What if your symptoms are not working against you, but are instead trying to reveal something to you? Dr John Demartini explores how to listen to your body by understanding the relationship between your perceptions and your physiology.

This content is for educational and personal development purposes only. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any psychological or medical conditions. The information and processes shared are for general educational purposes only and should not be considered a substitute for professional mental-health or medical advice. If you are experiencing acute distress or ongoing clinical concerns, please consult a licensed health-care provider.

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48 Years ago,

I entered into professional school

to be involved in the health field.

When I worked with clients and patients,

it was really, really,

really obvious that there

were correlations between

the psychology and the

physiology they were

presenting. I saw patterns,

repeated patterns in people

who were expressing certain

symptomatology and certain

stresses, certain perceptions,

certain attitudes,

certain interpretations.

And I started correlating

those. I would document those,

and I would want to know why. I was

always interested in etiology unknown,

when they had no rationale

for why a person had a

condition I was curious on the

psychology of it. In

my performal training,

that wasn't really the emphasis.

It was just something that

I wanted to know for myself.

The clinical aspects were,

were, were very substantial,

very important, but I was interested in

the psychology of it for some reason.

That's, that was my love.

And I saw these patterns and

I could not overlook them.

So I started accumulating a list of

repetitive patterns that I saw with

different conditions. I saw

certain stresses that were

underlying these things.

And so that made me,

when I was studying physiology and

particularly autonomic function and cell

physiology and pathology and

embryology, I saw correlations

that I just couldn't ignore.

And it seems like nobody seemed

to be paying attention to it,

but I was interested and

maybe a few of my other

clients and or colleagues were interested.

And I noticed that when

we are going through life,

we perceive two basic things.

We are infatuated with

things that we like,

that we seek. And we are resentful

to things that we dislike and avoid.

The two basic things are the polarities,

the positives and negatives you might say,

the supportive and challenging

perceptions we have in life.

In the subcortical area of our brain

called the amygdala. The amygdala,

when it takes in sensory

information, experiences, events,

stimuli, it assigns a

valency, positive or negative,

to the event. If it's a positive

valency, it represents prey.

The subcortical area of the brain

is a kind of an animal brain,

and it deals with prey and

predator. So if it's positive,

it seeks it. It creates an impulse

to want to consume it as prey.

When it is negatively valent,

it sees it as a predator.

It wants to avoid it with an instinct.

And so we have this impulse to seek and

instinct to avoid, seeking and avoiding,

positive and negative, food and predator,

you might say prey and predator responses.

One activates the parasympathetic

nervous system, the other,

the sympathetic nervous system.

The parasympathetic nervous system is

for rest and digest 'cause we want to

consume it and eat it,

and we rest and relax.

And it kind of inhibits the

excitations in our body and makes us

subdue and relax for the nighttime.

And the other one is during the

day where we fight or flight,

and we now excite the body to

keep it awake, ready for action.

So one is kind of a active and passive

roles of life based on these perceptions.

The parasympathetic and the

sympathetic system are complementary,

kind of like opposites. One turns

on, one turns off, one awakens,

one sleeps, excites, inhibits.

And one is the one for the

predator and one's for the prey.

Every cell pretty well in

your body is impacted by those

two sides of the autonomic nervous

system. When they're in balance,

you have autonomic regulation and

wellness. When they're imbalanced,

in extreme polarized,

you get illness and autonomic

dysregulation syndrome.

Now the question is, is the cells

are responding and creating symptoms.

For instance, if all of a sudden

you perceive a threat, a predator,

a challenge, and the negative,

and you have an instinct to avoid,

you get adrenaline fired. When

you get adrenaline firing,

your heart rate goes up,

your blood pressure goes up,

your glucose and your blood

goes up, blood sugar goes up,

your lipids go up,

and you get platelets going

up in case you get in a fight,

you end up having to clot blood.

So there's certain symptomatology that

goes up when you have a perception of

threat and challenge.

And so you now have blood

pressure that goes up.

Chronic perceptions of threat

can lead to hypertension and

diabetes. On the other

side of the equation,

you could have the parasympathetic,

which lowers blood sugar,

lowers blood pressure, lowers heart

rate, bradycardia, not tachycardia,

and hypotension instead of hypertension,

it lowers it and it lowers the clotting,

because you don't need to fight or

flight and it lowers the lipids, and so,

'cause it doesn't need to refuel.

So the physiology with its symptoms reveal

the psychology in the perceptions.

I'm going to say it again.

The physiology with symptoms reveal

the psychology of perceptions.

And I wanted to know what

exactly is the physiology,

and I traced the physiology to

the psychology and the perceptual

systems. And with every

perception in psychology,

you get a different ratio of all these

neurotransmitters, neuro hormones,

neuro regulators, and signal

molecules as they call them.

And so I mapped those,

I made a list of them.

I've got a vast list of

every signal molecule,

all the way from embryological

origins all the way to an adult.

And I looked at what ratios or

perceptions impact these signal molecules

and these hormones and transmitters

and what it does to various cells and

why those cells respond. For instance,

if all of a sudden you get the

sympathetic, the bronchials dilate,

'cause you need to run, you need

breath, your heart rate kicks in,

your circulation goes

up, you get turbulence,

you dilate your bronchials and

open up your lungs for running.

And the other you shut it down.

One kind of dries it out the secretion

so you can have dilation and the other

one increases secretion so

you're just resting and smoothly

at night. So the symptoms in our

lungs, the symptoms in our heart,

the symptoms in our

cardiovascular arteries and veins,

the symptoms in our muscles,

the symptoms in our digestive,

when you're under the challenging part,

the serous and the mucus in the digestive

track and the peristaltic action

of the smooth muscle slow down.

And so your bowels slow down.

The bowel transit time is now longer.

And you can get dry hardened stools and

get constipated from chronic stress.

On the other hand,

on the other process you could get

the opposite with the parasympathetic,

you get secretions, your

motility of your gut goes up,

your digestion goes up. That's

why rest and digest is important.

So each symptom reveals the psychology.

And that's what I started seeing the

patterns in. And I started logging that.

And I've written a whole textbook

that's a thousand pages on just those

correlations. I call it

Decoding Your Body's Messages,

what the body is trying to reveal.

But I'm fascinated by this correlation.

And I noticed that the second we've

had people who come to my program,

the Breakthrough Experience,

one of my signature programs,

when I show them how to balance

the ratios of perceptions and

ask quality questions,

because let me elaborate.

If you're infatuated with somebody and

you seek it and you see the positives,

then you're in a sense,

conscious of the upsides,

but unconscious of the downsides. If

you're challenged and you're resenting it,

wanting to avoid it, you're conscious

of the downsides but not the upsides.

If you see both sides, which we call love,

simultaneously, your physiology

normalizes, the symptoms go away.

And I've been developing for

54 years the Demartini Method,

and the method is a series of questions,

concise questions that take perceptions

of these stimuli and events in

our life that we think

are traumatic or ecstatic,

and balances them out until

they just turn into love.

Whenever you have missing information

because of the unconscious,

you have disorder. That's why

they call disease, disorders.

But the second you ask questions and

equilibrate the mind and see full

consciousness and see

both sides simultaneously,

you see the order. Order is reclaiming

the information that was missing.

So if you're infatuated, if I ask

questions, what are the downsides?

And if you're resentful, I ask

questions, what are the upsides?

Or if I see something you think

is challenging and traumatic,

what are the benefits? To neutralize it.

Or something that's ecstatic and manic,

and what are the drawbacks?

To neutralize it.

You stabilize yourself from

these cyclic mood swings and

volatility which create illness and

psychological and physiologic illness

and stabilize yourself.

And so I've been basically

developing this methodology to

transform perceptions that are imbalanced

ratios and get them back into balance.

And you know, throughout

history from Pythagoras,

to Asclepius to

Hippocrates, to you name it,

they've all talked about how

important balance is. In fact,

every drug in the pharmaceutical industry

is basically taking some imbalanced

chemistry and trying to balance

it. it's all about that.

But we don't need to be relying

on the drugs necessarily.

We have the power inside us to

change these chemistries within,

but nobody's been teaching how

to do that. But the truth is,

you have more power than you've been

given credence for and benefits of.

So what I've done is I've developed

that methodology on how to

neutralize those perceptions.

And every week when I teach

the Breakthrough Experience,

I'll get a letter pretty

well every week, you know,

I've noticed that now I'm sleeping more.

Do you know that if you're

highly infatuated with

something and you try to go to

sleep at night,

anything that's highly polarized

occupies space and time in your mind and

creates intrusive thoughts and

keeps you awake, so you can't sleep.

That insomnia is letting you know you

have an imbalanced ratio of perceptions

and is trying to let you know, go back

and balance them. And the moment you do,

you go to sleep and rest.

The same if you're highly

resentful and don't have a fantasy,

but now you have a nightmare, and you

see all the downsides, no upsides,

and you're highly polarized.

You can't sleep at night.

But either fantasies or nightmares,

infatuation, resentments,

or prides and shames within

yourself, keeping you from sleeping.

So the symptoms of insomnia are not

random, they're ratios of perception.

So in the method, the

Demartini Method I developed,

I'm asking questions to balance out the

perceptions to change the physiological

and psychological responses.

And people then almost every week you

get response said, I'm now sleeping.

I'm now my skin cleared up.

A lot of the responses we have

in illness are nothing more than

cellular regressions to a more adaptable

states based on the perceptions we

have. We're a mesophile.

A mesophile is a human being

that lives in the mid zone.

But we also have extremophiles,

bacteria that live under extreme acid

or alkaline, extreme hot or cold,

extreme gravity or radiation.

And these extremophiles are primitive

cells that live billions of years ago,

microorganisms.

But we still have the genome

and we still have the epigenetic

systems that they once had.

And so when we go under extreme stress

and distort things into high polarities,

particularly when we go into 'always'

and 'never's' in our perception about

events, we regress our cells,

they go through what is

called a cell danger response,

and they regress and

reactivate in their genome,

primitive genome responses.

And we go back and go back

embryologically and in a sense

phylogenetically, we go back and we start

having the responses in these cells,

which we call symptoms and disease.

They can all the way go

back even into cancer.

I'm working on a new

textbook on that right now.

So the quality of your life's based on

the quality of the questions you ask.

If you ask questions that are intuitive,

that are trying to help you see both

sides simultaneously and bring balance,

your physiology beautifully responds,

amazingly responds and brings wellness.

Wellness comes from a balanced mind and

a balanced level of perception and a

balanced physiology.

We also find out that people sometimes

overeat or undereat and have eating

disorders, very common. But

if you look really carefully,

you'll find out that when you overate,

it's because you perceived in

the stress that stimulated it,

that you were not getting what you wanted

or feeling you were losing what you

wanted. And so as a result

of not getting what you want,

you tend to promote eating with ghrelin.

If you feel you're getting something

you don't want and you can't escape what

you don't want, you stimulate leptin,

because when you're under fight or flight,

you don't eat, when you're

under rest and digest, you eat.

And so when you infatuate with somebody,

you want to take them out to dinner

and take them home to rest .

But when you're into fight and challenge,

you want to avoid the person

and you don't want to eat.

So these eating disorders, again,

symptoms to let you know and if

you understand the psychology,

you know what questions

to ask to help balance it,

you can liberate it and give yourself

freedom and change your physiology.

So that's one of the reasons I'm doing

this little presentation to give that

insight,

to open the doorway to instead of

just taking a pill for every ill or

running and thinking it's something

outside you, to give you your power back.

We go around and we want to blame

something on the outside and then look for

something on the outside

to give us credit.

And there's a time for that

under emergencies maybe.

But I find that it's the perception of

what's out there and the perceptions of

what you do that have a lot to do

with it, and the actions you do.

If you change your perceptions,

you change your actions.

If you have a perception that a tiger's

about to eat you, you're going to run.

If you imagine a little pussycat

coming up to you, you're going to pet.

So your perception's going

to determine your actions,

and your actions inside your

cell physiology is occurring.

Inside the cell there's little

micro filaments, you might say,

the little dynein and

kinesin microbe muscles that

are causing materials to go from the

center to the periphery or from the

periphery to the center,

one for fight or flight when it goes

to the periphery or one for the nucleus

when it goes into mitosis to grow.

And these are catabolic and anabolic

responses at the cell level.

And our emotions are running that.

And so the cell is just responding to

our perceptions of the environment.

It's not the environment, it's the

perception of the environment. I,

many years ago when I was 18 years

old, I used to do meditation.

I would sit in a hundred,

110 degree temperature

and imagine myself in ice,

surrounded by ice, and I could

sit in the sun without sweating.

I also went into a freezer

at Ye Seeker's Horizon,

this big health food store and I went

into this freezer to meditate to see how

long I could go in there and

imagine myself in the heat.

And I was able to override the

external circumstances around me.

And that taught me that it wasn't

so much what the world was doing,

it was our perception of the world.

And so in the process of doing that,

we can transform it.

And I know that that's why I love

teaching the Demartini Method in the

Breakthrough Experience.

I love doing it because I watch

the resourcefulness of people.

I show them how to bring

it all back into balance,

their perceptions and actions.

And I watch the physiology heal.

That was my dream since I was 23 years

old and I entered in professional school,

I wanted to be able to find a tool that

could give people their power back that

didn't rely on things on the outside, but

gave them their power from the inside.

I said many years ago, 20

years ago on The Secret,

when the voice and the vision on the

inside is more profound and powerful than

the things on the outside, the

people's opinions on the outside,

you get to master your life.

I really believe that you have the

ability to master your physiology and

psychology and take command.

Almost all my programs that I

teach are for that objective.

And I really think that, you know, you

deserve to be able to have your power.

Any area of your life you don't empower

other people are going to overpower you.

And that's when you give

dissociations to things outside.

Anytime we give blame to

something on the outside,

we're probably going to give

credit to something on the outside.

The devil made me do it. The

angel's going to save me.

You know we're going to

have terrible and terrific.

These highly extreme polarities

at what causes non resilient,

non adaptable stress responses.

The perception of loss of something

we seek or the perception of gain of

something we try to avoid.

All of those stress responses have

been underlying the inflammatory

responses, the cytokine

responses, even when we had COVID,

part of the reason why many people

died is not just because of the COVID,

it's because of the stress responses

from the media telling people,

these people are dying. That adds more

stress to it, it compounds the issue.

And we had heightened responses

with our immune response.

The immune response is a sensory organ,

and it's basically picking up on

all the microbes in our body and the

environment. And it's giving us insight

to our brain. And they work together.

And all the microbes that are sitting

in our body with our vagus nerve are

basically being monitored and they're,

they're actually being governed.

We have amazing homeostatic mechanisms.

As Walter Cannon said in 1932,

in his Wisdom of The Body,

amazing homeostatic systems.

And in that time we didn't

know as many as we know now,

there are thousands of homeostatic

mechanisms to maximize wellness and

productivity and fulfillment in life.

And so the quality of your life is based

on the quality of the questions ask.

If you balance out your perception,

you wake up these homeostatic mechanisms

to maximize your wellness quotient.

And that's been my dream since I

was 23, well, actually before that,

but 23 when I started professional

school, I just started logging that.

And I can't ignore it. There's no

way I can ignore what I've seen.

There's no way. And it's just

not necessarily mainstream.

It's almost like there's a tiny bit of a

commercial conflict of interest sitting

in the health field today that's blocking

even great researchers and health.

The funding and everything else is not

always getting to give people their power

back. And it's a bit frustrating.

So that's why I teach what I teach,

to try to give people

some of that power back.

You got nothing to lose

by educating yourself and

studying the autonomic nervous

system. And you know, the program I

did, the Decoding Your Body's Message,

I've summarized it all there

for you, but it's wise to do it.

Don't take my word or

anybody's word for it,

but go and do your own homework

and go and explore it. With AI

you can speed that up now and

go and learn about physiology,

but take advantage of

what you have inside you.

The magnificence of your body is far

greater than any of the fantasies you have

and any of the nightmares that

you might be avoiding and seeking.

I'm a firm believer that you

have power inside yourself.

The power that made the body,

that organized it embryologically,

from the sperm and the egg

and it gave rise to you,

in 52 generations of cell

divisions that this organized this

magnificent thing that is able to do

all the things we do as a human being is

still the most powerful part of your

being that allows you to bring wellness.

And we're not capitalizing

it using it to the fullest.

And so I'm just trying to give you a

little tip and a little tool on how to

start that engine running because

the reality is you've got more power.

That's why there's people that have been

told to go home and die of cancer and

they changed their perceptions,

loved their family,

cleared out some of the baggage, started

eating differently, started walking,

started exercising, started

doing something more natural.

Sometimes diseases are the last ditch

effort to try to get us back on track to

authenticity and start to walk a path

of authenticity and sustainable fair

exchange and equanimity. And

when we do and we balance that,

our physiology changes.

And there's cases after cases through

the ages of people that have these

spontaneous remissions from

these so-called illnesses.

Maybe these illnesses are signals.

Maybe they're trying to guide us.

Maybe they're not terrible things.

Maybe there's a meaning behind it.

I love helping people find the order in

their chaos and the meaning behind their

so-called tragedies and things.

So I just know that if we go through

and we study that and learn that,

it gives us an advantage.

And I've watched thousands of people

transform their physiology with changing

their perceptions.

That's why I try to teach the Demartini

Method because I know that you've got a

tool that you can do and you can reduce

stress by yourself on the spot right

there and you can watch

the physiology change.

And I think that it's almost insane

that that's not a standard procedure in

people's lives.

And I don't know why we don't teach

that kind of education right in the

educational system and give people the

opportunity to empower their lives.

So I'm pretty emphatic about that

because I've seen the impact of it and it

doesn't cost anything.

Some of the greatest things in

life don't even cost anything,

because it's just your own ability

to perceive and decide and act.

That is the three things you have

control over. Perception, decisions,

and actions. You want

to master those three,

'cause that's the ones

that control your life.

If you try to expect things outside that

and give credit and blame to things on

the outside and disempower your life and

subordinate and be a follower of some

paradigm that may be conflict of

interest, that's another story.

But if you want to master your life,

just know you have the capacity to do

more than you probably are doing right

now.

And that's why I'm taking this moment

to share a little brief presentation on

your physiology. Cause I really believe

that the physiology, your psychology,

even the sociology around you,

is a feedback mechanism guiding

you to the most authentic you,

the most sustainable, fair exchanging you.

The one that's in a state of

equanimity and poise and presence.

The one that has purpose and

meaning. The one that's productive,

that makes a difference, that has

something unique to offer the world.

So I just wanted to share that today and

give you a little presentation that I

know will maybe stimulate your

thinking to the power you have within,

again,

the power that made the body is the one

that has the capacity to heal the body.

May you take that on and I hope to

share more with you about this and come

and join me for the Breakthrough or some

programs that I can share more of this

information with you.

'cause I really believe that you'll have

an advantage over the people that don't

ever get this information.