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    PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT
    Podcast 13 min read

    Turning Life’s Hardest Moments Into Growth w/ Dr. John Demartini

    with Dr. John Demartini

    Chris Do and Dr. John Demartini examine how questions reshape the meaning people give to difficult experiences.

    Chris Do

    Chris Do

    Founder, The Futur™ · January 22, 2026

    A second interpretation is not an acquittal

    A painful event can change a life without deserving credit for saving it. That distinction sits at the center of Chris Do’s conversation with Dr. John Demartini, who introduces himself as a researcher, writer, full-time traveler, and educator with more than five decades in education. His perspective matters because he has built his teaching around a demanding proposition: people can change their relationship to difficult experiences by changing the questions they ask about them.

    The promise is agency. The danger is turning agency into an obligation to feel grateful for harm.

    Do arrives at the conversation through a personal recommendation. Over dinner in Vancouver, his friend Tim Francis described watching Demartini work with someone who had experienced severe trauma. What caught Do’s attention was not simply the subject matter, but the reported transformation in how that person understood the experience.

    Do later shared the story publicly and encountered resistance. Some listeners objected to the suggestion that someone could become grateful for an event that had caused profound suffering. He brings that objection into the interview rather than pretending the premise is easy to accept.

    It is the right place to begin. A discussion about recovering personal agency is not the same as a claim that violence is beneficial. A person’s later achievements do not establish that the injury was necessary, justified, or the only route to those achievements.

    Finding meaning after harm does not make the harm acceptable.

    Demartini argues that people often understand events through incomplete interpretations. They see a cost but miss a consequence that later became useful, or admire a person while overlooking the difficulties attached to that person’s behavior. His method attempts to bring the missing side into view.

    That is a more demanding exercise than positive thinking. It asks a person to examine a judgment rather than merely replace an unpleasant feeling with a pleasant one. In Demartini’s account, the target is not perpetual happiness but a less polarized understanding of experience.

    His claims become much broader when the conversation turns to trauma. He describes dramatic workshop outcomes, asserts that his methodology reliably produces gratitude, and invokes neurological explanations. The conversation does not supply independent clinical evidence for those claims, and a reported emotional breakthrough cannot establish a treatment’s effectiveness.

    That boundary matters throughout the discussion. His recollections can illustrate his philosophy without serving as proof that every survivor should follow it. Severe trauma should not be reduced to a faulty attitude, and professional care should not be dismissed as maintaining a story of victimhood.

    The useful tension is narrower and more durable: an event may be irreversible while its meaning remains open to examination. Recognizing that possibility preserves room for change without demanding denial.

    Do’s task is to make that proposition understandable. Demartini’s challenge is to demonstrate what his questions actually do. Between them sits a distinction the conversation repeatedly tests: what happened to someone, and what that person concludes must happen next.

    The prediction that became a project

    Demartini’s account of his childhood gives his argument its emotional force. He recalls difficulties with speech, reading, and writing, along with physical challenges that required braces. A first-grade teacher, he says, told his parents that he would never read, write, or communicate effectively and probably would not amount to much.

    The force of that recollection is not the accuracy of the prediction. It is the authority with which a prediction can become an identity.

    He describes getting through parts of school by questioning other children. Spoken explanations reached him when written language did not. Long before questions became the basis of his teaching, they were, in his telling, a way to participate in learning.

    By adolescence, his attention had shifted to surfing. He recounts leaving school, living on beaches, traveling from Texas to California and Mexico, and eventually reaching Hawaii. Accommodation mattered less than access to the water.

    Do notices the continuity between the young surfer and the adult educator. The subject changes; the intensity does not. Demartini describes committing nearly every available hour to surfing, then later bringing a similarly concentrated effort to reading.

    The point is not that deprivation makes people exceptional. It is that his story contains evidence of commitment before it contains conventional evidence of academic ability. The capacity to concentrate was present; its application changed.

    Demartini identifies an encounter with Paul Bragg as a turning point. After a serious health crisis as a teenager, he attended a talk that included guided imagery. He recalls imagining himself speaking to a vast audience and feeling, for the first time, that effective communication could belong to his future.

    The vision gave him direction. His account of what followed gives it substance.

    Back in Texas, he says, his mother helped him work through a dictionary. He describes a routine built around repetition rather than a sudden disappearance of difficulty:

    • Write each word repeatedly with its correct spelling.
    • Study its meaning and use it in a sentence.
    • Practice saying it aloud.
    • Review the day’s vocabulary with his mother.

    The contrast is important. An inspiring moment did not do the work on his behalf. In his telling, it made the work worth attempting.

    A new possibility still requires repeated action.

    He also recalls asking his mother for great works of human thought as a birthday gift. A relative sent crates of books, and reading became the organizing activity of his life. The extraordinary totals he cites are not necessary to understand the shift: something once presented as inaccessible became central to his identity.

    The story belongs beside The Futur’s The Importance Of Mentors as a consideration of influence. Here, one person’s discouraging verdict and another person’s encouragement occupy opposite ends of the same life narrative.

    But even Demartini’s own account resists a purely individual explanation. His mother practiced with him. A speaker gave him an image of possibility. A relative supplied books. Personal resolve mattered, but it did not operate in a vacuum.

    The practical reframe is not that every obstacle secretly helps. It is that an early judgment, however forcefully delivered, does not have to retain permanent authority over the person who received it.

    The adjective is not the action

    Demartini’s next move is to question the language of judgment itself. People describe others as generous, selfish, persistent, stubborn, admirable, or intolerable. Those words sound like observations, but they often combine behavior with the observer’s priorities.

    His example is his own dedication to study. Someone who values scholarship can read that dedication as determination. Someone who values time with children more highly can read the same behavior as rigidity.

    The action has not changed. The standard used to evaluate it has.

    A description of behavior is not a verdict on character.

    This is one of the conversation’s most transferable distinctions. It does not require accepting Demartini’s larger claims about trauma or physiology. It requires noticing how quickly an adjective can conceal the event that supposedly supports it.

    Demartini says he once worked through the Oxford English Dictionary, marking terms that described human behavior. For each trait, he identified someone who represented it strongly, then searched his own life for instances when he had displayed something comparable.

    He calls this reflective awareness. The purpose, as he describes it, is to soften the division between the person making a judgment and the person being judged. Rather than treating a disliked quality as foreign, the observer looks for evidence of it in another context.

    His reasoning moves through several related distinctions:

    • A trait can carry different meanings for people with different priorities.
    • An admired behavior can have costs that admiration obscures.
    • A disliked behavior can appear in the observer’s own history.
    • A broad label can prevent examination of a specific action.

    There is intellectual discipline in moving from a label toward an observable description. It makes the discussion more precise. It also prevents a sweeping conclusion about a person from passing unexamined as a simple fact.

    The companion issue appears in The Futur’s Dealing With Negative Feedback: criticism becomes a different object of attention when the response does not end at the initial sting. Demartini’s contribution here is his insistence on specifying what, exactly, has been judged.

    But precision has limits. Similar words can describe actions with radically different consequences. A metaphorical betrayal is not equivalent to physical violence simply because both can be described with the language of injury.

    That distinction becomes crucial when Demartini applies reflective awareness to assault. Recognizing an ordinary human tendency in oneself does not transfer responsibility for another person’s crime. Nor does acknowledging a personal imperfection establish moral equivalence with someone who inflicted severe harm.

    The useful practice is self-examination, not forced equivalence.

    Demartini also directs the exercise toward admiration. Putting another person on a pedestal can shrink the observer’s sense of possibility just as hostility can narrow the observer’s interpretation. His stated aim is to examine both elevations and condemnations.

    This gives the method a more interesting shape than a simple campaign against negative thinking. Admiration can distort. Resentment can distort. The task, on his terms, is to investigate what each strong judgment leaves outside the frame.

    A fuller account does not erase responsibility. It makes room for a more exact description of it.

    The story carries more than it can prove

    The conversation’s central example is also its most ethically difficult. Demartini recounts working onstage with a woman who had survived a severe sexual and physical assault. He says she volunteered during a seminar where participants selected her experience for a demonstration.

    His telling describes a movement from distress toward gratitude. The woman, he reports, connected changes after the assault with leaving drugs, returning to education, and developing new intellectual and spiritual interests. He presents those connections as evidence that her interpretation of the event could change.

    Those are his recollections of her statements, not independently established findings. The woman is not interviewed in the conversation, and the account provides no clinical assessment or basis for determining what caused the changes he describes.

    The distinction is not technical fussiness. It is the difference between reporting a speaker’s account and endorsing his explanation of another person’s recovery.

    Demartini says he separated the experience into specific actions, then asked the woman to identify benefits associated with each. He also describes asking her to find parallels between the perpetrator’s behavior and her own conduct, including metaphorical parallels.

    This is where a search for perspective risks becoming a demand for symmetry. A survivor can acknowledge complexity in personal relationships without accepting a comparison between those relationships and an assault. Growth afterward does not mean the perpetrator provided a service.

    A compelling demonstration is not clinical proof.

    Do presses on the mechanics of the encounter. Was she onstage? What did she understand about the exercise? Did Demartini ever worry that the process would not work?

    Demartini answers with certainty: “It’s a science.”

    He describes tears of gratitude as the expected endpoint of a thoroughly completed process. Yet the conversation offers no independent evidence that tears establish lasting recovery, that the process works universally, or that an absence of gratitude means a participant has failed to examine the experience honestly.

    Several things therefore need to remain separate:

    • Personal testimony. A participant’s reported experience deserves accurate attribution.
    • Demonstrated effectiveness. A vivid account alone does not establish a reliable treatment outcome.
    • Responsibility for harm. Later growth does not reduce the perpetrator’s responsibility.

    Demartini adds a later encounter in which, he says, the same woman described substantial changes in her life. That gives his account a longer horizon than a single emotional moment. It still does not resolve the questions of verification or causation.

    The communication stakes belong alongside The Futur’s conversation with Maria Ross about empathy and manipulation. Listening to someone’s experience and steering that person toward a predetermined emotional conclusion are different acts.

    A survivor may choose to describe growth, meaning, or gratitude. That language belongs to the survivor. It should not become a test imposed by an educator, an audience, or an article.

    The more defensible lesson is not that every tragedy contains an equal benefit. It is that people sometimes discover possibilities after devastating experiences, and their ability to discover those possibilities should neither excuse the harm nor become a condition of receiving care.

    A closer look at the questions

    Stripped of its claims to universal outcomes, the practical center of Demartini’s teaching is a structured interrogation of judgment. He calls the framework the Demartini Method. In the conversation, he describes using specific questions to challenge both resentment and idealization.

    His first demand is specificity. Instead of accepting a broad description of someone as good or bad, he asks for the particular action or inaction being evaluated. The point is to identify something concrete enough to examine.

    Next comes the search for a corresponding behavior in the observer’s own experience. He asks where and when the person has displayed the same trait, toward whom, and who would perceive it that way. This is the reflective-awareness component introduced through his dictionary exercise.

    Then he turns toward overlooked consequences. His questions include “What did you learn?” and “What awareness came out of it?” He wants the person to investigate changes in understanding, direction, or behavior that the original judgment excluded.

    He also examines the imagined alternative. If the other person had acted exactly as desired, what difficulties would have accompanied that outcome? In his formulation, resentment can be intensified by comparison with an idealized version of what should have happened.

    The sequence he describes includes these lines of inquiry:

    • Identify the specific trait, action, or inaction being judged.
    • Locate instances of that behavior in the observer’s own life.
    • Investigate what was learned or changed following the experience.
    • Look for what Demartini describes as a complementary opposite.
    • Examine drawbacks in the preferred alternative.

    This is a description of his approach, not a complete protocol or a recommendation to use it on trauma without appropriate care. Demartini himself resists treating the methodology as something fully conveyed through a book. He says it requires training and practical work.

    That caution is worth preserving even when other parts of his account sound absolute. A set of prompts does not automatically reproduce the judgment, consent, or competence needed to work responsibly with another person’s most painful experiences.

    His explanation of expectations is easier to examine in the everyday example he supplies: relationships. A person who expects only praise experiences reprimand against a standard that excludes criticism altogether. Someone who anticipates both support and challenge starts from a different picture of human interaction.

    This does not make every criticism fair. It questions the expectation that a worthwhile relationship should contain none.

    The distinction also clarifies what he means by balance. He is not simply asking participants to celebrate. He wants the admired alternative examined as closely as the resented reality.

    The Futur’s Learning, Collaboration, Critique & Feedback provides a related editorial reference point for that tension between development and discomfort. The present conversation places the emphasis on the interpretation that arrives before a person decides what to do with the discomfort.

    For ordinary reflection, the useful standard is accuracy rather than a compulsory emotion. A question earns its place if it reveals something supportable that was previously overlooked.

    If the process requires inventing benefits, erasing injury, or declaring gratitude that is not felt, the search for a fuller account has become another distortion.

    Agency without a compulsory happy ending

    Do eventually puts the discussion into plain language. Events happen; interpretations influence whether someone sees room to move. Demartini’s stated ambition is to compress the time that can pass before a person recognizes consequences that were invisible at first.

    The strongest version of that idea does not require certainty about every outcome. It asks whether a settled conclusion deserves another look.

    Demartini says people sometimes resist his questions. He describes offering participants a choice between continuing with the work and leaving with their money returned. Do hears the emphasis on choice and says, “So it’s a lot about choices here.”

    But choice must include the right to reject an interpretation without being cast as invested in suffering. Someone who does not find gratitude in an experience has not thereby demonstrated dishonesty, weakness, or a desire to remain unwell.

    Demartini’s remarks about therapists preserving victim narratives are especially important to separate from the usable parts of his philosophy. The conversation provides no basis for that sweeping characterization. Seeking professional help and developing personal agency are not opposing commitments.

    His own account of gratitude offers a less coercive application of the idea. He says he records meaningful encounters, opportunities, and expressions of thanks daily. Podcasts, clients, teaching experiences, and messages from people all become part of that record.

    He traces the habit to his mother, who encouraged him as a child to notice what he appreciated before going to bed. In adulthood, the practice has become a deliberate archive of what his work has allowed him to experience.

    That is gratitude directed at attention, not gratitude demanded as a verdict on someone else’s suffering.

    Do’s interest in this part of the conversation is personal to the work of education. People enter a teacher’s life and leave again. Often, the teacher never sees what becomes of an idea after it reaches someone.

    When a person returns with an account of change, the work acquires a different scale. The meaningful result is no longer the moment of delivery. It is what the person did afterward.

    Demartini’s final example of dedication returns the conversation to identity. He describes meeting a concert pianist whose life had been organized around practice since childhood. What moves him is the alignment between repeated action and a chosen form of expression.

    The thread reaches back to surfing and dictionary drills. In his account, the activities that changed his life were not merely new interpretations. They were commitments sustained through behavior, supported at crucial moments by other people.

    That is a useful corrective to the seduction of the instant breakthrough. A changed interpretation can open a door. It is not the same as everything that follows.

    The closing exchange is modest by comparison with the conversation’s grander claims. Do asks whether Demartini still surfs. He does, he says, and keeps a board on the ship where he lives.

    The detail brings the argument back to a recognizable human scale: a person who found something absorbing early in life and never entirely left it behind.

    For anyone examining a difficult experience, the standard need not be a triumphant retelling. Name what happened. Distinguish an observation from a verdict. Look for options that are genuinely present, without inventing a reason the harm had to occur.

    The next chapter does not have to defend the last one.

    TRANSCRIPT

    I want to start today's podcast with a story, a very personal story. I'm in Vancouver meeting up with a friend. His name is Tim Francis and a couple other people. Intimate, nice dinner. We're chatting and my next guest, his name comes up and his name is Dr. John Demartini. And Tim was saying, Chris, if you have to go to a workshop, if you have to learn from one person, I highly recommend you seek out Dr. Demartini. And so now I'm really intrigued. I'm leaning in and he's telling me the story about how he went to one of your workshops and how you handled someone who's experienced extreme trauma. We're talking about assault, something very heavy. I won't get into that part, but he just talked about how you handled it and how you talked about it. And so that's the beginning of the conversation today. So joining me today on the podcast is someone who is a prolific content creator, author, researcher, a very accomplished person, a prolific writer. Hi, I'm Dr. John Demartini and you are listening to The Future. Dr. John Demartini, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. I was looking forward to this. Pardon my delay getting on. No worries. We're privileged to have you. There are a couple of things that I really want to talk to you about, but just before we get going here, I would love for you just to quickly introduce yourself to our audience. Tell them what your name is and who you are. I'm Dr. John Demartini. Just like you said, I'm a researcher, writer, full -time traveler and educator. I've been doing education for, I'll be 53 years at it in November. So I've been doing it for five decades and I love it. Anything to do with maximizing human awareness and potential and helping people do extraordinary things with their life and the involvement of their conscious awareness, that's my love. And as you can see behind me, there's a bunch of books and people always ask me, Chris, have you read all the books? No, I've not even come close to reading all those books. But you, according to internet, have read over 30 ,000 books across a bunch of different disciplines. And that's hard for me to like even comprehend 30 ,000. I don't think I've read a thousand books. Here you are 30 ,000. What is it about you that loves to read and research and to learn? And when I was a year and a half old, I had to go to a speech pathologist because I couldn't pronounce or use my facial muscles and mouth properly. And I had also an arm and leg deformity and had to wear braces. When I got to elementary school, I was told by my first grade teacher in front of my parents, I'm afraid your son will never be able to read, never be able to write, probably not communicate effectively, not go very far in life, probably won't amount to much. So I definitely had learning challenges as a child. And I left school and became a street kid at 13. I tried to make it through elementary school by asking smart kids questions, which I'm known for now, questions. And I got through by learning stuff from people. When people spoke, I could get stuff. But reading didn't make sense, dyslexia and stuff. so I definitely had learning challenges as a child and I left school and became a street kid at 13 I tried to make it through elementary school by asking smart kids to questions which I'm known for now questions and I got through by learning stuff from people when people spoke I could get stuff but reading didn't make sense dyslexia and stuff so I didn't really read until I nearly died at age 17 almost 18 I didn't learn to read until I met a gentleman named Paul Bragg who inspired me one night at a recovery meeting or whatever from nearly dying to believe that I could someday become intelligent somehow be able to be able to read and speak properly so at that time I set out to try to override this challenge and at first it didn't work and I wanted to give up but my mom moved back from where I was living in Hawaii at the time riding big waves as a surfer and I moved back to Texas to see my family because I hadn't been seeing him for quite a while and my mom assisted me in going through a dictionary and I memorized 30 words a day and I wrote out the word 20 times proper spelling the meaning in a sentence and pronounced it 20 times each word 30 words a day and so I spent hours on this and my mom would test me on that each night and I grew my vocabulary 20 ,000 words in two years and kind of memorized the dictionary well then I started to figure out some meaning and words it started to make some progress and then I just wanted to read I mean it was like a dream and then when I turned just turning 19 my mom asked me what do you want for your birthday son what do you it's coming up on Thanksgiving I was born on Thanksgiving and I said mom I want the greatest teachings on the face of the earth the greatest writings human beings can ever have ever created by the greatest minds who ever lived she said you sure you don't want a teacher I said I said I know I want I want to learn mom and she was inspired by that and she had a brother who is my uncle Ralph who was a professor at MIT he was a very scholarly individual in physics and chemistry and as a gift I don't know how he did it or where he got it or it was his own personal library but he sent two giant six by six by six foot wooden crates of books of all different disciplines to my parents house and it was unloaded on a flatbed truck on the ground and I went out with a crowbar and opened up and filled my room with thousands of books and went to work and I started reading encyclopedias and dictionaries and books and and I gradually got faster and faster and faster until I was reading on average around four to seven books a day on average and weekends sometimes 20 so I just started devouring books and so I'm now just probably in the next couple months I'll probably pass the 31 ,000 book but today most of my reading is online so I now I have to equivalent a book by reading a book online or the equivalent of it in articles and stuff like I gradually got faster and faster and faster until I was reading, on average, around four to seven books a day, on average, and weekends, sometimes 20. So I just started devouring books. And so I'm now just probably in the next couple of months, I'll probably pass the 31 ,000 books. But today, most of my reading is online. So now I have to equivalent a book by reading a book online or the equivalent of it in articles and stuff like that. So I just love reading. It's what I do every single day. There's lots of strings I want to pull on on this. When you say you're a street kid, did you just leave home and just live out on your own? Is that what you mean? Yeah, it's a bit of a story. You know, I had amazing parents, but they didn't know what to do with me because I couldn't read and write and speak properly. So they thought, OK, he's going to be a street kid. And I was, believe it or not, I was in Texas and I learned how to surf. Texas was not the surf capital. And so I went down to the beaches at 13, down to the beach in Freeport, lived on the beach and surfed. And my mom and dad saw that I excelled at something. And they said, if you can excel at something, your self -worth will be, you know, helped. And I really was pretty decent at that. I mean, and so I, when I was 14, I hitchhiked to California and down into Mexico. And I lived there. And then at 15, I panhandled enough money on Huntington Beach, California to get to Hawaii. I lived under the Sunset Kamehameha Highway Bridge. And then I lived under a park bench and in a bathroom and a abandoned car. I didn't care where or how, I just wanted to surf. And I had panhandled enough money to be able to have a little bit of, I could live on about a dollar and a half to two dollars a day in those days. And I just surfed. And I was a big weight writer. I got into three surf movies and surf books and surf magazines and stuff when I was a teenager back in the late 60s, early 70s. Wow, this is incredible. So you love surfing so much that you just said whatever and you... I was not going to let anything stop me. I snuck into Mexico illegally when I was 14 and got out illegally. It's quite funny. There was no borders by Trump in those days. It sounds to me like, well, there's a theme that's emerging really quickly here is whatever you set your heart into, you do all the way. There's not like a middle ground for you. Like you went to the very extreme parts. So whether it's surfing or learning, you just go all in on this. Yeah, I think surfing, I used to do about 11 hours a day. So I was up at 545 in the water by six, surf to 11 -ish, come in, get a bite and back out, surf to about 430, come back in, go back out around five, then stay until dark. I mean, that was my life. When you're riding on the North Shore, it's a great space to surf. I lived at Iekai Beach Park and then down at Hialeiva Park. And I had to, you know, I was just right. Pipeline, Iekai Beach Park, Pupakea, Gas Chambers, Rocky Point, Sunset Beach, Pipeline. That was my back door. I searched all those. I could spend all day talking to you about your backstory and how you almost died and dyslexia and all this kind of stuff and pain handling. But I really want to get to the, I think, the meat of the conversation today, which is you said something to the effect that events aren't what traumatizes us. It's our perception, how we see it. Icai Beach Park, Pupakea, Gas Chambers, Rocky Point, Sunset Beach, Pipeline. That was my backdoor. I searched all those. I could spend all day talking to you about your backstory and how you almost died and dyslexia and all this kind of stuff and pain handling. But I really want to get to the, I think, the meat of the conversation today, which is you said something to the effect that events aren't what traumatizes us. It's our perception, how we see it, what we interpret from this that shape how we feel about these things. This is a really big idea, and I'd love for you to talk about this. So can you take me back to the first time in which you realized this idea that how you look at things can really resolve how you feel about trauma? Well, I think when I was told that I would never be able to read, never be able to write, never speak properly, communicate effectively, not go very far, not amount to anything. I've read 31 ,000 books. I've written probably 300 books. I've never gone very far. I've gone 21 million miles by flight, and I live on a ship full time. So I happen to be off now because I'm in the thing, but I live on a ship. I've gone over a million miles sailing. Amount to anything, I'm about 50 to 60 times financially independent, multiple. And I've communicated with billions of people. So the very thing I was told I was never going to do became the very thing I end up doing. So I thought, well, this challenge, it can be opportunity. And I started to explore how the voids become the values and how these events that we think are in the way are actually on the way. And the things that you think are traumatic are simply incomplete awareness. I've helped, I don't know how many thousands of people that think that they've been traumatized, and I've asked them a series of questions in a matter of minutes to an hour or less, help them transform their perception and cognitive reappraisally see it as thank you. Yeah, I always say there's nothing the mortal body can experience that the mortal soul can't love. The mortal soul is not a theological soul, as Aristotle described it. It's just the state of unconditional love when you actually are able to see both sides simultaneously and have an equilibrated mind and liberate yourself from the intrusive thoughts of imbalanced awareness. Was there a singular moment that helped you come to this point? Because you had mentioned that people told you that you can't do this and everything they've told you you can't do, you've been able to do. But is there this kind of divine moment of inspiration? Or were you like, hey, I just realized something? Was there something that led up to that point? Well, the night I met Paul Bragg, who's a guest speaker at the Sunset Recreation Hall, when he was speaking, he took us through a guided imagery meditation, an alpha meditation experience. And in there, I saw myself standing. I could probably show you the actual painting. It's been painted now, this image. But I saw myself standing on a balcony about 40 feet above a giant square with a million people in it. And that was me speaking to that group. And I saw that in a very lucid vision and brought tears to my eyes. And I just knew that I knew that I knew that I was destined to speak. And that was the very thing that I was told I'd probably not be able to do. So that lucid vision, which is painted, which sits in my office today, it's a five foot. on a balcony about 40 feet above a giant square with a million people in it. And that was me speaking to that group. And I saw that in a very lucid vision and brought tears to my eyes. And I just knew that I knew that I knew that I was destined to speak. And that was the very thing that I was told I'd probably not be able to do. So that lucid vision, which is painted, which sits in my office today, it's a five foot by four foot painting. That lucid vision that night was definitely a catalyst that has kept the vision that I've kept all those years, that I've kept in my forefront. That was when you were 17? I was 17. It was November 18th, 1972. I want to confess when Tim Francis shared a story about how you help somebody with extreme trauma go through this, they shared the story on stage. And I shouldn't have done that because some people had really strong reactions. Like, what do you mean you can be grateful for some of the events that are so tragic in your life? So I would love for you to share this. Like you said, you guide people through a series of questions, how they can turn something that's traumatic into a moment of gratitude. Can you take us through how this works? Like maybe a story or however you want to do it? Sure. 41 years ago, I noticed that many times the things I would emphasize to other people was talking to myself. As Chomsky's kid, much of our language is not for others, it's for us. So what we say to others is also for us. And so I realized that that's a form of reflective awareness. And so whenever I judge somebody, as it says in Romans 2 .1 in the New Testament, whatever you judge in others, you've done the same thing. And that's found in many great writings through the ages. And the seeing and the scene are the same kind of thing. There's no separation except in the elusive mind. So I went to the Oxford English Dictionary and I went through page by page. It's the largest dictionary I could find. And page by page, I underlined every word that described a behavioral trait of a human being. I found 4 ,628 traits at the time. There's probably more now, but that's what I did then. And I underlined it. And out to the side, I wrote down, who do I know that displays that behavior to the highest degree? And I wrote out their name, just really tiny print, pencil. And then I looked at the degree that I perceived them. And then I looked and I asked myself, all right, John, where and when do you display and demonstrate this same behavior, the same specific trait, action or inaction, and whom you did it to and who perceives you that way. So I wanted to make sure I had reflective awareness and transparency. Well, I found that I had every one of the traits. Every single trait I was able to identify at some moment in my life. And I realized that nothing was missing in me. I was both hero and villain, saint and sinner, virtuous and vicious. I had every trait. I was kind and cruel and nice and mean and generous and stingy and honest and dishonest. And I had every possible trait that I saw in there in some context or in somebody else's perception. For instance, if I am very dedicated to my studies, if you have a high value, question. Ah... I am... trait I was able to identify at some moment in my life. And I realized that nothing was missing in me. I was both hero and villain, saint and sinner, virtuous and vicious. I had every trait. I was kind and cruel and nice and mean and generous and stingy and honest and dishonest. And I had every possible trait that I saw in there in some context or in somebody else's perception. For instance, if I am very dedicated to my studies, if you have a high value on that, you'll see me as persistent and dedicated and determined. If you have a high value on children and not on study, you may see me pigheaded, rigid and stubborn. The same behavior has many connotations. And so I had to own all of the traits that I saw in other human beings. And that allowed me to have a preemptive strike on my perception of people that I judged and realized that my judgment was softening as I did that because I owned it. I realized that we only judge people on the outside, represent parts of us we've disowned on the inside and we haven't acknowledged we have. We're too proud or too humble to admit what we see in others inside us. And so when I did that exercise, that liberated me from a lot of the judgments that I was having. And so I started to put together a form. I call it Demartini Method today. And that was, I'd have people who would attend my classes to write down what they judge in other people, what they admired most and despised most. I didn't allow vague, broad generalities and labels and distortions and subjective biases. I made them go in and get very objective on the actual actions that the people were doing. And then I had them on the next column to go in there and identify where and when they did it and to whom and who perceived them do it until it was quantitatively and qualitatively equal. And I've done that on probably, I don't know, a couple hundred thousand people. So you'd have a hard time convincing me that a human being can't do that because I don't find anybody having problems doing that once they really look. What they see in others, they have. They just are too proud or too humble initially to see it. But once they transcend their amygdala's valent judgments of themselves and other people, they're able to find it, which puts them in their executive center instead of their amygdala. So they're not in survival, they go back into reflective awareness. So by doing that, I've taken people through almost amazing things. For instance, let's say I had a lady that was raped, stabbed 18 times, left chained to a block of cement on a highway to be run over by trucks and bleeding, thought that she was going to die from bleeding to death. And I went in there and we broke down what the traits were because rape was broad and vague, but we broke it down what the traits were. Constraint, threat, penetration without consent. And we broke all the way down those components. And we found that when we break it down, the components, instead of using a broad, vague general label called rape, and she was able to then identify where she constrained people, where she threatened people, where she did those things. This was live in front of 600 people at the High Valley Ranch at a Psy seminar demonstration, this particular case. We went through every one of the things. There were 18 items listed that she described. done a 3510, and she's done a 3510, and she's been about 35 .14 .oph видели for this. Back in 24 hours, thank you very much that day. See you can imagine two months as long Every All right, Paul, I see if it's necks because he makes nothing else out a year for instead of using a broad, vague general label called rape. And she was able to then identify where she constrained people, where she threatened people, where she did those things. This was live in front of 600 people at the High Valley Ranch at a Psy seminar demonstration, this particular case. We went through every one of the things. There were 18 items listed that she described the rapist by. And now, in the meantime, she had allowed herself to gain 45 pounds to 50 pounds. She had frumped out her hair to look asexual. She was not associated with any man. She was restricting her life's expression. She looked like she'd been the victim in her life, the mentality. She had health conditions that are associated with that. And she was the victim of history, not the master of destiny when she was there, when she came up on stage and volunteered to do the work. I had to go in there and I said, so where have you stabbed somebody 18 times? We have to find out physically or metaphysically or metaphorically. And she surprisingly was able to see where men that she had been with felt stabbed in the back by her departure and affairs with the next man because she was going from one man to the next. And so she was able to have reflective awareness and identify each of these behaviors. Astonishingly, she did a magnificent job of reflective awareness and transparency right in front of the group. She volunteered in front of the group. Normally these are private issues, but she owned it. Then we went in there and asked this question, go to the actual moment where and when you perceive this individual displaying or demonstrating the trait action and action that you dislike or despise most. They threatened you, they constrained you, they held you down or whatever it is. And in that moment, how did it serve you? What was the benefit? What did you learn? What did it catalyze? What awareness came out of it? What new insights came out of it? And in that moment, we started to identify the upsides. And people don't believe it. See, they get trapped in moral hypocrisies and highly polarized amygdala absolutes in their perception, which trap them and constrain their resilience and adaptability by doing that. And she was amazingly capable of finding the upsides. Very little prompting was needed. She was able to do it. And she said, well, without a doubt, it stopped me from doing drugs and saved my life. She brought down to tears. About 200 people in the room went into tears with her because she just realized that she was headed down a path that she was on drugs. She was in an environment, a circle of inner individuals where she was vulnerable to this kind of thing. And she realized it's actually saved life. I said, so what you're saying is this individual in that moment was actually a catalyst that saved your life. She stopped. And I said, what's another benefit? She said, well, I ended up going back into school and I'd been out of school and I went back to school after that event. in her individuals where she was vulnerable to this kind of thing. And she realized it's actually saved life. I said, so what you're saying is this individual in that moment was actually a catalyst that saved your life. She stopped. And I said, what's another benefit? She said, well, I ended up going back into school and I'd been out of school and I went back to school after that event. And so she started to see that the trajectory of her life changed from that event. And instead of seeing only the drawbacks, she started seeing the benefits. And we went through each one of those things, the constraint. When she was through, we found the advantages and disadvantages until they're equal. We don't stop. I just keep holding them accountable and keep looking and look in all areas of their life and see how it's... Because see, when events occur, the consequences, nobody knows all the consequences of any event. But we do know that the central limit theorem increases the probability of having a balanced consequence over time. We usually find upsides and downsides over time come back into balance. It's like a homeostat. It's a hedonic adaptation and a mechanism in the brain to do that. So we cognitively appraise things over time anyway, but we can have the wisdom of the ages with the aging process over time, or we can have the wisdom of the ages without it by just going in and asking quality questions and speed up the time. I was just helping her see it. So she did an amazing job. I mean, she was applauded at the end with a standing ovation when we finally finished the process, but she identified all the upsides of all 18 of the different experiences, even the stabbing. It was really quite amazing. She said in the stabbing, she dissociated from that experience and went into an alternate world where her creativity and her spirituality, she believed it was spirituality. It was actually a dissociation from the so -called stabbing, but she activated a spiritual quest. And she started on a new spiritual quest and started exploring philosophy and religion and all kinds of stuff and went on to school. And she looked back and I said, where were you before that? She said, I didn't believe I was doing drugs and I was hanging out with a, I was probably been dead. And she goes, this is a catalyst. So she ended up being grateful for that when we got through. Then I went in there and I looked at where she had done all those things and how did it help the people she had done it to? When she stabbed the guy in the back, the boyfriend in the back, how did it help him? Well, it got him out of a relationship that was, and she said she was toxic. Any guy that was with her was heading for insanity. It was a drama. But she saw the benefits of actually helping them go on and find the next person that was more stable and what they didn't want and did want. And then I asked her a question, go to the moment at that exact moment when these events occur, the constraint, who's trying to give you freedom at that moment? Because the mind will automatically, when it perceives something, it will perceive its complementary opposite in order to maintain the excitation inhibition ratios in the brain to balance. And for homeostatic mechanism, there's all the neurons, pre and post synaptic neurons, and all the transmitters have homeostats to make sure that they bring their chemistries back into balance. And these things are like within milliseconds. So the mind will automatically create a real or a virtual reality. Because the mind will automatically, when it perceives something, it will perceive its complementary opposite in order to maintain the excitation inhibition ratios in the brain to balance and for homeostatic mechanism. There's all the neurons, pre and post synaptic neurons, and all the transmitters have homeostats to make sure that they bring their chemistries back into balance. And these things are like within milliseconds. So the mind will automatically create a real or a virtual reality to counterbalance what's being perceived. People don't realize that. But you can't be depressed unless you're comparing your life to a fantasy. And the fantasy is elating and the depression is counterbalancing. And those two together are going on in the brain. So in those dissociative mechanisms, you're associating with the complementary opposite content in the brain in order to counterbalance it to being homeostasis. So I made her go through and find out. So when somebody's constraining her, who is giving her too much freedom? And she said, well, without a doubt, her family had let her go and just said, we don't want to deal with her anymore. And so she had freedom, and she was seeking freedom. And whenever you do, you attract constraint. Whatever you're addicted to, you attract the opposite to break the addiction, because the addiction keeps you juveniley dependent. And the opposite is what makes you become precocious, more independent. And she was realizing that this was helping her become more independent. And she was also more stable and not being so, we might say, easy with sexuality with people, which she was before. It's constrained it all and put her into more of an androgynous position temporarily. So we went through each of the events and found out the anti -event. I call it the anti -memory. If you look at Neuron Magazine 2016, March 17th, and Neuron Magazine is a great article on anti -memories that are counterbalancing memories for EI ratio balances. It's a great article. And I've been already studying this and studying psychology on this and found that back even before that. So it was great to finally see some literature come out on it. But what was interesting is we went through that, and then we asked the next question. Go to the moment where this constraint occurred and this injury and trauma and violence and all this stuff. Go to the moment. And at that moment, if they had done exactly the opposite, it would have been the drawback to you. And because we compare, when we resent things, we compare the opposite as a fantasy to it, and then we judge it because of it. Because we're holding on to the fantasy. If it was the opposite, life would have been happy. And the addiction to fantasies and happiness make things even resentful. In other words, if we think that somebody's supposed to be praised as, then criticism hurts. If we understand that human beings are going to praise and reprimand us in life, and every marriage is going to have that, then you have a grounded, objective view about relationships. But if you have the fantasy that you're supposed to be supported, not challenged, and praised, not reprimanded, then reprimands and challenges become more accentuated and painful. So I asked her if all of a sudden, whatever she was experiencing, the opposite was to occur at that moment, what would be the drawback? And she just started bawling. She said, I would be dead. I would be limited in my awareness. I would be probably drug addict. I wouldn't exist. And then she said, you know, when I stop and reflect, this gentleman came into my life and gave me my life. She's now grateful. She's in tears. opposite was to occur at that moment, what would be the drawback? And she just started bawling. She said, I would be dead. I would be limited in my awareness. I would be probably drug addict. I wouldn't exist. And then she said, you know, when I stop and reflect, this gentleman came into my life and gave me my life. She's now grateful. She's in tears. And I said, great. Now we've finished the process. Who in the room here, out of 600 people in the room, scan the room and find the individual here that reminds you, resonates or resembles that as an individual surrogate we can have up here. So you can have a dialogue with this individual to have a communication with them. Now that you're not frightened about this person and not this victim of history kind of thing. And she scans the room, 600 people, and she picks out a guy out of the room. And we asked the guy to come up. And he said, I had a sense I was going to get picked. And it turned out that he'd raped somebody when he was 18 years old. College football is back. So Hilton called a meet the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake -up call at 555 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. Hold on. He confesses this on stage? He confesses it right on the stage. And he just was bawling in tears and saying, I just want to know that you're okay. And I'm so grateful that you're okay and that your life has gone on and done great things. And she was thanking him and he was thanking her up on stage. There was not one dry eye in that room. I mean, everybody in that room was just absolutely blown away by the tears. And there was no judgment. Neither one of them, there was no judgment because he had put himself in his own prison for all those years, for 20 -something years, on his own accord, in his own head. That judgments on both ends were dissolved. And the whole room is kind of blown away that it's not what happens to you. It's how you perceive, decide, and act on it. And if you ask quality questions, you can change your life. Quality of your life is based on the quality of the questions you ask. What questions do is make you conscious of what you're unconscious of. And whenever you're labeling something good or bad, you're unconscious at the other side. So the event's neutral until you come in there with some moral construct on there that's now it's good and bad. And under different contexts and different cities and different times in history, that same event may not be what you think it is today. It's contextual. In situational ethics and relativist ethics, you realize it's contextual. And so the whole room was just astonished by her capacity to transform that. And this was in, I would say, an hour and a half of work. Hour and a half. I get to do that every week and many times during the week. So I'm, and I sometimes in my seminars, we're having 50 to 300 or more people doing this themselves and we're helping them through it. And they're dissolving their stuff and realize that everything was on the way, not in the way. And that they're you And this was in, I would say, an hour and a half work, an hour and a half. I get to do that every week and many times during the week. So I'm, and I sometimes in my seminars, we're having 50 to 300 or more people doing this themselves and we're helping them through it and they're dissolving their stuff and realize that everything was on the way, not in the way. And that there, anything you can't be thankful for is baggage. Anything you can't be thankful for is futile. So I just show them how to do that, ask new sets of questions. The Demartini method is a set of very concise questions that can liberate people from monopolar thinking that's very non -resilient and non -adaptable and absolutes and very distorted subjective bias interpretations from the amygdala, which is a survival response to an objective view of seeing things as they are, see actuality, not the reality that we created out of it. And I don't know, I've never seen anything that the mortal body can experience that you can't turn it around and find something to be thankful for. I actually, by the way, I had the opportunity to do 12 Holocaust survivors in front of a German pharmaceutical CEO and do this live for 12 Holocaust survivors on Hitler. And I just got through working with a series of rabbis just last week on Monday. Well, this week, it's Monday this week, doing this kind of thing. So it doesn't matter who or what it is. It's you have the capacity to transform your perceptions. That's the beauty. That's why William James said at 1895, he said, the greatest discovery of his generation is the human beings can alter their lives by altering their perceptions and attitudes of mind. And as you were speaking, I just wanted to ask you this quick question. There's a lot of things I want to follow up with you on, but I know you've written a lot of books, over 40 books. Is there a book that you've written and that we can learn this concept in? These questions that you're talking about this process? The methodology is a training methodology that I train psychologists and doctors on. I've got about 8 ,000 facilitators that I've trained. And it's more than a book. There's a training manual, but there's clinical actually working. I don't have a book that's really up to date on that methodology because I don't like to just liberate that out there without having real training on it because people use it loosely and incompletely without having the foundation for it. But there was a book called The Breakthrough Experience that I published about 25 years ago that is an early version of that, a light public version of that. There's also a little bit in a book called The Resilient Mind that I did more recently that covers some of the constructs. And there's part also in a book called The Values Factor that I did. And another one that's on The Essentials of Emotional Intelligence, another that I did. These are simple little books that I put out for people. But the actual work and methodology I teach in The Breakthrough Experience and in the training program. The Breakthrough Experience, I've done 1 ,242 times. I'm about to do it again here in Denver this weekend. That's where I introduce the methodology and let people take the most resentful, traumatic experience that they've had in their life or ecstatic because. that I did. These are simple little books that I put out for people. But the actual work and methodology, I teach in the Breakthrough Experience and in the training program. The Breakthrough Experience, I've done 1 ,242 times. I'm about to do it again here in Denver this weekend. That's where I introduce the methodology and let people take the most resentful traumatic experience that they've had in their life or ecstatic. Because many times people are infatuated with people and ecstatic and manic. And we take either pole. It doesn't matter what pole to start with. And we bring them back into the center. And so we let them experience it firsthand. And then if they are interested in further training on it, they can come to training on it or do whatever they want to do after that. There's no constraint on that. But that's where I introduce it at the Breakthrough Experience. So I'm trying to sort this out in my mind here. You're at a seminar. You're speaking in front of 600 people. They kind of know what they're signing up for, I think, because of your reputation. Well, I'm a guest speaker. This was Psy Seminars that was out in California. This was a number of years back. This particular case, they just had me as a guest speaker. And I did some principles on human behavior in the morning. And then somebody said, well, could you do a demonstration? And so I said, okay, I'm looking for the most challenging case that the room presents. And so about 75 people put their hand up and we went through and what was your issue? Well, my boyfriend dumped me. Okay. I was injured and beaten by my father. Okay. And we went around and let them vote. We let them vote who he want me to do. And they picked the rapist as the rape case as the one that they asked me to do that. Okay. So that person's in a state, they're like, okay, there's going to be some deep work here. She comes up on stage with you? She comes up on stage. I have a flip chart up there. They got a mic for us. She's sitting in a chair. I'm standing at the flip chart and we're working at the flip chart and she did an extraordinary job. Oh, I got to share something. I was speaking in Portland, Oregon to 1400 people a few years later. And this was after the movie, The Secret came out that I got to be involved in. And somebody asked me, well, what about killing? And what about rape? And what about all the stuff that, you know, they started throwing that change on. So I started to share a bit of the story about this lady. I didn't know the lady was in the room. She was in the room. I had no idea. She was from Seattle. I didn't know where she was from. And at the time I did the work, but she was from Seattle and came down and heard I was speaking and came down there. I wish I had a picture before and after. She was thin, had her hair all back, had her own radio show, has a book out. She's a completely transformed lady. I didn't recognize her. I would never have imagined that's the same lady. But she stood up and put her hand up and asked for the microphone and then shared what happened after that event to the whole room, the whole room. And people were just astonished because I didn't know she was there. She spoke up and she told the story of what trajectory happened after that and how she was catalyzed to no longer be the victim and actually empower her life in a different But she stood up and put her hand up and asked for the microphone and then shared what happened after that event to the whole room, the whole room. And people were just astonished because I didn't know she was there. She spoke up and she told the story of what trajectory happened after that and how she was catalyzed to no longer be the victim and actually empower her life in a different way and is now helping other people do that. I didn't know that. It was as much of a novel thing for me as it was for the other people in the room. But the room just kind of went, okay, there's a real case. When she introduced herself again and you're like, how did that make you feel? Well, I have the largest collection of gratitudes. In fact, you're already on it today. I could show it to you. I have the largest list of gratitudes of anybody I've ever met. It's not over 9 ,000 pages. And I document on a daily basis what I have the opportunity to do. And what I have the opportunity to experience and who I get to meet and every podcast and every radio show and every media and every movie and everything I get the opportunity to do. And every client and every breakthrough. And I have thousands of letters from people. Thousands. And they're tear -jerking. And so I have tears of gratitude most every day. Multiple times. It's very rewarding to be able to, you know, it's a great opportunity. I wonder all these things because as an educator, as someone who's trying to help people, when the actual person tells you what has happened to their lives because people come in and out of our lives. And then they tell you this. I'm trying to picture myself like if somebody tells me like their whole life is so much better from this extremely traumatic thing. I'm just wondering how you process that on stage live in real time. Humble. Well, I mean, there's no doubt in my mind that your show gives you that. You have to. You couldn't possibly not get thank yous from the show. And you couldn't possibly not have people say, you know, you changed my life or the speaker changed my life or the guest or the new insights or something you said. So I am certain I would be willing to bet that you would have the same kind of things. You may not have documented them as early as I have, but I just do it every day. I was told by my mother when I was three going on four that because I was born on Thanksgiving Day, she says it on a daily basis before you go to bed. Think about what you're grateful for, because if you're grateful for what you got, you get more to be grateful for. And I believe that that's pretty true. Because gratitude means that you're seeing things as they actually are, not as you judge them to be. Sometimes we elaborate and we manically assume that there's all positives without negatives and we're unconscious to the downsides. And sometimes we're seeing the downsides and unconscious to the upsides. And we have divided our full conscious into conscious and unconscious halves. And the part that's unconscious is the missing information, which is entropic, which is what mortalizes us and ages us and causes physiological symptomatologies and epigenetic alterations, etc. I taught physiology and I taught neurology. And so I do a lot of presentations on how we create illness from the psychological. the downsides and unconscious, the upsides. And we have divided our full conscious into conscious and unconscious halves. And the part that's unconscious is the missing information, which is entropic, which is what mortalizes us and ages us and causes physiological symptomatologies and epigenetic alterations, et cetera. I taught physiology and I taught neurology. And so I do a lot of presentations on how we create illness from these psychological states, these intrusive thoughts of imbalanced awareness. Going back to that event in front of 600 people, she gets voted up, she comes up, you have a whiteboard, you're writing, you're talking, flip chart. And you've done this thousands of times. I'm just curious, are you ever concerned? Is there a little percentage inside of you like this may not work out? It's a science. We cannot possibly do the methodology without having a tier of gratitude at the end. Because there's a gamma synchronicity in the brain and a spontaneous action potential in the ventral media prefrontal cortex that elucids, initiates literally a gamma synchronicity, which is an aha eureka moment that lets you know that you have now seen what's there. And we have physiological confirmation of authenticity. And there's tears of gratitude that come. And so when you do the exercise, if you thoroughly do it, that's what you get every time. I mean, every time. It's a science. I've been working on this 52 years. She's on stage, you're doing this, and there's not a dry eye in the room because of the transformation they're getting to witness. I think tears are there because I think deep inside every human being wants to live fully. And when they're seeing somebody demonstrate a transformation, it awakens inside them that feeling that that's them too. And so I think that, I mean, I'm sure you've seen America's Got Talent or UK's Got Talent or whatever, and you see these incredibly youthful, astonishing capacities of performance that are just mind boggling. And you cannot listen to them without tears in your eyes. I believe that I have spent 52 plus years exploring that. What is it that awakens that state? What is it that's led to that? I've studied all the polymaths and all the great Nobel Prize winners. And anybody that's done something extraordinary, I've devoured to try to find out what it is that initiated that outcome and what was the disciplines behind the scenes that led to their greatness. I mean, I was with a gentleman who came and did a performance who's a concert pianist. When he was three, he started playing a piano at nine. He was doing concert piano around the world. He was 81. He had been doing that since three. So that's 78 years. I asked him how many hours a day does he practice? He says 13 hours a day, every day, since he's a child. He knows 800 classical pieces of music by heart without ever having to look at a piece of music. His life and identity is piano. And when you meet people like that, that are purely congruent and dedicated to a mission of expression, and that's How many hours a day does he practice? He says 13 hours a day, every day, since he's a child. He knows 800 classical pieces of music by heart without ever having to look at a piece of music. His life and identity is piano. And when you meet people like that, that are purely congruent and dedicated to a mission of expression, and that's their identity, and you see that, you see extraordinary capacities. I've been fascinated by that, and the tear -jerkingness that this man has when he performs, and the tears in the room, you can't sit there without tears, because you're seeing an authentic expression of genius. And I think we all have that inside, and I don't think we give ourselves permission to be it. We subordinate to other people, live in the shadows of other people, put people on pedestals and minimize ourselves, and try to be second at being somebody else instead of honoring the magnificence that we are. So I'm going to try to do my best here, try to say simply the things that you've just communicated to us in the last hour. I'm voicing it for our listeners. They're probably sitting there with their dictionary open, like, wait, what did he just say? Pause here and look up these words so they're on the same page. So a couple of the big ideas. Events happen. It's how we interpret them that allow us to grow or stay stuck. There's a state of balance. And if you look at life in a long enough timeline, you'll see, like, why things happen. But your process helps people to condense or compress that timeline, so they don't have to wait until they're old to figure this stuff out. So every positive event or something that happens has positive interpretations. Sometimes we don't look at the negative. But when we're having negative events in our life, we don't look at the positive, like, how it's helped us grow and how it can alter our timeline. And you help people sort that out. I hold them accountable to balance out their balance sheet. Do you get people who fight you on this? Like, no, there's nothing good. Like, what are you talking about? Every day. Yeah. Every day, people want to hold on to their narrative and story of being the victim of the history. And I go, if you choose to want to hold on to the story, then fine. You have a choice. If you want to break through, I'm not asking you to make anything up. I'm not asking you to distort. I'm asking you to go be present and discover what was there that you overlooked. I am absolutely certain that they have another side that they are just overlooking. And if they finally get past their pride and their fantasy that their amygdala does, the amygdala wants to avoid pain and seek pleasure, avoid predators, seek prey. It's a survival subcortical nuclei that does that. It assigns valency to the hippocampus. And we store it as episodic memories. We call it the subconscious mind. And it's the neural correlates of these delusions that we run our lives by. So I'm used to the strategies that people have that are conscious or unconscious to dodge being accountable because they live in false causalities. They blame things on the outside and that's the cause of their problems instead of actually realizing it's their perceptions of that outside that's really the power. That's where the power is. They don't have control over those things. They have control over the perceptions. If they're willing to change their perceptions, then this event is whatever you want to make out of it. As John Milton said, you can make a heaven out of a hell or a hell out of a heaven. Thinking makes it so. Do you have the capacity to do it? to dodge being accountable, because they live in false causalities. They blame things on the outside, and that's the cause of their problems instead of actually realizing it's their perceptions of that outside that's really the power. That's where the power is. They don't have control over those things. They have control over the perceptions. If they're willing to change their perceptions, then this event is whatever you want to make out of it. As John Milton said, you can make a heaven out of a hell or a hell out of a heaven thinking makes it. So do you have the capacity to do it? Everyone does. Are you willing to do it? If you're getting more advantaged and disadvantaged playing the victim, you're going to keep the narrative going. If you're wanting to transcend that, I'm there for you. Either way, you're perfectly fine. You're loved it no matter what you do, but just know that you're going to the physiological, psychological impact of you holding on to that resentment, and that story is going to show up in your physiology. It's going to show up epigenetically. It's going to show up in your health, and it already has and already is, and you know it. So if you would like to transcend that, you can change your physiology because your body won't let you get away with your judgments. It's going to keep creating your physiological changes to let you know every judgment you hold. When you present them to these two choices, you're going to stay where you're at, and that's good. You're going to be fine either way. You're okay. I say either way. But if you come here, my job is to do everything I can to help you break through because that's what you came for the program. If you choose not to, here's your money back. You can go and keep running your story and go to your therapist, and you can keep being the victim because they love letting people narrative run the stories of their victimhood because it keeps them in business. And how often does that happen? They're like, okay, I'm leaving. One out of about 300. Okay. So it does happen from time to time. One out of 300. If you choose not to, this is not for them. And I go, fine, here's your money back. Thank you very much. I don't want to, I'm not going to try to force you to do something. I'm not trying to fix you. I'm here to give you a tool and show you how to use the tool that could change a lot. So it's a lot about choices here. It's like, what choice do you want to make? And if you choose this, I can help you. Yeah, that's it. Okay. Wow. I feel like I got the appetizer for like a 13 course meal here and I want more. I know you're traveling, speaking all the time. If you're ever in Los Angeles, in the Santa Monica West side area, I'd love to host you and have another conversation maybe with some people around because so many of the concepts that you talk about really touch parts of like what I've been thinking about. Clearly you have the language of experience and the methodology to describe some of the things that I'm just barely poking at. So I just feel deeply connected to the ideas that you're talking about. I just wanted to share that with you as I'm speaking to you right now. Great. Okay. Last little throwaway question. And just on a light note here, do you still surf? I do. I still have my surfboard on my ship. That's amazing. That is crazy. I can't say that I surf like I used to, but I still have it. I surfed in Tahiti and I surfed in Hawaii and I surfed in Sri Lanka and I surfed in Ecuador. And so my board is on my ship and I just happen to be off the ship right now. Of course it is. Of course it is. That makes me so happy. Dr. Demartini, you've lived up to everything I could hope for and more. I hope this is not our last conversation together. If you ever need space to do one of your things, feel free to use our space. I hope to stay connected with you. Thank you very much for jumping on the pod today. And thank you, Chris. I appreciate the questions. They're great questions. I hope whoever's... And so my board is on my ship and I just happen to be off the ship right now. Of course it is. That makes me so happy. Dr. Demartini, you've lived up to everything I got to hope for and more. I hope this is not our last conversation together. If you ever need space to do one of your things, feel free to use our space. I hope to stay connected with you. Thank you very much for jumping on the pod today. And thank you, Chris. I appreciate the questions. They're great questions. I hope whoever's listening can, you know, they can join the 12 -step program, Survivors of Demartini.
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    “So it's a lot about choices here.”

    — Chris Do

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