The greatest discovery of this generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitude of mind.
Albert Schweitzer
As a psychotherapist working in private practice, I see people every day who have created havoc in their lives through misuse of their emotions. I have seen the same people turn their lives around dramatically through contacting the tremendous power within them and using it constructively.
The greatest power in the world is inside your own head. It’s called the subconscious mind. The ability to correctly program this incredible force within you can transform your personality and create miracles in your life. Knowledge of the dynamics of your subconscious mind can bring you excellent health, financial prosperity, self-confidence, peace of mind, loving relationships, and whatever else you desire in your life. It can also help you overcome the negative concepts that create anxiety, depression, poverty, poor health, and lack of friends or lovers. In the realm of the subconscious, there is a vital force that can help and guide your life, if you will only listen to it, learn its laws, and program it correctly. Used incorrectly or ignorantly, that same fantastic power can produce an existence of living hell. It all depends on your ability to deprogram it from the negative concepts that others have given you, and reprogram it to positive ones. If you want to know what you’ve been asking for, just take a look at what you’ve got!
We all determine the direction of our lives, but most of us do it unconsciously, and the consequence is often chaos. To a very great extent, we create our own reality, and we are responsible for what we attract into our lives through our own thinking. Through using your mind constructively, you can unlock dormant potentials within you, alter inappropriate behavior patterns, overcome the negative conditioning from your past, and increase your creativity and self-confidence.
Richard, a biochemist I counseled some years ago, was a good example of how we can use the power of our subconscious mind to create a better life. Richard came to see me because of personal problems that were overwhelming him; he was particularly concerned because he had been searching for a job for over a month and had been unable to find one. He was highly qualified, with a master’s degree in chemistry, but his despondent attitude was preventing him from finding the position he so desperately wanted. He grew up in a poor family and had worked two jobs to put himself through college, but his parents had “poverty consciousness,” and were convinced that even a degree wouldn’t do much good. Richard subconsciously bought this negative idea.
I taught him how to make “money affirmations,” a technique I learned from Leonard Orr, instructor of “Prosperity consciousness” seminars in San Francisco. Because Richard was an intellectual and a scientist, he thought I was a little crazy to suggest that writing affirmations would get him the type of job he wanted, and at a higher salary. Reluctantly, he carried out my suggestions and was amazed to find they worked. Within three weeks he found a job at an excellent salary with an expense account and a company car.
Another client, Nancy, a fifty-three-year-old divorced woman, had attempted for three years to find a man with whom she could spend her remaining years. After two disappointments in marriage, one lasting twenty-five years and the second only a year and a half, she felt she was too old to attract the type of man she desired. Three years of making the rounds in the “singles scene” had left her already shaky self-esteem even more severely damaged, and she came to see me in a state of severe depression. After a few months of working with methods to increase her confidence and self-esteem, I taught Nancy how to use the power of her subconscious mind to attract a suitable companion. She diligently applied these principles for several months, then started getting telephone calls from men she had met in the past, and met new ones through friends who began inviting her to social affairs. Within a year I received a letter from her; she had moved to New York with her new husband and was extremely happy, having at last found the fulfillment for which she had long been searching.
When I was twenty-one years old, I enrolled in a course called Concept-Therapy. I was living in Toronto, Canada, at the time, and was a shy, self-conscious, constantly ill young woman with no belief in my own abilities. I managed to complete the course, but it took me three years to find the courage to enroll in the concomitant study group meetings. The first time I went to a meeting, there were only five other people present. Even so, when the textbook was passed around so that each of us could read a paragraph from it aloud, I was too shy to do so and had to hand the book to the next person.
Learning more and more about the power of the mind, I decided to try imaging myself being more confident. I sat down every day, morning and evening, for about ten minutes, and concentrated all my energy on seeing myself standing before a group, relaxed, perfectly poised, and speaking clearly and confidently. The first step was to get the feeling over to my body that I really had the confidence I desired, which was very difficult because I had never experienced it. If I were a confident woman, I decided, I would probably hold my head up high, pull my shoulders back, and look other people directly in the eye. I walked around my apartment acting as if I had great self-confidence.
A month after I began my imaging the leader of the study group asked me if I would introduce the speaker at the next meeting, a gathering attended by some thirty people. Since I had made a pact with myself that I would never turn down an invitation to speak, I nervously accepted, feeling my heart skip a beat as I said “okay.” A month later, after visualizing every day, I did it! I was nervous, true, but I didn’t fall to pieces; and I didn’t lose my voice or faint, or suffer any of the other disasters I had previously anticipated. Delighted with my initial success, I continued visualizing myself as self-confident. Eight years later, when I moved from Canada to California, I had conquered my inferiority complex to such an extent that I have now presented lectures before hundreds of people.
More and more people today are learning, as I so fortunately did early in my life, the methods for harnessing the tremendous power of the subconscious mind. Astronaut Captain Edgar Mitchell declared, “The simple secret of the universe is: you create your own reality!”
Your understanding of the profound significance of Captain Mitchell’s wise words can change your life dramatically. My objective is to share with you a variety of techniques you can learn to use your potential to the fullest, and become as successful, happy, and prosperous as you want to be. Every one of us has mental powers and abilities that are lying dormant. We can awaken these by applying proven methods for getting in touch with the Great Power within us. These techniques are not new; they have been well documented by New Age researchers, as well as in the lives of successful men and women who have learned the secret of tapping the inner power of the subconscious mind. You can join their ranks; all that is required is that you learn and apply the techniques for transformation that follow.
Although many books have been written on a single technique for improving one’s life, this book presents a variety of proven methods, while at the same time explaining why and how these life-transforming techniques work.
The book is divided into two parts. Part One is a study of the nature of consciousness, and how our minds work. To use the techniques for transformation most effectively, one must first understand the nature of the mysterious “something” we call consciousness, which permeates all life. This section explains in clear, nontechnical language why the power of the mind is so effective in producing change in one’s life. Rather than ask you to rely on faith alone in using these methods, data is presented from psychology, philosophy, and parapsychology to demonstrate how the mind functions, and how consciousness expresses itself in mankind as the life force behind all thought and action.
Part Two is a practical handbook on how to apply the theory explained in Part One, and includes guided visualizations, self-healing techniques, affirmations to attract love and prosperity, and methods of inducing self-hypnosis.
If the reader is not interested in the philosophical discussion presented in Part One, he or she may skip this section and begin using the techniques given in Part Two.