see what's happening
and then more specifically to
show the physiological effect,
that shows that there's
something else that's going on.
I mean, a person
could say to me,
"I'm not having a
response to it."
But you don't know exactly
what they're feeling
on the inside and I'm not
in the scanner with them
so they could still be in
tears and just fighting it
back better and saying,
"No, I feel fine."
But they wouldn't be able to
change the brain that way.
Even though it's obvious that,
you know, mind and body are one.
We used to talk about
a mind/body connection
like, I don't know,
maybe there was a rope
or a chain connecting
them or something.
And, you know, there
was even a debate about
whether or not there was a
connection prior to that.
We now know that they're the
flip side of the same coin,
that there is a physiology
and a biology to things
that we experience mentally
and emotionally and this
study elucidates that,
you know, beautifully
between both papers
and the effects that a
distressing event has
on the brain and the
rest of physiology
including the autonomic
nervous system
as well as subjective
ways that people feel.
And that when that
distressing event
gets neutralized
to a large extent,
that all of those things change.
That the brain changes, that
the rest of physiology changes,
that subjective feelings of
stress and distress all change,
quality of life change.
So it's, mind and body
in that regard are one.
I think that this
data is very important
in providing more knowledge
about the mechanism
of action of the Neuro
Emotional Technique.
It helps us to understand
better what it's doing,
how it has an impact on
different parts of the brain
and how it helps the person
to regulate their
emotional responses.
Now, you know, there could be
some other very interesting
aspects because the
cerebellum is involved
in our body's movement
and our motor function.
It appears that it
also helps to regulate
our autonomic nervous system
which was another part
of this study that showed
that not only do we change
the way a person's brain is
reacting to the emotional trauma
but we change the way
the body reacts as well.
And the cerebellum,
apparently, is able to regulate
the autonomic nervous
system in terms of
regulating heart rate and
blood pressure which were also
measures that we were
looking at in this study.
And, again, what
we were showing was
was that after the Neuro
Emotional Technique,
people's heart rate responses
to the traumatic stimuli
were much more normalized,
they didn't have that kind of
over reactivity that we had seen
before going through the
Neuro Emotional Technique.
So I think that this
really opens up an ability
to understand more and more
what the mechanism of action is
of the Neuro
Emotional Technique.
It tells us a lot about
what we may be able to learn
in terms of just
traumatic memories and
strong negative emotions, how
they play out in the brain,
what areas of the brain
seem to be involved in them
and provides us a target
for future studies.
Initially I do not like the
term alternative healthcare.
Bugs me, because this is
not alternative healthcare,
in fact, this is
almost more traditional
than any other type of
healthcare that we have.
Because really,
it's saying, okay,
you've got what
it takes to heal,
let's unleash, let's unlock,
let's help your body to heal.
If we start looking at
the body as mind as well,
it's not just the mind
that's in your head,
it's also the mind that's
down here in your gut
that is just as much at play
in terms of creating your health
as the brain in your head.
We look at the body
as perfect the way it is
and if there is a symptom
that's expressing,
it's because the
body needs something,
it needs attention in that area.
And emotions definitely
are not logical,
they're not rational,
emotions are non rational,
they're not irrational
but they're non rational,
they just are what they are.
Most of the universe
is non rational,
most of the universe is not
working on a rational plane.
Most of the universe
is just what it is.
Human beings, apparently,
have been given reason
and we can work with our reason
to make life better
for ourselves.
But we can't rely
100% on reason,
we have to understand that
we're more than reason.
The body heals itself.
And NET kinda
facilitates that and
kind of makes it
easier to do.
And it's just a process.
Through virtue of this process,
it allows that which
heals to come forth
and get the healing done.
You know, they say, "Oh,
you helped me so much."
And yeah, I tried to
help you all right but
your body healed itself.
I just want to
remind you of that.
So that we can get that
consciousness going out there
and start making that
part of the conversation.