The Dr. Zwig Show

When you experience a body symptom you most likely attribute it to an underlying physical process. You SHOULD think this way. Check out your symptoms with a medical doctor.

But there’s another, equally, if not more important, level of the human body—the PROCESS BODY. This isn’t a physical body with functions you can see, touch, and quantify but rather an experiential body you can feel and visualize. It encodes and expresses the psychological processes driving your symptoms and illnesses.

To work on your process body, you must use your somatic senses and visualization to explore, unfold, and process your perception of symptoms in order to connect with their meaning and message. The more you’re able to integrate this message into your consciousness, the more you activate a natural healing response in your biochemistry.

Today’s episode guides you through an exercise for processing your physical symptoms. Doing so can lead not only to personal growth and wellbeing but also to improvement in and sometimes healing of your physical issues.

It’s difficult to be objective about yourself, and when you interact with someone it can be daunting. You get caught up in the relationship process and lose yourself. This happens because a relationship is far more than just two separate human beings communicating by sending and receiving signals and messages.

Together, you and the other person form a system in which the contents of your psyches lose their borders as they interact, merge, morph, conflict, entangle, disentangle, and behave as part of a whole. Your personal history, present consciousness, and future fate intertwine with the other person’s and create a third entity called, the "relationship.”

The way to improve your relationship is to awaken to how your psyche gets entangled with theirs. This involves learning how to identify your own patterns of experience and behavior, and how they relate to the other person’s. To accomplish this, it’s instructive to understand how identifying patterns lies at the heart of both music and mathematics.

This episode includes a discussion of the connection between music, math, and relationships…complete with some loud guitar riffing! Learning how to identify the psychological patterns in your relationships will lead to healing, growth, and wisdom.

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“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction both are transformed.” – C.G. Jung.

This episode guides you through a practical exercise for working on your relationship. Sit together and make a video discussing a problem you’re having. Watch the video. Then, both of you close your eyes and imagine you’re an old, wise man or woman. You’re clear-headed, objective, calm, and centered. You’re an enlightened elder who sees through peoples’ conflicts and dramas. You have a mature and understanding way of relating to human processes. You see and feel the big picture of life, and are beyond all the little-picture pettiness people get entangled in. You’re loving, free, strong, happy, and in touch with eternity and the true meaning of life and relationships.

To do this, begin by seeing yourself as this wise figure. Take your time and create a really compelling vision. Observe every detail of how you would look as this wise man or woman. Then feel deeply into it. Afterwards, stand up and walk around the room embodying it in your movements. Finally, sit back down and watch the video together again.

As you do this, be the wise figure and study yourself in the relationship. Do it in a loving, supportive, but insightful way. Notice if there’s something that’s hard for you to admit about your own behavior but is nevertheless true. After you’ve done this, have a respectful discussion about what you’ve learned. Doing this exercise will help you improve your relationship and find healing, growth, happiness, and success.

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Being objective about yourself isn’t easy. You need a method to observe and facilitate your inner processes in a neutral, non-ideological way. Conventional psychology and psychiatry fail miserably at this but you can use processing methods to achieve it. drzwig.com - instagram.com/drzwig - youtube.com/drzwig - facebook.com/drzwig

A practical exercise in which you video yourself talking about a problem, tap into a new, more objective perception of your issue, and give yourself some sage advice. drzwig.com - instagram.com/drzwig - youtube.com/drzwig - facebook.com/drzwig

Does art imitate life, or does life imitate art? Is your life like a movie, or is a movie like your life? Neither! Life and art are the same thing, and they both arise from your process.

Your relationship isn’t "like" a movie—it IS a movie—a dream…and you play a character in it. Your character and that of your partner, create the story, and hopefully, it manifests a lot of goodness. But trouble can lurk in the shadows. One of trouble’s main instigators is when your character role gets cemented, set in stone, fossilized.

For example, you’re the rational one and she’s the irrational one, or you’re the thinker and he’s the feeler, or one of you is responsible and the other is irresponsible. There are many character roles available: Dramatic and calm. Extroverted and introverted. Educated and uneducated. Spiritual and mundane. Pragmatic and idealistic. Leader and follower. Doctor and patient. Innkeeper and drunk!

Relationship conflict arises when people become stuck in one of these roles. Switching them is a powerful, therapeutic change agent. Identifying the roles in your relationships and experimenting with swapping them will bring healing, change, growth, and happiness.

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There are three levels of a relationship. The first one is what most therapists focus on—the communication level. This has to do with how well people share their feelings and listen to each other. Solutions on this level require you to learn how to communicate better. But oftentimes, this isn’t enough. You can learn all the “right" things to do but still suffer from conflict.

The reason is that the other two levels have enormous influence on what happens. The second one is what today’s exercise focuses on—the internal level. Your partner, friend, boss, etc., aren't just real people out there with whom you communicate; they also represent psychological patterns in the form of inner figures/characters in a story in your own psyche. You don’t only relate to the other person, you also relate to this part of yourself without realizing. The most common inner figure that gets projected onto other people is an internalized parental figure. Change and growth happen when each individual becomes conscious of the other person as a part of their own psyche, and learns how to process it.

The third level is the systems level. This is the level in which an individual refers to him- or herself as “we” instead of “I”—even if their partner isn’t present! The person identifies with the relationship as a system that acts as a being unto itself—one which is greater than the sum of the the two individuals. Transformation happens by working on the said and unsaid agreements that create something bigger than the two individuals.

Everything you experience aims at your personal growth and expansion. If you can use your relationships in this way, it will lead to growth, healing, and wellbeing.

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Relationships get stuck when one or both people aren’t conscious of their deeper feelings and needs. A powerful method for tapping into your subconscious where these unknown parts of yourselves reside, is visualization.

People typically use visualization to help them get into a certain state of mind, improve their performance at something, clarify goals they want to accomplish, or even to try to heal physical illnesses. But a more effective approach is to visualize what you actually DO feel rather than what you want to feel. Instead of trying to create an experience, expose the one that’s actually there but hasn’t been consciously acknowledged, or at least hasn’t been communicated to the other person.

Tapping into this inner truth will set you free. It might hurt, it could shock, or it may delightfully surprise...you never know. It might also bring out unconscious, knee-jerk reactions in the other person showing you that they may not be up to having a conscious relationship with you. Whatever happens, you will have set yourself on the path to healing, growth, and freedom from half conscious, half-truths about what’s going on in yourself and in your relationship. This will lead to self-actualization, wisdom, freedom, and success.

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Relationship conflicts are ubiquitous and difficult. Each person is absolutely convinced they are in the right. This creates a communication knot that feels impossible to undo. Visualization is a method that can help untie the knot.

The method consists of sitting together silently, meditating on how you feel with each other, making images of your feelings, sharing them with each other, unfolding them in real time, and then respectfully discussing their implications for your relationship.

There’s no goal of harmony or resolution in this method. The goal is simply raise raise awareness in the relationship. The first time you do it, you might just gain a few insights into the dynamics between you and the other person. But even this alone begins to transform the atmosphere you share. Oftentimes, you don’t solve a conflict right away; you plant seeds of insight, and they eventually grow into something transformative.

This exercise is a powerful way to move beyond a stuck situation and can lead to change, healing, growth, and happiness.

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There’s so much info on the airwaves these days saying, “Never give up!” “Power through the obstacle!” “Believe and achieve!” “When the going gets tough, the tough get going!”…and all that’s good. But this approach is only a subset of a more important and effective way to deal with the things that block you in your life. To truly understand and transform an obstacle you must unpack the information in it and let it guide you.

It might want you to power through, for example, if the purpose of the obstacle is to push you to connect with your power.

But oftentimes, a problem shows up for a completely different reason. It’s there to redirect you by waking you up to something you haven’t been aware of. It might even want you to change your entire goal. If you just always try to power through you miss this essential information. You might even succeed at your goal but it’s a cost because when you repress or ignore information in your life it has an insidious way of appearing again as a different problem down the road.

The obstacles you encounter are unconscious parts of your story—meaningful, purposeful expressions that occur in order to make you aware of certain changes you need to undertake on your journey toward your goals. Instead of ignoring or just trying to bash through blocks, approach them as guideposts. They show up in order to raise your awareness, expand your mindset, and redirect your actions. Understanding and acting on the inherent message of your difficulties leads to positive change, growth, healing, and wisdom.

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