Amazing Healing and Drawing Insights Interview with Dr.Bernie Siegel [Podcast]

  • Eclusive Interview with Dr.Bernie Siegel!
  • What do your drawings mean? Symbology and Colors and more...

Dr.Bernie Siegel's resume and life experience is longer than Sigmund Freud's and Carl Jung's combined!


It was an honor to interview him and ask him ANY questions I wanted.
MIND BLOWING INSIGHTS!
One of my favorite, just as an example:

At the hospital radiology department, UNBEKNOWNST to the radiologist, the machine was not working.
The radio-active element was NOT installed.

The radiologist however treated people for ONE MONTH with the "empty" machine.
The patients all improved as if they had been treated with a normal working machine!!!

Listen in to this interview for one JAW DROPPER after another!

*FAVORITE QUOTE*

"Consciousness can be experienced as a universal field that affects us all, and studies by quantum physicists have verified this."

 

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*TRANSCRIPT:*

See Below

BOOKS MENTIONED:

1.) The Art of Healing - Dr.Bernie Siegel



2.) Life Paints its Own Span - Susan Bach

http://geni.us/LifePaints

3.) The Secret World of Drawings - Gregg M. Furth

http://geni.us/secretworld

4.) The Psychobiology of Gene Expression - Ernest L. Rossi

http://geni.us/GeneExpression

5.) The Bridge of San Luis Rey - Thornton Wilder


6.) 365 Prescriptions for the Soul - Dr. Bernie Siegel


7.) The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze - William Saroyan


8.) Cancer Ward -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn




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Eric:               Welcome to Zbooks Successful Authors Podcast. With me today, I have the honor to interview a man who has healed and helped people, over thousands of people, with their pain after operations and many other things. He's got resumè that's longer than Sigmund Freud's and Carl Jung's put together. So, without further ado, help me welcome Dr. Bernie Siegel. Hi, Bernie. How you doing? 


Bernie:             Thank you, Eric. Well, I tell people not to ask me that because we've all got troubles. I always say, "Listen to the news," but it is to really orient people not just that flipping, "How are you?" total reminders and I often say, "If you want to know, you have the time to listen." Let me just say one other thing because for a while, I used to say, "I'm depressed. I'm out of my antidepressant. My doctor is away on vacation." You want to learn what the world is like, say that to people because one day, my wife said to me, "Honey, you're not listening. You think it's funny." 


Bernie:             I started paying attention to their answers. Incredibly, how many people were offering me their antidepressants, from pocketbooks to lockers and the world is wounded. I always say, "Put a bandage over your eye and go shopping or go to work and watch how many people talk to you about their troubles because they know you understand. You've got a visible wound," but we're all wounded. So, next time you see somebody say, "You look wonderful. Have a nice day," not, "How are you?" 


Eric:               I read that in your book, The Art of Healing. You have a lot of books, a very impressive product palette. So, yeah, why don't we just start with what are you working on lately? 


Bernie:             Well, I'm in the middle of two books because I had found something I wrote 20 years ago and letters from ministers saying how spiritual my writing was and that they quote me when they give sermons. 


Eric:               Wow!


Bernie:             They made me aware of how I was writing things and then they would quote something from the bible that was saying the same thing. That I have found true. It's not that I was an expert with the bible. I was just saying what I had experienced. As a matter of fact, years ago, people, especially doctors, "You're blaming your patients." I said, "What are you talking about?" "You're asking them what's going on in their life." I said, "Yeah. I want them to be aware of why they may have gotten sick at this time." Then I found this quote from Jesus, "It is done unto you as you believe." 


Bernie:             So, I said, "Well, why didn't everybody quote Jesus and say, 'What are you blaming us for? Is it difficult to believe it? You're making it our fault?'" "Yeah." People have done the same. You can't separate your mind from your body. I always call myself a Jungian surgeon because of all the things I learned that doctors had never told.


Bernie:             I mean, Jung interpreted dream and diagnosed the brain tumor. That's in his writing-


Eric:               How did that-


Bernie:             ... the medical students and say, "Ask people." One of my books is called The Book of Miracles, where dreams are included. Somebody appears in a dream, a women, dark skin with an accent, appears in your dream, says, "You have a lump in your right breast. You need to have that checked." Woman wakes up, feels it, goes to the hospital, diagnosed as cancer. She's told, "Your oncologist will be coming in in a few minutes, who's going to direct your treatment." Who do you think walks in to the room five minutes later? The woman from her dream. She was a doctor from India who came here to practice and here she is. 


Bernie:             So, patients weren't afraid to talk to me because they knew I wasn't as normal. I mean, that's what a lot of them told me. So, they said, "I know I can talk to you about this because we know you're not a normal doctor." I get such a kick out of that. See, what doctors are doing, and I'll give you an example in a minute, is treat people like a mechanical object. Meaning, if you need electrical work on your house, you call an electrician. If the plumbing, you don't have a house specialist. 


Bernie:             Well, I sent articles, just what you talked about, The Art of Healing, about drawings and dreams of my patients to a medical journal. I thought, "They ought to be interested in this and talk to patients about it. It's so simple to do." The article came back saying, "It's interesting, but it is not appropriate for our journal." So, I sent it to a psychiatry journal, came right back, but this time, I thought it was so interesting. What is the comment? "Yes, it's appropriate, but it isn't interesting. We know all of this." 


Eric:               Just the opposite. 


Bernie:             Yeah. So, that's the inaccuracy of medical training. You're not being taught how to care for a person. 


Eric:               Right. So, let's get some background. You were a surgeon almost as long as you are now a healer. 


Bernie:             Yeah. Well, what happened was I went to several workshops because I felt in pain over the fact I couldn't cure everything. You're not trained how to deal with your emotions or feelings. Why did God make a world like this? So, I went seeking help for myself. In those workshops, I did things like meditations that I thought were nuts. Close your eyes and make pictures. Then I went to one with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. She could see the troubles I was having because almost everybody there was somebody who had cancers, some other problem in their family. I was there because I was a doctor. That was my disease. She said, "Draw a picture for me." 


Bernie:             So, I drew this outdoor scene from one of my meditations. I handed it to her and she said, "What are you covering up?" I said, "What are you talking about?" She said, "Bernie, I gave you a white piece of paper. You don't need a white crayon to make snow on a mountain. It's already white. So, you added a layer." I knew what I was covering up because even in a self-portrait I did of myself when the family got tired of posing and all our pets would run away because they didn't want me to make them sit still, I painted myself in surgical outfit, cap, mask and gown in order to know it's me. 


Bernie:             So, there were so many symbolic covering ups. I talked to her about my feelings. Then she said, "Why is 11 important?" I said, "What's that question about?" She said, "Well, there are 11 trees in the drawing." I said, "Yeah, I've been doing this work 11 months." As a matter of fact, I just thought I was also married on the 11th. So, there may have been a lot in that number. She knew so much about me from the drawing. I thought, "This is amazing." We'd go to the hospital with crayons. I did a lot of children surgeries, as well as adults and I would say, "Here. Draw a picture." Then again, it was incredible what I was learning. 


Bernie:             When I was able to diagnose people, sometimes from a drawing they had done just sitting in their hospital room and left it on their little bedside stand. 


Eric:               That's amazing. 


Bernie:             I'd say, "You don't need surgery." They'd look at me like, "How do you know?" I said, "Look at your drawing." I mean, just an example, the man had drawn a tree. The trunk was wide open. It was connected with open roots underground, but every branch on the tree was just the width of the point of a pencil. So, I said to him, "Your disease is in your liver. Those ducts are blocked. You have inflammation. Your bile ducts aren't. They're wide open." In other words, the tree and the roots. 


Eric:               Wow! 


Bernie:             He looks at me like, "Wow!" I put things like that in the chart, so that other doctors would see it because they'd be impressed by the anatomy. They could see it in the drawing. 


Eric:               Interesting. 


Bernie:             Yeah. 


Eric:               What else does the tree symbolized? 


Bernie:             Well, it's your life, too. In other words, one woman who had called me, literally, years ago, the phone had a message on it. So, I picked it up when I got home. It said, "Do you have Jack Kevorkian's phone number? I want to be dead. My father sexually abused me and I have a brain tumor and I want to be dead." I called her and I told her, "I love her." She became what I call my chosen daughter and I became her chosen dad. That was a label given to me by a suicidal teenager, who felt my love and didn't commit suicide. 


Eric:               Wow! 


Bernie:             So, I worked on it and I said, "Becky, draw a picture of me and mail it." She sent me a tree and in her tree, there was a certain area where it was black like a nut hole in the tree. If you took the tree, in other words, if I said, "Becky, how old are you?" and then I look at the tree and divided it, say, into 25 segments, I could tell which segments were black and how old she was when her father abused her. 


Eric:               Wow! Where was the black part?


Bernie:             Well, right in the younger years of her life. The other thing that was interesting, she had spots all over her face. I said, "Why are there spots on your face?" She said, "That's how many times he did it." 


Eric:               Wow! That's crazy. 


Bernie:             As I said, "That's amazing." On the other hand, also, in a simple way, if somebody says, "I have to go have chemotherapy. I'm having surgery next week," "Draw yourself in the operating room," "Draw yourself having chemotherapy." Now, when one woman draws the devil giving me poison, you know she's going to have side effects on the way to the doctor. 


Eric:               Wow! 


Bernie:             Others can draw it as coming from God. I tell them, "Don't worry. Go ahead." While the ones who draw the operating room as a black, empty box and you're lying there alone, I tell them to visualize the operating room in a different way, going there, everybody caring about you, doing well, getting up, going right home, feeling well. Then a week later, this one woman, she drew this beautiful picture of the operating room. There's the God's light and the family outside and all the doctors caring for her inside. I said, "Okay. It's all right to go now," because, literally, your mind is so powerful. 


Bernie:             Nurses would say to me, "Your patients are our problem." "What is it?" "They don't take pain medication. They refuse it." I said, "Ever occur to you they don't hurt?" The nurses thought I was nuts. I prepared my patients, so they might say, "Oh, yeah. I'm sore, but I don't need morphine. Just a little pill will be fine. Thank you. 


Bernie:             I learned it's really hypnotic that children took my word as the truth. Often, they were misinterpreting it, though. So, you say to a child, "You go to sleep and you go in the operating room," and they fell asleep when I wield them in. I thought, "What's going on?" Then I realized, "You said he'd fall asleep when he went in the operating room." It became a joke. The staff used to burst out laughing because I realized, "This is wonderful for the kids." There's nothing to fear. 


Bernie:             I mean, I start laughing when I say that because some of them would yell at me and I'd said, "What are you getting mad at me for?" "You said I'd go to sleep and I sleep on my stomach." This was a boy I was turning over to get his appendix out. That's the part that impressed people. He took it so literally. He flipped over and went to sleep. So, I had to turn him back. 


Bernie:             I learned and I would say this to any medical person listening to this. The next time you use an alcohol sponge to clean the skin before an injection, tell the person, "This is a new type of sponge. It numbs your skin, as well as cleaning it." I would guarantee you that two-thirds of the people will say, "Thank you. I didn't feel it." What if the other doctors do that?


Eric:               It's like you're hypnotizing them and they don't know it. 


Bernie:             Yeah. The other third will say, "I felt it." I'd say, "Oh, it was probably a bad sponge." 


Eric:               Interesting. 


Bernie:             They still had some relief, "I felt it," versus, "Ow! That hurts." 


Eric:               Are there any kind of stative hypnosis when they go to you? 


Bernie:             Yeah. Your words, I call it deceiving people into health. That's an article on my website because again, doctors aren't trained to talk to people. I mean, we have all these commercials on television for drugs. What do they tell you? They tell you all the things that could go wrong after they tell you it's good for your blood pressure. By the time they're done telling you, "You need to be sterilized. Cancer will come back," I mean, I'd say, "Who wants the pill?"


Eric:               That's pretty crazy. 


Bernie:             Doctors have to understand how to talk to people. It will be a lot better if they said, "There are side effects associated with it, but everybody doesn't have the side effects. It's just something we want to alert you about." Because I would often tell patients, "Let your family read the list of side effects. If you have something, you tell them, 'I'm having a headache.' 'Okay,' and they say, 'That's not on the list.'" Because I know people who have lost their vision and the family has given them the wrong pills when they asked for something. 


Bernie:             That's the part that is so crazy, but does the pill work? Yes. It told me when somebody else in the family says, "What are you doing?" and then realized they gave them the wrong pill because of, as woman said, "There was a C on it." So, she gave her mother Compazine instead of Coumadin, which is an anticoagulant, but did the mother do okay? Yeah, because she thought she was taking it. 


Bernie:             Let me say it in a positive way, too, that a radiation therapist said to me one day, "I feel terrible." I said, "What's the matter?" He said, "I just inspected the machine, which we do every month. I realized when they repaired it last month, they did not put the radioactive material back in. So, I hadn't treated anybody for a month." I said, "Are you a dumbbell?" He said, "No, I'm not a dumbbell. Why did you say that?" I said, "Then how come you didn't realize you hadn't treated anybody?" I said, "It's because all your patients thought they were being treated and they had side effects and shrinking tumors because they thought they were being treated." 


Eric:               Wow! He's crazy, huh?


Bernie:             He almost fainted. He said, "Oh, my God! You're right." Think of the power of the mind. Then I've had phone calls from radiation therapists and oncologists saying, "We thought we weren't treating your patients because they had no side effects, but then we saw your name in the record. We realized it's a crazy patient." That's a call from a radiation oncologist because he went back to the patient. I said, "Oh, I see you went back to see those patients." He said, "How come you don't have side effects?" She said, "I get out of the way and I let it go to my tumor." 


Eric:               Interesting. 


Bernie:             A woman was brought to me by her relative because her doctor told her, "You're going to be dead in a few months. Don't bother to get chemotherapy. You'll feel worse." 


Eric:               That's a nice thing to say. 


Bernie:             So, she brought her to me, saying, "Dr. Siegel makes people well all the time." I called my oncologist friends, the ones who knew about my crazy patients and he examined her and she had leukemia. So, I said to her, "It's not a surgical situation." He said, "Bernie, I agree with her doctor. She doesn't have much hope, but I know you and your crazy patients. So, I will give her hope and we'll start the treatment." Within two months, this lady was in complete remission from her leukemia, not a sign of cancer in her body. 


Eric:               How did that happen?


Bernie:             She said ... I'm glad you asked that question. She said, "When Dr. Siegel sat on my bed and hugged me, I knew I'd get better." 


Eric:               Wow! So, that was all-


Bernie:             He was the oncologist. He said to me, "I know you and your crazy patients, so I'll give her hope." 


Eric:               Yeah, but that's a compliment. It's in your book how one of Bernie's crazy patients is like a compliment now, huh? 


Bernie:             Yeah. I mean, they meant it in a complimentary humorous way because when I started as a surgeon doing group therapy, I was criticized by the doctors. They said, "You're not a psychiatrist. You don't know what the hell you're doing. You may kill people faster when they come in the group." Then they began to see the difference about the people. It wasn't just me because the people ... This was another shock to me. 


Bernie:             At one of those meetings, when I told you about meditating and all of that stuff, I was the only doctor out of 150 people. It blew my mind because it was by a doctor, for doctors to help the cancer patients. I'm the only doctor in the State of Connecticut who showed up, but my patients sat around me. One of them said, "I need to know how to live between office visits."


Bernie:             So, when I went back to my office, I had a secretary who send letters to cancer patients. She forgot to put into it, "It's only for the patient who gets this letter," and she sent 100 letters. So, I thought, "Oh, my God! She'll bring her relatives, her neighbors, her friends. I'll have hundreds of people. What the hell am I going to do? How am I going to manage it?" 12 women showed up out of 100 letters. 


Eric:               12?


Bernie:             That's when you realized these are people who are not survivors. They don't have that will to live or they're afraid, "He tells you to draw a picture. I'm not an artist," not having cancer. I don't make up any of these stories. When I ask them to draw a picture and the woman hands you a picture and it says at the bottom, "I had my 10-year-old son do this because I'm not good at drawing." "Lady, I'm going to help you with cancer and you're afraid of a drawing? What is going on?"


Eric:               Crazy. One of your quotes, I mean, I've been underlining and highlighting your book for the last three days, basically, but one of your quotes is, "The questions we must ask are, how does the invisible become visible?" 


Bernie:             Right. 


Eric:               Go ahead. 


Bernie:             Are you done?


Eric:               Yeah. 


Bernie:             I mean, I had just written a spiritual book because the answer is God speaks in dreams and visions. The bible tells us that. See, what's the universal language? I could have somebody who's Chinese draw me a picture and I can tell them something. I don't need to speak Chinese, you see? Because that's the universal language. God did that, so that there would be some way we could all communicate. At the same time, God wanted us to have different languages. The Tower of Babel, that story, breaking it down. 


Bernie:             Anyway, so, it's the dreams and images that is the universal language and colors have meaning, too. Think about that. What makes you stop when you're driving? A red light. Purple is a spiritual color. I always say, "God's residence is blue and the passion, color red." You mix them together, so that every color has meaning. Believe me, you see it in life what people color things. So, the colors have meaning. Even the position on the page relates time, your past, present and future. 


Eric:               Oh, well, so, let's get into that. You just mentioned colors and past, present and future. Okay. Let's start with the colors. What do the colors mean in the drawing?


Bernie:             Well, I don't tell people ahead of time, okay?


Eric:               Yeah. That's another question I had. What's the process? Do you just-


Bernie:             Well, I give them a full box of crayons, black and white, brown and then the rainbow. Well, let me give you a wonderful quote. Solzhenitsyn in his book, Cancer Ward, has one of the man come in and say, "Look, it says here in his book, 'There are cases of self-induced healing.'" You never hear a doctor tell you that. Doctors talk about spontaneous remissions. You see, you'd walk here if it happens. I learned to say to people, "How come you didn't die when you were supposed to?" They all had a story. 


Bernie:             So, I taught others what I learned from those stories. He said self-induced healing and, "It was as though self-induced healing fluttered out of the great open book like a rainbow-colored butterfly and they all held up their foreheads and cheeks for its healing touch as it flew past." Now, why would he pick a rainbow-colored butterfly? Because those symbols mean something. What's the butterfly? The symbol of transformation. 


Eric:               Aha! Yeah. 


Bernie:             The caterpillar struggles, get out of the cocoon, becomes a butterfly. So, when people transform their lives, that's when they didn't die. What are you transformed? You create a life of order, the rainbow. 


Eric:               Aha!


Bernie:             Then beautiful things happen because your body responds. The body chemistry is altered when you're living that kind of life. Literally, so, people understand if somebody's in a comedy show and you draw their blood, their immune function improves, stress hormone levels go down. Put them in a tragedy and the opposite happens. The immune function goes down, stress hormone levels go up. They're only acting, but how we act ... Monday morning, we have more heart attacks, stroke, suicides and illnesses. So, you have to understand that. 


Bernie:             Then on the page as I said, there are quadrants. The upper left, I'll mention that, so people know, is the far future or the death concept. 


Eric:               Why is the future the death concept? 


Bernie:             Well, not the future, but that's what ... It represents either thing. I'm not trying to scare people.


Eric:               Okay. 


Bernie:             Somebody could put the sunshine up there and I say, "Hey, look. It's beautiful," or they say, "I don't know where to move to," and I say, "Look what's in the upper left. That's where you want to go. That's the place for you." As one woman did, she drew a picture with her husband in that upper corner flying a purple balloon. I said to her, "You're ready to go, but your husband isn't ready to let go." So, she brought him in and said to him, "Honey," and she was a nurse, she said, "I'm ready to go. You have to let go." He said, "But you do everything. You're a nurse. You take care of the house. You pay the bills. If you die, I'm dead." She said, "I will train you." 


Bernie:             There were four trees in the picture. Four months later, he said, "Honey, I'll cut the string if you need to go. It's okay." She said, "All right. I'll die Thursday when the kids get here from California." 


Eric:               She called out her death three days in advance, huh? 


Bernie:             Yeah. Well, my father, he said to my mother, "I need to get out of here." My mother said, "Oh, you want to get out of bed?" He said, "No. I want to get out of my body." 


Eric:               Wow! 


Bernie:             I said, "Look, if you want to go, okay. When do you want to ..." He said, "I'll die Sunday." So, we had a wonderful, beautiful party. Everybody came. My father, literally, died laughing because of the crazy stories my mother was telling him. You see the craziness of life. I go for a walk before going to the hospital and a voice and I mean this literally, I heard a voice say to me, "How did your parents meet?" I said, "I don't know." The voice said, "Ask your mother when you get to the hospital." 


Bernie:             When I walked in the hospital room, instead of hugging them and crying and loving, I said, "How did you two meet?" My mother said, "I was on the beach on vacation with girls I didn't know. I learned later they had a terrible reputation. So, some boys were coming down the beach and they tossed coins to see who would get the other girls and your father lost and got me." She told more stories and my father died laughing. He looked so healthy when he died. I thought he was going to change his mind and say, "Come all back tomorrow. This is too much fun." 


Bernie:             When he died, again, he can't know who was coming to be there before he died and say goodbye. The last person who had told us they'll be there walked into the room. He took his last breath and died. 


Eric:               Wow! 


Bernie:             So, again, the unconscious, the language. I have had a near-death experience when I was four years old. So, I know that our bodies die, but our consciousness does not. 


Eric:               Right. So, tell us about that, your near-death experience.


Bernie:             Well, what happened was we had carpenters in the house and back in those days when I was a kid, the carpenters would put the nails in their mouth to keep their hands free and they pop them up, bang them and hammer them in. So, I was sitting on my bed with an ear infection and I was playing with my toys. One of them was a telephone. So, I unscrewed the screw that was holding the dial-in, which is not a good way to make that toy. I put the pieces in my mouth and I aspirated them and then I was choking to death. 


Eric:               Uh-oh!


Bernie:             It was painful as hell. It is no way to die, believe me, but I couldn't call for help. I couldn't do anything. Then suddenly, I realized, "Hey, I stopped hurting. What's going on?" I noticed that I'm up in the air like near the ceiling and I immediately ... This is the part that interested me. Whenever I told the story, I heard myself talking about the boy on the bed, that I watched him dying. I never said, "I saw myself dying." I find that interesting as a four-year-old that I separated myself from that body. I wasn't dying. The kid on the bed was dying. 


Eric:               What happened?


Bernie:             Well, first, I have to say I thought it was wonderful and I wanted to be dead. I mean, almost every kid who has this happened said, "Yeah, I felt that way." Don't you like, "Oh, my parents will find me dead. I'm sorry, but I prefer being dead"? I call it a Heimlich maneuver by my angel because it wasn't my time. The boy on the bed had a seizure and vomited. 


Eric:               Wow!


Bernie:             I didn't think of it as an angel then, but years later as a doctor, I thought, "He vomited." It's Heimlich. Everything came flying out and the pieces came with and he took a breath and then I was sucked back into the body again. 


Eric:               Wow! I'm glad that happened. 


Bernie:             Yeah, but I can tell you, the first words I said were, "Who did that?" Now, I had decided to be dead and then I realized, "It's not your choice. God has a schedule. You're supposed to be alive, so stop complaining." My mother, in those days, near-death experience was not something you talk about or in the newspapers. So, when she came in, she wasn't interested in my experience. 


Bernie:             What was interesting to me as a four-year-old was, "Well, I thought everybody must know about this, so no point talking about it," but today-


Eric:               Dr. Bernie-


Bernie:             ... we have books written by everybody when they have that experience because finally, it's become accepted. 


Eric:               Before I forget, though, did you have a mother or a grandmother that was also clairvoyant or is it in the family or is it inborn talent? 


Bernie:             Well, one of my patients, maybe who you're thinking about, because she came to me one day as an office visit, as a patient and she said, "I've learned you're not a normal doctor," that I had an open mind. So, she said, "I'm a mystic and I was meeting with other mystics." I said, "Let's see if there's a message for Dr. Siegel." 


Bernie:             She said, "Do you want to hear it?" I said, "Sure. Go ahead." She said, "It's from Frank. If I had known it was this easy, I had bought the package a long time ago and never had resisted so much." 


Eric:               That's what she said or he said?


Bernie:             That's what he said and she brought me the message. I said, "I know who that is." That's a doctor whose first name was Frank, who had died of cancer, who was a member of our support group. So, when the patient left, her name was Monica, I said, "I'm going to call his wife." I called Frank's wife and I said, "I have a message from Frank. If you want to hear it, but I'm not doing this to upset you, but if you want to hear it, I'll tell you."


Bernie:             I said to her, "If I had known it was this easy, I had bought the package a long time ..." and I heard her scream over the phone. I said, "I told you I don't want to upset you." "You're not upsetting me. That's what he said every time we left the meeting, 'I can't buy the package.'" That made me know that what Monica was doing was getting messages from people who have died. 


Eric:               Wow!


Bernie:             She would come in, I mean, she's done it with my parents. I mean, these are people she doesn't know at all and doesn't even live near them, but the phone would ring and Monica has a message. I give her phone number to people whose loved ones have died. Nobody has ever called me and said, "She's nuts. She doesn't know." They always are thankful. As long as you're talking about this, let me tell you this. January of this year, my wife died. 


Eric:               Oh, I'm sorry. 


Bernie:             I thought, "Let us see if I hear from Monica," because I'm not going to call her. She doesn't know. Well, my wife died on a Friday and Sunday morning, the phone rings and it's Monica, "Bernie, I got a call from a lovely lady who was an opera singer. She said, 'Bobbie is fine. She's back together with the family. Everything's okay.'" 


Eric:               Amazing. 


Bernie:             You know what my wife's mother was? 


Eric:               What?


Bernie:             An opera singer. 


Eric:               Aha! 


Bernie:             I mean, a well-known classical opera singer. 


Eric:               What was her name, if you care to tell?


Bernie:             Pardon?


Eric:               What was her name? 


Bernie:             Well, her stage name, let me think, was Merrill Epton. 


Eric:               Wow! 


Bernie:             I mean, this is like, oh, God, maybe 80 years ago because I was impressed seeing the old newspapers about her. 


Eric:               That's a pretty heavy story. 


Bernie:             Yeah. 


Eric:               It fits with your book, too. 


Bernie:             Go ahead. 


Eric:               In your book, you have a ... I see you have a lot from C. G. Jung, but we'll get to that later. One of the quotes is, "The future is long-prepared for in advance and therefore, it can be guessed by clairvoyance." So-


Bernie:             So, that's why you can get your fortune told. 


Eric:               Yeah. My grandma was a tea leaf reader and everybody thought it was ... I mean, we have hundreds of examples that were just too exact to be coincidence. Right. So, I think that's in your family, too, huh?


Bernie:             Well, I'm sure it is. I'm not as good as a mystical fortune teller because what Jung was saying is they're reading you. You know what I mean? 


Eric:               Yeah. 


Bernie:             So, with drawings, I'm better at it, having all those images, but I will say this, there are times, somebody will come in to our cancer support group and I'll say, "You're going to do well," because I can feel it. You know what I mean? It's like an energy around them. Others come in and it feels so empty when you look at them. I know we've got to change them and help them if they're going to survive. 


Eric:               How many people have you helped? It's in the thousands already. 


Bernie:             Oh, God! Yes. I started the groups in the late '70s, I believe. 


Eric:               Wow!


Bernie:             It's been a long, long time, but I know it's worthwhile. See, I can call it the whole, if you know what I mean, and the survivor personality. It's worth giving it a shot because-


Eric:               Yeah, definitely. 


Bernie:             ... if they're willing to learn and let me coach them, then I can show them what survivors have taught us and to be able to do that. 


Eric:               So, did you then make the switch from surgeon to, I don't know, life coach or psychologist? Did you go back to college and become a psychologist or-


Bernie:             No. I learned from the people. You know what I mean?


Eric:               Yeah. 


Bernie:             They were my teachers because if they did well, I mean, that's why I would ask people, "How come you didn't die when you're supposed to?" They all had stories to tell you. Again, the psychiatrist write the articles, you see? I mean, one, George Sullivan is out in California. When the AIDS epidemic started, he realized there were certain AIDS patients who did very well. So, he wrote an article about an immune-competent personality, see? Because he saw it that way. 


Bernie:             I may add also, there were other psychiatrists who thought I was crazy, "What could you do to put people into a group when they have cancer?" That's it. Well, one of them, who was one of my biggest critics said, "I'm going to show that Siegel is basically crazy. It doesn't make a difference." He started support groups, see? He had a controlled group, no meetings to come to and the other group. Of course, what happened after several years? The people in the support group had a much better survival rate. I think none of the controlled patients were alive and three quarters of the group, who were the support group was. He was honest enough to say, "Hey, Siegel's right." 


Eric:               Excellent. 


Bernie:             Because I did it. See, when I did a study, people said, "Well, what do you expect? You're playing with the figures and making it come out just fine."


Eric:               So, he got results, but they weren't the ones he wanted, but he was honest enough to-


Bernie:             Right. Yeah. So, then it began to spread and not about failing, but about the potential, what could happen. I mean, some of the craziest simple things that happened, I often tell this story, somebody said, "You should write a book by that title. I'll tell you what it was. A fellow went in at the mountains of Colorado to die because he said, "It's so beautiful there. I want to die in the mountains." I told the family to call me when he die, so I'll come to the funeral. 


Bernie:             A year goes by, no phone call. I called the family to say, "Why did you ignore me? I wanted to come." He answered the phone and he said, "It was so beautiful here, I forgot to die." People said, "You should write a book with that title, It Was So Beautiful, I Forgot To Die. 


Eric:               That is a killer title. 


Bernie:             Yeah. I have many of the letters that say the same thing about what people did to enjoy the last few months of their life. Then the letter ends with, "I didn't die and I'm so busy I'm killing myself." See? You have to laugh at it. Again, in one of my books, I talk about the landscaper. That guy, he was diagnosed in springtime. He had retired, was depressed, developed cancer. I operated on him and I said, "You need more treatment." He said, "You forgot something." "What?" "It's springtime. I don't have time for treatment. Going to go home and make the world beautiful, so when I die, I'll leave a beautiful world." 


Bernie:             Six years later, my nurse handed me his chart and I said, "He's dead. We must have people with the same name." She said, "Open the door." So, I opened the door and there sat John. "I have a hernia from lifting boulders in my landscape business." He never retired, died at 91 after his wife died that he turned his switch, if you know what I mean and let the health go, but never of cancer. It never came back because he was busy making the world beautiful. He became my therapist. I mean that. I would spend time with him, so I could see a beautiful world and just to take a walk with him was therapy.


Eric:               Amazing. Let's get back to the drawing for a minute because that death quadrant thing and the past and the future really fascinates me. So, can you summarize, again, where the death quadrant and where the past, present and future in the drawing? 


Bernie:             Well, I'll say these things because then people worry when they do the drawings. If anybody is listening and still does a drawing, just relax and do it and then put it away for a day and then come back and look at it and things sneak in that you didn't realize, okay? I can draw a picture of myself and you'd say, "Well, you know what to draw," but then I'm amazed when you come the next day and you see something. It's like, let's say, you forgot to draw the fingers on your hands. So, what are you having trouble getting a grip on? You know what I mean? Little things. 


Bernie:             The upper right is the present. The lower right is the near future or recent past. The lower left is the distant past and the upper left is the far future or death concept. So, again, purple doesn't mean everybody's dying. I mean, it's a spiritual color. So, it's more like a purple butterfly, balloon, something going up in the sky that's saying, "I'm leaving." For me, that also helps parents whose children give them a symbol. I can say, "Look, your child is ready. Don't keep putting them through everything. Your child is ready to go." 


Bernie:             Intuitively, everybody knows the colors. I mean, just to give you one example, where one child drew this purple balloon draped in black going out of the picture. Below it is a green and yellow child crying. I thought, "This is crazy." Green is natural. Yellow is energy. I said to her, "What does this means?" She said, "That's not me. That's the kid in the next room crying." See, that's what fascinates me. She's ready to die, but when she draws the kid in the next room, it's back to healthy colors again. [inaudible 00:41:32] do that. It's that intuitive wisdom and knowledge. 


Bernie:             So, again, as I said, if people say, "I don't know where to live. I don't know what treatment to do," there is a part that's the future and can tell you if you had a troubled past. Yeah, there'll be things there that show up on the lower left and all of those. I just tell people, "Draw a steam," to let it just come from their unconscious. I don't tell them to look outside and draw a picture or copy something. Just draw something.


Bernie:             Let me give you a simple example. My wife did a lot of work with me. When everybody was drawing, she happened to pick up the crayons and drew a picture. We have five kids. One of them, I was trying to get him out of the house to go to college. What she drew and at the time she drew it, two were away at college, three were home, including this boy and my wife and I. When I looked at these flowers she had drawn, instead of five at home and two away, she drew four at home and three away. I knew that man, Jeffrey is the boy's name, was going to college. He made up his mind. 


Bernie:             Now, between it, there were six little, again, more little structures, little flower-type things and I knew that the sixth had to do with the time. I know it could mean six years or six days. Six days from the day of her drawing, he packed up and drove off to join his brother in Denver, where they were both going to go to school there. That's the kind of stuff. My wife was just doing something to fill in the time. Here was the information for me about it and the future. 


Eric:               So, that's interesting because have you heard of this HTP Test, the House-Tree-Person Test? 


Bernie:             Yes. I've heard of it. I'm not any expert, so to speak, in it. 


Eric:               It sounds like you're an expert, though. 


Bernie:             Well, I mean, yeah, without knowing what it means, you know what I mean? Not trained about HTP. All these things, I mean, I often would say to people, "Draw your home and family." Yeah. You can tell all from the house. For instance, one child with cancer said, "I don't get enough time from my family." I said, "All right. Draw your family." 


Bernie:             See, the parents suddenly, "Oh, we're so good to her. Oh, we take care of her," but what she drew was herself sitting on a chair all alone and the rest of the family was on the sofa with an empty seat there, where she could have been. When the parents looked at that, they said, "Thank you." They took her home and treated her very differently. Again, it's not me criticizing them. You see, I'm not saying, "You're a bad parents. You're not doing ..." It's the child speaking to them.


Eric:               Interesting. So, tell us more. What do you look for in the house when people draw a house? 


Bernie:             Well, is there a chimney to let the hot air out, okay? Does it look warm inside? Lit up, not just empty. So, even the garden around it, pass in and out, who's home, who isn't. So, you see daddy's at work or not in the picture, mom's in the kitchen, "My sister is in her bedroom and I'm all alone." So, who's in what rooms? You can feel the warmth of the loving family. What's interesting, I will mention mine because at the workshop, I drew our home and family. There's a lot of light. Everything looks lovely and I wanted to make sure everybody knew we have a wonderful family. 


Bernie:             The same child who was driving me nuts, he wasn't holding hands of the brothers on each side of him. I had to get out to draw a picture, so everybody will know we have a wonderful family and everybody is holding hands. He wasn't touching anybody. When I looked at that later, you know what I mean? An hour or two later, when I was going over all the drawings of everybody, I thought, "Wow! I was blind to what I drew, but what I drew spoke the truth, not what I was trying to tell everybody, how we wonderful we are." 


Eric:               Well, you got your feedback, huh?


Bernie:             That's right. 


Eric:               So, did you learn a lot of these from Carl Jung and his teachings? 


Bernie:             Well, yeah. Well, I should say yes, but I learned a lot from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who was a Jungian because she became really a basic friend of mine and a therapist for me. Then the other was in London, Susan Bach. I came across her drawing, The Secret World of Drawings. See, these are drawings by children with cancer. The kids aren't saying, "I'm not an artist." So, she had an incredible collection. 


Bernie:             I went to London to be with her. I learned from her drawings, from the colors. Then she put a book out and I got that and learned more. So, it was just incredible to sit and learn from her. As I said, her book, to me, was ... because I would point out things about the body that I see in a drawing like a stream could be blood vessels, if you know what I mean. 


Bernie:             So, I would look and say, "Oh, look," and she'd say, "Jung was ..." This is here quote, "Jung was fascinated by the somatic aspects of the drawings." I said, "It's because he knew anatomy." See, that's the trouble. An art therapist doesn't know anatomy. So, they miss things that I might see in a drawing. Again, what's amazing is their children, I mean, one of the anesthesiologist was so fascinated, he made a coloring book for every child to draw before surgery. 


Eric:               Blank, right? 


Bernie:             I told the intuitive wisdom. It said on this page, "An anesthesiologist, who is dressed in green pajamas," it's what they look like, "will come in and be taking care of you." Now, this child draws the anesthesiologist in red, even it says on the page he's wearing green. Why would he do that? Well, the anesthesiologist said, "Yes. His mother has a muscular dystrophy and he could have a genetic defect, which will lead to adverse reactions to muscle relaxants and can threaten his life." So, I said immediately, "Turn to the last page." If he draws himself purple, I'm sending him home. I'm not going to operate on him. Well, at the last page, he had red and black, which said, "I'm hurt where the surgery was and I'm not happy," those colors. So, we went ahead with the surgery. 


Bernie:             Another child sitting in a waiting room, has never been in the operating room, drew a picture of the operating room she's never been in, the color of the drapes that we put on people. She drew two lights and black knobs, where they bend to focus them and how many people were going to take care of her. It was incredible. Again, that's what changed people in the hospital, "Because Siegel is always crazy." "No. Siegel is very interesting. This is fascinating. It's better than an X-ray." So, they became my supporters and we did this regularly. 


Bernie:             What's interesting? I showed them this because you had an identification photo before you came in to the hospital. They made it like a driver's license. You know what I mean? With your picture. On each one, they put a band of color behind the photograph running across from one corner, from the lower left to the upper right and then your picture was in the middle and the color was decorating it. 


Bernie:             I showed them how fascinating that was because the administration got a yellow color. The people who did radiation therapy got a red, an emotional color. The doctors got a purple color, to be spiritual people. So, everything, every occupation in the hospital had an appropriate color behind them. Strangers had orange. That's a color of change. 


Eric:               Interesting. 


Bernie:             So, if they're in for the today, they gave them that one. Again, that helped show people what we're showing you. It's no different than often, when you go into the emergency room, you get a wristband and things like that and they have a color and the color is appropriate to the emergency room and what's happening. 


Eric:               So, what's your advice for parents, for example, and their children's drawings and they're not a psychologist or a pediatrician? 


Bernie:             I say this to many parents. I say, "Ask your child to draw a picture of your home and family and tell them that you want to decorate the refrigeration because you're proud of them and their drawings and you want to put it up," because you don't tell your kids, "I want to evaluate you." As I said, I have five kids. When they were drawing pictures in their room and I'd walk in, they'd slump down on the desk over their picture. Why? "I don't want daddy to see this and start telling me ..." 


Bernie:             If they have a problem, they'd say, "Dad, what should I draw? I want you to help me." I would tell them what to draw. I would say to the parents, "Draw the home and family. I want to decorate the kitchen." Then sit down and look at it, "Where are you? Are you touching? Are you together?" all those things. 


Bernie:             As a matter of fact, one medical student was so interesting. He said he didn't know what specialty to go into. I said, "Draw a picture of each one, family doctor, radiation oncologist ..." I forgot what the other one was, what the other specialty was. I said, "Draw the three." Now, he was such a nice kid. I thought, "You want to be a family doctor." That's what I would have told him, but when you look at his three pictures, the family doctor was so damn busy, he wasn't with his patients. The radiation oncologist, I was amazed, was holding his patient's hand and his wife's hand and the other doctor, also, wasn't close to people. I can't remember what the other specialty was. 


Bernie:             I said to him, "Be a radiation oncologist. That's the best. Look at this," and he was a medical student then. He wasn't married. Years later, I got a phone call because we kept in touch. He said, "We're having trouble." I said, "What's the matter?" "My wife. She can't conceive. We can't have kids. No pregnancy." I said, "Matt, look at your drawings. There are three children in every drawing you did in your far future, that upper left."


Eric:               Interesting. 


Bernie:             I said, "I can't tell you whether you're going to adopt three kids or you're going to have them, but you're going to have three children." A few years go by and he's got three children-


Eric:               Amazing. 


Bernie:             ... and happy as a radiation oncologist. 


Eric:               Sorry. You're breaking up there. 


Bernie:             Again, he's not just treating cancer [inaudible 00:54:10]


Eric:               Okay. You broke up a little bit with our webinar recording. Could you repeat that? 


Bernie:             The whole thing or ...?


Eric:               No, no, just the last two lines, just the last-


Bernie:             Well, what happened was I said to him, "You drew three children in the far future. So, whether you adopt them or your wife has them, I can't tell you, but you will definitely have three children." After a few more years went by, they now have three children. 


Eric:               Wow!


Bernie:             That's in you. Let me just add one more about having children because a woman I knew from our cancer group called me one day and she said, "Bernie, I'm pregnant, but I'm going to miscarry. I'm in the hospital. It's very emotional. I wonder if you could come over and talk to me." So, I went over her hospital room and she was in labor. The doctors were there, the nurses, family, but the room was so filled with misery and horror because this terrible thing is going to happen. 


Bernie:             I just walked in and immediately, I could feel it. I screamed, "Get out of here. Get out of here." They all looked at me like, "Who are you?" I said, "Get out." She told everybody to leave. They left and I calmed her down and we did a meditation and imagery of controlling her uterus, calming it down, stopping the-


Eric:               Uh-oh! Are you there? Sorry. 


Bernie:             ... and it all happened. Yeah, I'm here. 


Eric:               Okay. I got a message. My internet connection is unstable. I'm sorry. Just the last three or four words. 


Bernie:             Well, I was able to get her labor to stop by getting her to communicate with her uterus. 


Eric:               Wow! 


Bernie:             She feel it and she went on to a normal labor and delivery. The nice news was I got a phone call and it said, "We're naming the child after you. It was a boy, but his name is Brady because we're Irish." 


Eric:               That's cool. Okay. Do you ever see snakes in drawings?


Bernie:             Yes. I mean, we had every kind of animal in our house. We had snakes roaming our house as well. I think a snake can be something that someone fears. I'd have to say, "What kind of snake is it?" If you said it's a poisonous snake, then I'd say, "What in your life is threatening you with poison?" When people have a problem, whether if they said it's a snake, "All right. Describe a snake. What does a snake mean to you?" or "I lost my job," " I have cancer." I'd say, "What words would you use to describe what you're going through? What's your headache like?" "Pressure." "What's it like to have cancer?" "Failure." 


Bernie:             See? Then I say to those people, "What's the pressure in your life? What makes you feel like a failure in your life?" Now, if somebody said, "It's a wake up call. It's a new beginning," fine. They're on the right track, but when you hear negative words like draining, "What's draining you?" The pressure was the woman's marriage. The failure was her parents committed suicide when she was a child. She must have been a failure as a child. Those things had nothing to do with their disease, but it had to do with their lives. Boy, do people thank you and go home and straighten out their lives. 


Eric:               I see quite often drawings of snakes that are smiling and quite often in the tree. So, I really don't know what to make of that. 


Bernie:             Well, let me tell you an interesting story that always impress me. I was almost going to say it happened to me, but really, it's a story. You're walking down outdoors and there's a cave and you go in to see what's in it. There's this beautiful gem, I mean, a treasure sitting there. So, you go to pick it up. What do you see? A big snake hissing. So, you back away and leave. You spend your life regretting that you didn't have the courage to pick up that gem, what it would have meant to your family. 


Bernie:             So, when you're an old man, you go back to the cave and you walk in and there's the gem. What's sitting next to it? A little frog. You pick up the gem and you take it home. You see? I think that's what that snake is representing. It's people's fears, what they're afraid of doing, what they're afraid will happen to them. When you grow up and realize you have the potential, you're not afraid, it's just a little frog. 


Eric:               If somebody wanted to learn more about Carl Jung and his drawing and symbology, which book would you recommend?


Bernie:             Well, the three things I recommend, there are three books. In my book, The Art of Healing, there are 60 drawings. 


Eric:               I have it. Yes. 


Bernie:             Then there is Susan Bach, as I said, Bach, The Secret World of Drawing and Gregg Furth, Furth, Life Paints Its Own Span. He's a Jungian therapist, so there's not anatomy so much in his book, but more of psychology. Susan Bach has a combination of life and death, the psychology. Mine is a little bit of everything because there's anatomy in it and other things where I as a doctor saw these things and put them in. 


Eric:               Yeah. When I got your book ... Anytime, I'm reading up to five books and maybe 10 if you count the audiobooks, but when I got your book, then I couldn't put it down, so I just kept going and going. I'm still highlighting everything in it. It's amazing. I highly recommend it. Is that your favorite book of yours?


Bernie:             I'll tell you in a minute what my favorite, but I say to people what you just said, "Highlight books." I fold the corner of the page down and then come back and read it two years later. You'll notice that you find things in there you didn't notice before. Hopefully, you will because that's a sign that you're progressing and becoming more enlightened. I discovered that accidentally when I started rereading books without realizing I had read it before and then I'd say, "Hey, you marked it. You read it," but new things are jumping off the page. 


Bernie:             The thing that I keep reading now that I wrote several years ago is called 365 Prescriptions For The Soul, a message for every day. Now, I used to randomly open it and look, but now, this year, I started again on January 1st each day opening it. What awakened me was how much I have forgotten because I think this book may have been published, it could have been 18 years ago. Let me just see. I have it on my desk. What year is in it? 2004. So, 14 years ago. 


Bernie:             It's enlightening me because I read about my experiences and say, "Oh, I had forgotten about that." So, it's a wonderful teacher with quotes, stories. I mean, it's practical, but it keeps you focused on life. I think that's the important thing. Then I read a lot of other spiritual books by various, I call them religious leaders, but the message to me is what they're teaching us. 


Bernie:             See, I learned and why I began to study religion ... How would you like this one? You go get a smallpox vaccination and then you hear what the pope tells you in 1823. He said, "You vaccinated yourself, you're not going to heaven. God decides who gets smallpox." I'd be like that one. 


Eric:               Is that a true story?


Bernie:             Oh, yeah. 


Eric:               Crazy, huh? 


Bernie:             I began to study religion because I saw for some patients, it was a handicap. 


Eric:               Yeah, but I noticed there's a-


Bernie:             To say this in a modern, Billy Graham, a minister here in the states. I don't know if you're familiar with him, but somebody wrote to him in his newspaper column, "Does God want me to have cancer?" His answer was, "Not necessarily." I said, "What the hell are you talking about?" He said, "Well, supposing you win the lottery and everything's wonderful in your life, God gives you cancer and now, you'll come back to church. You got a problem." I mean, I can't believe when religious leaders do that. Let me talk why I read Maimonides, A Thousand Years Ago, two very significant ones. 


Bernie:             He said, "Disease is a loss of health. It is not something God gives you. You've lost your health." The bible tells us, "If you find what your neighbor has lost, return it to him." So, people need to understand that. The other, which is very classical, "If people took as good of themselves as they do their animals, they would suffer fewer illnesses."


Bernie:             Now, that's a thousand years ago and let me give you a quote from modern day magazine called Cat Fancy magazine, "Your cat dies of lung cancer, your other cat is having trouble breathing and asthma because you and your husband is smoking in the house." I always say to people, "What would you do?" Now, some people say, "Well, I'll stop smoking." I'd say, "Wrong answer." What this lady wrote was, "Doug and I now smoke in the yard. We love our cats more than the convenience of smoking indoors. We are not killing our cats anymore. We hope you're not killing yours."


Bernie:             Can you imagine publishing that in a magazine without saying something to the readers?" Well, that's what the magazine did. See? They care about cats. If you want to kill yourself, go ahead. I mean, it's so absurd. This is a thousand years later after Maimonides recommended you take care of-


Eric:               A thousand years. 


Bernie:             Yes. 


Eric:               Let me give you a couple of quotes of yours. I mean, I can't go through your whole book because it's so fascinating, but I really love these two or three, "If you limit yourself to the channels accepted by your peers, your life will be all about staying within their confines." Then, "Consciousness can be experienced as a universal field that affects us all," and studies by quantum physicists have proven this. Can you elaborate on this? 


Bernie:             Oh, boy! I'm trying to think of-


Eric:               I found that really fascinating. 


Bernie:             It's something specific to quantum physicists, but it's part of why, for instance, Jung and Einstein became close because, again, the speaking energy equal mass times the speed of light squared. I mean, what the hell is that? See, the quantum physicists, this is what I do say, I love talking to them because they're into the mystical. We don't know how the hell life began. See, even the bible, I mean, what's his name? Joseph Campbell said, "Religion is a misinterpretation of mythology," and people get all upset when you said. 


Bernie:             What we're talking about, God was created, then creates man. It's a stepwise thing. So, whether you're talking about an Adam or creation, that's why the quantum physics is so mystical just because of the fact that we can't explain it, but here we are. I say, literally, you see, why I talk about it in the same way, if we spend all the money, we're spending exploring outer space, on the human body and inner space of where we would be today in terms of our health and longevity. So, inner space is just as remarkable and mystical as outer space. 


Eric:               So, what do you say to your atheist patients? I've noticed there's a lot of spirituality and religion in your books and your work. 


Bernie:             Well, my definition of God is loving, intelligent, conscious energy. See? You need all those things for creation. So, it isn't ... Well, there's a wonderful story called The Next Voice You Hear by Edward Albee, where God talks to everybody. God says, "A perfect world is not creation. It's a magic trick. Stop creating religions. There's a problem." You see? That's the difficulty, that when I've been called Satanic and a cult. Why? You close your eyes and you meditate and Satan could take over your images. That's a quote from a minister telling people not to attend my lecture because the devil might show up because as soon I tell them not to go, they all go. 


Bernie:             It's so crazy, you see, that we argue over words. That's when we get into trouble. So, I'm not a fundamentalist. I don't let words control me. I let experience control me. See, I don't live by my beliefs. I live by my experience. I hear voices. I mean, it's amazing, the incredible things that I have experienced and I mean, literally, talking to me. 


Bernie:             If I get started, we'd go on for hours more, but I can't deny that those things happen. It's quieting the mind. Let me maybe emphasizing this. 


Eric:               Yeah. Go ahead. 


Bernie:             The one key I've learned that for everyone to do is to quiet your mind. The ugly duckling, she sees a swan on a still pond. Joseph Campbell talked about a tiger brought up by goats because his mother died chasing them. He thinks he's a goat until a tiger takes him to a still pond and he sees he's a goat. I have an animal intuitive friend. I thought she's nuts. She talks to animals. It's what she does. She taught me how, "Bernie, quiet your mind and you can get into the animal's mind and talk with them," and I have. 


Bernie:             I may add, she has told me where to find the lost pet in Connecticut while she's been in Africa and California. She-


Eric:               How did you do that? 


Bernie:             Because she gets into the mind of the animal. 


Eric:               Crazy, huh? 


Bernie:             Yes. I thought it was until she did it. Then I wrote a forward for her book because I said, "You cannot deny." See, I experienced it. I said, "You can't deny what she did." Her name is Amelia Kinkade. I mean, she's become a good friend now. 


Eric:               You touched on that earlier. What Western doctors and medicine doesn't understand is invalid in the medical world, right?


Bernie:             Right. So, again, when you read about meditating, bible, so often that still pond theme comes up. Part of it, really important and simple words and Amelia gave me, she said, "Bernie, if your dog is missing, your cat is missing, stop screaming their name. That's not going to achieve anything. Quiet your mind. You'll get into their mind," and it always works and then I can talk to them. I could say, "Come home. I don't want you out in the woods overnight." I mean, I adopted a dog, who jumped out of my car on the way home from the animal shelter when I stopped to get gas. 


Bernie:             I had to get everybody helping me to capture him and bring him back in to the car. When I got home, I quieted my mind and I said, "Why did you do that?" I couldn't believe the answer, but I've learned when you can't believe it, it's really coming from the animal. 


Eric:               What was the answer?


Bernie:             "I belong to a couple. The wife is lovely. The husband was an alcoholic. When he would come home from work, the wife would say, 'Take the dog for a walk.' He put me in the car, go drinking, abused me and I don't want to be in a car." I said to him in my head, "I would never treat you that way. I love you. You're in a new home. We'll take care of you." 


Bernie:             Two weeks later, I accidentally hit the button that opened the side door of the minivan, where the door slides back automatically. I didn't know it. I went shopping. I came back and as I'm walking towards the car, I thought, "Oh, my God! He's gone." He was sitting in the open car waiting. 


Bernie:             My other dog wasn't there. Then I got upset, but I hear Amelia say, "Stop yelling. Get your mind quiet." I realized he was in the market looking for me. So, I went back to the market and there he was with the security guard saying, "You're looking for a dog?" 


Eric:               That's interesting. 


Bernie:             Yeah. I talk to all animals now and they also read my mind. If people are hearing this and think I'm nuts, say, "Okay. I'm thinking you to the vet tomorrow." They won't let me come near them. I have outdoor cats and I made an appointment. I said to the vet, "You need to see me first thing in the morning. That's when they come to eat and I'll grab them, the two cats outside." Next morning, they don't show up. They didn't show up for a week. 


Eric:               They know. 


Bernie:             I, finally, said to the vet, "Forget about it. I can't get them." Next morning, they were sitting and waiting for breakfast.


Eric:               They know. They know. 


Bernie:             I said, "How the hell did they know?" but they know. 


Eric:               Yeah. Well, that's not too far off. Sigmund Freud had a god named Jofi and he was there for every session. As a matter of fact, he got signals from the dog before the session even started about the patient. 


Bernie:             I do. That dog, Buddy, I mentioned to you, that was his name, Buddy. He was the one drawn to alcoholics. So, I bring all our dogs and I also had a cat named Miracle. I'll tell you how she got her name that I brought her to treatments and making rounds. Buddy would walk around the circle because we all sat in a big circle. He would walk up to some people and I could hear him saying, "Oh, you're doing very well. You don't need me." Then he'd go to the next person and say, "Oh, you need a dog. You need me and feel better." 


Bernie:             When I got good reports, I would tell it to people. I'd say, "You just got a good report from the dog." If it was a negative, I wouldn't tell them that, but I knew he stayed there to get that report. 


Eric:               You got a good report from the dog, huh?


Bernie:             Yeah. If you know about a Labrador, you can call it a Labreport, all right? This happened in a lady's dream. She said, "A cat named Miracle appeared, told me how to treat my cancer and I asked my doctor if he would and he said he would and I'm fine now." So, one of my kids brought home this kitten and I said, "We'll name it Miracle." She was a miracle. 


Bernie:             I mean, I have to say in a sense, I've treated her like she was a dog, meaning that I took her everywhere and we went walking. She was just amazing. She didn't fear anything because of her experience. You know what I mean? She's been everywhere with people. I put her in people's hands and they would all relax if they felt her. She lived to be over 20 years and died because of a medication that she needed when she developed a hyperactive thyroid. She had some crazy bizarre reaction. 


Bernie:             I mean, I don't know. If she hadn't needed the medication, she could have lived to be 50. I mean, she was just that incredible kind of creature. I have to tell you something humorous because I entered her in a dog show and when I showed up with her and one of our dogs, they said, "What are you doing here? This is a dog show." I said, "She thinks she's a dog, so I entered her. I don't want to upset her." There's so much attention because again, she had no fear. Imagine a cat sitting in the middle of a dog show with two other hound dogs running over to sniff and she would just rub noses with them. 


Bernie:             The next year, a sign went up. It said, "Dog Show" and at the bottom of the sign it said, "For dogs only". I knew they were telling me, "Don't come back because your cat took over the show." It's those kinds of dreams. I've had dreams, too, where cats ... When I have sought therapy to understand it, one was a cat called ... I thought it was called Diamond, but nobody was saying the D at the end. When I was talking to James Hillman, the Jungian therapist, he said, "No, Bernie. It's Daimon." It was just short. Oh, God! It made such a difference to talk to him and how in five minutes, I understood so many things about dreams I was having and I may add a past life. 


Bernie:             When somebody ... You see, again, these things have happened to me. It wasn't do you believe, not believe, but consciousness doesn't die. So, we can be born with the consciousness of people who preceded us. I always say, "When you see a five-year-old playing a violin in a concert orchestra, how the hell did that happen?" Well, there was a violinist that's in him, his consciousness. So, they have that talent. 


Bernie:             When a friend heard how many interviews I was having, how many places I was going to speak, she said, "Bernie, why are you living this life?" She wanted me to calm down and quiet down. I went into a trance because she said that to over the telephone, "Why are you living this life?" I will just abbreviate it, but I saw myself with a sword in my hand killing people and the dogs. I'll tell you, it was like watching a move about myself. It's the only way I can describe it. I cried for hours. 


Bernie:             The message that it gave me I felt was, "Maybe that's why you're a surgeon today, who help people with a knife. You're not killing." 


Eric:               Aha! 


Bernie:             The other was that one of our kids came home with the word "words" written over and over again on a canvass, in an art dress. What happens when you write words, words, words with no space between them? 


Eric:               I saw that picture. 


Bernie:             Yeah. Swords, swords, swords.


Eric:               Yup. They blend together. 


Bernie:             Where is this coming from? He's a little pipsqueak at school. I think he was telling me something. You can feel secure and about the past and I really felt and Hillman helped me because it was so emotional, but it made me realized why I wanted a dog when I was a little kid. Growing up there, it's crazy, but they didn't want a dog. 


Bernie:             Then in one of my books, love animals are miracles, you understand because I've discussed the Siegel Zoo. I mean, we've been rescuing and saving animals for decades. I mean, this house was a zoo. You wouldn't believe it. I mean, everything was running. Moose had names. They were all family and even snakes. 


Bernie:             It made me realized there's a reason you've always behaved this way, rescuing and saving people. The knife, as I say, can kill or cure. It taught me so much about my past by having to have experience. Hillman, this is a very key statement and everybody needs to know who their lord is because I was a knight in a castle. The lord of the castle said to me to go kill the neighbor's daughter. I said, "Why don't I kill him? He's the problem." They were fighting over the land that was between the two properties. 


Bernie:             He said, "No. I want you to kill his daughter?" "If I don't?" "Then I'll kill you." "Okay. I'm going." I went and killed the daughter and her dog who was in her bedroom when I went in because I wanted to try to kill her in her sleep. Anyway-


Eric:               In the dream?


Bernie:             Pardon?


Eric:               In the dream?


Bernie:             Well, it wasn't a dream. I was living it. It was like watching a movie. Let's put it that way, seeing myself doing all of this. 


Eric:               Wow!


Bernie:             When I said about the lord to Hillman, he said, "Bernie, you know what you're saying?" I said, "What do you mean?" "You keep saying 'My lord'." I said, "Yeah, the lord of the castle." He said, "No, Bernie. It's your lord. You have to go home and relive this." Boy, when he said that, I knew what it meant because think about Jesus, think about Abraham. "I want you to kill your kid." It's the same situation I was in. Why didn't Abraham say, "Take me. Leave the kid alone," okay? He says, "Okay," and he ends up with a living child. 


Bernie:             Why did Jesus, why didn't he jump off the cross to impress people? He's got full of miracles, so why didn't he say to God, "Look, can we find another way to do this"? He had total faith. I mean this today. If God came to me and said, "Bernie, would you give up your life to make a difference in the world?" I'd say, "Yes." 


Bernie:             Now, I couldn't have said that years ago before my past life and the therapy with Hillman. I would have had a lot of troubles saying yes. Today, I have that faith and I can say it. I have seen people go home with cancer, expecting to die and come back free of disease. "What did you do?" "I left my troubles to God." That's a quote from a lady whose cancer disappeared. They went home and they had faith. What that did to them and their body? I used to have a lot of trouble understanding Abraham and Jesus, but I learned they had faith and they knew what they were doing was the right thing for everybody, not just personal. 


Eric:               Could you mention again Hillman or his book?


Bernie:             Yeah. He wrote ... Oh, my God! I can't remember the title of it. 


Eric:               He was your therapist? 


Bernie:             About Fiction, there's a word "fiction" in the title because what I've learned also is it's not fiction. It's the truth. See, like reading Solzhenitsyn or reading other novels, I love William Saroyan. Yeah. In one of his, a young man dies starving to death. The last three words in the story, it's called The Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, trapeze to God. He becomes dreamless, unalive and perfect. 


Bernie:             Now, why those words? If you leave your body, blind people see. Deaf people hear. You see? You're perfect again or in the show Carousel. An angel says to a man who died, "You want to see your daughter graduate from high school." "My daughter is a baby when I was killed. What are you talking about?" The angel says, "There's no time up here." 


Bernie:             Now, why would somebody, Rodgers and Hammerstein, writing a musical, where did they come up with that sentence, "There's no time up here"? That was something else I struggled with. When parents would tell me, "I was driving down the parkway and I heard my son's voice. This son died seven years ago. I heard him say, 'Ma, slow down,' and a pigeon landed in the lane and he raised pigeons, so I slowed down. There's a sheet of ice and 20 cars piled up, but I wasn't in it because my son told me to slow down." 


Bernie:             Now, see, that drove me nuts. I mean, what the hell is a kid doing for seven years? There's no time. It's not seven for that kid, if you know what I mean. All that began to make sense to me, so all the people's experiences and everything else. So, I mean, I know I don't have anything to fear about death. I mean it. When my path comes, fine. I'll turn the switch off and go. 


Eric:               You'll tell everybody beforehand what minute you're going to die, huh?


Bernie:             Yes. 


Eric:               So, did you have ... That was after you shaved your head, right? What happened before you shaved your head?


Bernie:             Well, that's another one. You see, in the 1970s when our sons were wearing their head down to their shoulders and they told the barber, "If you shave my head ..." they're going to kill him. I went in and said, "I'll go away on vacation," and that was a lie. It was a Friday. I said, "I'll go away this week." So, he shaved my head. My wife almost fainted when she saw me. Anyway, I didn't know why, but I had to. 


Bernie:             Here, we're back to Carl Jung. I'm reading a story. The hero's head is shaved in this myth and Jung said, "It's like what monks do to uncover their spirituality." It's called the tonsure. It creates the head of the child, a little baby again, again. See, what are you covering up? That was a theme we started with. Here is an uncovering something. Boy, when I read that, again, I thought, "Oh, if I've been in therapy in the '70s, I wouldn't have had to do this." 


Bernie:             Let me add this. See how our life is stored in our body. I mean, we know this and accept it now because you have a heart transplant, lung, different organs and you know about the person that was put into you. People don't say, "You're crazy," anymore. They know. So, I went ... Let's see. When I was 50, I have to tell you why I say this because I was born to a woman who was very sick. My mother was told not to have children, "It could kill you." She went ahead and got pregnant. I won't go into the details, but I mean, she had a hell of a difficult time, couldn't survive a cesarean section. They finally reached in half the week of labor and pulled me out. 


Bernie:             My mother said, "They didn't hand me a child. They handed me a purple melon." That's from all the hemorrhage and bruising and swelling. She said, "We wrapped you in kerchiefs when we're allowed to take you home from the hospital, put you in a carriage and covered it, so nobody would see you and get upset. I said, "Then why am I not a drug addict, alcoholic? Why did I survive?" If you don't touch a child, I mean, kids in the 1800s died in all the [crosstalk 01:28:49] because nobody was touching them and stimulating them. My mother said, "Oh, my mother took you, poured oil all over you and pushed everything back where it belong three, four, five times a day."


Bernie:             Now, jump ahead 50 years, I got a shaved head. I go to get a massage with my wife. I always loved male therapists because of their coarse hands. It felt good. The therapist said, "I'm really busy. I can do one of you. My wife can do the other and she was also a therapist. I said, "Well, I want my wife to get the stimulation, so go ahead." I went to the wife. She pours oil all over me and starts on my shaved head. I went in to a total trance and became an infant again. It was incredible. What a wonderful experience. 


Eric:               Awesome. 


Bernie:             The minutes go by. I, finally, as she travels over my body, opened my eyes and the room was filled with people. 


Eric:               Aha. 


Bernie:             I said, "What the hell is going on here? I'm getting a massage. What are you doing in the room?" Her husband was standing at the foot of the bed. He said, "We thought you had a heart attack or a stroke. You were gone. We could not communicate with you." I said, "I know. I became an infant. I couldn't talk." 


Eric:               What was their reaction to that? 


Bernie:             Well, at least they knew I was okay. I explained to them about my childhood experience and my grandmother and what she had done. Then they all relaxed and left. What a hell of an experience that was. 


Eric:               You were in a deep trance. 


Bernie:             Yeah. I mean, I accepted it when patients at the hospital told me that they knew whose heart and lungs were in them and the name of the person and more about them because we are often connected with their families-


Eric:               There's a story in your book about ... Yeah, go ahead. 


Bernie:             I mean, I know that those things are true. So, what happened to me, again, see, I had experienced it. I don't have beliefs. I know damn well our life is stored in our body. You see there, again, psychiatrists who have gotten medical students to draw a picture of themselves and fill out personality profiles and then look them up 20 and 30 years later and say, "Oh, I could predict what disease they were going to get." That's the words of a psychiatrist. At Johns Hopkins, she said, "When I looked at their drawings and their personality, I knew what they were going to get."


Eric:               Wow! How old were they when they drew this? 


Bernie:             The medical students and then decades later. You see, it's about how you're brought up. At Harvard, they did a little study, very simple one, "Did your parents love you?" "No." "Did your parents love you?" "Yes." If you said, "No," 98% have suffered a major illness by middle age. If you said, "Yes," 24% had. It's no different than Monday morning. At Monday morning, you have more heart attacks, strokes, suicides and illnesses. Again, you can't separate yourself from your emotions and your feelings. Bringing up children, love is what the world needs. All the violence, it's all a matter of revenge. If you're brought up with love, you don't drive a car into a crowd. 


Eric:               Exactly. 


Bernie:             You don't run around in a restaurant. You don't shoot people at the movie. 


Eric:               So, you were talking these self drawings. How often should somebody do a drawing? 


Bernie:             I would say if you had a specific question about how am I doing in my life, I'd say, "Yes, do a drawing." If you said, "I don't know which job to take." I'd say, "Fine. Draw yourself in each job." Then you don't look at it right away. You draw it and then you come back a day or two later and maybe bring your family with you and say, "Which one looks good? Which one do you think I ought to do?" Because I know from my own experience, when I'd say to somebody, "I think you care about people being this," but then they draw the picture and it looks lousy and [inaudible 01:33:39] looks much better. 


Bernie:             So, draw the pictures. Look at them a few days later. The other is sometimes you can just draw a picture of yourself and look at what has changed. Are your shoulders big and broad? So, you're carrying problems on them. Are your hands in? So, you can't reach out and get a grip on things. You don't have legs. Oh, one that was really cute. A boy came in, showed me the picture and I said, "You don't have any legs. What's going on?" He said, "Turn the page over." He finished the drawing on the other side. See, that I love. He has self-esteem. He doesn't fit on one page. 


Eric:               That's a quote from your book, too. It says, "Having learned from experience to trust patient's drawings." So, there's more in there than we could possibly know, I guess. 


Bernie:             Yeah, because even when you think about it, as I said, when I do drawings, my consciousness blinds me to think. So, it's only when I come back to look at it as if somebody else drew it and my mind is quiet that I notice what's there. 


Eric:               Did Carl Jung have a dog because Sigmund Freud used a dog a lot, but he didn't do much with drawings, did he? Carl Jung really-


Bernie:             Yeah. Jung was the one who got into the drawings and dreams and everything, yeah. I don't know if he had a dog or not. I can't answer that. Probably not if you don't read much about it. 


Eric:               Yeah. No, no, no. 


Bernie:             I always say to people ... You know who Lassie is. I say, "If you don't know what to do, what would Lassie do?" If you act like an animal, I mean, in terms of their love, because again, I've operated on animals, too, on our pets. They don't bite me when I'm hurting them. They lift my hand. I mean, that blew my mind. It hurt my heart more than them saying, "Stop," or biting my finger when I was doing something. 


Bernie:             Let me tell you something. I would recommend everybody read a poem called Rags by Edmund Vance Cooke and I'll tell you why. The dog I have now is named Rags. A dog saves your life while you're in the war. He's working with the soldiers. The war ends, you get discharged, you can't find him to take him home. You go back to medical school. That's why this poem had me in tears. You walk into the class and there's a dog cut open on the table. 


Eric:               Uh-oh!


Bernie:             You go over to look with the other students and it's Rags. He licks your hand and dies. Basically, the finish of the poem is if there's no place in heaven for a creature like that, I'll take my place in hell. When I read that poem in The Book of Poetry, I mean, there was animal poetry, oh, boy. 


Eric:               That's a good one. 


Bernie:             Because there's a poet, I forgot his name, who on his dog's headstone, he put a stone where his dog was buried, it talks about all the wonderful aspects of the creature that's buried there. At the end, it says that it's a dog because a person would never fulfill that description, so for everybody to know that it's his dog that's buried there. 


Eric:               Is that your favorite? No, that's your favorite poem, huh? What's your favorite book? 


Bernie:             My favorite book? Well, the one I love is a novel by William Saroyan called The Human Comedy. It is all about life. I love the title. It takes place during World War II. So, it's very much like what's going in the world today and it deals with death and life and love. I mean, one of the quotes that I love from it was, "The best part of a good man stays forever, for love is immortal and makes all things immortal, while hate dies every minute." 


Eric:               That's a good one. 


Bernie:             Oh, it's so real about people and as I say and love because imagine having a job delivering death telegrams in World War II. 


Eric:               Yeah, not nice. 


Bernie:             All of this is blended together. Another book that ends interestingly that I always mention is The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder. Do you know that book? 


Eric:               No. It sounds familiar. 


Bernie:             In it, a bridge breaks and people die. You give a stop and ask yourself, "Why did God do that to them? Why did it break when they were on it?" Maybe the pope would say, "Oh, they must have been sinners?" What you'll learn in the book is no, it's not about that. It's not proving that they did something wrong and that's why God did it. It also ends with this wonderful quote, "And we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten, but the love will have been enough. All those impulses of love returned to the love that made that. Even memory is not necessary for love. It's the land of the living and the land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning." That's the last paragraph in the book. 


Eric:               Wow! 


Bernie:             I have learned that, too [crosstalk 01:39:46] ever love somebody. 


Eric:               That is profound, Dr. Bernie. We've been talking for an hour and 40 minutes. 


Bernie:             Yes, I never stop. 


Eric:               That's great. 


Bernie:             See, the only thing truer than the truth is a story. Well, let me finish with this if we're finishing now that I didn't tell you. In the meditation, I met a man named George, my inner guide. He was very spiritually dressed. I was rather disappointed it wasn't Moses or Abraham or Jesus. Then I'm out speaking one night and, "I noticed that you're not paying any attention to the outline that you made to talk from." I said, "Yeah, but what the hell? I'm doing well, so I'll just keep talking." A woman came up afterwards and said, "That was better than usual. I've heard you before." 


Bernie:             The next person came up and said, "Those men standing in front of you for the entire lecture drew his picture for you." It was George. He didn't talk. I'm the mechanism he uses to speak. I always say it's like your television set is demonstrating a program. It's not creating it. 


Bernie:             A couple of years after that, and I realized that that was true. I stopped preparing, I mean, if you know what I mean. I just show up and then I speak for George. I spoke at a Christian funeral and Olga Worrall, the healer, if you want to read some interesting things, see if you can find the book, The Gift of Healing by Olga and Ambrose Worrall. I know she's a healer because she healed me of an injury by just putting her hands on me when I didn't believe it. She was lecturing at a medical conference. 


Bernie:             She came over to me because she knew the man who died also and said, "Bernie?" "Yes?" "Are you a Jewish?" I said, "What's that about? Because I spoke at a Christian funeral?" "No. There's a rabbi standing next to you." It was George. She described him in total detail. Then I understood why he was dressed the way he was-


Eric:               Aha! 


Bernie:             ... in terms of all his garments, from his head to his feet. Then even at Stop & Shop one day, I'm kidding around and somebody said, "Oh, Dr. Siegel." I said, "Look, when I'm acting silly, don't call my name out, so everybody knows. Give me another name." She called me George immediately. Now, there are no coincidences. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross had a Swiss accent and she would always say to me, "Bernie, there are no coincidences." See, that's the thing I've learned, whether with Freud, Jung, Einstein. We're creating the future.


Bernie:             So, it's not a coincidence when you go somewhere. I really listen. I get in the car and it's like, "Which way should I drive? Where should I take the dog for a walk? Where should I park?" I mean, I get messages and it's amazing. So, I follow the instructions. 


Bernie:             See, there's something, maybe the last mystical thing to talk about. When my mother died, I found enormous numbers of pennies, several dozens. The grandchildren started saying, "They're pennies from heaven." It was like, "Where did they come up with that?" I mean, these are little pipsqueaks standing in the yard and saying, "Oh, they're pennies from heaven." I would find them on the way back from the mailbox. So, they weren't there when I went to get the mail. 


Bernie:             Well, when my wife died, I basically said to her even though she's dead, I mean, we're still talking to each other, some of the experiences I've had, I said, "Don't forget the pennies." Well, we were married on the 11th and I'll just focus on that. I have found a dime and a penny four times since she died. Where? One is in a birdbath outside our house. A voice came and said, "Go clean the water in the birdbath." I went over, dumped out the dirty water. There's a dime and a penny sitting in it. I mean, nobody can explain that. 


Bernie:             I said to our kids, "Did you do this?" "No, dad." I found it three times in Stop & Shop, the supermarket. I would hear a voice say, "Go into that aisle." I'd go into the aisle and there would be a dime and a penny on the counter where you check out just sitting there. Three times and other pennies that I've found. 


Bernie:             I've also had what I call a kiss at night. Think of yourself blowing out a candle, a puff and a breeze. I'm lying in bed and there's nobody in the room, not even an animal. I hear a puff and I feel a breeze on my face. I knew my wife was kissing me goodnight. That happened many times. I mean, the other things that happened, I can't even remember all of them, but it's from sounds to seeing mystical things in the room. I'm not the only one who's had that. 


Eric:               Of course. 


Bernie:             I mean, I've had families tell me that when one of their kids died and the sister got married, people were taking pictures at the wedding and there was this cloud, I mean, like a person, in the photographs. They knew it was the brother who came. I mean, it tells stories forever. 


Eric:               Interesting. 


Bernie:             I keep my mind open. I don't question it and found enormous numbers of pennies in all kinds of odd places that my wife would leave there. There's no explanation for it, if you know it wasn't there a couple of hours ago and then suddenly, you're walking around the house and it's sitting there. 


Eric:               That's very Jungian, huh? What about the one video in YouTube I watch a lot of yours? Direct quote out of the video, "The patient's statement, you practice everyday to become the person you want to be." 


Bernie:             Right. 


Eric:               Oh, boy. There's a lot. What's the-


Bernie:             Well, see, in that, let me say what Jung ... I mean, not Jung, but what Saroyan said in a story. He said, "Everybody alive is an actor, but almost everybody alive is a very pathetic actor. That's why you're given a lifetime to rehearse and practice." You see, if you act as if you're the person you want to be, it changes your body chemistry and you become that person because we know from drawing blood from actors. In a comedy, your immune function improves, stress hormone levels go down. In a tragedy, immune function goes down, stress hormone levels go up. So, literally, actors get sick, especially in the wintertime if they're in some tragic play because it takes their strength and energy and immune function away.


Eric:               That's one of the wonderful things about all of your books and your work is how you combine real world experiences with and I hate to say mystic, but let's say, the subconscious or whatever and it's a really awesome blend of the two domains and you do it very well. I think maybe that's why you have so many fans. 


Bernie:             Well, I've lived it. So, my mind is open. I don't deny things. I've learned. I've had enough arguments with doctors. As I said, it's why I became a storyteller. See, when you get statistics, you hear it from the audience, "That's poorly controlled. That's not a good journal." If you tell a story, "Oh, that's an anecdote." "Yeah, that's right. It's an anecdote, but it's true." Then they have things happen in their life and the next thing you know, they show up and start to tell you, "I got a story for you." See, then the walls come down. 


Bernie:             One student did a study on our cancer patients and showed the benefits. His Yale professor said to him, "It can't be true," and made him change the numbers, so everything came out even. See, that's the problem. 


Eric:               I've heard of that before. 


Bernie:             Yeah. You see, when you're talking to the quantum physicists and the astronomers, they have an open mind. 


Eric:               Yup. That's awesome. So, boy, you know what? We're going to have to do another podcast. So, what's in the future for you? 


Bernie:             Life. 


Eric:               Yeah. I mean, projects, books. 


Bernie:             Oh, yeah. I'm working on a very spiritual now that I've sent to the Hay Foundation. They're putting it together now and what they're calling the gems because it's me with all my stories, but they're going to put it together and we'll edit it and publish it. 


Eric:               Oh, I see. 


Bernie:             Also, I've written a novel that I want to get published about past lives. One of them is mine, but I changed the character. I was called, I think, The Insurance Man. That's me, but I have a psychiatrist and a Mafia done. You see? If you're a kid in past life and you lead to someone committing suicide because of what you do, think about coming back in this life and wanting to help people or you have a family killed by another tribe. You come back in this life, you want to be the tribe that everybody is afraid of, so a Mafia member. 


Bernie:             I mean, there are reasons we do things. In the book, they all learned from their past life experience because the psychiatrist who didn't, basically, believe in it has it happened to him when he goes to a workshop and then he comes back and does it with his patients. What a difference it makes in all their lives. 


Eric:               So, have you started this book? 


Bernie:             Yeah. 


Eric:               Have you thought of self-publishing it? 


Bernie:             Well, if I can't get the Hay Foundation or someone to do it, you're damn right, I'll self-publish it. 


Eric:               I'll help you self-publish that book, Dr. Bernie. That is my specialty, if you didn't know. 


Bernie:             You see, there's life. It's synchronicity what you just told me, all right? 


Eric:               Yup. Good stuff. I love it. I love it. 


Bernie:             You know what? When we're done, send me an email mentioning that. 


Eric:               Okay. Definitely. 


Bernie:             I'm going to check with them. I'm doing a last edit. I mean, I wrote the novel several years ago, but I brought it back up to add things to it and check with the Hay Foundation and see if they're interested. If it doesn't work with, you and I will put it together. 


Eric:               Awesome. Yeah, because you already have a website and I was looking you have ... I think you're doing a podcast on another website or something. 


Bernie:             Oh, I do all kinds of things, yeah. 


Eric:               Yeah. So, you have a following. I mean, you don't need a big publisher anymore. You've got enough people behind you. You can self-publish very easy. Okay, but that's another topic. 


Bernie:             No, but, I mean, I have ... Yeah. For me, it's just having agents and even editors I have. As a matter of fact, she's over in Ireland now because these are people I've worked with, so it's easy if I let them help me do the mechanical things and if you're able to do that, that will be perfect. 


Eric:               Yeah. Excellent. All right. So, Dr. Bernie, I mean, I want to reserve another podcast date with you someday. It's so fascinating talking with you. Let's try to wrap it up with your number one tip for anybody. 


Bernie:             A simple statement is, when you live in your heart, magic happens. 


Eric:               When you live in your heart, magic happens. 


Bernie:             Yes. In other words, don't make up your mind. Ask your heart, "How does it feel to do this?" I grew up with three messages. Let me tell you what my parents did and what your parents. I come home from school when I was a kid, "Ma, I got a horrible day today. It really drove me nuts. So, I don't know what to do tomorrow." "Do what makes you happy." She never told me what to do. It was always, "Do what makes you happy." I wasn't happy when she would say that, but I learned from her to pay attention to your feelings. 


Bernie:             The second was, "Ma, everything went wrong today." "God is redirecting you. Something good will come at this." "Ma, you don't understand," but she was right. It's amazing to me what often happened ... I call it a spiritual flat tire. You get a flat tire on the way to the airport. You missed your plane and you learned it crashes. Oh, that's like that tire in the living room. 


Bernie:             The other was that materials things would make it a better world. I was asked by somebody who called me that, "You can win a million dollars. You just give me some information." I love entering lotteries. So, I did. Then they said, "What would you do if you won the lottery?" "I'll make the world a better place for a lot of people." The guy was stunned. He said, "I've never heard anybody say that." 


Bernie:             So, material things make the world better. Problems are guides to redirections and how do you make decisions? Do what makes you happy. That's not being selfish. You know what I mean. 


Eric:               Yeah, yeah. 


Bernie:             You just do what feels right for you. What job should I take? Where should I live? Who should I marry? Stop thinking and don't let others impose it on you. 


Eric:               Thank you so much, Dr. Bernie. So, what is the name of your website?


Bernie:             Berniesiegelmd.com. 


Eric:               Excellent. Excellent. Thanks so much, Dr. Bernie. It's been one hour and 55 minutes. I respect your time, but I could talk to you forever. 


Bernie:             That's true. 


Eric:               So, let's do this again. 


Bernie:             I should have asked you to order dinner for me. That's what I should have done. 


Eric:               Okay. Well, I'll let you go now. Thanks again, Dr. Bernie. 


Bernie:             All right. Bye-bye. 


Eric:               Okay. 


Bernie:             Have a good one, Eric. 


Eric:               You, too.

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