New interview with Dr Jeanette Gallagher: “What is a healthy perspective? We can’t just stop disease, we can’t stop destruction of the earth, we can’t stop change of the earth, or the human being or the human body. How do we avoid letting ‘bad’ things take us to our knees?”
How can we change our perspective to reduce anxiety?
Charles: We are very anxious as a species. And because we are all anxious, we think it’s normal. But in fact, anything that we can do to bring down that anxiety is going to be very healthy for us, will bring down the diseases, will make us more fulfilled in life and so on. And that’s just the comfort of making your life a little bit more predictable.
Dr J: But what about the concept…like let’s say there were earthquakes in Italy the other day. And everybody says, “Yeah, I saw it on Twitter” and they don’t think anything of it. But really our existence upon his earth is dependent upon each other. The earth is not a solid mass, it is a living, breathing organism. We are all in the web of life, so it’s really about a higher concept.
What is your frame of reference?
Charles: Yes. If you were to try to monitor every situation that happens across the earth, you would go insane! You don’t have the capacity to really understand, comprehend and digest everything that’s going on. Well, we were never meant to process everything like that. Now, you can take a situation like the earthquakes in Italy and take different approaches to it. “Oh my God, this could happen to me!” OR “This is not me. I don’t care. I’m going to be totally oblivious to it.” OR “I am so grateful for what I have, and that this has not happened to me, that I’m going to appreciate my life a little more, hug my children more, say ‘hi’ to my neighbour. I’m going to appreciate and value my life more.”
Dr J: Right.
Challenges are going to come
Charles: Now, there are many different ways you can come out of a challenge. It all depends on your frame of reference. So no matter what happens in your life, as you said earlier, no matter whether you believe in God, you don’t believe in God, whether you have a good life, you don’t have a good life, whether you are spiritual or not, whether you’re well-grounded or not…none of that is going to change what’s going to happen in your life. Challenges are going to come. So it’s about how you deal with them. And the more you are capable of dealing with challenges – the more, for example, spiritual you are, the more grounded, the more fundamentally strong you are – the bigger the challenges are going to be.
Dr J: Exactly.
Charles: Because the little challenges are not going to bother you. You’re not even going to think of them as challenges because you are capable of working through them. So it’s the big ones that are going to stop you. And you’re going to ask yourself, “Why is this happening to me? I feel I’m spiritual. I believe in you, God. So why is this happening?” Because that’s life. And when you look at it from the perspective that it’s a bad thing, that’s your problem right there. It’s the fact that you think of it as being bad. With any challenge that can happen, there are a lot of beautiful things that could come out of it. No matter how horrible it might be right now.