Change Your Brain Every Day - Relationships: What They Teach Us About Ourselves with Guy Finley

Episode Date: February 4, 2019

Relationship Magic author Guy Finley states that it is through our relationships that we discover the true reality about ourselves. So what happens when we have contradicting views over the appearance of things and their reality? In the first episode of a series on relationships, Dr. Daniel Amen and Finley discuss the ways our unconscious demands can cause conflict in ourselves and in our relationships, and how we can prevent this phemonemon.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Welcome, everybody. We are so excited this week to, this is relationship magic week. We are with Guy Finley, who's been a friend for many, many years. He's an internationally renowned spiritual teacher, self-realization author. He's the founder and director of Life of Learning Foundation, a nonprofit center of transcendent self-study located in Merlin,

Oregon. It's an incredibly beautiful part of the world. He's also the host of the Foundation's Wisdom School, an online self-discovery program for seekers of higher knowledge. He is the best-selling author of The Secret of Letting Go and 45 other books and audio programs. It's sold over 2 million copies in 26 languages. His latest book, which I have here, Relationship Magic, Waking Up Together,

applies decades of spiritual wisdom and teaching to practical relationship challenges. You know, I grew up with five sisters. I know. A brother, an older brother who used to pound on me, transforming any relationship from mundane to magical. So welcome. Thanks, Danny. I'm glad to be here. So much for coming down. Talk about the origin of relationship magic.

Why this book now? The greatest single resource on this planet, in my opinion, is relationship. It is how we discover ourselves. It is how we learn about ourselves and ultimately through relationship, whether with friends, family, the world around us, it is how we transcend ourselves. We discover ourselves through relationships. And when you put it all together, there's nothing more important than self-knowledge, whether it's knowledge of the brain, of the heart, the body, or spiritual knowledge, the amalgamation of those elements, all important.

And relationships serve to do nothing but help us discover those higher parts of ourselves. And when they're not right, we want to kill ourselves sometimes or kill other people. I mean, just looking at the people I see, the crises happen when you get disconnected. Absolutely. And that's the real insight here is that we have as a human being a capacity to be able to be present enough to ourselves, to what our mind is doing, what our emotions are doing, so that when these negative reactions appear, instead of looking out and blaming the condition or the person, we actually start to understand that there's something in my consciousness that is producing this alienation, something in me that is pushing away this situation, saying that my suffering is because of what you said. My suffering isn't because of what

you said or what the world did. My suffering is because I don't understand there's something in me that walks around with demands, that nobody should speak to me in any other way than the way I imagine it. So when you have unconscious demand meeting an unlimited supply of challenges, you run into conflict with the world. But understanding that begins to mitigate it, Danny, so that then the very things that were problematic to us, painful, actually become a source of perfecting us. It's a very beautiful thing. So tell the audience about you.

How did you start and get involved with teaching people how to have higher selves? You know, Danny, I was born and raised in an incredibly successful family. My father was Time Magazine Man of the Year. I was literally raised as a junior Rat Pack person most people spend their lives trying to reach that supposed plateau. And I was born there. So it gave me a tremendous opportunity to see that there's these incredible contradictions that exist as a part of the web of our society. Why would the most successful people in the world be so dysfunctional? They've got everything. And then you start to realize that the problem isn't the conditions. The problem is,

again, the nature that develops those conditions, actually seeking some kind of way to feel good and perfected by life, and then turning out to be enslaved by the very thing that was supposed to liberate us. So I had a great chance to see that. And it started questions for me, Danny, honest to God, the age of six and seven years old. I rode in the lap of Jane Mansfield in the Hollywood Christmas Parade. And I remember smelling alcohol, feeling fear. I didn't know what these things were.

You can't when you're a kid. But I knew there was something wrong. And for some reason, I wanted to understand the contradiction between the appearance of things and the reality of one's being. And that led me through this work all the way. I did go through a musical stint. You know, my partner and I were the first white soft rock artists on Motown Records. I had a very successful career as a composer,

but in the late 20s, I just abandoned it because I found myself living a lifestyle that instead of being free to enjoy, I had to fight to preserve. And I thought, well, how did this happen? I love music. I got successful, but now I'm serving the thing that was supposed to serve me. And again, another one of these contradictions. So off I went, meeting people around the world to see if anybody could answer what in God's name is going on here? What's wrong with our world? With so much, why is there so much suffering?

That's how I got going, Danny. Well, having seen a lot of the young stars they're often not happy oh man i like the idea of expectations uh and so then you became a student of another spiritual teacher vernon howard yes when i came back i went to the far east ind India. I dusted the feet of more people with my forehead than you can imagine, which is a tradition, the way in which certain kind of energies are supposed to be. But I came back with nothing other than the realization that what I was looking for, I wouldn't find outside of my own mind and my own heart. And it was right at that point that I was fortunate to meet a great individual and an illumined man named Vernon Howard. I spent 15 years with Mr. Howard, became a close associate,

became the co-director of his foundation and before about, oh I don't know, two or three years before he passed, he must have known it because he told me he wanted me to write a book which he'd never done. There wasn't a single student that he'd ever instructed. And I wrote The Secret of Letting Go, which became and still is an international bestselling book some 35 years later. So wonderful experience. I owe everything in a way to this man for educating me to understand that if I was going to be a different kind of human being, it would be through authentic self-knowledge and its application. We've all heard the expression,

if you know the truth, the truth will set you free. You teach people the truth about their chemistry, their brain, and it liberates them to have new ways to approach their own health. I teach people self-knowledge as to be able to observe ourselves and to realize that the problem with any relationship isn't that the relationship has confronted me and denied me my happiness, but rather it has served to reveal to me a limitation in my own mind. And so the relationship reveals the limitation. And if I get that, then I can begin to meet the limitation instead of try to change you because you've awakened me to it. And that's

why we fight with people, Danny. We fight with people because they challenge an assumption that we have about ourselves, what we think we know, who we think we are, an image that we've got. And when people don't agree with it instantaneous resistance and the resistance well they what's happening that's exactly right that's exactly right because the resistance gives rise to a demand and the demand is the overt expression of the hostility so so when i think of relationships i always or when i think of relationships, or when I think of us, I think of four circles. We have a biology, so that's the brain stuff that we do. We have a psychology, how we're thinking, which is what I'm hearing you talk about.

We have a social circle, which is also what we're talking about, the interaction of psychology and the social circle. And then we also have a spiritual circle. Why the heck are we here? What is your deepest sense of meaning and purpose? And the four circles are always sort of spinning together. And so balancing them matters. And so back to relationship magic. Over the next 40 minutes or so, we're going to sort of unpack the major principles of that.

And I'm so excited to do this with you. So stay with us. When we come back, we are going to go deep into some of these self-healing principles that can change your relationships and change your life. Use the code podcast10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or on our supplements at brainmdhealth.com. Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Go to iTunes and leave a review and you'll automatically be entered into a drawing to get a free signed copy of the Brain Warriors Way and the Brain Warriors Way cookbook we give away

every month.