I hope I've made it quite clear by now that I'm not yet walking on water, manifesting gold coins in my hand, or maintaining half a dozen resort villas to which I flee in one of my four Lamborghinis when I tire of my servant-laden estates overlooking the Caribbean.
Has my life changed since learning to direct my energy flow? Like an about-face! Sure, I still have an ample supply of old beliefs that cause my teeter-tottering scales to tip toward negative focus, negative feelings, a closed valve, and bad moods … until I catch 'em and turn 'em around. Sometimes the process is fast and electrifying; other times so slow it seems like lifetimes pass before I get myself talked out of a downer.
There is, however, one area of my recent energy-flowing life that has been more of a joy to me than the freedom of money or any of the other betterments of well-being, and that is my body.
When I was in my forties, in the midst of my worst victim-hood years, I had one lousy bad back. Sometimes I couldn't get out of bed for a week. Other times the spasms that grabbed me were so intensely painful, I'd let out screams that could be heard in the next state. Although I'd manage to scrunch into the car, I'd finally make it to work, only to stand or kneel all day at my desk, as sitting was far too painful.
No sooner did I begin to get that mess under control with a stringent exercise routine, than I was off to visit four hundred twenty-two and a half different doctors to find out why my heart was doing the rhumba all day instead of a quiet two-step. A holistic M.D. finally labeled it severe hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), “probably brought on by stress.” A slight understatement.
I was not in good shape emotionally, physically, mentally, or spiritually. I had already put well over two decades of Alcoholics Anonymous under my belt, but nothing was working except that I was sober; I couldn't have found a spiritual direction if my life depended on it, which, at that point, it did. I was in big trouble.
Then it was joints that didn't want to move, excess weight, lack of energy, poor eyesight, bad teeth, and hair going bye-bye; all sure signs of … signs of what? Normal aging? No, all sure signs of a life being lived with a valve more closed than open, a life being lived more disconnected from my Source energy than connected, a life projecting far more negative vibrations than positive. Which is all that aging is anyhow.
But why had I shut down so? Where was all the negativity coming from that had become so destructive to my body? I wasn't a nasty ogre or a cruel, wicked person wearing my negativity on my sleeve. Actually, I had grown up as an ordinary kid from an ordinary upper-middle-class dysfunctional family. I had done all the right things, gone to the right colleges, worn the right clothes, held the right jobs, and lived in the right places, all with an unfailing pleasantness to my demeanor and properly timed smiles on my face. Yet that underlying tone of “normal” negativity was my constant companion, and the older I got, the more it blossomed.
Sometimes I had fun. Sometimes I was happy. Never in a million years, though, did I consider myself to be negative, and neither did my friends. On the contrary, I was viewed as the embodiment of optimistic cheer. Still, I was always worried— about everything. With a grin on my face and a good word always on my lips, my constant focus was on lack—in either myself or others. Just like everybody else I knew.
Now, more than twenty years after the back and low blood sugar episodes, and several years of working with the Law of Attraction, I've never looked better, felt better, moved better, or been better. Not even when I was in my teens did I have this kind of stamina, and I'd have to go back to some other lifetime that I'm surely not aware of to dig up this kind of passion for life and living.
Fear is rarely a visitor to my world, not even worry or concern. Money comes easily, most of the time. (You thought I was a pro at this? Surely you jest!) New ideas abound. Work is accomplished with fun and ease. I'm doing what I want to do, when I want to do it … for the most part. Bouts of negative focus last only briefly, or for as long as I feel like having them. A continuum of days that are extraordinarily happy comes by my design. And the by-product to all of this? Ah, my astoundingly good health!
These days just about everybody knows that the state of one's physical health is connected to the state of one's mental health. Even doctors, by crackie! Scientists stress the hell out of mice, then watch the cancer cells develop. They deprive baby chimps of mama's breast, and watch them develop diabetes. The whole scientific/medical community knows all too well there's some kind of link between body and mind, they're just not sure what it is … yet. Won't they be surprised when they find out it's nothing but our own energy.
(I can see the cartoon now: two doctors standing opposite each other over an opened-up patient on the operating table. One says to the other, “I've got the tumor out, but where's that damn valve we're supposed to open?”)
Illness in any form is nothing more than our negative energies choking off so much of our Life flow—those higher frequencies that are our natural state—that cellular damage results.
Oh sure, we're always attached energetically by at least a string of that Life force, or we'd be outta here. But a pinched-up string (closed valve), and a wide open Feel Good valve which allows that Life force energy to flow through us freely, are two very different things. One starves the body of its natural Life force and Life-giving energy, while the other feeds the body. It follows, then, that if a state of higher-than-usual vibration is maintained on a fairly regular basis, sickness cannot possibly happen or be maintained. It just can't.
The body, after all, isn't separate from the universe, so when we think a thought, the vibrations run through the body as well as everywhere else. If those vibrations are in harmony with our body's intrinsic programming for well-being (open valve Feel Good), then the cells thrive.
But if it's negative energy we're projecting, the cells can't remain strong enough to do their job. All they've had to feed on are the physical foods we've ingested, and that's simply not enough to keep them going. Without the high-frequency energy of Life force necessary for them to survive, they eventually weaken and die before their time, no longer able to replicate normally and sustain healthy life.
Illness exists for only one reason: someone has flowed more low-frequency energy than high. Which, of course, is why so much illness exists. Find the generally happy person, the one who constantly pulls themselves up and out of negative emotions, and you'll find a healthy person. Always! People who are sick have shut themselves off in some degree from their Lifeline. It may not be so obvious on the outside, but in some way or other, they've closed their valve off to their Source energy through worry, blame, guilt, whatever.
Sick people are just misinformed, like all of us. They can be devoutly religious, honest, upstanding citizens, dear and trusted friends, but if they are not allowing enough of the flow of their own greater energy into their lives, they are not allowing Life. Indeed, all illness, without exception, is the disallowance of that higher energy flow, and the ultimate manifestation of one's endless negative emotion.
If you currently have an illness, then right off the bat I'll recommend you stay with your doctor, stay with your treatment, stay with whatever your recovery program is, as that is undoubtedly where your beliefs lie. No sense in ruffling the waters until some new beliefs and new vibrational changes are strongly in place.
For centuries we've held to the doctrine that only something outside of ourselves could make us better, so until we learn to override that gargantuan belief, only an activity which resonates with that conviction—e.g., continuing to go outside of self for medical assistance—can possibly offer any measure of recovery. That recovery may be minimal or shaky at best, for if the thoughts and energy flows don't change, the original illness or something worse will be back. But for now, stay with your doctor!
However, if you are sick, I ask you to know from the depths of your being that any illness is reversible. While there is probably no more difficult task in this world than attempting to feel up when you're physically down, it is not only achievable, it has been done many, many times.
Norman Cousins did it, the publisher who was dying of cancer. He declared “No way am I checking out” and decided to spend his time in a state of laughter. He knew instinctively that if he could reverse the frequencies in his body, it would heal itself. So from his hospital bed he watched only funny movies, read funny books, had friends tell him jokes, and cured himself completely of the cancer that had raked his body. Then he wrote a book about it. I have to hand it to him; that is one committed soul … and teacher.
Cousin's recovery is a prime example of what we're talking about here, that it's not our genes, not our sexual habits, not our ingestion of bad meats, and not even our exposure to infection that is at the core of our illness. A connected person flowing Life force energy through their body can never, ever, be affected by those things. What causes illness is body-starving, the disallowance of Life Source energy so critical to health and well-being.
Now obviously, the most spontaneous thing we do when hit with an illness, particularly one we view as serious, is fly into action, rush to a doctor, and never take our thoughts off the condition. We're frightened, so of course that's how we react. And yet with our constant negative focus on the illness, we're cutting off the most important ingredient available to reverse the condition: the curative powers of our higher frequencies.
No illness or accident happens overnight. Adversities take a while to cook, usually several years. While your more-down-than-up energy over the years is indeed the hard-to-swallow cause of what you may be looking at right now, that has not one thing in this world to do with what can be!
If, for instance, you've been in a serious accident, it didn't happen all of a sudden out of nowhere. As you look back over the years, could you say your pattern of thought has leaned just a little toward low frequencies: anger at family, ticked off at circumstances, aching to be liked, fear of failure, blame, concern over finances, hidden guilt over whatever? It would have to be so, or you would not have had the accident. That negative momentum builds over time, and builds and builds until finally you step into your self-made vortex with another who has his tuning fork pitched the same as yours. And you come together, often head on.
Low-frequency energy is the cause; body damage—either accident or illness—is the effect whether it's been building for a few weeks or several decades.
And then there's the matter of intensity. Mild, lukewarm negativity over a period of years is still negative vibration, and your body responds in kind with a mild, lukewarm problem. By the same token, a hefty negative flowing of your energy over the years (or months) will yield a hefty illness or a good-sized accident.
But whatever the physical problem may be, it is nothing more than the result of vibrational abuse to the body, a result which can be undone far more rapidly than it took to create.
To turn an illness around, once again we go for trickery, looking for ways to trick the mind into creating the high vibrations required for the cells to begin their process of regeneration. This is not a cure-all; nothing is, for only a change in energy across the board will bring that transformation about. This is a beginning, and one that can work wonders.
This trickery is much like writing a new script, but with some important twists added to unhinge a veritable storehouse of rusted old beliefs. We're going to play a little kid's game called “Let's Pretend,” and I promise, if you will dive into this wholeheartedly and play the game full throttle, your valve will open. Okay, here's part one.
First, get the jump-start smile on your face, then move into a buzz from that Gentle Inner Smile. When you've got that going, reach back in time to the little kid in you, because the game we're going to play is the game of “What If.”
“What would I do if …”
“Where would I go if …”
“How would I play if …” If what?!
… if you were healthy as a horse!
… if you were young, and strikingly good-looking!
… if you were the frisky, frolicsome youngster you used to be or always wanted to be!
… if you had three wishes and could do anything you wanted to do, and have anything you wanted to have.
Get into it and live it as much as you can until the feeeeelings of fun and excitement flood through you. (If you're feeling foolish, that's a pretty fair indication of how stuck you are in rigid adult—meaning generally negative—vibrations.)
Now call to mind (and feeling) some actual times when you truly were vibrantly healthy and happy, and the buoyant feelings that went with those times.
Maybe it was playing hockey after school on a frozen pond, or cheerleading in high school. Maybe it was meandering along a lazy summer stream picking watercress, or bobsledding with friends down the back nine of the golf course, or hayriding with your first love under a harvest moon. Whatever it was, find your times and go back to the happy feelings that went with them.
And now, put both together. Bounce back and forth between the two feelings, gradually merging your “What Ifs” and your “Back Thens” into one feeling tone. Let them flow together in a symphony of happy vibrations until the sunny feelings of “Back Then” overlay onto the desired outcomes of “What If.” They become one feeling, one happiness, one joyful remembrance. Most important, they are now one outcome!
You can't look at how much you don't want your illness, and expect to open your valve to well-being at the same time, any more than you can look at not having enough money and feel good about it. It's got to be one or the other, open valve or closed. Feel good and allow the Life force to flow through you to wellness; or be scared stiff, cut off the Life flow, and perpetuate the illness. Cancer has never been the cause of death to the body, but cutting off the Life force through fear, anger, blame, or any other negative vibration will do it every time.
If you will allow yourself to really get into playing “What If” and “Back Then” and stop being such a stuffy grownup, you will reach the feelings required to begin bodily changes. The moment you do, the moment you feeeeel yourself as healthy as you used to be or want to be, and can feel it throughout the depths of your being, you launch a whole new creation of you out into time that now exists in a vortex of thought as surely as a tree stands in the forest. You may not be in the forest to see the tree, but it's there. You know it's there; now don't ignore it.
Go often to that place of thought to check out the looks of this new body you've created. Take with you the feelings merged from your games. With those buoyant feelings in place, slip into your new body to check out its shape, how it fits, how it feels, how it works, even how it smells. Pretend, pretend, and feeeeel.
If you're in pain, wait for a time when the pain has lessened, then step into the healing world of “Let's Pretend.” Go there as often as you can. Then get out of your own way, meaning keep your focus off what hasn't happened yet, and let the universe do its thing.
At a talk I gave recently I was asked (as I almost always am) how to get to that feeling place of “thin,” when you can see quite clearly that you're fat. It was another “Let's Pretend” scenario, knowing that you can't think thin—much less get there—when you're feeling fat.
A gal in the back, who was frantically waving her hand, spoke up with the kind of excitement I usually associate with winning the lottery. I mean, she had something to say in no uncertain terms, and sure enough, she hit the nail on the head.
It seems this gal had wanted to lose a considerable amount of weight, went through all the usual diets, lost, put back on, lost, put back on, as we've all done. Finally she got into visualization, which sounded liked a good idea, but went nowhere until she decided to put some emotional pizzazz behind the imagery. Then all sorts of things started happening.
First came her idea to work out at the gym. A good start, but she was astonished to find she couldn't even fake a desire to go to the gym if she was allowing herself to feel fat! Even more important, she found that as long as she was focusing on her weight, any notion of sticking with a diet, past the first few pounds, went out the window.
So back she went into the visualizations and pretending games where, at first, she had to almost bully herself into feeeeeling the weight she wanted to be. It worked. As long as she continued to pretend thin, and feel thin, and keep her focus off feeling fat, she could maintain her not-too-stringent diet with relative ease and no longer had to fight with herself about going to the gym. I don't know what her weight was before, but this lovely young woman was a picture-perfect size twelve when I saw her.
This is not just simple “wanting” to be thin or well. You can't just want and expect it to happen. It's refocusing and refeeling, refocusing and refeeling, refocusing and refeeling. Your body will always respond to the image you give it, provided it's accompanied with the appropriate feeling; fat or thin, sick or well.
The secret to reversing anything within the body is to get your focus off what you don't want, find any way you can to get into that feeling-place of what you do want, then know with a certainty that the laws of the universe are working and must bring that felt vision into reality, as long as you don't squelch it.
There is truly no sense in staying away from doctorsif your beliefs say doctors work. While I've turned the health and shape of my body around dramatically, I know what my mind will and will not allow right now, so I still make an occasional visit to an M.D. or dentist.
But think about it for a minute. What are doctors trained to do? Heal you? Sure, that's the objective, as soon as they find out what's wrong with you.
“What's wrong” is their business, their reason for being. Yes, they want to help, but if they don't find something wrong, how can they help you? Since “what's wrong” is what they're looking for—and what you expect them to find—that is precisely what they—and you—are going to attract: something that is wrong.
Haven't you noticed that with doctors we're either on the verge of getting something, or we've got one foot in the grave? We're either pre–cancerous or haven't a chance. I'm not knocking those in the medical profession; they're a grand and commendable group just now beginning to understand the process of wellness. But we don't have to join them in attracting any more of what we want to get rid of, and we certainly don't have to visit them in fear with closed valves.
If you've been told you're in some sort of “pre” condition, and it's scaring the pants off you, slow down and take a look at what you're creating. You've closed your valve by becoming fearful, you're magnetizing negatively, and are now headed straight toward the inevitable fulfillment of the doctor's verdict. Every doctor on the face of this planet knows that illness soars once the diagnosis is given. Fancy that!
By all means go to your doctor, but watch your reactions, your fears, your beliefs, your denial—which means watch your valve. Set the so-called incurable rate aside, along with any other gruesome statistics about the disease. This way you can employ your doctor as a means to the end you desire, rather than as a cause for any further fear.
We've been talking a lot about the pure positive energy that creates worlds, the energy to which we are always connected but rarely open. Since our body is an extension of that primal force of Life, why do we die?
Let's say you're an actor. You get on stage, put on a costume, and experience the fun of being a character in the play. When you're done, you put the costume and character aside, but you're still you.
Same thing with your Expanded Self. It's here playing around in a body (yours) for the sheer experience of it all, for the learning, for the fun. When it tires of this, it will do something else, but it won't go out like a candle. It can't; it's pure energy, and you can't snuff out energy.
Ah, but even though energy can't be squelched, our negative vibrations most surely can squelch physical cells, a practice we seem to sanction with an appalling vitality. Focus with fear on a condition in the body we don't want, and our link to the greater energy we truly are becomes so drastically diminished, so constrained, the cells begin to shrivel from lack of Life energy. The body is then reduced to bare survival conditions, ultimately dying from the relentless suffocation of its cells. But only the body dies, not the Life force you are.
In that state of suffocation, the poor cells, which must have a constant supply of Life force, are now compelled to respond differently to the negative vibrations seething throughout the body. Since their own well-being has been compromised through lack of that critical energy, they have no alternative but to allow dis-ease to take over. If disallowance of the Life force continues, the cells can no longer reproduce themselves. At that point, they cease their physical existence and simply recycle back into the pure positive energy of well-being from which they came. So do you.
We call it death, but the only thing that ceases to exist is your physical form, not You.
Scientists already know that the body can live far longer than it does now, like centuries. Yet these incredible instruments we take for granted aren't going to keep running without gas, so if someone is no longer excited about their life, and the energy stops flowing through them, what we call death is the result. But only to the body, not to You.
It's not the tainted smoke from the cigarettes that kills you; it's the disallowance of Life through the Life line. It's not the heart attack that kills you; it's the disallowance of Life that caused the attack in the first place. Let that Life force pour steadily and freely through you, unrestrained and unrestricted, and you could drink cyanide every day for breakfast without even getting the hiccups.
So isn't it interesting that the biggest fear we continue to vibrate, and then stuff away to vibrate even stronger, is the fear we have of death? Fearing death is a deplorable learned response we picked up long ago from a bunch of power-hungry fanatics, religious and otherwise, who wanted to play the game of “Let's Control the Masses.” And they did, brilliantly. Get a bunch of people to fear something like death, and you've got them right where you want them—under your oppressive thumb.
That's how all the stupid rumors about devils and evil and hell and some big judge in the sky got started, by using fear as a mechanism of control. But since energy can't die, and all of us are most assuredly energy-based, fearing death is nothing but a monumental waste of time that evokes nothing but more negative energy. The sad thing is, we've been so cleverly taught to fear death, we've totally forgotten how to live.
However, if you do decide to change costumes, what happens is nothing more than a withdrawal from being physical, a disconnection from the body. The “You” that you are never quits. That part of you is forever and ever connected to eternal conscious awareness: You.
So what we erroneously call death is just a shift of focus, a bipping from one frequency to another. Will you ever be John Doe again? No, and would you want to be? But you don't cease to exist. You can't! You are the ongoing energy of Life scampering around down here right now on this particular playground. You are the pure positive energy of well-being, and you cannot kill energy!
The importance of putting this fear to rest is no small thing, because even if we get all of our other Don't Wants switched to Wants, but then leave that one scary thorn in our side called death, we still have a fear vibration affecting everything, along with a mighty uphill climb to enjoyable health.
The easier way is to stop fearing this atrocious manmade myth and concentrate with everything we have on raising our frequencies to that Greater Part of ourselves which is the very essence of All That Is. Then we'd have all the heaven we could handle right here in our own little world, the way it was meant to be.
Many years ago, the mother of one of my closest friends was killed in a bizarre auto accident. As she and her husband were heading toward an underpass on the freeway, some swell kid tossed a boulder from the overhead crosswalk, sending it crashing through the window on the passenger side, killing Mrs. T. instantly.
Seems like one of those awful coincidences, doesn't it? Rotten luck. Bad roll of the dice. No, none of the above. It was a cocreation.
First of all, had either Mrs. T. or her husband been more plugged into their Guidance, they would have taken another route, gone later, or skipped the ride altogether.
But secondly, and more importantly, this was not an instant happening of the moment. Like any accident, or illness, or calamity, it had been a long time cooking vibrationally. Mrs. T. had been operating with a closed valve for many years, smiling sweetly and chatting pleasantly while being deeply resentful of life's dealings. She was an exemplary victim who had been in strong resistance to the flow of well-being for a long, long time. And so was her young executioner.
Here's where we go back to the “Who's on First” routine. Whose vibration was responsible for the happening? Was it Mrs. T.'s, from her years of concealed pessimism? Or was it the kid's?
As it always is in any so-called accident, it was Mrs. T.'s vibration that did her in, even though it was a cocreation. She was pinging on a particular frequency and pulling in everything of like vibration which, in this case, wasn't too cool for her. Just simple physics; you hit that one tuning fork, and every other tuning fork on the same wavelength is going to respond.
Let's say on a scale of one to ten—ten being a wide open valve—Mrs. T.'s life of worry had caused her to emotionally vibrate at a destructive four for some time. On the other hand, the young lad had only a few years of feeling inferior to his peers, and grossly angry at life. Yet so strong were his feelings—and therefore his magnetic attraction—he too had reached that same destructive four.
Their courses were set. Sooner or later he was going to meet up with another four that was flavored with the same vibrations of unworthiness. For Mrs. T, if it hadn't been the rock, it would have been something else just as devastating from some other four.
Like a diver whose oxygen line has been severed, this frantic young man was simply lashing out in pain and anger from being cut off from his own Source of supply. In another way, so was Mrs. T. Finally, each in their own brand of pain, they were sucked into one another in a perfect example of cocreation. She had attracted her destiny; he had attracted his.
Someone or something need only match you in frequency, and the attraction begins. Which one (event, person, circumstance) will get to you first? The one with the strongest intensity. And you will keep on attracting and merging, attracting and merging, attracting and merging until you get so tired of the gloomy game, you eventually check out, as Mrs. T. did. Or you change your frequency.
If an accident involved two or more people, it was a joint exercise in negative attraction. If it was an accident that involved children too young to develop their own negative emotion, then those youngsters picked up their vibrations from their environment. If it was a plane crash, those on board of all ages magnetized themselves into the event.
Disaster, cataclysm, mishap, or disease: The brew of negative emotion that has perked over time to cause these happenings has come from an amalgamation of negative vortexes joining forces to form an electromagnetic attraction so strong that ice forms on the wings of a plane to bring it down, or brakes fail in a bus to careen it over a cliff, or a firestorm uproots what otherwise appears to be totally contented lives.
If we're living with our connection to that Life force cut off, sooner or later something's going to sock us, like a car, a flood, a train, or a tornado. (Ever wonder why a tornado will hit one house and leave the next? Now you know!)
If it's just a dent in your car, your valve has been partly open. If both you and your car got creamed, your valve has been pretty well closed. If you broke your leg on the slopes, your valve's been partly open. If you busted up your whole body, your valve's been pretty well closed.
I could go on, but it's sort of valve-closing to dwell on all this stuff. My point is that nothing, but nothing, but nothing comes to us by accident. Not our lotto winnings, not our new loves, not our illnesses, not a freak of nature, not an accident. They've all been drawn to us electromagnetically by our feelings and our vibrations. Nothing in our world ever has, or ever will, come to us except by our own vibrational invitation.
Now don't go flying off into Panicville if you've been a jaded basket case all your life. That's not an automatic ticket to cancer. Close, but not automatic! You have only to find your joy, and that open-valve vibration will instantly override years of gloom and doom. You might have a little fender-bender, but that's all it will be. No big deal. Or maybe you'll have a little cold. No big deal. Just small reminders that you still have some resistance to the frequency of well-being.
And so, who are the main attractors? We are, always! It's our feelings, our valve, our resistance. No one is doing it to us. If we're attracting negatively, it's because we're vibrating negatively, drawing some other thing or some other one into our space in the timeless dance of cocreation.
The bottom line to all of this is that we simply have no damn business being sick, being in accidents, getting old, or even dying for that matter, but as we routinely turn off our wellness switch to block our cells from their source of Life with negative emotion, something's bound to happen.
So you might want to watch how you're expressing yourself. If you're saying, “I want to be well” but your dominant vibration is saying, “Help, I don't want to be sick,” which way are you attracting?
If you're sick and saying, “By God, I'm going to beat this thing, I'm going to win this battle,” from that position of defensiveness, what are you focusing on?
No matter how many people love you, no matter how much you give to the poor, no matter how well you run your business, no matter how delightful and pleasant a person you truly are, if you have negative vibrations of any kind running, even in your manner of speech, you're going to attract some kind of bummer.
Now granted, the primary vibrations of mass consciousness are all around us, an endless exhaust of powerfully negative energy which we allow to govern us, knocking us about like a ship in a storm without its rudder, and usually making for a pretty rough ride. That does not have to be. You don't ever have to be a victim to mass consciousness, or to any one person's negative energy: not your doctor's, your family's, your friends', your lover's, or the groups around you.
Just state your Wants every day, write (and then speak) new scripts about your body, your health, your looks, your life. And pretend. Get into the feeling place of what you're pretending, and become one who is so aggressively flowing your own energy and vibrating in the frequency of joy that you override all that you—or anyone else—might have been flowing before. Not only will your body joyously respond, but there will be no more accidents.
Is it easy? No, it is not the least bit easy to switch focus away from a roaring illness, or pain, or unwanted weight. But you can talk yourself down a little bit at a time. You can open that valve a little bit at a time and reverse your body's direction.
You are far greater than your body, so never doubt you can do this thing. Laugh more at everything and lighten up. There is only one thing you need do in order to have the body you desire; you have to find ways to be happy. A little at a time at first, until nothing else in your world matters, not your body, your family, your old doubts—only your focus on being happy. That, in the final analysis, is what health and wellbeing are all about.