Robert Lufkin 00:00
Welcome back to the health longevity secrets show and I'm your host, Dr. Robert Lufkin. Today's world is an obstacle course of stresses, hassles and worries that challenge our ability to cope. The result is an epidemic of chronic illnesses, trauma and burnout. The path by Dr. Stephen Sideroff is a comprehensive program for dealing with stress and achieving optimal living. Based on 40 years of research and clinical work. It illustrates the author's proven method of resilience in an easy to follow and strategically laid out step by step guide to one's optimal personal journey. We're trying something new today and that we're releasing the full first chapter of this remarkable book in our video podcast, the entire experience can be had by our audio only podcast listeners. Although the video version does include some figures from the book for those who are more visually inclined, please give us feedback. And if you would like to continue with more chapters from this book, or from other books that might be of interest to our community. And now, please enjoy the path by Dr. Stephen Sideroff.
01:12
Off. Chapter One, introduction, the laws of life. One of the greatest points of leverage I have when consulting or working with clients is my knowledge of what I refer to as the primary or universal laws of life. This is not just my perspective, my position is grounded in a group of fundamental principles about how mind, body and spirit operate. One of these principles is that unconsciousness or lack of awareness will always interfere with the achievement of your goals, and will create invisible obstacles and contradictory motivations in your life. Another basic principle is that any self deprecating or self abusive talk is never helpful and thus, never okay. Another principle states that the level of organismic activation, how much concern you display and how much you mobilize to allay that concern should correlate with the importance of the event. I use these and additional laws of life to help define a set of primary rules that help guide your behavior and measure your progress. For example, every time you respond to an event, you activate your body and expand your personal energy. Every time you experience stress in the form of danger, uncertainty, worry or fear your body activates in response. One of the hallmarks of resilience is optimal activation, which means activating precisely to the level required by the event. Clearly, you want to activate enough to successfully address the experience, but you don't want to overreact or expend too much energy. In addition, resilience is about returning to a ready state of calm focus after the activating event is over. Rather than continuing the activation, when it's no longer necessary. Worrying or thinking too much about a problem causes tension that is not constructive. Similarly, when you are unable to let go of a difficult event and continue to be activated by it, you are wasting precious psychic energy. This overactivation as you will learn is the source of imbalance and potential burnout. Thus, the goal is to be able to optimize energy use. Now, you might ask me, but wait, what if there really is something to worry about? Something bad that might happen? Here is where true resilience comes in. Appropriate planning is definitely important. But once you do this planning, continuing to go over the same thoughts is what I refer to as worry, which is never helpful. activating your nervous system and stress response when there isn't a constructive response to make meaning when the response will not have a positive impact is the prime example of wasted and even toxic energy. Life is uncertain, something is always happening somewhere that may change your life. As an example, we can look at the tragedy in Japan during the winter of 2011 when a major earthquake followed by a giant tsunami changed people's lives forever. The other reality of everyday life is that it's very, very complex. uncertainty and complexity are triggers for your body's adaptive survival mechanism. Most people are not well prepared for adapting to this type of world. You never got the appropriate training remarkably, it's not something taught in school. I suspect that's because our very educators are subject to the same unconscious behavioral choices as the pupils they teach. In fact, the training most people receive is counterproductive, leaving you even less prepared than you would be without any training at all. Typically, there are multiple choices surrounding every aspect of your life. Wouldn't it be helpful? Wouldn't it be freeing if there really was the path? A guideline for always making the right choice in how to act? And what perspective to take? That is the goal of this book, to show you the path? How to get on it, and stay on it? Why did you buy this book? What are you looking for? No matter what you can break it down into two parts, one, to achieve your goals and to to be as happy and healthy as possible. In the process of achieving these goals. I find there are two groups who come to me for help those who are experiencing physical or emotional pain resulting from ongoing imbalance and those who are doing okay, but know they can be doing better, feeling healthier, or performing better. The challenge and goal of this book is to find the path for yourself. In addition, I hope to present information that motivates encourages and supports deep and significant change in the following ways. Enhanced use and management of your personal energy resulting in the greater availability of resources for important tasks. improve recovery after stress, increased focus and overall effectiveness. better relationship with yourself less critical, less negative, more accepting improved relationships with others, setting appropriate boundaries, making good relationship choices, being assertive and getting your needs met and thwarting those who want to take from you or pull you down. less emotional reactivity, improve physical health and recovery from illness, better thinking patterns, and better decision making with fewer mistakes, greater flexibility and more satisfaction in life, increased ability to achieve goals, and finally, greater happiness in your life. In order for these goals to be achieved, certain universal laws need to be learned and then followed. As noted earlier in this chapter. You can't fudge with these laws, and there are no shortcuts. For example, if you have lost some of your ability to relax as manifested by sleeplessness, frequent headaches or illness, you need to retrain your body that requires practicing some form of relaxation technique, like any other learning or training process, practice makes perfect. These are not rules I have personally invented. They are universal principles I uncovered after years of working with 1000s of individuals. I have consistently found that when people disregard or are ignorant of these rules, they encounter more and greater problems that lead to crises. They experience more accidents in their lives, more unfulfilling relationships, and greater stress and illness. Let me emphasize here. These laws are not open to debate. Ignore them at your own risk, and inevitable pain. Remember, you don't mess with Mother Nature,
08:58
flow and the life force. We are designed by nature to function effectively, your body engages in literally 1000s of functions from moment to moment to keep itself in balance. If your blood pressure becomes elevated sensors in your blood vessels send signals to make adjustments that bring your blood pressure back down. If you're injured resources are mobilized to heal the injury. With each demand placed on your body processes are put into play to handle the demand. Fueling all these processes is your life energy or life force. The concept of life force goes back many centuries. It forms the philosophical basis of many ancient traditions, including the Chinese notion of chi and the body's meridian system, as well as the Yogi Science of prana. Think of it as the flow of energy through and around the body for peak purpose. hormones and resilience, you must master the concept of the life force, we don't have an unlimited amount. It's important to understand the principles that determine the efficient use of this force, as well as how it can be replenished. Without such awareness and by continuing many of your habitual patterns, you interfere with the flow of this life force. This will likely result in fatigue, illness, and less overall effectiveness in your life. For most of us, this life force is used exclusively for survival. This was the default condition of our hunter gatherer ancestors, and it did help them to survive, usually to the age of 20, or 25. But for resilience, success, meaning a long, healthy life, it's important to master the factors that contribute to the optimal utilization of this force, and its regeneration. This requires a shift from an overwhelming focus on survival to a balance between survival and creativity or adaptability. Throughout this book, I will help you address this process by referring to reaching inside or opening to the deepest place inside yourself. We actually start off in life setup for optimal adaptation and adjustment to our environment. The process is referred to as homeostasis, the ability of the organism to achieve stability and always return to a place of balance. This process is designed to maintain the lifeforce through continual renewal. Ironically, it's adaptation to your childhood environment that is the major cause of your problems. Whatever is learned here about reward and punishment gets generalized to the world, locking you into a pattern with reduced ability to adapt. certain qualities help us to be and stay in the flow and on the path, while others keep us stuck and frozen in place. Let's look at some of the differences between being adaptable and enhancing your life flow versus being stuck in old fixed patterns that interfere with resilience, adaptability and optimal functioning are enhanced when you take responsibility for the results you get in life. In other words, you take an active approach. On the other hand, if you feel you just have to play the cards you were dealt, in other words, a more passive approach, you will stay stuck and thus less resilient. To be adaptable. You need to be open to new ideas and new ways of engaging with the world. When you stay loyal to old lessons and close to new approaches, you will stay stuck. Your resilience and success will be enhanced by a positive attitude, being receptive and flexible. When you focus on what's possible, and are committed to discovering how you can be better you engage the developmental process and learn to stand on your own two feet. This leads to greater resilience and success. If you allow old thinking and fears to go unchallenged and continue to be guided by old messages, you will be living off the path grasping the possible for many years, breaking the four minute mile and track and field was thought to be impossible. And then one day in June 1954 Roger Bannister and Australia broke the four minute mile with a time of three minutes 59.4 seconds. The recognition of the possibility of this feat resulted in 10 other runners breaking this barrier within one year of banisters triumph. In other words, the myth of its impossibility, held runners back and the reality of its possibility yielded numerous breakthroughs. I want to help you believe that resilience and optimal functioning are possible. I want to show you that the path will take you there and most importantly, that it's within your grasp. In other words, more than simply informing you and capturing your interest. I want this book to bridge the gap between what you learn and know and what you believe. And actually do. Change involves a very basic yet difficult to achieve force. When I first began presenting seminars 30 years ago, I was excited about teaching people what they could do to reduce their stress handle it better and live a better life. Participants of my seminars and workshops attended because they were challenged and even overwhelmed by the demands of their lives and the symptoms they were experiencing. Yet after listening to my program and leaving with enthusiasm about following through six months down the road, they had fallen back into their old patterns. Despite experiencing the consequences of too much stress, many people resist doing anything about it. Change is difficult after all, no matter how motivated you are. This ordinarily difficult process is exacerbated by our specific resistance to dealing with stress and changing our habitual patterns. For the past 25 years, I have been researching and experimenting with ways to address one of the most primal forces known to humankind. I have described this force as each person's primitive Gestalt, it carries with it a gravitational pull, holding behaviors and thinking in place. Primitive gestalts are the neuro behavioral patterns established as the result of early survival learning. A more detailed discussion of primitive Gestalt will be found in chapter two. Briefly, primitive gestalts peih Gee are conceptualized as fixed patterns in the brain, and they exert a gravitational force on all our behaviors, perceptions, and thinking. This gravitational force makes fundamental change as difficult as it is for a rocket ship to leave the Earth's gravitational pull, or an electron to leave its orbit around the nucleus of the atom. This book, the path is the culmination of my research and experience helping 1000s of people achieve this step in their lives. We can say that at the heart of resilience success, is the ability to shift one's pattern and not be stuck in rigid thinking and behaving and excess emotional reactivity. Thus, part of the process of this book is to help you loosen the hole that your RPG has on you to block its attractor, state quality, and even to show you how it's no longer needed. Part of this process involves labeling some of your old thinking as harmful as you move forward on the path. Together, we will visualize a new attractor state, one that you personally create. The process of visualization is like planting the seeds for something new. By fully visualizing it, its qualities its shape, why it's attractive, why it should be an attractor state, you will be watering those seeds and beginning literally to guide the expression of your genes. Your biological blueprint, it will express them through the development of new nerve cells that enhance neural or brain connections, those connections will become stronger, more reinforcing more appealing. This in turn, will contribute to the loosening and weakening of the old patterns and their hold on you. But this process will not come without some difficulty and resistance, change of any kind. Even positive change can be uncomfortable. To help you move forward in the face of this discomfort. I will address your fears, as well as support you in your development have the courage to tolerate discomfort and let go of the old the visualization process in which you see and imagine the new brain growth will further this development.
18:59
Being in the moment, at the heart of being on the path is your ability to be in the moment. PGS are reinforced and maintained by our ongoing tendency to live life on automatic. We go through life doing things the same way day in and day out. We become in trance to go through each day the same way we did the day before. We love the familiar. we gravitate to what's comfortable to what we know to what we've done time and again. Living life in this manner will continually yield the same results you've gotten in the past. And up until this point, right now. Notice who is behind the eyes moving across this page, the eye that is doing the reading. Be aware of yourself right now in this moment. Focus on your breathing and watch your breath as you in inhale and exhale. The part of you that right now is watching the part that is observing yourself following my words. That's the part of you we need to call on to begin living more in the moment. Wake up. This is what gives you the ability to make choices. And only by making choices, can you begin to step out of the old patterns and step onto the path. When I was a kid in school, I was fascinated by the concept of compounded interest. I remember a teacher holding up $10 and demonstrating how much you would have in 10 years. If that money compounds once a year, then she recalculated based on once a month compounding then once a week, and once a day. In her last example, she compounded the interest once an hour with each example, the same $10 Over the same period of time turned into larger and larger amounts. When she compounded the money each hour, those $10 turned into millions. Wow. The more frequently you compounded, the greater the growth, I got it. It's the same thing with awareness and presence. The more moments of your life you are present, the more frequently you wake up to life, the greater the choice points for change and growth, and the greater the growth. The path is a process for enhancing awareness and empowering choices. And having them compound moment by awakened moment. I will teach you a strategy of thinking that will help you deal with procrastination, worry and everyday distractions. I hope to help you identify emotional, unfinished business that causes you to overreact in social situations, while giving you the tools and step by step processes to help you resolve these emotional whirlpools. Ultimately, the path is a process for enhancement and directing of your brain's neuroplasticity. Its ability to create new nerve cells, and new nerve connections. What do you want in life? Whatever your goals, this book will help you get them, enjoy them and keep making them better. Here are the nine things you will gain pillar one, a better relationship with yourself. pillar to better relationships with others. Pillar three, a more defined purpose in life and a stronger sense of interconnectedness. pillar for a more efficient use of energy, improved sleep patterns, a greater ability to relax and a greater ability to recover after stress. Pillar five, a positive attitude and greater control over your thoughts. Pillar six, resolution of emotional issues and less reaction to life situations resulting in less anxiety and depression. Pillar seven, the ability to be more present in life and live in the moment. Pillar eight, greater flexibility to adapt to the ever changing conditions of life. And pillar nine more power, which I define as the ability to get things done. One of the hallmarks of primitive Gestalt and indeed of most childhood training and development is a focus on external judgments. We continually question ourselves based on what we think others are thinking. We continually judge ourselves in comparison to others. The consequence of this life strategy is that we don't give ourselves the opportunity to develop from the inside. One of the keys to resilience, Optimal Living and rejuvenation is the process of reaching inside and opening to the deepest parts of yourself. This is the source of your creativity and even the birthing of new nerve cells. This is the source of your self confidence and trust in the ability to let go which further results in the optimal flow of energy throughout your body. One of your jobs along the path is to begin pruning back the thicket of old thoughts and behaviors that slow your progress on the path. This will lead you to true Internal wisdom. I would like to end this introductory chapter by congratulating you on your intention to grow and develop yourself in a healthy way. As you will learn in this book, the use of intention will facilitate the directing of gene expression, the actual manifestation of your genetic makeup. I'd like to encourage you to keep this book next to your bed, carry it with you and find time each day to read and refer to it. This book can change your life, I encourage you to give it that opportunity, you will be rewarded on many levels.
Unkown Speaker 25:40
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