Better Listen Audio Program
Emmett Miller
Excerpt
MIndfulness

Excerpt From Emmett Miller:

We are pleased to offer this excerpt from Emmett Miller as he teaches you how to open your mind and gain a deeper understanding on how your mind and body can work together in your everyday daily life.
 
What I used to do is to ask……How many people here would like to really live a life completely free of stress? Everybody would raise their hand, of course, and of course, you would have to be dead (laughter) to do that, you know?
 
And most of us think that way, but of course it’s impossible. It never occurs to us to go beyond the implied boundaries. It’s the same way with stress. When we talked about stress, all we talked about was what was inside here.
 
What I’m going to try and do is to set some points up, outside your usual definition of stress.
Stress is a very unfortunate name for the phenomenon. I mean, it’s like, it’s, it’s got to be some
divine plan behind this. Because the word stress already has meaning. You stress a point. I
want to really stress this point today. If you are an engineer or scientist, you know that materials
have stress. You put stress on a mater…., on something. Stress in every other definition is
something which is done to something else.
 
But when Hans Selye uses the word stress, he’s not talking about something which is being done
to something else. And therein lies the critical movement that’s going to be important for us
to be able to accomplish what we want to accomplish. When Dr Selye was a medical student,
he pointed out to his professors, he said “Why are you busy telling us how all of these different
patients with different diseases are different, and we’re looking at all of the things that make
them different, but I notice that there’s something that makes them all the same, they all have
coated tongues, they’re all feeling tired and a lack of interest in things, they feel ill, they’re
losing their appetites, they have diffuse aches and pains, they have a fever, they have elevated
white counts and so forth”. He said “Doesn’t it seem interesting that they all have these things
in common?”. And this professor said “That is irrelevant. It doesn’t help us to distinguish
between the different diseases, therefore, it’s not important to the physician in making a
diagnosis or establishing a treatment”