Theatre of the Mind Podcast Episodes

Kelly Howell: Welcome once again to Theatre of the Mind. I'm your host, Kelly Howell. For this show we are particularly graced with a very special and wonderful guest Dr. Larry Dossey.


Dr. Dossey has spent decades examining the role of the human mind in health and illness. He is one of the leading pioneers in the field of mindbody medicine. He has authored numerous books including "Reinventing Medicine, " "Be Careful What You Pray For" and the "New York Times" bestseller, "Healing Words."


Today we're going to talk about his new research and book titled: "The Extraordinary Power of Ordinary Things." Here we go with the interview.


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Kelly: Well, Dr. Larry Dossey, welcome to the Theatre of the Mind. Thanks for coming here today.
Larry Dossey: Great to be with you, Kelly. Thanks for inviting me.
Kelly: You've written 10 books on the mindbodyspirit connection, so you are the expert.
Larry: Well, I'm not an expert, but some people would say more of a dilettante than an expert. I cast my net pretty broadly, but I have a good time doing it.
Kelly: What can you tell us about miracles of mind and the mind's ability to heal?
Larry: For starters, the capacity of the mind to heal is vastly underestimated. And so too, I might add, are the frequencies of miracles. I, in my medical education, was taught the standard version of miracles; which is, that they're utterly rare. As a physician you can go all your life and never see one. We now know that that's not an accurate view of what physicians really think about miracles and how they experience them.


For example, there was a recent survey about a year ago, a national survey, which asked physicians what they thought about miracles. Seventyfive percent of them said they believed that they happen. Astonishingly, fiftyfive percent said that they actually see miracles in their own patients.
Kelly: That's extraordinary.
Larry: Well, it is. And it's a completely different picture from the one that you hear about.
Kelly: Yeah. We have a mass belief that miracles are rare, maybe two or three percent of the time.
Larry: Yeah. Yeah. But this is a whole different picture. What it tells me is a lot of people aren't talking about these kinds of cases that they see. I think it's important to bring this out because it...If you recognize and acknowledge that these are more common than we think they are, it's a cause for hope for people. It says that you don't have to consider these things so completely rare. They may be more frequent than we think. That's a cause for hope for people who are looking for one.
Kelly: What are some of the extraordinary miracles that you've witnessed?
Larry: Well, I had a patient my first year as a physician, who had terminal lung cancer. He had lung cancer spread through both lungs. He was dying in the hospital. I was taking care of him and he just wanted to go home and die. The only therapy that he had, if you want to call it therapy, was that members from his congregation came to the hospital at every waking hour and stood by his bed, ringed his bed, and prayed for this man. I didn't consider that a very convincing therapy.
Kelly: When was this?
Larry: This was late 60s. So I acknowledged his wish and sent him home. We had nothing to treat this disease with at that time. So I assumed that he would be dead in two or three days and I forgot about him. A year later I had a call from one of my colleagues at the same hospital who said: "You know, you ought to come by and see your old patient. He's back in the hospital with a bad case of the flu." I didn't understand how this could be.


So I went down to the radiology department and looked at his old chest xray, which was completely riddled with lung cancer, and I put it up alongside the current one. The current one was normal. This man had not had any sort of treatment except that he'd been prayed for. This is your basic miracle type cure. There's no way to explain it.
Kelly: Oh, that's amazing.
Larry: So that was a genuine comeuppance for me.
Kelly: Did that start you in your work?
Larry: Actually that didn't make me turn the corner. Because I was so thoroughly brainwashed that these things just don't happen, I did what a lot of doctors do, I just repressed it. I shoved it off the stage of my awareness and back into the unconscious where we put things like that, that we just don't have the courage to face up to.
Kelly: Our little trash basket called "coincidence"; where that didn't happen.
Larry: Actually I went to one of my old professors at the medical school and I said, "What do you think about this case?" He said, "Well, you know, Larry we see this." Then he changed the subject. This was not helpful at all. It was just turning a blind eye to the whole thing. That's actually the way that I was taught to deal with these sorts of things. It's selective blindness.
Kelly: This reminds me, I was just speaking with Dr. Dean Radin. We were talking about the invisible college, which is all the people that are interested in parapsychology and these miracles, in academia, that don't talk.
Larry: Right, right.
Kelly: Does that go on in the medical world?
Larry: Oh, there is an invisible college. Talking about these sorts of things, particularly parapsychological things that don't fit in, is not exactly the best way to advance your career in medicine, to put it mildly.
Kelly: It doesn't make you popular.
Larry: No, it doesn't. You can get thought of as a troublemaker. Your colleagues begin to look at you funny he believes in "that stuff." Well, "that stuff" is more common than anybody ever thought. I think it's time we had a national dialogue about it. That's been one of my goals in writing books on spirituality and consciousness and healing, is to try to bring this forward and say: Look, this is what's going on in real life and it's important to talk about it.
Kelly: What percentage of doctors do you sense are coming out now? What are we looking at here?
Larry: It's really quite a high percentage. The taboo has been broken in talking about this. I'll give you one example. I'll just pick this issue of spirituality in medicine. Back 30 years ago, there was no dialogue; you didn't even bring this up in polite, academic, medical company. But then certain things began to happen.


People began to do experiments looking at the role of consciousness and prayer in healing. If you fastforward to today, you can see that 90 of the nation's 125 medical schools now have formal courses where this kind of information is talked about in lectures, and they examine the studies that have been done in this field. So there is a vibrant national dialogue about this now.
Kelly: Nurse practitioners have been very, very active.
Larry: Oh my gosh, yeah. Credit where credit's due. If it hadn't been for nurses, the wheels would have come off the healing profession even more profoundly than they already have. Nurses have kept alive the fire of healing over a good 4, five centuries in the western world. They have much less intellectual indigestion over this ideas than physicians do. But things are changing and changing dramatically; I'll give you another example if I may.


In 1997, the Association of American Medical Colleges which all the medical schools belong to developed a requirement that in order to graduate with an MD at any medical school in this country you have to, as a student, be able to take a spiritual history from a patient, and to demonstrate to the satisfaction of your professors that you understand how spirituality is an important avenue for delivering compassionate care to the people you're taking care of. This is a historic development and it's just another indicator that the taboo has been broken and it's getting much more permissible to talk about these things which you know thirty years ago, one just could not do that safely.
Kelly: yeah you wrote in you book when you had an appendicitis and how that moment when the nurse told you it was going to be OK how healing that moment was.
Larry: Yes, I'll never forget that. It was one of those epiphany type of experiences that change you forever. I was a senior at the University of Texas at Austin and finishing my premed work and getting a degree in pharmacy and was getting ready to enter medical school that fall, and I came down with acute appendicitis. Went to the student health center, turned myself in, and had an emergency appendectomy. It was a frightening experience, I was a 22 yearold kid, I knew nothing about surgery...never had a night in the hospital in my life. I never met the surgeon a head of time, he just didn't think it was necessary.


I didn't meet the anathesiologist, he was too busy, and I woke up after the operation not knowing what the surgery had found and still not having a clue about who my surgeon was. I was alone and hurting frightfully. And I was, I was a mess. Something really simple happened; a nurse came by and she simply held my hand and she said, "don't worry, Larry, everything's going to be just fine." and it was something happened it's like somebody had turned a switch in my body at that moment the pain went away the fear and anxiety and isolation disappeared and heck I got so hooked on nurses I married one five years later, who I'm still married to, Barbara, is the author of 23 books in holistic nursing and spirituality in nursing. She does in Nursing what I've done in medicine. We've had very parallel lives together.
Kelly: The role of physician is so important in the healing process, could you talk about that? Because we're talking about the way a nurse will tell you everything's OK, how much impact that can have. What about people who are undergoing a lifethreatening illness, and they receive the negative messages which are given out like kleenex in doctors offices?
Larry: Well The words that doctors use and the way they convey them are all important and can make the difference between life and death. We need to look at this in our culture, we have required of physicians that they disclose everything. You know when you have a dire diagnosis the doctor will give you a prognosis. and let's say the biopsy proved to be cancer and we know from this kind of cancer you have a 50% chance of living for two years well a patient on hearing something like that will flip it around and say well I have a 50% chance of dying in two years.


So the physician can be attentive to delivery facts without ever understanding what's coming across to the patient. And patients have a way of dying on time. When you make a prediction like that it's not unusual for the patient to die on the anniversary of the prediction. And I think that we really underestimate the power of words. And it goes beyond the words that physicians use, it has to do with the way they deliver the message. I used to work with physician, I used to be the chief of staff of a major hospital in Dallas. And there were two oncology, cancer, doctors on the staff who were utterly different in terms of their temperament and personality.


And many times I saw them treat patients with the same diagnosis, with the same medications. But one of these doctors was really negative, and pessimistic. And his patients were always getting sick with the worst side effects of chemotherapy you can imagine. The other doctor was positive, upbeat, compassionate really outward going and really loving and compassionate towards his patients and ever though he used the same medications for the same disease his patients rarely had problems with the side effects of chemotherapy. I'll never forget the contrast between those two physicians.
Kelly: Have there been studies on that because I think it's so important?
Larry: Oh yes there have been, and it's so important now that most medical schools have formal courses in what they call doctorpatient communication. This is...
Kelly: Sounds so cold and clinical.
Larry: Well it does, it sounds so psychological, but its a start, you know, and...
Kelly: I know because last year I had a back injury. And as I was lying on the Chiropractors table and he had looked at my MRI, and I was in searing pain and He said, "Well." I hade cyotica. He said, "Well you've got degenerative disc disease." I burst into tears on the table and I thought, 'Oh my God.' I saw myself in a wheelchair. I'm fine now, but I didn't go back.
Larry: I think you made the right choice. I have a rule with my relatives that if you leave a doctor's office and you feel worse that when you went in you need to change doctors.
Kelly: Well that's what I wanted to ask you, what would you recommend for people what is a kind of rule to go by?
Larry: Well, I'll give you Irma Bombak's rule, have you?
Kelly: Yes I know who she is, but I don't know this rule.
Larry: Irma, bless her departed heart, said once, "never go to a doctor who's office plants have died." That's one of my rules...
Kelly: So many of them don't have office plants, so.
Larry: Or plastic plants. Well I think that if you have an intuitive hit that you don't connect at a heart level or an emotional level with the doctor, you are not obligated to keep going back to that doctor. And many people do feel obligated, they just don't have the courage to take a stand and say this physician is not meeting my needs. I need more than what I got.
Kelly: Did you read Lance Armstrong's book?
Larry: I have not.
Kelly: Oh, well, he went to maybe four top specialists, and it was the fourth one who was optimistic. Which brings me to your chapter in your book about how important that is.
Larry: well I think we would do well to take a lesson from Lance Armstrong. I think it's just absolutely crucial. I have looked at, what I call, words that maim and this is a collection of words that doctors use in their conversations with patients, that should make bells and whistles go off if a doctor talks like this to you.


For example, I've known doctors to say things to patients like "you've got the worst case of this that I've ever seen." That really makes you feel like you're going to get well. Or "you should have had surgery yesterday" things like this, I made long list of these things.


Andrew Weill and I, who's a good friend, often trade stories that we've heard doctors use. And these things can be lethal, because people will live out what a doctor says. Doctors are still revered by people as the oracle, anything they say is true. That's a dangerous position for a patient to let themselves get into, particularly regarding doctors who just don't have the sensitivity to honor the subtleties of the words they use.
Kelly: In your book, you talk a lot about the constant need to have new and novel experiences, and you also say that risk taking is innate, and that when we avoid risk we sabotage our greatest potential.
Larry: Well, there are some chapters in the book that sort of go together. One of them has to do with risk, it's connected with novelty and newness. Here's what we know about that. We know that, beginning with animal studies, let's just start with the rats. There are two types of rates, the ones that love to run mazes, and just do this without any hesitation, live about a third longer then rats who hold back and will not run a new maze.


Those who expose themselves to new experiences are healthier and live longer, this should get our attention. The question is, is there any parallel in humans for that, I think there really is. There are studies now looking at the behaviors of tens of thousands of American women in middle age, and the goal was to try to identify behaviors and habits if these women, that might correlate with the preservation of their mental faculties as they get older.


Could you find any connections about how they behave, that would seem to connect with being mentally acute as they got older? And as it turns out, the women who were willing to do new things, take on new habits; get out of habits, ruts, and routines. Were the women who as they got older tended to be much more mentally acute, and retained their mental faculties, compared to women who just stayed in the same habits, ruts and routines in middle age.


Now there are other things that contribute to that also. For example, exercise and following a proper diet, and so on. Those are things that sort of make common sense. But the thing that stretches people's minds, are the things that are good for health. No one knows precisely how this works physiologically.
Kelly: So learning something new, like taking up the piano or learning a new language.
Larry: Exactly, taking a cooking course. And as an author, one of the things that I really like which they identified, is that women who read books tended to really be the women who remained mentally acute the longest, as a writer I really like that scientific finding. But it doesn't matter what it is, as long as it stretches one. Interestingly, doing crossword puzzles was also on the list, doing jigsaws, I don't think there is any magic behavior, I think it's the thing that stretches you and makes you go a place you've never been before in your experience.


By definition, that's what we mean by taking a risk, right? That's risky behavior at least in a mental sense, getting out of a rut or a routine, exposing yourself to something that stretches you. Most of will experience that as a kind of risk taking behavior.
Kelly: So it's not jumping out of airplanes? [laughter]
Larry: No, although I must say, I think that if you did it sensibly that might be on the list also.
Kelly: So what happens to people that don't take risks?
Larry: Well they pay a physiological penalty for it. Here's what we know in men who take risk, and we know this by looking at the number of times that these men have been in trouble, this may not be a pretty sounding finding but it's been validated.


Men who get into trouble with the law and who have been in fights for example, when you look at their immune system it's much more robust, and perkier, and responsive, then is the immune system in men who are just squeaky clean as far as their behavior goes.
Kelly: Is it more testosterone or just overall immune function?
Larry: Here's the thinking, the thinking that biologists rely on goes like this. In out evolutionary history, men who were really aggressive tended to have more of a choice of mates and territory and food, because they were aggressive and they challenged everybody else for these things. And also, if you were aggressive you probably tended to get bruises, scrapes, abrasions, and all of this. And so the ability to heal, to have an active immune system, probably got paired up in our evolutionary history with being aggressive.


So that by now, people who are really aggressive reap the benefits of this more robust healing system, in terms of immune activity. So when you look at people who are really aggressive today like these men I just mentioned, and you examine their immune function, what do you know, you find that it really is perky and responsive.


I'm not advocating breaking the law or getting into fights, but that's what the data shows. And it does show that a certain amount of risk taking may well indeed at the physical level have a definite benefit for people.
Kelly: So you wrote in your book that mediation keeps things fresh.
Larry: Well it seems to. One of my favorite meditation experiments took place in place of Buddhist monks. And they something really simple, they hooked them up to EEG machines that measured brain wave activity, and they exposed them to bell type sound, where you ring a bell and look what happened on the brain wave tracing.


Now, if you look at what happens in people who are nor meditators in this situation, they undergo what we call "habituation" to the sounds. The first time that they hear the bell ring there's a real spike on the EEG brain tracing, but it becomes lower and shorter with each successive exposure. You get used to it and you just don't register it in your brain as much with each successive ringing if the bell.


That didn't happen in the Buddhist meditators. With each ringing of the bell, the brain responded as if they were hearing it for the very first time. They were as acute at the end of that experiment as they were at the first.


And this indicates it seems to me, that they had the ability with successive experience to remain fresh and new in terms of how they responded to it. That's one of the stated of the stated goals of meditation, to remain open experience. And I think that bell ringing experiment you see visible evidence that, that's what they are able to do.
Kelly: It keeps things fresh on a subjective personal experience, but on a physiological level it also...
Larry: Yes.
Kelly: ... keeps things fresh, right?
Larry: Yes, they seem to go together. The subjective experience, and the objective evidence for that.
Kelly: Are there any other research studies that you've noted about meditation?
Larry: Well, the body loves meditation. If you look at how the body responds in terms of blood pressure, pulse rate, even the amount of oxygen that the body requires. You find that people who are really gifted with meditation look better on all those counts, then people who are not meditators.


This issue of wakefulness, you know. Meditation is sometimes described as a highly wakeful, alert condition. Even the people that are sitting there, you know like a knot on a log, and you would think nothings happening, they are as fresh as they can be, in terms of how they apprehend things that are happening around them.
Kelly: Yeah, and it changes our perception so much.
Larry: You know, one form of meditation that's quite popular these days is called, "Mindfulness Meditation." And I love the term. It is such an apt description of what people who are great at mindfulness meditation experience. They are mindful of things, they are awake. And I think that pays great dividends as far as health is concerned.
Kelly: all right! Funny my next question I was going to ask you I forgot, and it was on your chapter on, "Forgetting." [laughs] How can forgetting prevent illness?
Larry: You know, I think the chapter on, "Forgetting" causes people as much a challenge as anything in the book. We're horrified at forgetting. You know, when we can't remember where we put our car keys, or our glasses we wonder if this is the first sign of Alzheimer's Disease or something. But, I'm fascinated with a new area of research that sprung up in just the past few years in medicine called, "Forgiveness Research, " and this is really linked to forgetting. You know, it's when we use the term, "Forgive and forget." We link forgiveness and forgetting in a very dual way, and I think that there's a real lesson there.


People who cannot forget and forgive, pay a price for that. The Forgiveness Researchers now have demonstrated that the level of anxiety, hostility, and aggression is higher in people who can't forgive and forget, then people who can just forget and forgive, and move on. The level of stress hormones are higher in people who can't forget and forgive. Chemicals such as cortisone, and adrenaline are higher, then the people who can't forgive and forget.


We pay a price as a culture if we can't do that as a nation. For example Germany could not forget that lost the first World War, which led to the second World War. Bosnia couldn't forget that they lost the battle of Kosovo in the 14th Century, for goodness sakes, and you see what this led to in just the last few years. We can make a long list of things of that sort.


Forgiving and forgetting is just really something that is important. Not just at the personal level, in terms of resolving anger, and hostility toward people who have offended us, but it's also important in National, and International level.
Kelly: Not on the International, National level, I was thinking of, you know that joke, "How do you keep a long marriage? You've got to have a short memory."


[laughs]
Larry: Oh, that's good. I would have used that in my...
Kelly: Forgiving and forgetting. [laughs] The secret to a long marriage is a short memory.
Larry: That's terrific, that's great. You know, but it doesn't people misunderstand this, in the way I'm using forgetting, it doesn't mean that we actually become amnesic for an event...
Kelly: Or, in denial.
Larry: ... or that you deny it and shove it off the stage of awareness. It's just that we come to terms with the person who is involved with this, in the way that we reestablish a different relationship with them. So, that when we confront the memory of the slight let's say, it doesn't trigger the sense of hostility, and aggression that it once did. That's what I mean by forgetting. It isn't obliterating the memory of it totally, it's learning to rerelate to the other individual in a different way.
Kelly: Yeah, and forgiveness the way you're talking about it, recreates memories.
Larry: Yes, yes.
Kelly: And you know, which is everything, we're also inundated with information. What can you tell us about, you know making peace without forgetting?
Larry: Well, you know my first suggestion is that we take a deep breath, and not be so harsh on ourselves. You know, we don't do a very good job of giving ourselves credit for all the things we remember in a day's time. But, we are quick to beat up on ourselves when we can't remember something. And there's a social horror that we may be experiencing when we can't remember what we want to pull up, that we may be drifting into some memory deficit syndrome.


You know, back 30 or 40 years ago, when I first entered medicine, we just thought that these problems with memory were utterly rare. Alzheimer's was not something that you just saw every day. But, now we have become sensitized as a culture to this. You know, I didn't mention this in the book, but this is becoming a huge issue something called, "Disease Mongering." And Disease Mongering is the hype that's perpetrated most usually by drug companies in the culture, to sell a certain drug for a certain product. You'd be surprised if you think about what's mongered these days in terms of diseases Osteoporosis in women, erectile disfunction in men...
Kelly: They're called the, "Lifestyle Drugs."
Larry: Exactly. These lifestyle drugs, if you don't use them, you may you know, experience some out, and out disease. Well, it's questionable whether a lot of these problems that these products are tauted for, where actual diseases are not.
Kelly: Well, and that there are other ways to treat them.
Larry: Exactly, but...
Kelly: Natural ways. [laughs]
Larry: Yes, and I think that the so called problems with memory fall into this category. It's something that we're deliberately targeted for. The drug companies want to horrify us about these things, and if we get properly horrified, we'll beat on the doors of our doctors, and demand their products.
Kelly: Now, what is the new drug for memory, that people are kind of exploring right now? Is there a new one for memory?
Larry: Well, there's several. The so called, "Memory Enhancers, " and then there are also, "Memory Retardants" that can if you have a traumatic experience in your life, such as an automobile accident that was really tough for you to deal with. There are drugs now, that can be given in the emergency room to dull your memory events, so that you don't you're not as likely to have...
Kelly: So, you bury the trauma even further into the body. [laughs]
Larry: I think so. This business of memory manipulation is just a gathering ethical storm, I think. We haven't even begun to consider the implications of manipulating memory in people, either to enhance it or to retard it. This is going to be a huge issue in the days ahead, primarily because products are on the horizon now to move in either direction: to enhance your memory of something, or to retard it.
Kelly: Well, and the Baby Boomer generation, which is getting older now, is a target market.
Larry: Of course.
Kelly: So it's all a plot? [laughs]
Larry: [laughs] Actually, it sounds like we're getting paranoid. [laughs]
Kelly: [laughs] Yeah. I mean, is this a plot?
Larry: But we're not getting paranoid. There is a plot. This is part of the marketing strategy of drug companies. To properly horrify you about a normal variation in human behavior, so that you think you have to manipulate it through medication. And if you look at some of the drugs that have popped up on the market, which are of terrific use if they're properly used... For example, Prozac, which was initially marketed for severe depression. It underwent what we call "therapy creep." So now, people use it just because they want to...
Kelly: Feel better.
Larry: Feel better. They want to be better. They want to feel better than well...
Kelly: They want a happy pill.
Larry: That's our generation. We are not content.
Kelly: I know someone who was on Prozac, and still had the depression that she said she went to the doctor for. And it turned out she didn't have depression at all. She had an iron deficiency. But, the first thing they prescribed for her was Prozac.
Larry: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I love this term, "therapy creep, " because you can see this played out in any number of instances. And the direct marketing of the pharmaceuticals now to people over television is part of the strategy of the drug companies to make you really pressure your doctor into giving you what you think you need...
Kelly: So can just prescribe for yourself.
Larry: Exactly, yeah.
Kelly: Let's talk a little bit about optimism and pessimism. You have a great chapter in your book on that.
Larry: I think that the data surrounding the value of optimism is one of the most neglected areas in clinical medicine. Before I began to research this area for this book, I was completely in the dark about the evidence suggesting that optimism is terrific for people's health. The bottom line is that people who are optimistic live longer, on average, than people who are pessimistic. And optimists have a lower risk of every major disease you want to look at; including heart disease and cancer, the two big killers in our culture.


If you look at people who have developed an illness, and then you look at whether they are optimistic or pessimistic, you see, in disease after disease, that the optimists do better often sensationally better than people who are pessimistic about how they're going to do.


There was one study that looked at people after they had a cardiac catheterization for heart symptoms. If people were optimistic, they had only oneeighth the risk of dying over the next 18 months then people who were pessimistic.
Kelly: That's huge!
Larry: This is absolutely huge. And study after study shows the value of optimism.
Kelly: We so minimize it, too...
Larry: I know we do...
Kelly: It's like, [laughing] be happy...
Larry: The smiley face and all of that. That's not what I'm advocating. I call that faux optimism. If you have to really struggle and try to be optimistic, it's probably not genuine.
Kelly: What do you recommend people do to be genuinely optimistic?
Larry: For people who are at least in the middle class in this culture, I think it's quite odd that we ought to be sitting around figuring out how we could be optimistic. We go to bed every night with a roof over our heads, we're wellfed, we're not hungry, we have clothes to wear, most of us have a job that pays reasonably decently; while 90+ % of the rest of the world doesn't.
Kelly: Yeah, Larry. I'm an innately optimistic person, so I find it fascinating. But the fact is, there are a lot of people out there that are very pessimistic.
Larry: Yeah. That's true.
Kelly: One of the main causes, I think, is the media.
Larry: You can, if you work at it, really get yourself into a snit and stay there most of the time by watching the media.


[Kelly agrees]
Larry: You know, this is a hugely debated question, about whether or not it's even worth talking about being optimistic or pessimistic. Many people say we're born one way or the other. It's your godgiven temperament, and you can't change it.


[Kelly laughs]
Larry: I'm sure you've heard people take that position. I think that was an argument developed by a pessimist, by the way...


[Kelly laughs]
Larry: The king of optimism teaching in the country now is a psychologist named Dr. Martin Seligman. Dr. Seligman is a heavy hitter in psychology, a past president of the American Psychological Association, and he's written a book called "Learned Optimism." The bottom line is, you can learn how to shift from negative, pessimistic ways of thinking toward an upbeat, brighter, optimistic way. These techniques have been used in children, in college students, and adults.


The bottom line is that they work. Here's the problem: the problem is that pessimists hate these techniques. It's hard to get them to voluntarily go through programs like this, because they think they see the world correctly. And you're trying to put rosecolored glasses on them. You're trying to fix them...
Kelly: Brainwashing...
Larry: And they know they don't need to be fixed, it's you who sees things...
Kelly: It's you who've got the problem. [laughs]
Larry: Exactly. So what one does in actual practice, generally, is to wait until a pessimist enters into what we call "the teaching moment, " where they're susceptible and open to these suggestions about how to be more optimistic. And this usually comes after pessimists bump into health problems, most commonly, in this culture. And if a pessimist is looking at their life and seeing a lifeanddeath division in the road, this is the moment where they're usually open to these kinds of considerations.


That's where the teaching tools really come into play. They're not very sophisticated. They've been around in psychology for a long time. They go by the term "reframing techniques.".
Kelly: Yeah.
Larry: Many of our listeners will know what those are. It just simply is a way of rehearsing a situation in your life, and deliberately restructuring how you would usually respond to that situation.
Kelly: Yeah, doesn't have a little formula?
Larry: Yes he does.
Kelly: And what is it?
Larry: Well, he says it's easy as A, B, C, and D and E. It's just an acronym that helps people remember all of these steps in the process.
Kelly: He has kind of a whole process where you look at this. Say you're rushing, and you're angry because somebody took the parking space in front of you, and then you go through a whole sequence of thought processes.
Larry: Right. And you recreate, in your mind, how you would usually respond. Like, a person in the parking lot got your space, and you let yourself feel the hostility and anger you'd usually feel, and criticize the person to high heaven for doing it, and then you imagine: "Well, this could go in another direction. The woman was elderly. She was limping when she got out of her car. She needed it more than I did. There are a million other parking spots. I'd be healthier if I walked farther anyway.".


So you dress this up in a different way, and you practice this, personally and in a group with other people, you share these kinds of reframing efforts. And, what do you know, in real life when you go out and encounter that situation again, you begin to respond in a more optimistic way. This sounds gimmicky, unless people really try...
Kelly: You know, when I read that, I thought, "this is great, " because the reframing in a particular situation... not when you're lying in your bed and you're meditating, or whatever... but when you're out there in the world dealing with road rage, or whatever, and to apply the techniques in those times just seemed really powerful me. That's mindfulness.
Larry: Oh, that's mindfulness. That's exactly right. The struggle is to develop a way of responding to these situations in life that are not habitual. This gets us back to the value of getting out of ruts and routines, and developing new ways of encountering experiences that crop up every day. It's breaking the bonds. As one friend of mine said: "Our goal in life should not be to try to find more freedom for ourselves, our goal should be to find freedom from ourselves." And to break those habitual ways of responding. To stop being an automaton, a robot.
Kelly: [agreeing] If people did one thing to help reduce the risk of illness, what would you recommend?
Larry: I think the biggest risk of illness is the fear of death. It isn't reducing your risk of any particular illness, but the biggest problem that has caused more fear and more suffering for people throughout human history, is none of the physical diseases it is the fear of death and extermination, and complete annihilation of everything that we are. That is the big disease. And, for me, the biggest riskreduction effort is anything that helps annul that.


[Kelly agrees]
Larry: For me... and I've written several books about this... this has to do with our sense of spirituality in life, whether or not we can go beyond the sense that we're a limited individual in time, moving along the river of time toward destruction. How can we get beyond that? Throughout history, most people have accomplished that by identifying with something beyond the individual self and ego. Whether that's the term god, or goddess, or Allah, or the universe, or the cosmos, the bottom line is that we encounter the divine, however we structure that in our individual life.
Kelly: Yeah. It could be in nature.
Larry: It can be in nature, as it is for many people. To the extent that we can identify with something endearing, something eternal, something immortal, then we have reduced our risk of fear of annihilation and extermination with bodily death. That is a project which I place in value above all others. I think any attempt to reduce a risk for a physical ailment pales in comparison to the importance of that.
Kelly: People often undergo such a transformation when they're faced with a lifethreatening illness, or a lifeanddeath situation, and they face death. It changes one.
Larry: Yes. We see that time and again. I used to be puzzled, as a young doctor, when my patients would come back and say something like: "You know, developing cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me.".
Kelly: [laughing] Right.
Larry: And I used to say: "Sure...".


[Kelly laughs]
Larry: People will stop at nothing to put a good face on a horrible situation, and I didn't buy it.
Kelly: [sarcastically] Those optimists, they're really out of control. [laughs]
Larry: Exactly. [laughs] This is optimism run wild. And I thought that they were just trying to dress up a horrible situation. I no longer think that. They were at a place that I didn't understand as a young physician. I understand it much better now.


That, for me, is the big project that is of more value than all the other projects. There's something ironic about it, too. The more that you develop a sense of connection with something beyond the self, there's a physical payoff for that. We now know that people who follow a spiritual path in their life live significantly longer, and are healthier in the process, on average, than people who don't. So this is sort of having your cake and eating it, too.


I think that striving to live a long, healthy life is not the best reason to develop a spiritual practice, as I've said. But, if you get it in the bargain, it's sort of a blessing and a grace. And that's what we see statistically. People who are attuned to their spiritual health enjoy, generally speaking, greater physical health. It's not a guarantee and there are many exceptions but, statistically, you're better off to do that. I think if you start a spiritual life in order to live longer and avoid illness, that's sort of shooting yourself in the foot. Those are probably the wrong reasons.
Kelly: Sometimes, things get so painful. People get on their knees.
Larry: That's right.
Kelly: Well, thanks, Larry. This has been great.
Larry: Yeah. It has been.