Judith Simon Prager, PhD
email: judithsimonprager@yahoo.com
phone: 310.346.5555

Press
Printed Press
Services Offered
• Verbal First Aid Training
• Hypnotherapy
• Prenatal Programs
• UCLA Creative Writing Classes
Biography

Press

An interview with ABC Good Morning America

Between the Lines Interview - Part 1

Between the Lines Interview - Part 2

Hay House Radio interview with Dr. Christiane Northrup

On pacing

Printed Press
click on images below to read the articles

 

Services Offered
Verbal First Aid Training
Hypnotherapy
Prenatal Programs
UCLA Creative Writing Classes

Verbal First Aid Training
I offer a 1-hour overview, 3-hour training, or full day/weekend workshops in Verbal First Aid. I have trained physicians, nurses, EMTs, firefighters other first responders at university medical centers, fire departments, and at seminars across the United States and around the world in this life-saving protocol.

Hypnotherapy
In my office in Redondo Beach I provide 1-3 hour sessions to help heal trauma, to reclaim the lost self, to help heal the mind/body, and to help people live up to their full potential.

Prenatal Programs
With the Bonding With the Baby Within program, individual sessions to help pregnant mothers use hypnosis techniques for birth, and the prenatal lullaby, I have helped support babies' entry into the world gently and with awareness that they are developing their emotional templates and consciousness for life at this important formative time.

UCLA Creative Writing Classes
Together with my husband, Harry Youtt, I have been teaching creative writing classes in the UCLA Ext. writers program, where we were named Outstanding Instructors of 2004.

contact Dr. Judith Simon Prager at 310.346.5555

 

Biography
Who I am
Being Blessed
The way it is
Working with Doctors and Hospitals
Web-as-Metaphor

Who I am

On the surface of things, I am a writer, a teacher, a lecturer, and a practicing clinical hypnotherapist.

My writing life as taken me across a myriad of media and a number of countries, leading finally to a great respect for the power of words. I began as a novelist (The Newman Factor), became a journalist (columnist for the Australian Magazine, Follow Me), wrote for a daytime TV series (General Hospital), became Vice President, Creative Copy Supervisor of an international advertising agency in New York (Ogilvy & Mather Promotions), and, realizing through all of this how words can provoke, inspire, harm, or heal, can even influence and change a life’s course, I decided to use my skills in the service of good.

I began writing non-fiction that I hoped would illuminate and even humbly dreamed might shift the world to a better way of communicating and being.

I wrote a book about how to change your life by changing the thoughts and the images that run you (Journey to Alternity: Transformational Healing Through Stories and Metaphors), and co-authored books about using words and loving presence to set the course for healing in emergencies and crises (The Worst Is Over: What To Say When Every Moment Counts and the latest Verbal First Aid: Help Your Kids Heal From Fear and Pain—and Come Out Strong).

I decided to go directly to the kids, next, and write a book about Verbal First Aid, just for them. It's Owie-Cadabra's Verbal First Aid for Kids: A somewhat magical way to help heal yourself and your friends.

Since 2001, I have taught the protocol of Verbal First Aid, how to speak in medical emergencies to relieve pain, calm, promote healing and save lives, to firefighters, emergency medical personnel, doctors, nurses and police officers across the US, at New York University Hospital immediately after the September 11th attack, and in England and in China after the devastating 2008 earthquake that killed 80,000 people.

Together with my husband, Harry Youtt, I have been teaching for the past 20 years in the highly-regarded UCLA Ext. Writers’ Program, where we were named Outstanding Instructors of 2004.

I am also a hypnotherapist with a PhD in psychology in a private practice that includes energy work as well as regression to the womb and beyond when those “stories” provide answers or different responses that heal.

As a frequent keynote speaker at the Association of Pre- and Perinatal Psychology and Health, I've developed a prenatal program (and CD) called “Bonding With The Baby Within” that helps mothers to connect with their babies, to support healthy emotional development and to build the brain architecture of their baby even before birth.

As a consultant to the Cardio-thoracic Surgery Unit of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, I used my knowledge of the way that words can heal to develop a series of before, during, and after-surgery CDs that were pilot tested among heart patients. The findings included dramatically reduced requests for pain medication, dramatically reduced requests for sleeping medication, nearly 100% patient satisfaction and anecdotally the nurses reported earlier release from the hospital and fewer side-effects from the anesthesia. I then created a CD for all surgeries, as well as a CD for Guided Imagery for Chemotherapy, and one for Creating Calm. As a consultant to Children’s Hospital of Orange County, I have trained doctors in Verbal First Aid and lectured at Grand Rounds.

My books and CDs are highlighted throughout this website, and the testimonials let you know what others think of my work.

CREATIVITY -- IT'S OURS, IT'S FREE, IT'S MAGICAL

How I got to this point, after a career that began with writing a best-selling novel, moved on to a stint as a writer for General Hospital, and then progressed through the executive ranks of New York advertising agencies, is a separate story. The essential point is that when I discovered it was possible to help people heal on the material plane by inviting them to create alternate realities, I knew I'd found my niche.

The magic that we all have is our imagination. When people move into that plane, they move into the magician's journey.

In my hypnotherapy practice, which has at times focused upon people who are suffering serious physical illnesses, my clients have experienced "spontaneous remissions" from cancer, recovery from paralysis, and rapid relief from allergies and eating disorders. The solutions my clients discover have been influenced by visitations by angels, sometimes discussions with a fruit bowl and, in one case, a dance with her own cancer.

These stories are all documented in my book, Journey to Alternity. The power of these clients' creative imaginations changed their worlds.

As an instructor in the UCLA Extension Writers' Program, a best-selling novelist, TV writer, Creative Director at major advertising agencies in New York and Los Angeles, I have seen how creativity opens the door to Alternity — alternate realities — and, ultimately, as I've seen through hypnotherapy, to healing. I won't give you "five easy steps" or some quick grid that will change your life. I can't. I don't think the easy answers exist.

All I do know is that you have it in you to heal yourself through your imagination. We are not stuck in any one "reality," and when we know it, we are free to live our full potential. Can you do it for yourself? Try some of the exercises from my book: Journey to Alternity on this site and see.

Being Blessed

We are all blessed with insight, but the luckiest among us are those who know it. The insights I've been blessed with, I want to share with you.

I want to tell you about meaning and purpose and how, when people I work with in hypnotherapy suddenly understand, when they "get it," no matter how dire their fate, they smile. You don't have to go into trance to connect with your wisdom and all that is. It makes it easier, but there are lots of other ways — laughter, nature, creativity, love, music, meditation and dreams are some.

I'd like to show you all of the answers, the magic, the secrets I have found (but there is no one answer, and anyway, the main secret is that yours are so unique to you, when you discover them, they resonate with a chime inside, in an "ah-ha!," or with goosebumps on the outside).

I'd love to give you the five or the six steps that will guarantee you the path to your own truths (but there are far more than five or six steps — and at the same time, there are far fewer, perhaps even one, perhaps none really.)

In the end, communication of the most essential truths ends in frustration, because everybody wants to make the message far more complex than it is. People want to delegate the journey to enlightenment to the seers, they want to delegate the task, when in fact, there is no alternative for them except to commence their own journeys.

Ultimately, at our cores, we seek love and purpose. It looks like we are seeking safety, but that's because we're not as certain as we should be that we are safe, that the universe is meaningful and we are exactly where we should be. But when we get to the love and the purpose, all else melts away.

To get to the love, do as the writer E. M. Forester said, "only connect..." Know that what happens to any of us happens to you, too. And treat everything as holy. It is -- but beyond that, when you do, you feel holy, too.

To get to the purpose, listen to your inner voice, your intuition. It is your own imagination, your creative leaps that will open you to the infinite possibilities. And to the unfolding of your own purpose. I can tell you that stories and metaphors, myths and imagination can transform a problem into an opportunity or even a gift.

I can tell you that forgetting about yourself---not denying yourself or putting yourself last, but simply BEING (n the words of the Tao, becoming "tolerant, disinterested, amused") enriches every moment and makes it and all your interactions sacred.

And, beyond that, you may want to "become transparent." So that your life is not "about you," anymore. Not even about your generous acts, although they flow naturally, nor your guilts, nor your desires. From that place of clarity and disinterest, you are free to feel joy as the angels may.

I can tell you about my own journey, to give you courage, and a little know-how. It is the most difficult journey I have ever taken. It is the easiest journey that I have ever taken. And within the span of all of these mysteries and opposites lies the message that I hope you receive. Bringing that message to the world is my life's work.

"The Way It Is"

The Tao means "the way." But maybe nobody knows the way it really is. Of one thing I feel certain: the way we thought it was, it isn't. We are not solid beings limited to our minds and our bodies. Our minds and our bodies are not separate from each other, nor are WE separate from each other. Time isn't linear, it isn't just a one-way street of Mondays through Sundays. Our thoughts aren't in our heads, but shared, all over, coming and going. Every breath we breathe was also breathed by millions of beings over eons of time.

We need to know this, because it invites us to live larger. And more carefully, lovingly. If everything you do and say has a ripple effect in the world, how very awake and aware and clear you must be to be playing the part you were born for, the unfolding of your life to its full potential.

The Dalai Lama says: "There is no way that you can come up with one formula that will solve all problems." But he believes that it is compassion and empathy that brings you inner peace and happiness. Inside you, deep, deep beneath the job description, the clothes and the skin, your name and the labels about yourself you think you believe, under all the layers there is the being that connects with everything, with all there is. When you experience it — in trance, in meditation, in love, in nature, in laughter, in creativity — you remember, if only for a moment, who you really are.

And the Tao says: "When you realize where you come from [who you really are], you naturally become tolerant, disinterested, amused. Kindhearted as a grandmother, dignified as a king."

There, in that place, there is no judgment, no comparisons, no anger, no jealousy, no illness, no victimhood, no abandonment. Buddha said that it is our desire that hurts us. I think it is our desire to be "worthy" that hurts us. To deserve love. What we don't understand is that we don't have to do anything material, anything on this plane to be "worthy." We each have every right to be here.

And when we know it, in every cell of our body, we can relax into it and change everything. This "who you are" -- it has something to do with meaning and purpose. In my experience, no matter how drastic or tragic a life is, when the person understands the meaning, he/she smiles.

Our lives are not about the story, the details, what happens to us-- but about what we make of this gift of life, how we deal with the hand we've been dealt. It is "the grace with which we live" that defines us.

And, here's where the paradoxes challenge our imaginations. While the details don't define us, our thoughts, actions, and decisions set the trajectory of the path of our livs. And so that means that EVERYTHING COUNTS. Nothing is too small to be important, and yet, our lives are not about the circumstances but the themes.

If this is all true, we have no choice for the sake of our larger selves, our SOULS, but to fill our lives with love as if it were the air we breathe, background music, energy, a fragrance wafting on a perpetual breeze. Love unconditionally, no agendas, no expectations, and see your love reflected in the pool of all that is.

Whatever you beam out returns to you. The world you live in matches your vibration. Make it the highest vibration in the universe, the vibration of love.

Bruce Lipton, Ph.D., cellular biologist, says that we "see" four million bits of information every second, but can process only 2,000. Which 2,000 do we choose? Generally those that we're familiar with, the old habits and patterns. If you believe that the world is out to get you, or that you are a victim or a loser, don't you think that in those 4,000,000 bits you can find 2,000 to confirm that view of reality?

Everything already exists in those four million bits. The "proof" that you are loved, creative, whatever you seek, is out there waiting for you focus on it. Dr. Lipton says that we need new lenses in order to see the other possibilities. When you know who you are, and use a lens of love to view your world, you can create new neural pathways that lead to a whole new life.

I do not believe it is possible for us to know exactly what to ask the universe for, what would be in our highest good. But I do believe the universe gives us clues in "synchronicities," -- meaningful coincidences. When you begin to follow those clues, you begin to find your true self. Then you do not have to know how to envision a future that is right for you -- it unfolds by itself, through following your guidance.

I believe it's harder to live frightened than brave. You came here for a reason, to unfold in a particularly unique way, as only you can.

If you agree, then tune in to the universe, ask for guidance, vibrate in love and follow Dolly Parton's dictum: "Find out who you are and be it on purpose."

Working with Doctors and Hospitals

People who enter the medical profession generally do so out of a desire to help others. The medical training is rigorous and scientific, and that initial impulse is sometimes lost in the process.

I have been fortunate to gain acceptance with some in the medical profession who remember their original impulse and who also want to respond to the requests of their patients.

I have had opportunity to work with the Cardio-Thoracic Surgery Unit at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where they are running a pilot program utilizing acupuncture, massage and guided imagery. I created a series of CD's for the pre-intra-post and ICU patients which are being tested to determine whether pain relief (in the form of fewer requests for medication) and earlier release can result from initiating the body's own inner healing mechanisms. I have also done trainings for the Pediatric interns and residents, helping them become magicians so that their interactions with their tiny patients are more pleasant for all.

There are also physicians who recommend my work to their patients, and I feel that is an exciting development. The new medicine for this new millennium must be more "integrative" taking into account mind, body, spirit and "non-local" effects, in the words of Dr. Larry Dossey. Every interaction is an opportunity for harming or healing, and as we recognize that, we can change the face of medicine forever.

Website as metaphor

Most people use a web site for informative or commercial reasons, or both. That's the literal description of the web. But even the name, well...

When we use the web, we are interconnected, moving into the new paradigm in which we move beyond the five senses to become more intuitive and psychic.

The way I see that happening is that, as we move up the chakras from the third chakra (ego) at which we have been stuck for some time as a planet, into the fourth (heart), we will interconnect differently. Coming from our hearts, we will know what others feel and therefore what they think, and in that way, we can be psychic.

That will require, as well, impeccable integrity (in Carlos Castenada's phrase) because others will know our hearts and minds, but that will add to the excellence of the world.

All of this is symbolized by the internet, that web in which time and space have been overcome.

It's thrilling. Use it wisely and well and become a pioneer into the new paradigm.