Welcome to the art of conscious living. I’m very pleased to have back as a returning guest, doctor Henry Grayson. He’s from New York City.

He’s a psychologist who has absolutely defined a new way of being of using your body to heal your mind.

I’m so very, very pleased to have him here in the studio today.

Good to be with you. Thank you. Thank you for joining me today on your very, very busy schedule. Well, thank you for inviting me back. Yes.

I remember it was a number of years ago. Yes. It’s been about five years now That’s right. We last spoke. And, I would we have a lot to talk about.

You have a new book, and it’s, using your body to heal your mind. So I read it, and it’s a very, very beautiful book.

It’s definitely going against the grain of where most people who are therapists are going. It’s, based on the way of being in a somatic way, based in connecting to your body, your body, connecting to deeply to your feelings. And I’m very much appreciate you sitting and talking to me today.

So let’s get into your book. What was your motivation for writing this book? You had your other book was, Mindful Loving. Mindful loving.

So this is basically a lot to do with your work of what you’ve been doing in the last recent years.

Well, both have to do with my work, but I recognize that all of us have a lot of physical symptoms. Some are simple and some are quite serious.

And of course, they are quite serious. We certainly don’t want to avoid medical treatment if necessary. We prefer to, live rather than to die.

But I think it’s what’s really important is to see that there are often other reasons behind all of our symptoms.

It’s my body that’s speaking a language that needs to be interpreted, needs to be translated. And so, whatever is going on in my body, instead of just seeing it as a symptom to get rid of, we need to see it as something that needs to be translated.

For example, I learned many years ago, actually started back when I was in graduate school, when I first used these questions. I had, severe sore throats and colds, every winter. And now four or five times, they were quite debilitating. And this had gone on incessantly. And I just learned something about mind body connection, and I was about to take my comprehensive exams, and I was preparing a fence in my re repairing a fence in my backyard in Massachusetts, and 20 mile an hour wind, and 20 degree temperature, and it’s snowing like crazy. And I started to get my sore throat. And that sore throat said to me, oh my God, I won’t be able to do much for my exam.

But instead I thought, what is the mind body connection? What might be going on here? So I asked myself some questions. Why might I need this symptom? And why might I need it right now?

What would it get for me? What would it get me out of? What emotion might it be expressing that I’ve not dealt with directly?

Or is there some metaphor involved here that I have not really looked at?

And of course, the first thought occurred to me, maybe I wanna get out of taking those exams. And when I thought of that, I realized, no, I didn’t really want that because I was 95% prepared, and I didn’t wanna give up on the weekends to study. And I thought it’s gotta be something else. And so I asked myself questions again.

Why might I need it? Why might I need it now? What would it get from me? What would it get me out of doing? And what emotion might it be expressing?

And with that, I felt a pang of guilt. I saw my neighbor looking out of her kitchen window over my yard, and I felt guilty. And with that, I realized something’s going on. What could this be? Then I realized I promised to do something for her aged father, but I knew I would do it as soon as my exams were over. But I projected onto her a different motive. I had no idea that she might be thinking, like we human beings all the time are projecting. And so I projected onto her that she was thinking some critical thoughts about me that here I was doing something for my dog when I’m not doing what I was gonna do for a father. And I was feeling guilty. So in essence of what you’re saying, with all the projecting of what you were doing and trying to talk yourself out of doing what you knew was best for you to do. You’re basically telling your mind is telling your body to go into a sick mode or a shutdown mode. It’s affecting so your mind body coordination is listening.

Your body is listening to your mind. Meaning, if you’re telling it to be sick, it’s going to become sick.

And especially guilt is a prominent factor quite often. And if I felt guilty then, which I did for that moment, that was really an attack upon the cells in my body. Guilt always demands punishment.

How did you start to get that? Punishment could be to the body. Yeah. Absolutely.

How did you start to have the sensitivity and awareness that this was actually happening to you?

I think just having studied something about that there is a connection to mind body caused me to think of that because I really didn’t want to get sick when I had exams coming up, and I really like to be free of it. And I thought if it applies to things like asthma and skin disorders and a variety of other things like that, why wouldn’t it apply to colds and sore throats too? And so that started me thinking about that. So this was the beginning of your part way back then? That was the beginning of that then.

And then maybe twenty years later, I discovered I had such a severely degenerated disc in my back that I wouldn’t walk again, the doctor said, without back surgery. Instead, I asked myself these questions. I came up with some answers of several things I needed to deal with in my life differently. I made a clear decision I was going to do those that I knew I would keep. That’s an important part of the process I found and find too.

Not just saying, oh, I better start exercising, or I need to meditate to bring my stress level down. But unless I know I absolutely going to keep those commitments, it doesn’t really work. And so when I made those commitments, I knew I would keep to deal with an issue with a couple of people that I needed to work out things with.

Then I began to get better and two months later I was skiing in Colorado. So it sounds to me what you’re saying is that you need a true pathway of communication between your body and your mind, and the thoughts need to be of a healing, rejuvenating, natural way of being in balance.

And if they’re not that, if they are the opposite, that goes right into every cell too. Like if I did, muscle testing with you, hold your arm out and push down on the arm, and if you thought a, a negative thought, a fear thought, a worry thought, guilt thought, angry thought, no matter how much you resist, I can just push it down with one finger.

In fact, fact, I could even demonstrate it if you want. Well, that would be Explain muscle testing for those who don’t know what it is. Well, just simply the way I’m using, just a simple thing is to show without even going into the whole field of applied kinesiology and muscle testing.

Is just to show that anytime I’m having a negative thought, a weakening thought, a guilt thought, an angry thought, resentful thought, instantly, no matter how much I resist with my arm, my muscles become weak. So the negativity in thought and the vibration is affected in the body, so therefore the body is equally weakened by this negativity. Yeah. And that’s where you say muscle testing Which just reveals that so quickly. And if you’re thinking a compassionate, loving thought, a joyful thought, and you extend your arm, it becomes very strong.

I can have trouble pushing it down as hard as I can press with both hands. Now we know how that works now a little bit better after Candace Pertz’s work when she was at Johns Hopkins. She’s the one who discovered how the mind body connection takes place, and that’s the role of what you call the neuropeptides. So I have a thought that’s negative or positive.

It’s really an instant messaging system in my body. Those neuropeptides go quickly to all the cells and produce a result. So if I’m thinking a negative thought or if I’m thinking a positive thought, it immediately starts to affect the cells in my body. So if I allow those thoughts to stay, then that are negative, I’m going to be causing some disturbance in my body. If I get them get them out of here, if I do, say I’m not going to focus on those, I change my thoughts to something else, then in a more positive way, then my body becomes more resilient and more strong, almost instantly.

So the opposite of that is you choose to take a walk in a beautiful sunshine, and you choose to have happy thoughts and then you start feeling all the serotonin and all of the brain chemistry being released. So you have this feel good, incredible walking experience. So basically, it’s showing us that we need to be very aware and very mindful of our thinking. Yeah.

We have a huge amount of thoughts every day. Some studies say as many as seventy, seventy five thousand thoughts. And those thoughts are all having an effect. There’s no such thing as an idle thought.

I’m thinking a thought. It’s being an act of creation. It’s a it’s a much better way to think of our thoughts. They’re not so much observations of facts as they are acts of creation. And the creation starts first and foremost right here in my body. So the mind may be having a thought and the mind may not even be believing that thought, but is the body believing that thought? So let’s say it for example, let’s say the mind is having a thought of wretched hatred towards oneself and wretched jealousy, but then the mind is saying, well, I really don’t believe that. I believe it. I don’t know if I believe it. But what is the body doing now with that?

Is the body taking it verbatim that is actually happening or is it able to censor what the body and what the mind may be believing?

Well, if it knows what we really believe and what we think and what we’re thinking is true, then it’s what’s going to resonate. We could have the thought, but the key part is we’re all gonna be having some negative thoughts. It’s it’s part of the human condition. We all have an ego, and the ego mind is always thinking negative thoughts. In almost every situation, it comes up first. But the key part is, do I just catch the thought and let it go? Or do I invite it in for tea?

Do I invite it in to stay for dinner? Do I invite it in as an overnight guest?

Do I invite it to move into my house and live there? And which is what we often do with our negative thoughts.

We allow them to linger. When instead, I think one of the first Indian yogis who came to this country, it was Yogananda, Paramahansa Yogananda, who I think has a center out here in California or did before he died.

He made a statement that I think is so poignant and relevant to this.

He says, I never allow any thought to linger in my mind without my express permission.

And I thought, boy, that is certainly something I aspire to. I can’t do it that way. Sometimes I don’t catch it, but I certainly catch them much better now than I did ten years ago, a whale of a lot better than twenty years ago, and that’s like eons better than thirty years ago. And it’s something next year I expect to be still better at it because I’m so much more aware that my thoughts are acts of creation, and they’re creating results in my body, in my life, in my relationships, in every aspect of my life, actually. Right. Well, Eleanor Roosevelt said something similar to that too.

We cannot others cannot hurt us without our permission. Without it. Yeah.

I express permission and therefore, I’m allowing it in. I’m taking it in and dwelling on it. Rather than just hearing that, seeing it from a different perspective and letting it go like water off a duck’s back. Right.

So it’s important to be very aware of our thoughts and to know that the thoughts are affecting and they are not just random idle thoughts that we need to be taking accountability and responsibility for what we are thinking at every moment. Exactly. And then we need to recognize too that sometimes it’s hard for us to, to really stop those negative thoughts. And we might wonder why.

Why are there some so hard to let go of some and not of others? And if we look back, we have to go back upstream. And we realize this, stopping those thoughts is, not so easy. If it’s like stopping a train at the same time, you got four diesel engines pushing as hard as they can trying to push the train. So what are those diesel engines inside us that might be pushing those thoughts? And several things are part of that, but one is, any negative experiences we had as when we were little. Painful experiences, traumatic experience, upsetting, disturbing, experiences of deprivation, experiences of being criticized, experiences of being neglected, you name it. Any of those negative experiences we had, they become a part of our memory bank in our survival brain back here, the old reptilian brain, just above the brain stem. And according to the neuroscientists, they’ve some have put it to me that part of our brain now is way too active for our stage of evolution. Maybe about 15 to 18 times too active.

In fact, one even put it so interesting that says that part of the brain is like, Velcro to the negative experiences, and like Teflon to the positive ones.

That means we have to be extra conscious to not let that part of the brain rule us. We have to be extra careful. Some systems of thought would say it’s way of being careful to catch the ego thoughts. Doesn’t matter which language we use, whether we call it the ego, whether we call it the survival brain, the limbic system.

But either way, we need to be much more conscious using tools to catch it. Now, what these negative experiences are encoding some information back in this part of the brain, and they give off a signal or interpretation of something as being dangerous or safe. When it gives off a signal of danger, that’s based on a past experience of something that we experienced as frightening or upsetting or dangerous. And anything that resembles it triggers it again. And so we all have that experience of something triggering us, and we wonder why at a given moment.

Why did I react so strongly to this? Or why did this other person react so strongly? And it’s because that part of the limbic system has been activated. But now we know that there are methods we can use where we can be do the equivalent of, like, pressing delete button on our computer for old programs. And we can do that equivalent thing for this information that’s encoded in our brains.

So even if I was, not very well taken care of, say, when I was a baby, and I didn’t get fed when I was hungry, I was left to cry in the crib for hours, I was not changed when I was wet, Those experiences get imprinted in my limbic system, and then they cause me to react to situations where I’m not being attended to, I’m not cared for, I’m being neglected, I’m not loved. And out of those experiences as they continue, then I’ll draw conclusions from that too. And those conclusions, I call negative core beliefs. And we draw those beliefs that, man, I must not be lovable. I’m no good.

I’m not deserving. I’m not adequate, I’m not sufficient, or I’ve been bad. We all have some of those kinds of beliefs, and we have those in place that are kind of rehearsing the negative, painful experiences.

So what does one do with those beliefs now that they find that they are there and they’re unwanted beliefs and they’re very aware of these beliefs, but they no longer serve their purpose? Well, now there are methods we can use actually to change those.

We can actually delete that information. Is that in your book? Is that’s described in the book. I drive describe a process in there that is, based on what we call Meridian Stimulation. It’s based on the Chinese system of acupuncture, but we don’t use needles.

We just have a person touch or tap on some acupressure points, and they do that with the statement of intentionality about what they’re releasing.

They’ll, bring themselves to focus by focusing on this part of the brain, you know, where we often focus, where their frontal lobes are, and we’ll recall the scenes or images where that disturbance occurred. We’ll see where we feel that emotion in our body, and then we’ll release the emotion connected with each of those, acupressure points. And so what happens is that, each one is attached to a meridian attached to a different organ in the body, and that negative emotion, if you’re stimulated according to that system, it releases a negative emotion, allows the opposite positive when they come in. Well, you’re a perfect person to talk to about this because in science, they’re gonna say that this is Pluto science and it’s not proven.

There’s, so therefore, you have a practice in New York City where you see patients ongoing basis for many years. So what results have you seen? What would be your data to show that this is actual proof that this is happening, this body mind connection? I see it repeatedly in all sorts of things.

Several that come to my mind that I can mention. You know, one is Share some of your patients. The one that comes to mind now is a person who had experienced anxiety reactions, you know, all of her life. And she’d been through years of talking therapy, many years of it, and had no success with it. And then she learned that I did this other kind of work, and she came in and we discovered that she had, a lot of painful experiences and very early in her life. And we then through went through a number of rounds of this, and she comes back saying, I’m just don’t have any anxiety anymore. It’s just gone. It’s just not there. And that is the meridian tapping.

Yeah. So you’re basically reinforcing something else of thoughts and changing the inner tapes of her mind with something else of positive. And you can even do it for things now. We know that when we’re in the uterus, we can experience traumas.

They put little cameras in the uterus. They can photograph the baby reacting to different signing situations. And if mom is all disturbed, you know, then there’s going to be a lot of adrenaline and cortisol flowing, which goes in through the umbilical cord. If they have negative music, like, hard acid rock, or, you know, or rap music that’s negative playing, the baby feels that. And his little buddy just reacts like this.

You can have the photograph of that. And if the mother and father are being loving together, or they’re having a happy time, or a joyful time, or mother’s listening to nice melodic music, little baby’s just all peaceful, laid back, just relaxed. And it’s amazing, that gets programmed in the developing nervous system. And so that becomes part of a predisposition in our lives, what we got there. That means it’s something we have to attend to.

But the good news is, from a quantum physics perspective, everything is just encoding information and energy. And all our bodies are is really energy and information. In fact, our bodies are 99.999% empty space, if you can believe that. Over what period of time the per the patient who had anxiety did you start to see positive results? And how long did it take to from beginning to the end?

Well, this varies from person to person. But this particular patient Yeah. This particular one, there were some significant things in early childhood that were very relevant to this particular problem.

And so in just a handful of sessions, we would clear those, and then she felt the results. On the other hand, there are some people I think of one person, for example, who was in Poland, during the second world war. Her mother died when she was about one and a half. She was farmed out to relatives to take care of her. Her father worked for the underground, and he was never there. Finally, he got himself killed when she was about four or five. So she lost both of her parents. Things were in such turmoil in Poland at that time that, everybody was upset, and so it was hard for her to have even the relatives taken care of, or have the time or energy to give very much to her. So she described her life as being very depressed all of her life. She married and had two children, and described herself as being a horrible mother to them, and, saw her kids as growing up with severe problems and felt bad about that. She had her marriage was horrendous as a result of all that.

And she came into therapy in her late fifties and, did this kind of work. For her, it was a gradual process. In fact, what happened, I should say too before I mention that, finally she was taken, into a home by a woman who’s had lost her daughter in the war and wanted another daughter.

But because that had happened, she was totally overprotective. And then there was also the problem because the Russians were coming in hauling people off of the work camps. It was not just the Nazis coming in, but the Russians were there in Poland as well. And if a truck stopped in front of the house, you didn’t know if it was a delivery truck, therefore, it’s regular purpose, or if it was the Russian truck coming to haul off you to the concentration camp, I mean, the work camps in Siberia. So there’s constant pain and stress throughout her whole growing up years. And she did this work cumulatively, and it took several months of this, actually, until we got up through clearing everything, that old part of the experience, to hit about age 13 or 14. Then I walk out to the waiting room and I see her.

She greets me with a smile on the face. The first time I’ve ever seen her smile. And so she comes into the office, and I say, well, how are you feeling today? And she says, why I’m happy. It’s the first time I remember being happy. And of course, I would just touch the core of my being, that this had worked for her. That these processes work that way. And then we proceeded to keep doing the work, and she had moved out of her depression, whereas nothing had worked for her. None of the notes. She tried every medication.

She tried every alternate and names, and she had been severely depressed all of her life. Now for the first time, she was not depressed. Then when something would happen that was a disturbance, she’d be disturbed for maybe a few hours or for a day, but she was resilient now. She bounded right back. Then she learned to use the tools on herself so she could sustain this as she went on.

Powerful. So that was very powerful. Or I think of someone else who just recently came to me who had stage four cancer, stomach cancer. And, her cancer markers were about 2,275 or something like that, which were very, very powerful. It was a huge tumor in her stomach. And we started doing this work, clearing out the traumas in her background, the negative beliefs she cared about herself. And we started coming up with some other work of imagery that would help focus support of her healing. And she brought her cancer markers down to about a 78 from 20 to hundred. And then she was supposed to have surgery to have it removed. And also, she was doing chemotherapy. But the doctor said, wow, this is unusual to have this much progress, because I worked with her to do some imagery to make the chemotherapy just work positively and not have negative side effects. Because if we can tell it what to do in the body, we harness the famous placebo effect.

Yes. Well, they seem to be doing studies today that the people who are doing the visualization and prayer connecting to the kindness, the gentleness within them. As opposed to the fear and the anger and the doubt. When they change that, they seem to be charting that there is definitely an effect going on there. Exactly. They don’t quite know why they haven’t because they can’t they can’t they can’t draft it or chart it well. So therefore, they’re yet to say that this is actually happening. Right. But they know that there is something going on there. Well, when they finally decided to do surgery on her to said, let’s remove the rest of the tumor even though it had shrunk somewhat, They opened her up and found nothing there but dead cancer cells. Tumor was totally gone. The doctors were aghast, that this is not supposed to happen. This is a miracle. This doesn’t happen. And, of course, we both believed it because we believe this can happen. And so for her, one thing I might add too is that she also had some people praying for her, and she believed that could help. So it was a combination, I think, of the distance healing with prayer, combination of the clearing of the traumas, the clearing of negative beliefs that combined with her mental imagery that supported her healing. And you put all that together, it was a very powerful package.

And now she’s totally cancer free. And so, I don’t give myself a credit for that, but what I give her the credit is her willingness to use these various tools to deal with the things upstream that it helped to cause that problem. Because our illnesses don’t just suddenly occur. Cancer just doesn’t suddenly occur. It’s something that we all have some cancer cells now, most of the time.

But why do they multiply at one time and not another? And of course, when we are in stress, which comes from a lot of trauma and negative beliefs and negative thoughts, that creates flow of stress, that stress weakens our immune system. Our weakened immune system allows the cancer cells to multiply and cumulatively begin to grow. Then at some point, it’s big enough to be diagnosed. Right.

Well, doctor Grayson, let’s get back to when you mentioned that you had the degenerative disc, and it must have been very, very painful to go through that, extremely painful. So actually, it was in an x-ray and MRI that there was a diagnosis. And what did you do with that and over what period of time did you get a different outcome of a more favorable outcome? Well, there were two what did you do to get that favorable outcome?

Different kind of outcomes. One was my ability to function well without pain. Then later, I found out just about seven or eight years ago, actually, when I did a routine physical exam. For just to show the doctor how healthy I am. That’s why I get why I go for a physical exam that way. Took a routine chest x-ray, and he came back saying, your lungs are fine, Henry. He said, but that something is not supposed to happen. That that degenerated disc of yours has regenerated. And I said, I believe it, because I’ve been pain free for all those years. But what I’d done, you were asking about, is when I was told that I would not walk again without back surgery, I knew I did not want back surgery because it was 68% of the time, you were worse off afterward at that time. And so I knew I didn’t wanna risk that. I like being active. I like doing sports. I like just being active in general. And so, I asked myself those questions.

I came up with about three or four things I needed to deal with differently in my life. One was a person I’d felt betrayed by. I needed to deal with that issue with that person, somebody who’d been a friend. Another issue was a conflict with a colleague about an issue that I needed to talk out with. I needed to make some lifestyle changes.

One was I’d been doing sports all my life and had never done any stretching, so I made a vow to start doing yoga. I’d never done anything about stress and handling stress and tension in my life, so I made a vow with myself. I’d start an active practice of meditation daily. I’d made a commitment to myself I would do those that I knew absolutely I would keep. Then I began to get better. Within a week, I was able to get out of bed. Within another couple days, I was able to get back to my office to see my patients. And as I said before, within two months, I was skiing in Colorado. And I had little pain there, but I used my skiing as kind of a physical therapy.

I would imagine my hips being loose, and I’d move, and the whole thing was just loosening and being good physical therapy, making my back healthier. And so I thought used that thought as I would ski. Then I became pain free. Within about, I guess, another two or three weeks, I was totally pain free and remained that for now it’s been twenty five years. But as I said about six or eight years ago, I discovered the disc was regenerated. Now what would happen, there’d be some times through those years when I would have a slight pain starting in my back or down in my sciatica.

But I would instead of letting it, oh my god, here it comes again, I would say, no, let me ask myself those questions again.

Why might I need this? What’s emotion being expressed through it? What would it get from me? What would it get me out of?

And to ask myself those questions with real sincerity and the willingness to allow any kind of mostly irrational of answers to come in. But I find that just getting the answer doesn’t solve the problem. I have to make a firm commitment to an alternative way of dealing with that other than paying the price of being sick. And if I come up with an alternative way, then and commit myself to it, I found that the pain would go away within a half hour and be gone. It wouldn’t develop into this real back debilitating back problem.

So it makes me think that for people who are having a lot of physical pain, extreme pain, severe pain, that their thinking is going to make it worse. If they are most likely. Yes. If they are all tensed up from their thoughts and they’re all stressed out and they’re. They’re really contributing to their fear, and the more they contribute to that, the more that the pain that they are having as a result of whatever, then it’s gonna start to heighten. So therefore, it’s actually taking the opposite, calming down that exactly. And just being at peace with it and being quiet with it. And what a difference that makes. And what a difference. But those neuropeptides communicate that instant messaging system. Yes. And that different way of peace rather than tension, conflict, stress, anger, resentment. You’re it must be a feeling of being a real pioneer that you are one immense many. Today, it is, you turn on the television, it’s all about pharmaceutical.

And one ad after another, showing you that if you want to get rid of this, then take this pill for that. Unfortunately, no. Bridge land, Zoloft, it’s all about quieting yourself down in a way of a pharmaceutical and dumbing yourself down if a way of turning your feelings off. And then comes you, a person who is working with your patients and has lived a life of saying, no. That is not the way that you want to go or way that you would treat your patients.

You are doing quite the opposite. It’s about embracing those thoughts and these feelings. Well, even more, it’s important to the bottom line piece of embracing the incredible power we have inside ourselves. . We mostly, as human beings, deny and disown the power we have. But our intrinsic power is really quite immense. If every thought we have is having an effect on our all the cells in our bodies, and there’s so much, you know, evidence that shows that now, like this one study out here in California that occurred with HIV patients, and they had two different groups just do a simple exercise. One just to sit down and write for a half hour about anything, and the other group was to sit down and write about loving or compassionate thoughts towards somebody. Then they went back and took their blood tests again, and they found that those who had the just a normal writing about whatever, their immune system remained the same level. But they found those that wrote about love or compassion during that time, their immune system jumped up about 200% stronger against the HIV virus.

Really quite amazing in just a short period of time. Where was the study done? It was down at, I think, at, USC. If I’m not mistaken. Down in, San Francisco I mean, in, Los Angeles.

. USC. . And, there’s an amazing kind of outcome with it. And then we go back to this whole idea of embracing our power.

What we do when we often take medication is that we’re seeing the source of the problem, first of all, is outside, then we’re seeing the solution is outside. We’re saying I hurt my back because I bent the wrong way. But what we don’t see is I bent that same way a hundred times in the last week and nothing happened.

Why did something happen this time? Or I got the cold because somebody sneezed on me or because it’s a virus going around, is what we’ll say.

In the sense, I make myself a victim. Instead of saying, there’s always some bacteria around, there’s always some kind of virus, it’s always happening around us. And why at that particular moment? Did I invite it in? Yes. But at that particular moment and why is it at that particular moment? And so I have to ask myself the question, why did I need it right now? What would I think it would get from me? What would it get me out of doing?

What emotion might be expressed in it and so on? Or what the metaphor is? Or what’s the tribal belief system in my mind? It might be simply that I believe that I’m going to get that because it’s going around that I have to catch it. And if I simply believe that, that’s gonna make it happen too.

And so what I’m concerned with is helping people become aware of the immense power they have inside themselves to maintain their health and to bring about healing and health. And that’s why a lot of times we don’t, there are also reason we need to look at too is why we don’t do things that would enhance our health. You know, we say we’re going to meditate. We say we’re going to exercise. We say we’re going to eat more healthily.

We say we’re going to get adequate rest. But so many people don’t keep that vow. Yes. They don’t keep it at all. And they wonder why.

What stops them from doing it? I had the best of intentions. Then there are others who will do these things, and then they’ll still get sick. But that takes us to then, what are the traumas that they did not clear? What are the negative beliefs that have not been cleared?

What are the thought systems that have not been changed? Those all have to be attended to. Then the amazing thing is, when we take care of this larger picture, that’s the way we sustain our health and our happiness and our productivity and our abundance and the whole works. When you were studying to become a psychologist many years ago, what form of psychology did you ascribe to and what was your interest at that time? Was it the Freudian or the Carl Jung of the dream work?

Was it more of the somatic or was it more of talk therapy of the conventional? Well, mine’s been something with journey because when I was in graduate school, I had was primarily emphasis on Carl Rogers’ approach, where you just reflect back what the person is feeling to help me get in touch with it. But then I had the great, experience of having Viktor Frankl as a visiting professor at Boston University at that time. And he was the one who was the Jewish psychiatrist who was in a concentration camp in Dachau. And, he wrote his books about his experience, which have been widely read and still classic reading in many schools and universities today.

And I remember him telling about his experiences in the camps, that he saw that why people got sick and died, why they, sometimes would stay there, or they’d run into the electric wire and electrocute themselves, or some others be offended or abused by the guards instead of befriended by them. He began to observe a lot of the things about this, and he began to see that a lot of it has to do with what the person is thinking and believing. What kind of attitude they carried about themselves, about life, about their future. And he would conclude, I remember him saying this over and over again in one class, and maybe it was my best class in graduate school, better than all the requirements. Made an incredible impression on you.

He made an incredible impression on me that shaped my life. He says in the concentration camp where all of our human freedoms are stripped away, he says the one thing I learned is that they cannot take away from me is what the power to think what I think in my mind. Right. And that, he says, made the difference of life and death for so many people. The ones who thought thoughts that would support their happiness and well-being and health, and ones who thought negative thought.

He says, for example, one day the guards might bring us a watery soup out, and they might bring a crusty moldy piece of bread with it. One person would say, those stupid guards, they think this is food, this is not food, this mold all of this bread and stuff like that. And another one person would say, boy, I’m so thankful to have a piece of bread with my water and soup today. Just that simple difference in attitude, he thought, was characteristic of a larger pattern of the way we think. And how many of us go around finding criticisms of everybody and everything most of the time?

And how many of us go around criticizing ourselves over and over again, all the time? It’s no wonder we then get sick. It’s no wonder then we get an autoimmune disease, which is my body attacking itself. Because I’ve been attacking myself and my mind over and over and over and over again. Did you practice a different type of, way of treating your patients in a way of a conventional way, and then you changed at a certain point in time during your practice?

Yes. It’s been did it evolve over a period of time? It’s been a big evolution. I. When I finished graduate school, I thought, geez, psychoanalysis is the be all end all.

I’ll go to New York, and I’ll get psychoanalytic training. I did that. I went there and got into training, and that was about my third year of training, and I’d had a good training analyst and so on. I thought there’s a lot that’s value here.

And there’s some very good things from, Freudian psychoanalysis. But I realized it didn’t cover all problem areas. It didn’t cover even all the ones for me. I knew I grew up in a household where nobody expressed any emotions, and I needed to learn to do that. So I went into encounter groups where I pounded pillows and screamed, and I hit them with tennis rackets, and I yelled as loud as I could.

Open up those feelings. I learned to practice emotions through bioenergetic analysis. I learned it through gestalt therapy. I learned some other behavior therapy systems at that point and later. I began to explore all other modalities, which is what led me to found the National Institute for the Psychotherapists in New York.

It’s because I felt it should be a place that would bring be a more integrative approach and draw the best from these various systems to help us learn. And what happens there at this center? Well This is the two. It went along for a while being that, and then, some of the students having difficulty absorbing diverse things, and then it did a reactionary movement and moved back to be more of a psychoanalytic program. But then more recently, we developed this different center within there, a trauma center, which is teaching and training people to work with trauma with much of the newer methods.

And it’s evolving more back that direction again, finally, which I’m happy about. But, what I found though about ten, twelve years ago, there are a bunch of other new methods that have emerged that are so much more effective for clearing these traumas and beliefs, much more than talk therapy. And that’s, originally, it was the EMDR that I learned about, the eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. In fact, all these methods originated out in California, so it’s interesting. And, Francine Shapiro did that, and she was a professor in a graduate school, and one thing that caused it to take off is that she had a lot of her students do research for their dissertations.

And that research started to popularize it and it spread to other universities and more research and that made it known. Give me an example of the eye movement.

Well, now, it was originally is that you look back and forth, left and right, left and right. And what that does is stimulates the bilateral stimulation of the brain. It helps the, the corpus callosum, which collects connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain to communicate more fully.

And it seems to have an effect. Even balance. It brings an imbalance, and she learned that would help clear out traumas. Then they learned that you could do bilateral stimulation by tapping on opposite shoulders or opposite knees, or put little clickers, the opposite ones in your ears, and that would work. And then I learned after that the meridian stimulation worked based on that I described before about the acupoint stimulation.

And I found in my experience that works even better. Then I’ve developed a form of that myself that’s described in the book, and actually it’s on my website too. People can just download it and use it, where you put your fingers and just touch on these acupressure points, and you state what emotion you’re releasing. Like, if I’m clear in a trauma of something that happened, say, last week, I had an automobile accident, and I was really shaken up by it, and some somebody got hurt in that accident, and I’m still carrying that trauma. I bring my fingers to the eyebrow and say, I release all fear related to this problem.

And I take a slow deep breath afterward. I release all anger, resentment, and rage, and I proceed around to all the different acupressure points. And by the time I’ve done that once, twice, or three rounds, I find it’s just totally cleared. Do you have to know which, meridian coordinates with which question and which emotion? No.

Actually, I describe in the book which emotion for each acupressure point. Okay. But, I do it in this comprehensive way because it covers all the different bases. Because what I find in doing this, sometimes people will think, oh, this thing had happened, you know, I’m not angry at all about that, you know. I was scared, but I never was angry. And they said, unleash all fear, then you get over here to the side, and suddenly they just feel this surge of anger inside them. They didn’t know they had. It’s part of the unconscious recording. And if what we know to be true now is 95% of our behaviors are all unconscious. And so it’s not that we’re bad that way, it’s just the way human beings are structured.

And so there’s a lot that we’re not aware of. And if we’re not aware of it and deal with it, it goes into the body and causes sicknesses. Yes. So when you say unconscious, it’s our patterns and basically it’s the when we’re numbed up to our basically feelings and thoughts of what actually is happening. And for a lot of people who do not do therapy and have not had the opportunity to do therapy, they’re walking in this perpetual pattern state of just reactive mind.

Reactive, and we also get just attached to our suffering too. . We really get attached to that because it becomes a part of who we are. And we identify with it. And we identify with it. That’s what it is. You know? Then we call it my thing. It’s the whole system now looks that way. The doctor says, you have an ulcer, or you have this kind of problem, or you have a virus.

Then we walk away, say, yes, I have this, and I own it as my possession. I have allergies. And so I can go around with that. And then I noticed too the power of suggestion. It was back in the nineties after the first Bush administration allowed us to advertise drugs or medicine.

We’re only two countries in the world that they can advertise drugs or medicine. . And so, when we started doing that, there were ads along with the traffic and weather report, and there was an allergy report sponsored by a drug company. And the account would say, oh, high allergy count today at such and such. You know, oh, you allergy sufferers, beware.

And I realized twice as many people were coming to my office with allergies after those ads started because the power of suggestion. There are allergies there, there’s a pollen, you’re going to be victimized by that pollen, and lo and behold, they were. They sold a lot of drugs though. So instead of subscribing to that, what would one do? We know you have a tendency towards an allergy, so you would give in to the thoughts that you are okay, you are balanced, this is not gonna affect me, I am powerful over this matter.

Yeah. We need to see that it’s really a miss misinformation system encoded in my brain. The way the limbic system works and to protect us is like if you’re bitten by a snake, then you walk along at dusk and you see something that looks like one, you run the other way or you grab a club, but it might just be a limb that fell from the tree. Our immune system works the same way. You know, it has an encoding of information.

This is something that’s dangerous. Okay. The immune system fights it. And so somehow, it got encoded in my brain. There’s danger out there, even though it’s not a dangerous substance.

And so now we have people allergic to all sorts of things that are not at all dangerous. It’s a miscommunication system that’s gotten programmed in. Often it comes from being around people who say, oh, I have this allergy, or this thing is hurting you, or this thing is going to get to you, this is going to harm you. Often we have parents who are very frightened about the world. We program that in, that helps us even be more prone to have allergies.

And so the whole system goes in programming our self to react to something that’s dangerous even when it’s not. Yes. And let’s talk about projections, when other people are projecting their thought, their feelings, their negativity onto you and one takes that literally as being truthful because they’re used to being in an established relationship, in that marriage or in that friendship. . So what does one do when this is a constant and they want to turn this around, but yet there is a firm established pattern that they’ve allowed this for many years?

Well, I think first of all, I may need to make sure I don’t have unclear traumas in my history that are similar to this kind of experience. Because if I have traumas that are similar to this, not being heard, not being listened to, or being criticized, or being judged, I’m gonna be 10 times or 20 times more sensitive to it, and I’m gonna take it much more personally. So I may need, in order to handle it, to go back upstream again, do some clearing on those, like even I do these prep methods on myself. And if something pares to me and I overreacted in a situation, I’ll ask myself, where did I experience something like that when I was a kid? Was that something that was bothersome to me?

Did it something that caused me pain? I’ll identify it. I’ll do the clearing on myself to release it. I’ll touch these points and release it. That’s the preparation for letting it all go.

And so I think the same thing is true for us, you know, about any kind of symptom that we have. That we can see, well, what’s behind it? What’s firing it up? Then I can see what I could clear about that. Then I can see how I can change my thoughts now and look at it differently.

So it’s like decoding the story and. Allowing the source to come through of exactly what actually happened and how to open up to that, to neutralize it, to balance it. That’s the part when you ask about my different training. That’s the part where psychoanalysis helped me.

Because I learned to go back and look for what the origin to something was. Unfortunately, the techniques of psychoanalysis didn’t work very well. And Freud himself didn’t see them working very well. He even concluded and says the most you can expect from a successful psychoanalysis is just to be relieved of some of the worst of your human suffering. But the brilliant part about him was the curious part.

He kept being curious and trying to find ways it would work, and he kept exploring them. And if he kept living longer, he would have come up with a lot of other things. Unfortunately, it was made into a doctrine and kept where it was. As things happened in so many religions and so many schools of psychology, schools of medicine and so on, we get attached to the doctrines that have been there in the past. Yeah.

And the Freudian way was to isolate that there was symptoms and find out the cause and the symptoms and just do it again. About it or to do brain, or to do, dream analysis of it or free association, which would help some people. But it didn’t often get to those things. In fact, the brain scan studies now say that if you’re talking about your trauma, a lot of the times it just reactivates that limbic brain and tends to rehearse it. And so, talking for some people might work, but talking for others can just make it worse. And we need to have some other means to get beyond that.

And so if it’s going to make it worse, one would think that you need to be perhaps talking about it, but releasing it with actualization and awareness at the same time. Yeah. If we can use a bilateral stimulation or we can use the meridian stimulation with conscious intent, then we can release it.

And it’s effective a very I think a larger percentage of time than any of the therapies I’ve studied, and I’ve studied most of them. Well, what final thoughts do you have that you would really like to share with others and the readers of your book . And others that are very curious to contact you? And do you also you’re in New York City.

So people are listening to the show here and they would like to contact you. Do they have to be in New York City or do you do Skype sessions or over the phone sessions?

Sometimes when I have the time, but also there are people that I’ve trained around different cities that do some of this work that I can refer people to as well. But one thing, I think, too, that they read the book, they’ll find these tools described.

But also I demonstrate them. They can go to my website, henrygrayson.com, and they can go there and download demonstrations of these tools and they can follow them, follow along with them and use them on themselves because my goal is just to help people be free of their suffering. And the main part that I really feel underneath it all is helps us not just remember our intrinsic power, but it’s remembering who I truly am as a human being, that I’m not a powerless victim. And so the goal of healing is not just to heal the body, but it’s to heal the mind so that the body just naturally follows suit and heals. And it’s really to heal the mind that thought the body needed to be sick. And if I can do that, excuse me, I take back my power. I take back my strength. I’m no longer a victim. I don’t have to think of things as happening to me. I don’t have to say, attribute bad motives to different parts of my body like some people do.

My head is killing me. You know, as if my head had a motive or my back is killing me. No, it’s not doing that. So I don’t have to, put bad motives on my body or onto people or the environment or germs around me. I need to embrace my own power, to see my own strength, my own resilience, and to know that when I move to a peaceful state and especially a state of love and compassion, my whole immune system becomes stronger.

I’m not affected by other people and their negativity. We were talking before about that, you know, somebody who’s criticizing you and you might feel attached to it. If I can just see them as coming out of fear and not being loving, and I can have a compassionate thought for them, I’m not affected at all by their criticism. I can consider and see, oh, does that apply? Did I actually do that?

Oh, let me consider it. But I’m not making myself wrong. One could think that they’re in a relationship with a negative person is projecting all of this fear and anger onto another, that is the that is the way to be in a relationship with that person. They’ve accepted the fact that the anger and the fear is the person and is the relationship, but they do not see that they can affect that other person by changing it into something else. That’s By helping themselves and helping the other person.

That’s absolutely right. And there’s another factor too though. Unless we clear our childhood traumas and our negative beliefs, we are very likely to pick a person who will help confirm those and who will abuse us in the same way we were abused, who will give maltreatment the same way we had it before, will confirm our beliefs about what we don’t deserve, and we’ll keep picking partner after partner after partner who will reinforce that until we get that stuff cleared. It’s amazing how often a woman who’s beaten up by her father will pick a guy who will beat her up. And we all see that, you know, repeatedly, you know, from time to time.

We’ve seen evidence of it all over the place. This doesn’t make them bad people. It’s just the way the limbic system works. And so, what we now know, they can find freedom from that by using these tools. That’s the part that I’m excited about, that we’re not in bondage anymore.

We’re not in bondage to the environment. We’re not in bondage to other people. We’re not even in bondage to our own thoughts because we can actually change them all. And that’s the way we take our power back and to realize that we are more than just those powerless human beings who we often think of ourselves as being. Well, thank you for writing this book, this amazing book, Using Your Body to Heal Your Mind.

And thank you for all your incredible work that you do. And, I look forward to speaking with you in the future. I would enjoy that. Thank you for having me on your show again. It’s good to do it even after all these years.

Thank you. Thank you, Henry. And I thank you for the work you’re doing. And from the art of conscious living, I thank you and do take care of yourself and take care of others. Have a blessed day.