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Joe Bailey knows that life can be difficult. In addition to life’s ‘regular’ challenges, he’s had personal experiences with illness, including Lyme disease (more than once), and the effects of mould.
He also knows that all human beings are in possession of an innate and trustworthy ‘compass of wisdom’. Our thoughts can be noisy but our innate wisdom and resilience is the eye at the centre of life’s hurricane that can guide us and smooth out the bumps on the sometimes rough road of life.
Joseph Bailey, M.A., L.P. is a licensed psychologist, an author, seminar leader, consultant to organizations, public speaker, and psychotherapist.
His work has included co-founding The Minneapolis Institute of Mental Health, developing programs for health care provider wellness at the University of Minnesota Inner Life of Healers Program and numerous hospitals including North Memorial Hospital, Minneapolis, East Lansing Health System and Mayo Clinic Arizona (The Resilient Physician Program). He has also worked extensively in treatment centers for addictions—Gulf Breeze Recovery, Meridian Systems and Farnum Center, and numerous social service agencies.
Joseph is the author of six books with over a half million copies in print including the best seller, Slowing Down to the Speed of Life with Dr. Richard Carlson and The Serenity Principle.
Learn more about Joe at JoeBaileyAndAssociates.com.
You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below.
Show Notes
- Learning from Sydney Banks and his very different approach to human psychology
- On the paradigm shift of the three principles
- Working with everyone from climate scientists to clinicians at the Mayo clinic to those struggling with addiction
- The priceless value of relying on a calm mind
- Finding our own compass of truth
Resources Mentioned in this Episode
- Joe’s book: Thriving in the Eye of the Hurricane
- Interview with Mahima Shrestha about her work in Nepal
- Joe’s book: Fearproof Your Life
Transcript of Interview with Joseph Bailey
Alexandra: Joe Bailey, welcome to Unbroken.
Joe: Thank you. What a great title.
Alexandra: Oh, thank you., I was so pleased when I thought of that. So it’s so great to have you here today, Joe.
Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got involved with the three principles.
Joe: Sure. And thanks for having me. So a little bit of background, I guess, to go way back, I discovered when I was 16 that when I was an exchange student in Guatemala, I had an opportunity. My aunt was a Catholic nun working in Central America with the poor and involved in lots of social justice issues.
I lived there for a summer, and it opened me up to my vocation really, to want to help people, alleviate suffering in the world and being raised Catholic, after high school that I went into seminary, thinking I’d be a priest. I had some amazing experiences for that one year I was in the seminary, got to work with Martin Luther King’s organization, and my prefect, the counselor that for our unit, was one of Martin Luther King’s best friends.
So we got to learn a lot about all of that. And with that was a big influence on my life. But it led to me leaving the seminary after a year and deciding to continue my vocation by helping people. So I became a clinical psychologist and went to grad school and all that. And the more I got into psychology, the more I thought, is this the right fit for me because there is no spirituality in psychology was very agnostic.
I did yoga and meditated and all did all these other things, because I always felt that was part of the whole person was to help people not just with their mind, but their whole essence or spiritual nature. And that wasn’t really to be found in psychology until I met Sydney Banks.
About 10 years later, from the beginning of grad school till I was about 32. I met Syd at the recommendation of Keith Blevins, Dr. Keith Blevins, who was my best friend at grad school. And actually, he urged me to listen to Syd’s tapes over the years. But I was cynical at that point.
There was so many trips going on in psychology that I thought it was just another fad. And I was tired of that. So I just was not very open. Until one day, Syd was going to speak in Miami, at the University of Miami medical school. And Keith invited me, and his wife Elda also said, By the way, my best friend, Michael, she is coming too, and we’d love for you to meet, and I was available.
And so I thought, Okay, well, that’ll be fun. I went to Miami, and that first day I met my wife, Michael. She’s a woman, but she has a man’s name. Because she was born on the feast of St. Michael the archangel, and she was going to be a boy.
I fell in love with her first sight. And four hours later, I met Sydney Banks.
Alexandra: What a day!
Joe: It was stars aligned or something. So but when I heard Syd, I had a mixed reaction, part of me is just curious because I’d heard so much about him. But he was unlike any person I’ve ever met. And when he spoke, everything he said was felt absolutely true if my truth meter went yes!
But my brain went ARGH because it went against everything I had been learned. Learning in psychology and family therapy, and all these people that I studied with, was all about going back in the past and healing from past trauma, reliving emotions, and getting in touch with your feelings.
Healing, forgiving, it was a very long, arduous therapeutic process, and my clients would stay in therapy for years. So as a good economic model, you didn’t have to have a lot of people to make a living. But people never really got, well, they just coped better.
But they also started to identify with their labels and their diagnoses and start to think of themselves as an alcoholic, as a person with depression, as a person with anxiety disorder. And so it kept it put a cap on their full transformation or their ability to be free of the past and free of their symptoms.
And what Syd promised was from for me, as a spiritual, psychological person, it was like it transcended the dichotomy between spirituality and psychology. And it showed that the root of the word psychology is psyche, which in Greek means mind, soul, or spirit.
What’s revolutionary about Syd’s experience and his psychology, the three principles psychology is for me the hope that psychology becomes can become a true science that includes this primary dimension of human beings that is essentially spiritual or formless, which is what Mind is.
And the principles are formless energy that we’re all part of. So my work, a lot of my work, was involved in prevention. I was the director of prevention for the state of Texas for addiction when I was 26, and I had no idea what it was doing and had no idea how to prevent alcoholism. But I got paid to do it. So I did it.
And a lot of my work accidentally got me into the alcoholism and addiction field, just because I was assigned to it when I worked at the mental health center, and nobody knew about alcoholism, including me, but I was assigned to be the head of the alcoholism and drug addiction program.
So when I heard this said, I realized that this would transform the addiction field and the field of psychotherapy because it really helped people not just cope or identify with their habits but to identify with their innate resilience or their innate health and to let that blossom and grow and evolve through a deepening understanding of the principles of how we create our day to day, moment by moment experience, through mind, thought and consciousness.
So that was the beginning of, to me, my real career began when I met Syd Banks because I finally had a way to actually help people.
But at first, I didn’t know how to do it because there’s no techniques. Syd didn’t know about my world that much. Although he had this incredible realization. And so when I went back to my practice after hearing him, I was clueless.
How the heck do you do this?
But I would just share a little bit about my own realizations I was having just as a human being. And I just toss those out and the clients would go, wow, why didn’t you tell me that before? That is so helpful.
And I say, what did I say? So I just reached my way along in the beginning because I didn’t have a language for it. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just flying by the seat of my pants.
And yet my clients were not only getting over their symptoms, they were achieving mental health and true love in their marriages. They were healing from the past that was and so pretty soon, my clients quit coming because they got better, which was not a good economic model.
But it was great as far as satisfaction as a therapist, but then they would tell their friends, and pretty soon my practice grew so much I had to train other people in the principles.
Chris Heath and I started what was called the Minneapolis Institute of Mental Health, which was a licensed treatment center for outpatient mental health and addictions.
Chris left and went to Hawaii about halfway through that. But I ran that for about 10 years; we treated 1000s and 1000s of patients, helped so many people, and did research. And it was an amazing experience. But it created a real ripple effect in the community because everybody wanted to go to that clinic, a lot of people, and it was a big threat.
That’s what happens when you have a paradigm shift that threatens the status quo.
Anyway, that’s the backdrop, or how I met Syd and began my journey with the principles.
Alexandra: It’s such a fascinating story. I love hearing about the dovetailing of your own interest in spirituality and your desire to help people and how those two things came together when you met Syd.
It always surprises me that this understanding isn’t more widely known, especially in the world of psychology.
Do you think it’s that element of spirituality, that affects the growth somehow?
Joe: I don’t know really why, to be honest. I would have thought by now, although, in some ways, it has exploded all over the world. It’s all of Syd’s books and tapes. And there are practitioners and communities of three principals in Iceland, and Italy, and France, and Spain, and Germany and the United States and, the United Kingdom, and Ireland and Asian countries, that’s all over my books are in 68 countries and 26 languages.
So I know it’s getting out there, but the field of psychology, it’s all evidence-based treatment modalities. But the field is still growing into recognizing thought as the primary focus of therapy in the cognitive revolution in psychology, cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, they both and then mindfulness based treatment, and modalities are really exploding.
Psychology is evolving because this is what people want. They want a deeper, more spiritual psychology. And so they’re combining Eastern thought mindfulness practices. But they’ve done a lot of good research on that. And so they show the results. We, in the three principles, haven’t done such a great job of documenting this in terms of getting into recognized journals and all that.
Some of that’s happened but not enough to create a critical mass. So that’s one part of it.
The other part of it is that it’s a threat to a lot of people who have I created their practices from a school of thought, and then to introduce something that makes that obsolete is a threat to their identity and to their practice.
Anytime you find anything really true that comes into the world, it’s always thought, that’s how it’s really true because it’s really threatening to the way we collectively perceive reality.
In this isn’t an intellectual model; it’s not something you can figure out analytically. It’s something that has to impact you. And when you change from within. You see the world differently. It’s not a technique you do.
Current psychology is all based on techniques and doings. This [the three principles] is based on raising the level of consciousness through insight and understanding of how we’re creating a reality moment by moment.
In the addiction field, I’ve done a lot of work with treatment centers, training their whole staff. I’ve done a lot of work in healthcare. I’ve worked with many hospital systems. The University of Minnesota helped create a program called The Inner Life of Healers. We worked with physicians and nurses, and allied health professionals to teach burnout prevention and resilience.
I also worked for eight years at Mayo Clinic, training their physicians and leaders in the principles because it lowered burnout dramatically. So it’s gone out more in the business world, the healthcare world. Psychology is like the holdout.
It’s threatening to the existing paradigm that is based primarily on biology and the past instead of a spiritual essence that’s already mentally healthy. It’s already resilient. And so it puts you out of business in a way, but not really, with change. But anyway, that’s probably a long answer to a short question.
Alexandra: No, I’m really fascinated by this subject. So, thank you for sharing that with us. Speaking of resilience, your most recent book is called Thriving in the Eye of the Hurricane. I’d love to talk about that a little bit today.
Tell us about that metaphor, the eye of the hurricane, and why it matters.
Joe: Well, I don’t know if you have hurricanes in Canada.
Alexandra: Not on Vancouver Island.
Joe: In the United States, we have a lot of hurricanes, especially on the coast of Florida and the Panhandle, in that area. And so hurricanes are often on the news. But they’re a very powerful storm. The winds on the outside of a hurricane are like 274 miles per hour. So when a hurricane comes in, it devastates and decimates everything.
Nothing can withstand that. But it also is torrential rain. And it’s just a very destructive force. But climatologists who study hurricanes fly airplanes in the middle of hurricanes in what’s called the eye because once you break through the wall of the hurricane, it’s totally quiet, in the center of it. And they call it the eye of the hurricane.
Birds fly around in there, and most of the hurricane is like 110 miles across in the eye. It’s just the outer perimeter that’s destructive. It’s like the ego versus the true self. The ego is what creates all the damage.
Our thoughts and our wisdom, which is at the eye, is what is resilient, which is where we get insight into healing transformation. So to me, it was a perfect metaphor for not only climate change, because I talk a lot to climate scientists, and about this, because they get burned out a lot too, and climate activists, but it’s the perfect metaphor, because in the eye of us as human beings, our innate mental health is this source of ability to bounce back from whatever. And ability to think creatively under pressure in a business.
I’ve done a lot of work with police and first responders, military, people who are really on the front lines, how to stay calm in that crisis, in that moment where your life is truly threatened. And oftentimes, in the news, you’ll see interviews with people who were in a hurricane or a tornado, or a flood or a bombing, or in nowadays have a massive gun shooting, with AK 40 sevens and in our crazy country we have here and how someone will become a hero in the middle of that and just respond and save lots of lives.
And afterward, they’re interviewed by the press, and they say, Well, how did you do that? They just go. I don’t know. I didn’t think about it. I just did it.
I went into that burning building, and I saved that child, or I covered the body of that person that I didn’t want to get killed. They shot me instead. And I survived. Or people who did like the guy who landed the airplane. On the Hudson River. I can’t remember his name right now. They made a movie about him. Sully. And they’ve made this movie about him because he was such a hero.
When you interview him, he says, I just did what anybody would do. I wasn’t anything special, I just seemed like the right thing to do. And that’s when you’re not bogged down by fear and insecurity. Those thoughts, your natural resilience or wisdom, respond appropriately to falling in love like I did with my wife or to solving a crisis.
It that’s life and death, or when I work with healthcare professionals, how to be in the midst of the emergency room or a surgical procedure, but be light-hearted and loving and caring that loose feeling. You’re so present. And you’re so responsive. And with all of the training you’ve had, you get just whatever you need from that training library at that moment to use you.
I just thought about an article that I read about this. Let me look at that. That’s the solution. I found leaders or healthcare professionals say, I’m in the same stressful situation. But I’m more responsive to the needs of the patient. I’m a better listener. I’m the calm influence in the room, rather than getting frenetic and scared like everybody else, even professionals.
When I’m operating from that eye, that resilience, I’m a calming influence.
There’s a story that I love in my book from Mahima Shrestha. She actually just did a thing for one of Syd’s books or talks on forgiveness. She was in charge of emergency preparedness for the country of Nepal.
And so she tells the story, and I’ll just read it here because it’s really powerful. And you can also watch this on a video on my website because I did a podcast with a lot of people who were interviewed toward thriving in the eye of the hurricane.
Their stories that are in this book are also their stories on the podcast. So anyway, so she’s tells the story.
“There was this destruction and devastation all around us after the first earthquake struck. 9000 people were killed, and 1000s more were injured or left homeless. We were overwhelmed with grief and fear.
As we watched this beautiful country pounded into a pile of rubble. My family and I were huddled together in my home. With each tremor, we were filled with terror, anticipating the next earthquake, between tremors.
We would wait in fear and imagine what might happen next. In contrast, my three year old niece would go back to playing between tremors and seem to be enjoying having her whole family together in one place.
Her laughter and play relieved and distracted us momentarily from our own panicky feelings. At one point, she looked at all of us and proclaimed, it’s over. Can’t you see it’s over? Her childlike innocence and lightheartedness in the face of our stress hit me like another earthquake, a psychological one. She was being resilient in the face of danger, while the rest of us were being feeling traumatized.
The dormant thought that had been resting in my head for many months suddenly burst forth.
We are always living in the feeling of our thinking each moment.
By witnessing my niece’s resilience in the face of real danger, I realized what the three principal psychology was all about.
With this insight, my mind and my body became calm. From that moment on, my stress diminished, in my resilience returned. I realized that the earthquake and the tremors didn’t create my stress and fears.
My thinking did. Since that profound moment, I felt more energy and more clarity of thinking, and I’m better able to respond to real and present dangers. Every did everybody did what they could to bring solace and help restore resilience in their communities in the weeks following the earthquake.
I hosted webinars with international experts in the crisis response field and invited trainers from the UK to introduce these three principles in Nepal to help earthquake survivors source their own resilience more effectively.
Many organizations, groups, and institutions, such as schools, chambers of commerce, insurance companies, community hospitals, young women’s leadership programs, and more, have since benefited from this teaching.”
She also won an international award for Women of the Year for her work with the sex trade between China and India. She’s just an amazing human being. But she really is primarily a three principles teacher now.
Alexandra: Wow. That’s beautiful. Thanks for sharing that with us. I’ll put links in the show notes to your website, where the interviews are, and also to your book as well. So people can find those if they’re looking.
One of the things I love about the eye of the hurricane metaphor is that the outer wall of all are stirred up thinking and can be so distracting that sometimes it’s hard to get into the center. And I said to you, in some of the notes that I sent you, that it felt has felt to me like understanding this has been a really distinct two-stage process.
- The first stage is even knowing that the eye, the quiet eye is there.
- And then the second part has been coming to trust it, that I can rely on it, no matter what.
I loved your book for just its emphasis on that, on the eye, the quiet resilience center of all of us. It’s been really great to learn that.
Joe: For me, too, for sure. Because I still get caught up in my thinking on a regular basis. We all are, Syd did, I don’t know anybody who didn’t get caught up in their thinking. But when you have an understanding of where feelings come from, you can’t have a feeling without thought.
Connecting to your consciousness to create that feeling, that perception in the moment. So if you’re panicking, it looks like you’re in a really dangerous place, and you can’t see a solution. If you recognize that in the moment like you’re a firefighter, or a police officer, or a politician or teacher, whatever your role is new, you catch it because it feels this discomfort.
And you see that it’s not what I’m thinking about. But how I’m thinking about what I’m thinking about. That’s creating my experience. So it’d be you see that it’s coming from the inside out your human experience, rather than outside in, in the proof is that if you look at people watching a movie, being in a real crisis, all of them respond in a totally different way on a bell curve, something completely traumatized, immobilized to people who hardly even notice they just go right to work.
They don’t even think about themselves to somewhere in between them. So depending on your thinking in the moment.
You’re going to have a different emotion and a different experience. But with an understanding of the principles. You’re able to tap into that eye, that resilience because your feelings become a barometer, like a barometer for the storms. We have a cabin in Canada, and it’s in a really remote area. So we have a barometer because there’s no weather forecasts.
We can see when that barometer drops; we’re gonna get a storm long before you see the clouds, the barometer is dropping. Looks like there’s no problem coming. But when you see that barometer dropping, prepare, get your raincoat, and your umbrella, and come on inside. And so when your feelings of anger or anxiety come up, it triggers your awareness that you’re creating a thought, perceptual experience from the inSyde.
And when you’re attuned to that, it helps you get perspective maybe to value a calm mind, rather than an overreacting, fearful mind. The more you value a calm mind, you begin to see in that eye, you get a lot of insights that you wouldn’t have otherwise, you are able to have more sticktoitiveness, which is another term for resilience,
You’re able to have more energy, you sleep better, you’re more responsive, you have more empathy, you have more connection to others. So there are many beautiful human traits that are built into this innate resilience or innate mental health that you can witness in any child.
Little children who haven’t yet learned to be fearful, or to be self-conscious, or to be resentful. They get over things very quickly. If they are upset, they’re naturally extremely curious. And their learning curve is like this. Whereas when you become fearful, you’re learning curve becomes like this.
So young children are little sponges; they learned so much in the first few years of life because they haven’t yet learned to be afraid. They haven’t yet learned to worry; they haven’t yet learned to hold a grudge or be prejudiced, or judge. Those are all learned things that create a feeling.
And when you use that feeling as a barrage, better, it helps you, oh, don’t go there, Joe. Because I can still do that. This last year of our lives, my wife and I would both 75 and suddenly, having things happen with our bodies and our brains it didn’t happen before. We’re starting to experience aging. And some pretty, fairly serious health issues happened this year for us. All due to the fact that our house had mould, and we didn’t know. It was insidious. You can’t see it.
But our doctor suspected it and had us tested for a variety of toxic chemicals. Because I lost a lot of weight. I didn’t have any energy, and my brain was foggy. And so I took these micro toxin tests, as did my wife. And actually, we were on our way to British Columbia when we got the news, the mould levels in your body are 500 points over normal.
You can never live in that house again. You must move out, and you will not survive if you go back in that house. We have to demolish our home and rebuild. We’re in our early semi-retirement phase. And all of sudden, there goes about a third of our net worth right down the drain, and the insurance covers none of it.
So it was you could imagine, economically and physically, a huge disruption in our life. And it’s been a year of that. It’s just been like one thing.
My wife wrote this poem last week. Can I read it?
Alexandra: Yes, please do.
Joe: It’s tongue in cheek.
I’ve had so much bad luck, it’s good luck.
What is bad luck, but an opportunity to sharpen our skills. The skills we were born with the talents we didn’t know we have. What is bad luck but the uncomfortable handle on the door to success covered with mold tarnished but recognizable by the finest jeweler?
The minor of gold reaches past the disgusting to discover what’s inside. The door opens, and the day is saved. Sight from within penetrates the surface of all disasters. It uncovers the wholeness of salvation that exists inside this room of peace—the architect of design lives in this hidden world, the eye.
Wherein lies all resource to create from the universe of knowing. Answering any questions needed to build a foundation from the only existence that is true, universal love.
By opening the door of bad luck and finding peace inside, we move aside the barriers we’ve created and rebuild our life from the inside. The lens of destruction is no longer feared when we rest in the state of knowing that the power of life bends to bring forth a new universe every hour of every day; residing an eternal knowing can be misunderstood and mixed with fear of seeing the truth. We have the freedom to understand that the comfort of not knowing is a state of recognition of what is to become known.
A recognition of this powerful ingredient called Love transforms what is not known into the treasure of assurance that we are here to create and be known as the power that arises from within, to change our world and the world with a passion of persistence that never ends.
Rely on this eternal force to give you the passion, the love, and the knowing to resurrect from within the heart and the soul of you. The Universal Consciousness leave behind the limited thoughts, releasing their unformed energy to float free, disengaging from misunderstanding. I will not falter in my one desire to be one in the peace of universal creation.
Alexandra: Oh, that’s beautiful.
Joe: Isn’t that amazing? My wife’s passion comes through her art. She’s an artist. They just come out of her all whole like this. She didn’t have to edit. It’s just amazing. But we all have that in a different form.
What you’re doing in your podcasts is a form of it. I’m sure there are many others. I never thought I would ever be a writer. I was told not to go to college because of my poor language skills.
And Syd said oh, you’re going to write books, and they’ll be all over the world. You’ll teach at universities, and I said, “Me? You’ve got the wrong guy.”
Alexandra: Wow. That’s amazing. Well, thank you for sharing that poem with us. That’s beautiful.
I wrote down a couple of things. The ‘architect of the design’ was one of the phrases that I loved from there.
And also the idea that there’s a new universe, she said, in every hour, but it’s like, in every moment, so lovely.
We’re just about coming up to running out of time. But I wanted to come back to the phrase that you use in the book, the compass of wisdom.
And this touches on everything we’ve talked about so far today.
If you were to recommend for listeners how they could find this still point, this eye at the center of their hurricane, how would you recommend they do that?
Joe: Well, I think the first step is a leap of faith. God doesn’t create any bad things. There’s no mistakes in creation. And we’re no exception. We have this human potential, this essence that is wise. So considering the possibility that that’s true even for you.
Even though you might have doubted that or thought you weren’t smart enough, or that you were damaged goods, or that you were too insecure. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been a chronic alcoholic or suffered from mental illness or had a horrible marriage or anything.
Every human being that’s still alive has the possibility of transformation and change through insight. And so, first of all, it’s just, for me in the beginning, it was really just hearing that, and it felt true.
But I didn’t think it was true for me. I realized it, but it sounded true. And then I started getting eyes for it. So when I would have a thought come into my mind, that was like one of those head-shakers when you go, what does that mean?
That sounds really true, but I don’t understand it. That I would listen to that more, and sometimes that would be from just writing. When I was troubled or this still, small voice some would call it, and if you look back on your life in hindsight, you can see something told me not to do this, but I did it anyway.
I should have listened to myself. I wasn’t listening. So in hindsight, you can see I can’t believe that I took that risk to ask her out. It was unlike me. But something was so compelling to me. I couldn’t help but do it. That was the compass. Something told me to go to hear Syd Banks, against all of my misgivings.
It was like a magnet that pull me like the magnet and a compass. And so, for me, I could look back on my life. And I can see that that still, small voice was always guiding me even when I ignored it. And I could see, I knew that was the wrong decision. But I did it anyway.
And so when you start to have experiences of insight, and this wisdom, you’ll have flashbacks and see how it was always there. And that’ll give you more confidence to trust it. Because when you’re going into the unknown, the future, you don’t know what’s going to happen. But if you get quiet, and you listen, is this the right thing for me to take this job, or to call that person or, and if you listen inside, you’ll start to recognize that feeling of truth.
And the compass of truth has a feeling built into it. It’s called a knowing you got like a knowing without knowing why. Just knowing. And the book I’m writing. Now, I didn’t think I’d ever write another book. I was like, Okay, I’m done. This is the last one. But then I had a dream a few months ago, I had this whole book come to me in the dream.
I woke up and I thought, Oh, my God, what was that? It was like a whole life review. I’m dying. I thought, what’s going on here? But it was like my whole life path before me. And I realized how that compass had been guiding me all along.
The book I’m writing, which I haven’t started writing yet, but it’s called up My Magic Carpet Ride. Because it’s like a magic carpet. There’s no steering wheel on it. You just go wherever it takes you. And that’s the compass. The more I understood what Syd was saying about the principles, the more I didn’t have to steer; it’s like a kid’s go-cart.
You think it’s connected to the wheels, but it’s really your imagination that you’re turning the car. It’s just an illusion. But when you trust the carpet, opportunities open up for you that you never would have dreamt up.
I never thought I’d ever write a book. I never thought I teach at universities or travel around the world like I do. This just one story after another story; I got healed from major illnesses, through the power of the mind, with Lyme disease, and knock on wood with the mold coming out of my system now, so it’s just, it’s always there for us.
And the more we understand, through insight, the principles, the more trust we have in faith and hope as we go through life that life is guiding us. This divine intelligence is guiding us each step of the way. Whether we know it or not
Alexandra: I love that magic carpet analogy. That’s such a great one.
Joe: I couldn’t remember anything of my dream. So then my wife and I, we went off skiing this winter. And we’re there in a Best Western hotel in the middle of Nebraska somewhere. I woke up in the middle of the night and I’d had the same dream again.
With another download. I thought I could write this down. I’ll never remember this. And then the next thought was, you’ll remember as you write, yes. So that’s the compass, you don’t have to try to write things down. Remember, your wisdom will always be there. Your compass will always be with you. guide you into the unknown
That’s what we need in these dark times. Just last night, I was watching TV. And there was a story about how there’s so many mass killings in our country, there’s more than one per day now in America, with ak47s. It’s just horrible violence happening.
So now what’s happening? They showed this basketball game where someone thought they heard a gun go off, and it spread like panic. And everybody ran out of the room.
There was no, no gunman, nothing, but just the thought of it could happen here. So people are living in this fear. And if people could understand that, their common sense and wisdom is always going to be with them to protect them and to know the right thing to do. And in the meantime, enjoy your life. Be with your friends. Don’t live in fear.
It’s all self-generated. You don’t have to do that. And that’s the other book I wrote was Fear Proof Your Life after 9/11. Because we become so addicted to fear. As a culture, we still are. The Canadians, not so much. I don’t think I don’t know.
Alexandra: Hard to say depends who you talk to you, I guess.
Joe: I guess it’s individual by individual, that’s right.
Alexandra: We’ve covered a lot of ground here, Joe; it’s been just great.
Is there anything we haven’t talked about that you’d like to share before we wrap up?
Joe: Let me see. Maybe one more story. I could tell a story about healing physically, myself, or a story of a nurse and how this helped her. Or Mavis, who worked with gangs.
Alexandra: I’d love to hear the story about healing yourself.
Joe: Me?
Alexandra: Yep.
Joe: This happened. The summer of 2017. I was at my cabin in Canada. And I started experiencing extreme back pain. Sweating, just excruciating pain in my body. And I’d never experienced that before.
I thought do I have cancer? What’s going on with me? I was all alone, I was writing another book in the middle of nowhere, and I’m struck with this, and it just wouldn’t go away. And day after day, I was just in this excruciating pain.
It felt like Lyme disease because I’d had it before, but I didn’t see any bite. And then my wife says, Well, look in the mirror. Do you see anything behind you? And I looked in the mirror, and I could see there’s a big red target on the back of my knee. I got Lyme disease again.
So I came home, and I went to took that doxycycline with the doctors recommended, but I had all this mental fog and sleeping difficulties. And all this, I went to a specialist was referred to a specialist that worked with Lyme. And the first thing she said to me 90% of this is in the mind. Your mind is so important in your healing.
I said that I’m a psychologist so I agree. Totally. She said, here’s supplements you should take and avoid being around areas where you can get a tick, always check yourself or a bar, don’t get it again, and take the supplements, etc. And I never really got well; I just felt like I was always sick. Low energy instead of high energy. Not as clear mentally.
So when my wife was going to Malaysia to study Kung Fu with a grandmaster, she said there was going to be a course on Qigong healing there. You should come along, and I said, Sure. I’d love to travel. I’ll go. So we went there.
There was a guy there who was a gifted Qigong healer from Switzerland. I thought maybe I’d get an appointment with him and maybe he can help me. So Michael said that during her kung fu course she said, Andrew is going to be with us. Once you join us for lunch, you can ask him so I went to Chinatown, where they were going; I caught up with them.
And I saw Andrew, and she said, why don’t you ask Andrew? So I was hoping to meet Andrew, who was a teacher of Qigong and a well-known healer from Switzerland. As luck would have it, I caught up with Andrew on the busy streets of Penang.
Could I set up a time to meet with you for a session regarding my illness? I said, let’s just do it right now. I said now, here on the busy streets of Chinatown, why not? I reluctantly agree. So what’s the problem?
Well, last summer, I got Lyme disease. Stop right there. He said, Don’t ever say you have Lyme disease if you ever want to be completely well.
Puzzled, I tried to correct him and telling him, but I have the symptoms long before I realized I had Lyme with absolute sense of knowing he repeated what he said earlier, I understand the power of mind in healing and its relationship to heal illness and mental health. I said I’ve written several books on this topic. I believe in what you’re saying. No, you don’t you just think you do.
Every time you say I’m sick with Lyme, you send all the beliefs and thoughts that you have about the illness to every cell of your body. Your body and mind are one. Well, I know that, but you don’t believe me? Or no, he says, do you believe me? Yes, I do. I think I do.
No, you don’t. I can see it in your face. If you don’t change your thinking about your illness, your body’s natural capacity to heal will be interrupted by your sending signals of being sick to the by. You don’t believe me except intellectually.
I knew he was right. And I felt humbled by his result and certainty. He wasn’t lead going to lead me off the hook at that moment. I saw it for the first time.
He smiled. Now you believe me.
How do you know that? I can see it in your face.
I felt something live from my whole body. All the invisible worry and thinking were falling away. My mind squirrels as it had when I first met Syd Banks; I knew Andrew was right. But my brain kept trying to understand what it just happened. So should we set up a session, I said?
Why? he said. We just had it.
That was it. But we only talked for a few minutes at most. You’re on the busy, noisy streets of Chinatown. You got it. You’re done. Well, can I pay your fee? That’s okay. Don’t worry about it.
The next day I woke up early, feeling totally awake. In a way, I hadn’t in many months, perhaps years. My head was clear, and I had all this energy. I decided to go down to the gym and work out and then go for a swim. I doubled my weight from the previous day with ease.
I went for a swim and felt like I could swim forever. I didn’t know what had happened. But I was grateful. When I walked into my friend’s apartment, she stared. What happened to you? You look 10 years younger. I told her about my conversation with Andrew the day before.
Blake and I have been so worried about you chill. You had you at an age so much not like before; you’d always seem so youthful for your age. You were our inspiration. Andrew, the healer, had never heard of the principles of mind-thought consciousness, as discovered by Syd Banks. But he obviously had a deep understanding of the mind.
Alexandra: Wow. That’s incredible.
Since then, have you had any symptoms at all?
Joe: I’ve not had any symptoms since.
Alexandra: Wow. Thank you for sharing that with us. Well, thank you for your interviews.
Joe: Great to meet you. Alexandra. Lovely to meet you as well.
Alexandra: Why don’t you tell the listeners where they can find out more about you and your work and your books.
Joe: So my books are on Amazon. You can order them they’re in Kindle and book form or audio. Some of them are on Audible. This book is on Audible. And then, if you go to my website, JoeBaileyandassociates.com, you can see all the interviews and podcasts of my past podcasts about the book and the people in the book.
Lots of other resources, we have lots of other good three principals, teachers and programs, and other books that have been written about since wonderful discovery of the three principles.
Alexandra: I will put a link to those things as well in the show notes. So thanks again, Joe. It’s just been a delight to chat with you.
Joe: Thank you so much. Take care. Bye
Featured image photo by Anthony Cantin on Unsplash
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