Dr. David Alter

nagging sensation and someone says well you should probably go check it out then they go check it out they say you know what you have stage three cancer well in that moment there's a profound change in how they exist in the world they can either from that moment forward feel all is lost they're a victim of hopefully medicine can make it go away or they can co-participate

in their own healing process, their own experiential process.

And so right away, meditative approaches can help the body to respond differently.

Meditative approaches tend to activate

positive immune system responses.

They activate a move from what we call the sympathetic fight-flight nervous system into a parasympathetic state, which is the energy conserving, energy healing, restore and repair mechanisms of the body.

So we're dealing with modern scientific awareness of the benefits, coupling that with several thousand plus year old awarenesses of how in the world do we navigate through this world in a way that we're not constantly victims of it.

Right.

Yeah.

I hope I answered your question.

I want to start in, I'll make it brief, a maybe surprising place.

You said that you walk in and ask, what's your pain level?

The fellow John Kabat-Zinn, who has popularized mindfulness meditation in this country, wrote a book called Wherever You Go, There You Are.

Okay.

And when I have found that you ask, where's your pain level?

Well, people go to their pain level.

So what I ask is what's your comfort level.

And then that's where they go.

So if their comfort level is three, after 15 seconds of breathing, their comfort level may have grown to four or four and a half when they were at a seven or eight and they go down to a four.

That's great, but they're still tracking the distance between four and one.