In today’s episode of Healing From Within, your host Sheryl Glick author of The Living Spirit: Answers for Healing and Infinite Love which shares a look into our true nature as intuitive and highly empathic beings who can manifest their healthiest and most joyful lives through learning, accepting, allowing and surrendering to conditions beyond our control, welcomes Dr. Todd Pressman an international speaker, psychologist and author of Radical Joy.
Dr. Pressman is the founder of Logos Wellness Center and The Center for Management Excellence dedicated to helping people and businesses achieve extraordinary levels of performance and whose work with Olympic athletes has honed his understanding of the technology of mind, body and spirit that help those already excellent in their fields to become even more so. We will discuss his work as a spiritual psychologist learning more about Transpersonal breath and other tools to accept a higher consciousness and awareness of Self.
Todd’s father, Maurie Pressman MD author of Living In The Supermind was a guest on Healing From Within and Sheryl so enjoyed his energy and wisdom shared on that episode. The show may be heard on the radio page in the archives dated October 7, 2013.
Sheryl asks Todd if he remembers his father and saw a difference in the father he knew as a child and how he saw him later on in life. Sheryl shares how she often thinks about how much she personally has changed in the last 20 years since becoming aware of a greater reality beyond the physical world realizing her children remember her the way she was as a young mother with certain fears and limitations many of which she unknowingly imprinted on their pure loving and fearless little souls…Were you able to see a difference in the father you knew as a child and the father you knew as an adult is what Sheryl asks Todd? She reminds him she saw him as both a man of science allopathic medicine and spiritual psychiatry. He merged his dual nature of soul and mind into one force for compassion and love. Todd tells a wonderful story of when he was 13 and was helped by his father to see the bigger picture of soul presence and the ego or mind that influenced our decisions and the reality we created with our own thought processes..he is grateful to have been so in alignment to his father’s loving energy and open minded search for truth.
Todd’s father was a psychiatrist focusing like Todd, on spiritual psychotherapy and the exploration of the human soul. He was interested in the connection between the mind and body and pioneered the use of hypnosis and creative visualization to help people reach their full potential. In the show I recorded with him I read something he wrote about the Spirit and the soul which is often confused by many people.. “The Spirit is the divine spark within each of us, a part of God Himself creating and inhabiting every part of creation including humankind. Because the Divine is all powerful and all knowing it does not experience. One can only experience by having limitations…so the Soul is the Causal body or the fourth plane of Involution or God’s nee to experience through our physical being… a part of seven vibrational planes of decreasing frequency. The Soul is the part of God that can experience in its material form or denser form and the 3 lower vibrational forms are the mental emotional and physical.”
Sheryl says, “As a Reiki teacher and practitioner I work with the seven main energy points of the body and the 3 lower vibrational chakras the root sacral and solar plexus deal with physical life issues while the four higher chakras deal with intuition and spiritual awareness and self-development and experiencing God or Universal Energy at this higher level of consciousness.” Dr Pressman may have been talking about the ability of the Soul to recognize the changing nature of the physical aspects of life and to learn through every experience that it is an opportunity to grow and evolve into something new.
Todd has traveled around the world studying the great wisdom traditions. In 1982 on a trip around the world with the University of Pittsburgh he had the good fortune to spend time with a Zen master in a monastery in Kyoto: to stay with a Jain family whose reverence for life had them put out sugar each night to feed the ants: to meet and exchange with one of only eight remaining Zoroastrian high priests outside the Fire Temple of Bombay; and to witness authentic fire walking and other fakir ceremonies in Sri Lanka
Sheryl says “In my travels and studies of the great wisdom traditions I have found a common thread that runs through life and every living being and in my book The Living Spirit describe the importance of the need to love and be loved. I expressed it this way… “In continuing our quest for personal truth, along with our goal to hear the whispers, experience beautiful thoughts and sense the feelings of peace that may reside in our soul and body a pleasant feeling of cooperation between body, mind and soul can be achieved to bring about a future reality of substance. …We will learn that we can manifest the lives loves, and relationships we truly want, and perhaps, most of all, we will see our circumstances as something that can assist us in taking our souls to the next level of development.”
Todd mentions Life Coaching and what it is. He tells us that Life coaching is a dynamic, results-oriented approach to living an extraordinary life. It differs from counseling in that it focuses exclusively on helping you define and clarify your goals and then taking the actions to reach those goals with power and with purpose. The chief "work" of coaching is to vigorously move through the obstacles to your goals, that you may see real results in the timeframe you set. It is said "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, each time expecting different results". Life coaching takes a person out of the rut of creating the same unfulfilling experiences, to recreate who you are and redesign your life according to your highest ideals.
In discussing Spiritual psychotherapy we find it is conventional, dynamic therapy expanded to include the spiritual realm as in the following: a group therapy session unites members into a family each eager to help the other and group learns about our immortality, near death and after death encounters through these members who have lived through these experiences. Todd shares his views on Carl Jung the founder of Spiritual Psychology and his approach to help clients feel empowered to seek joy and fulfillment in creating what they really need to express in their work family life friendships and view of life in its spiritual and physical realities. He also discusses Sigmund Freud who worked with Carl Jung and had a more pragmatic or ego mind based view of psychological issues and believed in traditional talk therapy and what was available at that earlier time in building a foundation for treating dysfunctional patterns involved with a person’s view of Self and the world.
Sheryl says “In other words instead of focusing on individual issues in only the physical life experience we must try to see the bigger Universal view of Energy and the greater potential to use our intuitive and innate soul wisdom to accept allow and surrender to some circumstances without resistance, trauma and fear eventually staying in a state of well being, joy, and peace which is our normal and desired way to live.
Todd goes on to mention The Center for Management Excellence and the mission statement of that organization.
The Center for Management Excellence at Pressman and Associates
In recent years, American business has become ever-more focused on excellence and efficiency. Motivational seminars have cropped up everywhere, providing short-term, superficial measures to increase productivity, reduce stress or build morale. However, the catch-phrases of these programs create no real change or lasting difference. What's missing is a deep understanding of how people--and therefore businesses--operate. In order to thrive in today's market, this deeper view is critical. The highly-trained, credentialed staff at The Center for Management Excellence can unlock the true potential of your business. With a penetrating, x-ray view into the hidden workings of your business, you can achieve unprecedented levels of success, productivity and fulfillment.
Martin Luther King once said, "If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep the streets as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry."
Excellence inspires us. With this inspiration, a business becomes infused with life; its people enlivened. The ingredients of excellence are simple: A compelling vision, a solid strategy and especially, a disciplined approach for implementing this vision.
Todd shares some ideas about the Performance Breakthroughs Program
This program will provide you with the tools for reaching unprecedented levels of productivity, success, and satisfaction. During this course you will:
Create a strategic design for growing your business.
Increase productivity as measured by criteria you set.
Reduce health-care costs and absenteeism through advanced stress-management techniques.
Reduce Workers' Compensation costs by reducing stress-related injuries and helping the injured employee quickly return to work.
Experience more fulfillment and satisfaction in your work and personal life.
Receive specialized testing and in-depth interviews to analyze the particular challenges of your business.
We then go on to talk about Transpersonal experiences which may be defined as experiences in which the sense of identity or self extends beyond the individual or personal to encompass wider aspects of humankind, life, psyche or cosmos…Also… of or relating to psychology or psychotherapy concerned especially with esoteric mental experiences as mysticism and altered states of consciousness beyond the limits of ego and personality. Transpersonal psychology may be found in Eastern Spiritual traditions by practices of monks and saints writers such as Emerson and Thoreau and the religious democracy of the Quakers and early Protestant groups and the pioneers of modern psychology such ad Carl Jung and William James.
Sheryl wonders what Todd’s view on dreams and their place in understanding who we are and how dreams may help us develop greater wisdom. It may be when we are asleep and the body is resting that the soul wanders in wide areas in the upper realms and brings back messages that are incorporated in our dreams so inspiration, new knowledge, precognition, and more can be utilized to improve thinking more clearly and with help for working with our daily life challenges. Sheryl Says: “As a medium I download messages while in a meditative state, not quite asleep, and sometimes in dreams…An example of precognition or seeing something before it happens is: In a dream I had one night, I saw a suntanned man with a balding head and lovely smile pointing at a chalkboard…days later I went to hear SQuire Rushnell author of “When God Winks” a book sharing coincidences and synchronicity which are information and assistance from higher realms. When he took off his baseball cap and pointed to the chalkboard I recognized the same man I had seen in my dreams and told him the story…Years later he was one of the first guests on this show “Healing From Within”…we all may have examples of this type of experience.”
Todd and Sheryl have shared their trust in the Universal Plan and design for evolution’s process for shaping a world community of citizens who reflect the true nature of man and Spirit and function at a level beyond primitive and lower vibration emotions such as jealousy hate prejudice anger fear dissatisfaction and general negativity, possessing the means within them to manifest and fulfill their life plan with greater efficacy and joy. When we align our powerful energy system and mind - ego connection we can unify the best aspects of our complete life force..mind body and spirit. As always there is a body of questioning seekers who wish to weave together a clearer view of who we are as spiritual beings having a physical life experience. Your father Maurie Pressman wrote…”There is a counter movement to psychoanalytic training where one is taught to stay within the limits of the body-mind …a movement of seekers who know the value of emotion, love and the presence of the Heart Brain. Advance studies in quantum physics are proving that the core teachings of all religions the One-ness that we are and to which we shall return is the Essential Truth. “
How can we doubt this for a higher consciousness and awareness that comes to those who meditate prayer and alter their thinking mind to access the goodness and altruism of their divine potential and a reflection of the higher view of Universal Energy. We recognize and function from this level of awareness when we teach our personality and physical life thinking to surrender to a higher authority and lay aside issues of control fear exclusion and societal mores to open to the divine message of the eternal nature of life.
Todd and Sheryl would have you seek to awaken your curiosity and desire to learn and grow and do your best to find joy in whatever job family friends or challenges that surface in your everyday life story…In doing that you will find Radical Joy and experience the lightness of being and the gift that life offers us to explore our own reality dreams and desires in a wholesome and holistic fashion. |
