Dr. Judith Orloff's Blog

Today I was saddened when I heard of author Michael Crichton's passing at age 66 from cancer..
Michael and I were good friends at the time when I first started exploring intuition and spirituality in the early 1980s during my psychiatric residency at UCLA. I write about him in "Second Sight.". We were spiritual buddies and explored all kinds of wild people from a housewife who claimed to channal an ancient entity to going to spoon bending parties where people bent metal with their minds. Michael had a wonderful dog he'd take with him. One day his car got stolen and the dog was in it and he was so upset. Thank goodness both were found! Michael and I learned to sense and outline energy fields practicing on each other. Michael has a brilliant mind and was just cynical/skeptical enough to make me feel in good hands when we explored all this spiritual and psychic phenomenon. He gave me my first computer lesson on my first Mac though he was a bit impatient with how slow I was comprehending the whole thing and how clumsy I was at first with my first mouse. We used to have lunch in Santa Monica and talk a lot during those days. I remember when he was in the midst of writing Jurrasic Park, and he was bemoaning to me how he was afraid he was losing touch with his creativity. As a writer i loved to listen to him talk about writing. He loved doing the same things everyday when he wrote--going to the same Japanese restaurant, keeping a routine. Michael had a big heart, a wide open imagination and was a great buddy for me. We lost touch when he got really famous. I don't know why. I thought about him over the years a lot, with love, missing him. I will miss him now with his passing.

Judith

Dear Wonderful Community,

I am excited to announce that my new book EMOTIONAL FREEDOM is available on amazon for preorders now!

GO HERE TO PREORDER:    www.drjudithorloff.com/shop

It’s about how to transform negative emotions such as fear, worry, and frustration into courage, calm, and patience. I also describe how to identify your “emotional type” and combat emotional vampires who can agitate your mood. Every step we make in the direction towards emotional freedom lets us be heroes in our own lives and creates a ripple effect to the world so that we can create positive change. It is so essential that we make a commitment not to lead a fear driven life and do our best to overcome fear with faith, staying in the "Now" instead of catastrophizing, listening to our intuition instead of just our overactive heads. I wrote Emotional Freedom as a guidebook with everyday strategies to overcome negativity in all its seductive forms, so we can move towards what is best and brightest in ourselves. I am presenting emotions as a path to spiritual awakening and to a more compassionate consciousness toward yourself and others.

My fondest hope is this book can help you find peace and centeredness in these tumultuous, soul-stretching times we live in.

Judith Orloff


Note: I also have a companion DVD and CD “Introduction to Emotional Freedom” available on www.drjudithorloff.com/shop


Emotional Freedom: Liberate Yourself From Negative Emotions and Transform Your Life

Judith Orloff, M.D.

Picture yourself in a traffic jam but feeling utterly calm. Or not letting your supervisor’s bad mood frustrate you. Imagine being peaceful instead of worrying. Or enjoying nurturing relationships and a warm sense of belonging in the place of loneliness. This is what it feels like when you’ve achieved emotional freedom.

National bestselling author Dr. Judith Orloff invites you to take a remarkable journey. One where can embrace more happiness and serenity. Where you can gain mastery over negativity that can pervade daily life. No matter how stressed you currently feel, the time for positive change is now. You possess the ability to liberate yourself from depression, anger, and fear. True emotional freedom is closer than you think.

Synthesizing neuroscience, intuitive medicine, psychological and subtle energy techniques, Dr. Orloff maps the elegant relationships between our minds, bodies, spirits, and our environments. With humor and compassion, she shows you how to identify the most powerful negative emotions and how to transform them into hope, kindness, and courage. Compelling patient case-studies, stories from her on-line community and workshop participants, and from her own private life illustrate the simple, easy-to-follow action steps that you can take to cope with emotional vampires, disappointments, and rejection.

Emotional Freedom is a road map for those who are stressed out, discouraged, or overwhelmed as well as for those who are in a good emotional place but want to feel even better. As Dr. Orloff shows, each day presents opportunities for us to be heroes in our own lives: to turn away from negativity, react constructively, and seize command of any situation. Complete emotional freedom is within your grasp.

JUDITH ORLOFF, M.D., is a psychiatrist in private practice and an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA. She is the author of the bestsellers Positive Energy, Dr. Judith Orloff’s Guide to Intuitive Healing, and Second Sight. For more information and inspiration visit www.drjudithorloff.com

Also available as an eBook and audio book

Advanced Praise for Dr. Judith Orloff’s “Emotional Freedom”

Emotional Freedom is a heartfelt, accessible guide to the graceland of peace and calm--regardless of our parents, our past, or our present. It's loaded with nuggets of practical and profound healing wisdom."
Christiane Northrup, MD
Author, Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom

A must read for anyone who’s tired of feeling frustrated, lonely, jealous, or emotionally tense. Dr. Orloff shows you how to achieve a lightness of being and feel more peaceful and positive. Highly recommended.
Deepak Chopra
Author, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success

Spectacular! I endorse this book so heartily because it gives a unique blend of the author’s personal and professional experience to enlighten us and it’s a totally fascinating read. I recommend it to everyone who wants to overcome sabotaging emotional patterns to achieve self-mastery.
Candace Pert Ph.D. author of Molecules of Emotion

EMOTIONAL FREEDOM combines neuroscience, psychology, and spirituality to present a new approach for freeing yourself from negative emotions. Scientific studies document that people who often feel lonely, angry, or depressed are more likely to get sick. This book offers you a path to greater health, intimacy, and compassion.
Dean Ornish, MD
Author, The Spectrum

If you, like myself, wish for a deeper and truer life, a wiser understanding of yourself and your emotions, this book will provide you with answers, with companionship, and, most powerful of all, the clarity and faith of an extraordinary teacher.
Mary Oliver
Pulitizer Prize winning poet

Dear Community

We are living in time of intense fear, stress, and economic insecurity. It is so essential that we make a commitment not to lead a fear driven life and do our best overcome fear with faith, staying in the "Now" instead of catastrophizing, and doing what we can to make positive changes in our personal life and the world--all vital themes I talk about in my upcoming book Emotional Freedom. Part of this requires that we vow to trust our deepest intuition, not just our heads and the fearful thoughts that roll around in our mind which can keep us up in panic in the the middle of the night. Intuition is the still small voice inside that tells us the truth about things, a non-linear knowledge that goes beyond the intellect into the realm of body knowing. Listen to your body to move towards when is positive and energizing and to avoid negative people and obsessive negative thoughts. I hope my video "Listen to Your Body" will be helpful with this!

Trust your intuition and remember to exhale!

Judith

How To Listen to the Body

Find out why energy is the missing piece to overeating and why diets may have failed even though you have given them your all. Video tells you how to stay open in an overwhelming world without overeating!!

How do you constructively deal with intuitive empathy? What practical methods can you employ to avoid becoming overamped or depleted? I'm going to present some strategies I use. Try them. See which appeal. One is not more preferable than another. Most important is if your choice works.

Walk away. Let's say you're chatting with a man you've just met at a conference and your energy starts bottoming out. Here's how to tell if you're being zapped: Don't hesitate to politely excuse yourself; move at least twenty feet from him (outside the range of his energy field). If you receive immediate relief, there's your answer. Most people are oblivious to how their energy impacts others. Even energy vampires--people who feed off your energy to compensate for a lack of their own--aren't generally intending to sap you yet still they do. Obnoxious or meek, vampires come in all forms. Watch out for them. For years, reluctant to hurt anyone's feelings, I needlessly endured these types of situations and suffered. How many of us are so loathe to appear rude that a raving maniac can be right in our face, and still we don't budge for fear of offending? Whenever possible--if your well-being feels at risk with an individual or group--give yourself permission to make a tactful and swift exit. In a spot, physically removing yourself is a sure quick solution.

Shield yourself. A handy form of protection many people use, including healers with trying patients, involves visualizing an envelope of white light (or any color you feel imparts power) around your entire body. Think of it as a shield that blocks out negativity or physical discomfort but allows what's positive to filter in. For instance, your sister is on the rampage. She's about to blow up; you don't want her anger to shatter you. Now--take a deep breath, center yourself, engage your shield. Literally picture it forming a fail-safe barrier around you which deactivates anger. It simply can't get to you. Shielding is a deliberately defensive technique aimed at guarding your feelings, not repressing them. It works by establishing a perimeter of protection around you that functionally doesn't permit harm in.

Practice vulnerability. One tenet of my spiritual practice is to remain as vulnerable as I can to everything; not to shield, the antithesis of defense. Some people prefer my strategy, some don't. Use it if it succeeds for you. Here's the premise (not madness) behind this: if we solidify our bond to our inner self, we'll become centered enough not to need to defend at all. Thus, the best protection turns out to be no protection--a stance that initially alarmed me. It didn't seem possible I could do hands-on energy work with someone who had cancer or depression, for example, without absorbing their symptoms myself. But it was. What could be more liberating than to find I could hold my own and still remain open! Too often we're taught to equate vulnerability with weakness. Not so. I like being vulnerable and also strong. This disarms people. To me, the appeal of such an approach is that it's a non-fear-based way of living in the world. It requires that, increasingly, you harmonize with whatever you confront, let it flow through you, then recenter again, stabilized by your own resilience. Pace yourself. A vulnerable posture will feel safer the stronger you get. It is a choice and a life-long practice.

Meditate. To cement your inner bond and hold your center in any situation, I recommend a daily practice of meditation where you focus on the spirit within. Doing so gets you into the habit of connecting with yourself. Start with a few minutes, then gradually increase the duration. The technique is simple: follow your breath and explore the silence. It is not void or empty; that's the mystery. As thoughts come, and they will, continue to refocus on your breath. Every inhalation. Every exhalation. The spaces between thoughts are where your spirit waits to be discovered. There is something real in there worth finding. My spirit feels like a core of head-to-toe warmth vertically aligned through the center of my body. Imbued in the warmth itself is an intelligence and intuitive responsiveness to my rhythms and questions. It speaks only truth, which resonates like a chiming in every cell. Silently become acquainted with your spirit. You can return to it to reinforce who you really are--not just the self you present to the world, but that part of you that is timeless. Make room to pursue it.