Dear Friends,
First, a warm welcome to my new subscribers who found me through Instagram and asked for my Golden Light practice. If it never reached you, here is the simple 2-minute version I’ve been practicing in the hospital and in rehab for the past several weeks.
You’re joining me at an interesting time.
Five weeks ago, I was enjoying the most privileged of lives. My marriage was thriving, my children were healthy, and at 87 I was doing aerobics seven days a week and lifting weights three days a week.
Everything was coasting, and I was living every single day in what I can only call beatific gratitude.
Then, without warning, life smacked me right in the face.
It turned out that what looked at first like a worn-out right knee was actually a life-threatening bacterial infection – Staphylococcus aureus – that had settled into the joint.
In a single afternoon, I went from total independence to non-ambulatory. I was taken from my home in an ambulance for an immediate surgery at a nearby hospital to clear out the infection, and then helicoptered to Stanford Medical Center for a second major surgery to clear out more of the infection and install a brand-new knee.
For days I lay there with medicines going in and out of my body, watching my leg bloat up with edema, and experiencing massive amounts of pain.
Now I am home, in bed, with my darling wife, Jolee, taking care of me like an angel. I have had a great deal of quiet time to reflect on what it feels like when the doctor suddenly becomes the patient – and what actually carries a person through a season like this.
And for the fourth time in my life, I’m learning how to walk. I learned how to walk as a baby. I learned how to walk after I was run over by a Winnebago and both my legs were crushed. I learned how to walk after my first knee replacement, and I’m going to learn to walk after this knee replacement.
I intend to transmit the lessons of my own healing journey to all of my readers and viewers who wish to consciously direct their own healing process.
Below are the four practices that have made all the difference for me over the past few weeks.
Before I go on, a short note: today I am opening my course, The Golden Reset, along with a special offer for new and returning Substack members. Read on for details or click here to sign up.
Healing Practice #1. Partnering with the body’s healing from within
When your body is fighting off a serious infection and recovering from surgery, the doctors and the antibiotics are doing essential work on the outside.
What can your mind do on the inside to help them?
When you lie in bed consumed by fear and anxiety, your brain floods your bloodstream with chronic cortisol and stress hormones. The alarm never turns off, and that constant state of emergency wears down the very immune system and cellular repair machinery your body needs to mend.
We still do not know every mechanism of how the mind influences recovery, but there are decades of research showing that patients who actively direct their mental state – maintaining calm, expectation, and a determination to get stronger – give their bodies a very different chemical environment in which to heal.
Whenever I have broken bones in my life, I have closed my eyes and pictured golden strands circling the injury, binding it back together.
So throughout this ordeal, I have used the Golden Light exercise I learned at the Esalen Institute more than sixty years ago.
I sit or lie quietly, close my eyes, and let warm golden light fill my head, then travel down my neck, my shoulders, my arms, through my chest and stomach, and right down into my operated leg. Does it replace the surgeon or the antibiotics? Of course not. What it does is take my body out of alarm mode so my immune system and my tissues can do their job in peace.
Healing Practice #2. Refusing to let the mind predict the future
A hospital room gets very quiet at three in the morning. When you are hurting and weakened, your mind wants to run ahead into next week or next month and predict terrible things.
Yet I have had virtually no anxiety through this entire experience. Even in moments when I knew the infection was life-threatening, I was not scared – because I refused to go into the future and predict my death. In the present moment, there was only the breath I was taking and gratitude for being alive.
First, I used conscious abdominal breathing to keep my emotions steady. Put your left hand over your belly button and your right hand on your chest, and breathe in slowly so only your left hand moves out. Nice and easy does it.
Second, whenever my mind tried to pull me into dark predictions about tomorrow, I started counting numbers slowly in my head: one, two, three, four, five.
If a worry tried to push in, I pushed it right back out and returned to the count. You do not have to debate a frightening thought in the dark. You just take the microphone away from it.
Healing Practice #3. Choosing my attitude from within
Nobody in eleven years of university – a bachelor’s, a master’s, and a doctorate in clinical psychology – ever taught me that my attitude belonged to me.
No external circumstance gets to decide my attitude. Not the infection, not the pain in my right leg, not the hospital room. Every morning before the day begins, I select the attitude I am going to bring to the hours ahead. And any time I feel it slipping in the slightest during the day, I reset it on the spot.
The best attitude comes from within, not from what is going on outside.
Healing Practice #4. Gratitude, family, and the medicine of connection
Mastering your own mind does not mean doing life alone. The most important thing this month reinforced for me is what it means to have family involved when something serious happens. Without Jolee, Sarana, Evacheska, Aaron, Kathleen, and the rest of my family stepping in and getting me to the right place at the right time, I might not be writing this letter to you today.
And you helped too.
Sending notes out to you and reading your replies while I go through this has been a genuine piece of medicine for me. Connection is a free medicine; when you connect with another human being, it breaks down isolation, alienation, and loneliness on the spot.
So today, please do not just send someone a text message with little fonts on a screen. Pick up the telephone and call a friend. Let them hear your tone of voice. Let them hear your laughter.
Let them hear the voice of your soul.
How to build the reflex before life smacks you
All of the tools I have described here are free. You do not need to buy anything from me to use them; I share them in my videos on Instagram, and I have put short, free PDF guides to each one on my website.
Here is the only catch I have seen across sixty-five years of clinical practice: knowing about a tool is not the same thing as having the skill when a crisis hits.
When life smacks you in the face in a single afternoon, or when you wake up at three in the morning with your heart pounding, you do not rise to the level of an idea you agreed with once. You fall back on whatever you have practiced enough times that your nervous system does it automatically.
Instead of a traditional fifty-minute therapy hour once a week, my method is built on tiny repetitions while the weather is calm: thirty to sixty seconds, five or ten times a day. That is five minutes a day, and over a year it adds up to 3,650 repetitions – until quieting anxiety, shutting off a 3 a.m. loop, and resetting your mood become second nature.
Just before I was hospitalized, I had finished recording the complete skill-training program where I walk you through that entire progression step by step. It is called The Golden Reset – 18 short video lessons spread across 5 modules (plus 5 bonus lessons, guided practice audios, and a workbook). Because the whole program was recorded before my hospitalization, you do not have to wait until I am back on my feet to begin.
I have shared one of the core lessons on the course page so you can watch it for free today. Start there, and practice it once tonight while the room is quiet.
If you’d like the full course, there are three ways to get it:
Join the Golden Circle, $295 a year. The complete Golden Reset course, my Sunday members-only letters, and a 30-minute private consultation with me as soon as I’m back on my feet.
Or become an annual member, $80 a year, by November 15. Through November 15, annual membership includes the full Golden Reset course along with a new series of Sunday members-only letters. While my podcast is on hold, I will be putting that time into writing and answering the many questions I receive each week from my Instagram community.
Or get the course on its own for $65, discounted until November 15. I am discounting it because there may be some kinks to work out and I want your feedback. After next week, the price goes up to $95.
Golden light,
Dr. Richard Louis Miller.
The 10 Commitments
Available for pre-order soon.
“You have a maintenance manual for your car. Maybe one for your refrigerator. But do you have a health maintenance manual for yourself? Most people don’t.”
– From the introduction to The 10 Commitments
A Health Maintenance Manual for Living with Purpose, Grace, and Vitality
A practical guide to the daily commitments that support a life of purpose, health, and vitality – drawing on nearly nine decades of life and more than sixty-five years of clinical practice to make the work concrete and usable.
Advance endorsements
“Dr. Richard Miller’s The Ten Commitments is a vital, masterfully crafted guide for anyone seeking to cultivate true vitality, purpose, and grace in their daily life.”
— Robin Carhart-Harris, PhD, Ralph Metzner Distinguished Professor of Neurology, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of California San Francisco
“Richard Miller and I share a lifelong commitment to practicing health. In The 10 Commitments, he brings that dedication to the page through personal stories and simple practices readers can make their own. His affection for life comes through.”
— Christopher Hobbs, PhD, herbalist, mycologist, and author of Christopher Hobbs’s Medicinal Mushrooms
“Richard Miller is living proof of what I have spent my career advocating: how we age is far more within our hands than we might think. The 10 Commitments turns a remarkable life into ten practices readers can begin today.”
— Maddy Dychtwald, co-founder and president of Age Wave; author of Ageless Aging
“Aging well is about more than longevity. It is about vitality, purpose, connection, and remaining open to awe. The 10 Commitments is an inspiring, practical guide to doing just that.”
— Michael Amster, MD, physician and co-author of The Power of Awe
“The 10 Commitments is a practical, engaging guide to living with greater energy, balance, and wisdom. Drawing on a lifetime of experience and memorable stories, Richard Miller offers accessible ways to care for our minds, bodies, and emotional well-being with intention and compassion.”
— Kristin Neff, PhD, author of Self-Compassion and Fierce Self-Compassion
My Other Books
The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines
Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out
Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)
Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances
Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca
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Nice hat. Wishing you well, "Other" Richard.