Original subtitles

- 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 NET

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 NET

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 NET

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 NET 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.