the (inner) citadel


The Teaching of the citadel addresses how to organize one’s life and environment to support essential development (i.e. being over having), to  live according to realization (i.e as if having had lost its importance) while addressing conditioning , reacxtivityt, and habit – to explore more deeply service to the truth.

         A.H. Almaas, the Ridhwan School


“If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgement of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgement now.”                                                                                                                    ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations


"The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." 

     Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990, p. 3)


“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.“ — Mark Twain


When one attempts to create value for others (as we are doing here), especially others who have been suffering for some time, when they begin to emerge from the doldrums, it is best to have something for them that hangs together internally. AcuDestress had one purpose, much like Smith’s AcuDetox before it, to introduce its subjects to higher skills which existed at the outset as unrealized potential. We can go back there, make sure we are doing that, but having unearthed some skills, what are we going to do with them? I’m not here to lead you down any particular road, but every age has had its Stoic philosophers. Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius called what the were up to was building an inner citadel, where outside reality gave cause for reflection, but never to giving in to “the part of least resistance.” Some people (us included) say “things go better!” and they really mean it. What follows here makes the foregoing chapters meaningful.



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Yes, things go better “when you’re present,” and even better when you’re singing it. Have you begun to notice that I’m populating these pages with things that might come in handy when you’re nudging people towards what’s best in them? So, the next three pages will be devoted to the three essential parts of The Citadel, the important things that will enhance its presentation. So don’t ever print these pages. They are meant to be resources which link you to the places which will help the process. Let me remind you or tell you for the first time why The Citadel was fashioned. It was not to replace AcuDestress which was doing well on its own, but people had to leave their houses to attend, this became less and less wise, then not permissible, and our clinic closed its doors. Thus, if something was going to continue it needed a new form. This is it.


It was not an attempt to reinvent the wheel. It preserves the best parts of the same wheel I’ve been working on for years. I’ve always been a program designer. I mean always. I can remember those days between ages 5 and 10 when I just loved to go outside, because it gave me the opportunity to create a “program.” In 1979 when I sold my general practice and opened a psychotherapy practice, I went to Werner Erhard’s est. I liked it, admires the creator, but I had to rely on seeing it work for my friend who went with me. It didn’t work for me. So I replicated it a few times. It worked for others. est opened with a scripted putdown of everyone in attendance, culminating in a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that things were going to get so bad, that people might have to use “barf bags.” We had to learn how to say this with a straight face, so before hand we rolled in laughter on the floor, before the participants arrived. So one time we did our best iteration of the “barf bag routine” and one of the participants started laughing. Now I mean laughing. Not mere tittering! Laughing to the point of his having to leave. As we glanced out the window at him driving away, peals of laughter kept coming from his truck. So, the show went on, not without a few people getting a little worried for him.


Then, four days later, with the program complete, we had the participants gather to debrief, who should arrive but our laughing man - but, guess what, he was still laughing, not just giggling but full-throated laughter. Then he explained things. He hadn’t so much as cracked a smile in 35 years after something really let him down. He has retreated into himself. He said he just needed to get his smile back, thanked us, and went out the door still laughing. Now that’s what iI call beyond talk therapy. Do you think we ( or anyone) could have convinced him, or he could talk himself into it? It probably had happened but failed.  I won’t go into the details of other programs I created. One you’ve heard of -  Young Canadian Leadership Challenge. Another was AcuDestress. One thing about them - I always stuck with them till they worked - really worked. I didn’t wait until I had every detail worked out, but eventually every detail worked out.


So, The Citadel is natural follow-on of what I’d learned from AcuDestress, that as a person destined  from birth to struggle with withdrawal, was at my best if I just let it come to me what to do next. I only had 5 weeks to put it together and it came together in three! I’ve often counselled a BLUE like myself to give themselves a day, with no plans, during which I keep asking myself “What am I to do next?” And that’s the way The Citadel was designed. I kept asking myself what to put in next, and I listened to what people were saying around me and the design just flowed out of me. There’s that word “flow” again. Touché.


TAPPING (Citadel Part 1) Hold on here. I have only this small segment left of the page to talk about (Emotional Freedom Technique). I’d come upon, spontaneously, a memory of 10 years ago. I had a patient who, among other things had severe Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis and fibromyalgia. At the end of the  program she and her family moved to Australia. She loved AcuDestress and the intuition she’d gained and wanted to stay in touch. After a few months she wrote to say she’d taken up tapping (EFT), that both her fibromyalgia and Hashimoto’s were gone, and that she was teaching EFT. No words needed here.      Just get tapping.




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While EFT is easy to take up, and just takes doing, and not even any theory, that’s the way  that acupuncture works too. We Westerners don’t understand it. Easterners don’t really understand it either. They just accept it for what it does. I had a serious motor vehicle accident four years back. Serious enough that they X-rayed me at the hospital - but I also had an acupuncture appointment that afternoon. I went in walking like a cripple, and I went out, dancing, as if I were 30 years younger. Don’t think too much about EFT. If you have to, see the scientific studies of the results. Take anxiety, for example. So, there. If you need proof, you have it. All it takes now is a little patience on your part. Want the book?



SILVA MIND CONTROL METHOD (Citadel Part 2)  So, you’ve got the picture, now. The write-ups are really just ways to expand on the topic, which is already covered on the web page, but I like to tell stories about my experience with the methods I support. 


You’ll remember in my Chapter on acupuncture and intuition my story of Lee Pulos  and his student from Monterey who became acquainted simply because Pulos  concentrated on his name on his plane trip between Vancouver and Monterey.  I didn't have time to tell the whole story, but after the traveler from Monterey and I had gone through his story  in detail, he said: “Why don't we go down and have supper with Pulos. I know him now.” So we went.  I’d never been to Vancouver at this point that I had a friend who would become my landlady a few years later, who went to Vancouver once a year.  Her name was Eleanor Sim.  So I sit down to supper,  and Pulos is somebody who doesn't engage in chitchat.  Everything was serious and on the table.  In short order I felt compelled to say ( and I don't really understand to this day what I mean by  “compelled to say”) “ You know Eleanor Sim don’t you?” Pulos shot back: “Of course.”  Why did I ask that question?   I still don't know but when I got back home I
asked Eleanor if she’d ever mentioned Lee Pulos.  She said “ No I hardly know him.” Weird!


By the end of Pulos seminar,  I was introduced to José Silva’s “working  a case”  which appears to be his signature exercise.  Little did I know then that I would find a book by Dr. Carl Simonton, called “ Getting Well Again”  which detailed Simonton’s  learning how to pull people back from the brink of death,  people who had Stage 4 cancers,  with a mere visualization ( which I later learned that he had learned from Silva)  that simulated what might happen in the body,  if it were to reject the cancer. This was very important to me because at the time my mother was awaiting surgery for breast cancer. After the surgery, with a pathology report that showed that she had a serious cancer,  I was able to work with her with Getting Well Again. Her visualizations were kind of fun,  as she would make up a mythical bugs that had the capacity to eat up the cancer,  like bugs or spiders or  ladybirds.  And she would   practice that everyday.  She died 25 years later, at age 91 without

the slightest whiff of cancer. Remarkable.


In You the Healer, after eight million had taken his

course José promised his students,

that they could:


  1. •Fall asleep at will

  2. • wake up any kind without alarm clock;

  3. • stay awake when drowsy;

  4. • get rid of the headache;

  5. • solve problems by means of a dream;

  6. • stop smoking;

  7. • lose weight;

  8. • remember long lists easily;

  9. • study with greater concentration and

  10. •

  11. •

  12. •

  13. •                                                                          43

  14. •recall;

  15. • answer difficult problem;

  16. • reach goals;

  17. • get rid of pain anywhere in your body;

  18. • correct abnormalities in your body;

  19. • trigger both brain hemispheres to work for you;

  20. • become more creative and perceptive;

  21. • correct health problems in others


You The Healer reads: “You will acquire the 16 benefits through what I call formula type techniques. By formula I mean “first do this, then do this, then do this “– simple mental steps, performed mostly at the alpha level. With an 8 million graduates in some 70 countries have taken a minimum of 32 hours of instruction in the Silva method,” as  compared to the 500,000 detective out in the Silva Mind Control Method. I would think it would be best to have both books,  and to have someone make sure that people are following the steps precisely as they’re written down.  Even though the steps in AcuDestress aren’t as rigid, better results come from being at all the sessions, from reading all the material,  and from taking it  at face value.  I've just ordered his second book.  Maybe you don't need to unless you're doing this alone.


One last Silva footnote.  I never recommend that my AcuDestress patients learn to meditate or use meditation that they've learned along the course.  with 5-point ear acupuncture, they become mindful spontaneously without any effort or spending any time. Other people have said that mindfulness separate from meditation is more effective,  and the jury's out but I believe they are right -  and besides when I learned meditation took me five years to become good at it, so with only a month to work with,  it wasn't something I could recommend.  I must admit though, when I  meet people afterwards I suggest things like meditation and Qi Gong.  Silva’s meditation is about as simple as you can get, but it works like a charm.


POWER OF EIGHT (Citadel Part 3)


I’m not going to say as much about Power of Eight, as I have just scratched the surface, but of all 3 this one has the most research behind it. A book review reads:


“This is a monumentally significant book, a once-in-a-generation work that will turn the tide in how we unleash the power of healing for each other and for the world. Drink in its meticulous and transparent scientific method, its countless uplifting stories of vivid healing breakthroughs and its breathtakingly luminous vision. Then go manifest The Power of Eight.” —James O'Dea, peace activist, former President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences and author of Soul Awakening Practice


Discover how to tap into your extraordinary human capacity for connection and healing, using astonishing new findings about the miraculous power of group intention and its boomerang effect, in this new book by the author of the international bestsellers The Intention Experiment and The Field.


What we send out into the universe comes back to us, magnified. Although the power of intention—the energy of positive thoughts—is widely accepted as an influential force in transforming lives, the exponential power of group intention has never been explored, until now. In The Power of Eight, Lynne McTaggart, an expert on the science of spirituality, reveals her remarkable findings from ten years of experiments about how group intention can heal our lives—and change the world for the better. Drawing on hundreds of case studies, the latest brain research, and dozens of McTaggart’s own university studies, The Power of Eight provides solid evidence showing that there is such a thing as a collective consciousness. Now you can learn to use it and unleash the power you hold inside of you to heal your own life with help from this riveting, highly accessible new book.”                               I think that’s enough to say for now.



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