Heart of Wellness:Cesar Millan and the Teton Wellness Festival will teach you how to lead.

Tuesday, October 06, 2009

By JH Weekly Staff

Jackson Hole, Wyoming - Hey once again, friend! How’s your earthly temple? Is the foundation solid? What’s that you say? A few cracks? Oh dear, I hope it’s not close to buckling!

And how about your various antennas? You gotta have those puppies tuned-in, right?

Speaking of puppies, does your little friend need the guidance of a household brand dog trainer and best-selling author? (Answer: No, your dog needs guidance from you!)

And then there’s the ole ticker: one can’t neglect the heart except at one’s own peril.

In fact, the organizers of this year’s Teton Wellness Festival, which commences Friday, want you to focus on your heart in particular – it’s physical, emotional and spiritual health.

(See JHW General News for Complete Schedule of Events)

The theme of the 7th annual Wellness Fest is “Pursue Your Purpose,” and was designed to bring a new dimension of comfort in this period of monetary loss and uncertainty coinciding with life’s usual assortment of travails, said Teton Wellness Institute Executive Director Marcia Craighead.

“The idea was to give people the support they really need right now,” Craighead said. “People need to find something they can actually do something about for themselves.”

In the same spirit as years previous, organizers will emphasize “an integrative approach to wellness through many different routes,” Craighead said, but this time it’s “mainly through the heart.”

Cesar Millan, known as “the dog whisperer,” will doubtless be the rockstar keynote speaker, but his fellow presenters may hold the keys to your own heart.
One of them, Dr. Mimi Guarneri, a cardiologist, used to insert about 500 heart stents a year, but the acclaimed author and lecturer discovered the procedure doesn’t work if stress and poor emotional health hang in the balance.

And partners Gary Zukav and Linda Francis will shed light on a practical path to spiritual growth.

But now, without further adieu, take it away, perennial student of wellness Teresa Griswold!
– Ben Cannon

Cesar Millan doesn’t train dogs –
he balances them – and their owners
Popular dog-behavior expert, Cesar Millan, communicates easily with animals – more specifically, dogs – but that doesn’t mean he has a loud bark or whispers to them. Instead, he exudes personal balance and tunes into the nature of the dog, assuming the leadership role and garnering trust. That ability combined with his wildly successful television program has earned him the reputation of being a profound “dog whisperer.”

Millan was always connected to dogs, even in the “machismo” culture of his native Mexico. As a child he was able to show dogs affection, even though his parents and grandfather discouraged such exhibitions of emotion. Their dogs were loved, but they were not pampered, he says. This taught him first-hand the differences between a trained dog and a balanced dog.

When Millan immigrated to the U.S., he realized his dream – that of becoming a dog rehabilitator. After watching Rin Tin Tin and Lassie as a child and seeing the credits roll with a listing for “dog trainer,” he knew that was his destiny.

Later, he observed that the dogs in America didn’t need “training.” They needed psychology. That’s when he founded the Dog Psychology Center of Los Angeles, and became known as the “Mexican who walks a pack of dogs.” After a story ran in the Los Angeles Times on a Sunday about the remarkable work he was doing with dogs and his goal to have a television program, TV producers where lined up asking what the program was about . . . on Monday.

Now he’s the star of National Geographic’s “The Dog Whisperer.” He has a wife and children, a pack of dogs, writes books – his most recent being released this week How to Raise the Perfect Dog – and he launched a magazine in September, Cesar’s Way. He’s helped Oprah, Wayne Dyer, Tony Robbins and Deepak Chopra with their dogs. “I’m teaching people who I admire,” he says. “It doesn’t get any better than that.”

Here’s more from Millan and how dogs help us
create life:

Jackson Hole Weekly: How does a dog-behavior expert relate dogs to wellness?

Cesar Millan: Wellness, wellbeing, happiness, harmony, in touch, in tune, one with the world, one with nature – to me a dog has been a tremendous help in that regard. I always describe a dog as a helper in three worlds: the instinctual world, the emotional world, and the spiritual world.

Now, the intellectual world is a world that I don’t bring dogs into, because I don’t see intelligence the way other people describe it when they say, “My dog is very intelligent.” That’s instinctual intelligence. The intelligence in the human world is Microsoft. It’s our conversations, telephones and satellites. That intelligence is foreign to them. That’s why I always tell my clients, “They really don’t care what you do for a living. They really don’t know if you make a dollar or a million dollars.” So I remove the intellectual world that a lot of people give so much attention to.
A lot of humans become detached, because they pay too much attention to making money instead of making life. And a dog makes you create life. A single human cannot exist by himself, and a single dog cannot exist by itself. A dog is going to unite with someone. And we often see what we call miracles when a dog can coexist with a pig, when a dog can coexist with a cat or a rabbit or a chicken, but the reason why that exists is because at that moment when the predator is looking for a partner, he goes into a surrender state and the other species becomes the dominant one. So that’s the yin and the yang. That is the way a relationship exists.

JHW: What creates a healthy relationship between a human and a dog?

CM: It is very important that we humans take the responsibility of fulfilling our dogs which is the body, the mind, the heart, the spirit. By being responsible, we take the position that I call the dominant position or the leader position. The point is that you begin the activity instead of waiting for the activity. The dog will take the other space, which is a follower position and companion. Once you accomplish this simple connection, then the whole entire world of possibilities belongs to you.

JHW: How does a dog help us fulfill our need to exercise?

CM: A dog must walk. A fish must swim. A bird must fly. But we can’t do that with them. One species we have become very dearly connected with is the dog. In modern society, a dog is the species that allows us to be together with them in public places, in parks, at the beach. A dog, in a way, is fulfilling or helping us to fulfill something that is very important, which is exercise.

JHW: How do you maintain a leadership role with the dog?

CM: I always tell people, “Animals don’t follow instability.” Their level of integrity is too high. Only humans follow unstable leaders. And so that means your emotions have to be in place in order for you to provide balance. So you in a way are forced by someone who doesn’t have a college degree to really be aware of the state of mind you’re in.

A lot of my clients are controlled by their own emotions. Fear is the worst one. Sometimes people are angry, but for the most part, fear is the one that controls the world. Because of that a dog is not going to be able to follow that human or to trust the human, because they don’t trust fear. They don’t live with fear. They don’t live with anger. Only humans live with that.

And then comes the belief system, the spirituality. If you believe that if you walk three miles every day to cure a certain disease, let’s say cancer, your dog will completely embrace that concept. So now you have two species believing in the same thing. In order to create a miracle, a group of people must gather in one place and believe in the same thing. Why? Because it’s a stronger form of prayer, and so the second, or third, or fourth or fifth, doesn’t have to be a human. And I can attest to that, because everything that I have in my life, I’ve done it around a pack of dogs and as a pack leader who fulfills their pack. My pack is in a position where they are willing to believe what I believe. And my belief system is about making people become more in tune to their nature, making people reconnect to themselves, to what is in them. It is in them to be instinctual. It’s not just in the animal, it’s in you.

JHW: I can see you have a real spiritual, instinctual connection to yourself and to your dogs and also to humans.

CM: Well, when I came to America 17 years ago, people asked me, “What is different about you?” People asked me if I have a gift. Maybe I do, but I think everybody has it. I’m just more aware of it, and that’s what I research – how I can influence people, and how I can make sure I trigger your voracity so you can find out more about you.

When I came to America, I came with a high level of awareness of the instinctual world, and a high level of awareness of the spiritual world. Coming from a third-world country, that’s all you learn. You learn to survive and you learn to believe that God will provide.

The reason why I say I completed myself in America is because I learned about the intellectual world. And then I also learned about the emotional world. One thing that is not available in a third world country is education.

Another thing, especially in Mexico, which is very much machismo oriented, is you can’t cry if something happens to you. You have to learn to suck in your emotions. As a human being, you cannot not express your emotions. For me dogs were really important, because I was able to express affection to a dog.

JHW: What else is involved in maintaining a healthy relationship with a dog?

CM: I say body, mind, heart or exercise, discipline, affection. Now discipline is the challenge to the mind. The mind must be challenged. The mind must know rules, boundaries, and limitations. People misinterpret discipline with punishment.
Correction is an outcome of breaking the rules. For example, as a rule you must look both ways when you cross the street. That’s part of discipline. Now if you don’t, the outcome can be you’ll be hit by a car. That’s your correction. But you don’t have to have a correction if you follow the rules.

That’s why when dogs raise each other they share rules, boundaries and limitations at an early age. They don’t wait until the dog gets a year old, because then they will face a strong fight, and eventually one of them, the male or female, will challenge the strongest one in the pack. It’s the nature of it.

JHW: You are making a big difference.

CM: That became the goal. We went from dog training to fulfilling the life of a dog and when I started utilizing words like that and methods and philosophies, my whole entire world changed. 
 – Teresa Griswold

Get well and stay well with
Dr. Mimi Guarneri

Dr. Mimi Guarneri knew from a very early age that she was a healer. So when she earned her undergraduate degree in English literature, she knew it wasn’t a departure from the medical degree she would go on to earn, graduating first in her class from SUNY Medical Center. The two were not mutually exclusive, she said.
She used her background to write a book, The Heart Speaks, where she blended research with stories about the transformation of her heart patients through the integrative approach to medicine – treating the whole heart.

As a cardiologist, Guarneri first focused her practice solely on the physical heart, but discovered the heart was not only a physical organ, but multi-layered and complex. When she saw that treating the whole patient was the key to optimal health, she founded the Scripps Center for Integrative Medicine. In 1997, it was one of the first of its kind to approach medicine from a mind-body-spirit perspective.

On Friday evening, Guarneri will discuss lessons in longevity ranging from “looking at eating a more plant-based diet, which is not only good for the human, but good for the planet to looking at the role of movement in our life, social connection, spirituality, and having a purpose in life.”

Jackson Hole Weekly: What led you to integrative medicine?

Dr. Mimi Guarneri: When I went to medical school, I was taught a disease care model. When people are sick they come to you, and you diagnose them and prescribe medication or surgery or something specific for their particular problem. That’s the way Western allopathic medicine is taught. When you’re ill it’s nice to know that someone can make a diagnosis and prescribe the right medication, but after doing that for a number of years and placing stents and doing the mechanical fixes of blood vessels, I realized we were doing absolutely nothing to get to the underlying cause of the problem.

We were cleaning up the mess and not turning off the faucet. It’s all an illusion, because this whole concept that you’re fixed, is very relative. Putting a stent in someone maybe fixes 15 or 16 millimeters of an artery, but it doesn’t get to the deeper issues as to why that artery was blocked in the first place.

I started to do research with Dr. Dean Ornish, and we started looking at some of my really sick heart patients and asking some simple questions. What if we taught them a vegetarian diet? What if we got them meditating and doing yoga; put them into support groups, got them moving, exercising?

And it was very eye opening because I saw some of the sickest people, who were not surgical candidates at the time, and their chest pain was significantly reduced by about 90 percent. They started to lose weight. They started to have some joy in their lives. Families had less stress because when someone is ill, all your loved ones are affected.

I thought this was an amazing way to start to think about prevention. Let’s think about it from a body-mind-spirit perspective. Let’s look at in that way and see what we can do to prevent disease in the first place; not just heart disease – osteoporosis, diabetes, cancer, all of it and how does it tie into how we live our lives?

A lot of the spiritual concepts for me have become very important, because I think they’re intimately related to health. The research supports service is good for your health. And to have an appreciation for even the smallest things, like even the air we breathe. Looking at what we do have as opposed to what we don’t have. I think all these things are integral to health.

JHW: When you first founded the Scripps Center for Integrative Medicine back in 1997 or so, was integrative medicine widely accepted?

MG: It was basically unheard of. The only other person who used the term at the time was [Dr.] Andrew Weil, and I liked the term, because it embraced what you need in Western medicine. Because let’s face it, there’s a time when you need a surgery, you need a surgery. There’s a time and place for everything. But it was also looking at all of the other global healing traditions.

There are many paths to healing and they may be different for each person. The issue I had with just the term integrative medicine was I also feel strongly about holistic medicine, because holistic of course is treating the whole person and integrative medicine at the time was more about modalities and things coming together than it was about a philosophy. And so for me, it’s really all about philosophy.

In the early days, we were one of the first centers out using the term integrative medicine and as a result of that many other places were able to get started, because you can imagine if there’s a major medical institution [Scripps] that has an integrative medicine center, it lends itself some credibility for other sites to get started.

Now the climate has changed somewhat, but it’s still a struggle, because this is not what insurance reimburses. Insurance doesn’t reimburse for prevention, and it’s very disturbing to me when I hear them talking about prevention on TV and prevention is a mammogram. Prevention is not a mammogram. A mammogram is early detection. Prevention is eating a plant-based diet. Prevention is staying away from foods that are contaminated with toxins and hormones. Prevention is cleaning the planet, it’s eating locally, it’s eating organic, it’s walking, it’s being connected to the people you’re with, it’s service work. It’s all of these things that go into health and longevity. How we live our life, how we think, how we move, all of these things – that’s what prevents disease.

JHW: What are the latest and greatest things happening in the area of integrative medicine?

MG: One of the latest and greatest things happening is the opportunity with the healthcare reform for us to step up to the plate with the integrative centers in the country and do a demonstration model on prevention. The government is considering this. That would be a fantastic opportunity for us to prove that people when given the right tools, and the right environment and the right opportunity that they can change their lives and change their health. Also more and more physicians are coming on board with integrative medicine. It’s that paradigm shift that’s going to occur with the more education we have for patients, people, as well as physicians, nurses and healthcare providers.

Every doctor needs to be an integrative doctor. That’s how I see it. What does that mean? It means in holistic terms, treating the whole person, and it also means looking at all the possibilities, pulling from the best of all the global healing traditions.
– Teresa Griswold

Emotionally aware
with Gary and Linda

Gary Zukav and Linda Francis are co-creators of the Seat of the Soul Institute, based on teachings that Zukav included in his 1989 book Seat of the Soul, which talks about how people can align their personality with their soul to find fulfillment.
Zukav wrote The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics in 1979. In 1989, The Seat of the Soul was a New York Times’ bestseller for nearly three years.

Their teachings are intended to help people dissolve stress, anxiety, and other fear-based aspects of their personalities by becoming aware of their emotions and choices. Zukav has been on Oprah.

Jackson Hole Weekly: What will you teach about at the Wellness Festival here in Jackson?

Gary Zukav: It’s going to be about living courageously.

JHW: Living courageously?

GZ: Thats right. You see, most people don’t understand that spiritual growth requires living courageously. It requires becoming aware of your emotions. It requires becoming aware of your intentions. It requires the courage to experience everything that you experiencing, and to make the best choices that you can, the most constructive choices that you can in the moment. That’s what we’ll be talking about; authentic power.

JHW: What is authentic power?

GZ: Authentic power is an experience of being fully alive, fully engaged in the present moment, grateful to be alive, knowing that your life has a purpose and that what you’re doing serves that purpose. It’s an experience of joy, fulfillment, vitality, creativity and health.

JHW: What you just described sounds a lot like why people participate in a religion. How does one achieve this? Does it have to be through a religion or spiritual practice?

GZ: No. You achieve it through emotional awareness, responsible choice, consulting your intuition, and co-creating with the universe. Now, a responsible choice is a choice that creates consequences for which you are willing to assume responsibility. In other words, creating authentic power, living an authentically powerful life requires being aware in your life, conscious in your life, proactive in your life in choosing the most constructive outcomes that you can.

LF: Even when your angry, even when your jealous, even when your sad. even when things happen that you don’t want to happen.

GZ: Even when you’re worried about the economy.

JHW: Are there any philosophies in religions in which these ideas take root?

LF: What we’re doing isn’t based on any religion, at all. These are universal principles that you may find in religions.
We can put it this way. There are a lot of religions that don’t require you to become emotionally aware, to become aware of your intentions.
We are in the midst of an unprecedented transformation in human consciosness. It is enormous, it has never happened before. It brings with it new potential and new responsibility. And new potential is creating authentic power. The new responsibility is using your life as an instrument to do that.

JHW: Can you tell me about the unprecedented transformation then?

GZ: The unprecedented transformation is the expansion of perception. It’s the expansion of human perception beyond the limitations of the five senses. In other words, we begin to experience ourselves and our world as more than we thought they were.

LF: There’s always been these people in the history who have experienced more than the five senses, but we’re talking about a species-wide transformation, where everyone becomes multi-sensory.
And it’s happening now, and it will continue to happen until everyone is multi-sensory. And I don’t just mean babies that are being born. It happens within peolpe of all ages now, who are beginning to notice more than just what their five senses are telling them.

JHW: And what is the evidence of this? Where do people see this? And could I maybe see this in myself right now?

GZ: Yes, you can, and that is where the evidence of this exists. You can say that this evidence of this transformation in human consciousness was in the new movements that it has brought forward as it has broached human awareness. For example: citizens diplomacy, the feminest movemnt, the ecological movement. But it is in yourself that you can find evidence of this huge transformation in human consciousness.

That term multi-sensory means having more than one sensory system; the system of the five senses is a single system whose object of detection is physical reality. As we become multi-sensory we acquire another sensory system and that system detects meaning, intelligence, compassion, wisdom that is real but not physical. In other words it detects not-physical reality. Within a few generations everyone will be multi-sensory and that transformation is already in process.

JHW: I want to understand how you know that this is happening more and more now than it did in the past. What is there to tell us that?

GZ: This didn’t come from a history class or an academic setting. Now, there are millions of Buddhists who believe in reincarnation, but not that many who experience it. It’s common for people to believe something but not experience it themselves.

Now the time has come in the human experience for the entire species to become multi-sensory. This doesn’t mean for the entire human species to become wise or kind or compassionate.

JHW: What sort of things can you do to start to making the choice to have authentic power?

LF: You become aware of your emotions. You become very aware of whats going on inside of you. And what I mean by that is emotional awareness means you are aware of whats happening in your body.

GZ: You become aware of your emotions in terms of physical sensations in your body.

LF: The idea is for you to feel it and not act in the way you have before.
— Henry Sweets


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Heart of Wellness:Cesar Millan and the Teton Wellness Festival will teach you how to lead. | Planet JH News Article: Cover Stories

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