How many times have you opened your eyes first thing in the morning and slowly begun knitting together all the things you simply must do that day? By the time your feet hit the floor, you feel burdened, irritated, sluggish, and downright miserable—especially on workdays. No wonder they call it “daybreak”—you feel shattered even before you begin.
Where are those moments like on the television commercials where a fresh-looking person with a joyful smile laced with morning sunshine lifts themselves luxuriously from the bed with an expression of bliss?
That moment isn’t in a product.
It can’t be bottled, jarred, or shrink-wrapped.
It isn’t stuffed in your mattress or pillow, or woven in your sheets.
That moment is actually in you.
If your mind is clouded upon waking with all the tasks you must complete this day, then the reality you’ve set before yourself will be tiresome, long, and filled with stress. If, however, you turn that first moment of magick into a thought of positive power—what then? How do you think your day will unfold?
Meditation, generally thought of as an esoteric, New Age practice for the elite few who can sit with their backs straight and legs in a perfect lotus position for hours on end, is simply an elongated thought turned into an enchantment. It is more than a tool for self-knowledge and self-improvement, though it is those things too; what we are going to focus on here is how it is a tool for daily living that can change your life and assist you in manifesting whatever you want and living the life you really want. And anyone can master the techniques to make dreams into reality.
MindLight Meditation
Right now—this minute—I want you to put this book down and prop it so that your hands are free, but you can read along with me. Are you situated? Good!
- Position your hands as if you are holding a small ball of glowing, white light. Take your time. Just relax and build the light between your hands. This light is a part of you and a part of the Great Work: what you will accomplish for the good of others throughout your lifetime. The light is a tool that you can use to build a healthy, positive future—and the most remarkable aspect is that this tremendous power lies in you!
- Next, move your hands apart and together as if they are held by a giant rubber band. Open, close, open, close. Keep playing with the light and, as you do so, remember what it is like to move your hands through water—nice and slow, with a gentle, flowing resistance, except here we translate that feeling through watery resistance as elasticity.
- Add this remembered feeling of what it is like to move your hands through water to the present movement of your hands working with the MindLight—in, out, in, out. Try not to go past your shoulders when you move out, because we are working on building (we don’t want to scatter).
- Keep the rubber-band motion of your hands moving in and out shoulder-width apart, then move in for the compact ball of light, and out again. Repeat. Think of nothing but the light in your hands. If you begin to worry about other things, just gently push the thoughts away. Concentrate only on the ball of light. Stay in the moment.
- Now we add the sacred breath. As you inhale with nice, deep breaths, draw your hands together to make the small ball. As you move your hands out and away from each other, exhale with one smooth, even breath. Inhale (hands in)—exhale (hands out). The slower the better. Techniques learned at a nice, slow pace stay with you longer and will be more precise when you need the power.
- Rather than dwelling on a specific problem at the moment, let’s choose an energy that encourages openness of opportunity. What do you want the most right now: Peace? Harmony? Creativity? Wisdom? Happiness? Healing? Choose one of these and say the word aloud.
- Now, look into the MindLight you hold in your hands and take a deep breath in through your nose and out through your mouth. Do this at least three times—more if you are stressed or unhappy.
- Now, breathe fully from the diaphragm and then inhale from the chest. Practice this type of breathing with several cleansing breaths, and when you are ready, take three of these nice, deep, measured breaths.
- On the third time, blow your desire (peace, harmony, creativity, wisdom, happiness, healing, etc.) into the MindLight. That’s right, just pucker up those beautiful lips of yours and send that thought easily, fluidly into the MindLight you’ve created. Let the breath carrying your desire flow across your lips like fine silk through your fingers—the moisture from your body digitized by your thoughts of perfection. Once the thought is in the ball between your hands, you may feel the seemingly empty space vibrate, or your hands may tingle, or you might feel a “lightness” throughout your body.
- Pull your hands (holding the light ball) in over your heart, allowing your body to drink in this lovely MindLight you created.
- Breathe deeply several times, and as you breath in, think of your heart being surrounded by this harmonious, vibrant light. As you exhale, continue to relax and let go of any pent-up negativity—old hurts, pain, fear, unhappiness, etc. Every time you inhale, allow the light within yourself to grow stronger and brighter. Every time you exhale, let go of more and more crusted up, gross mental garbage. Let the negativity break away, piece by piece. Keep up this visualization as long as you can; there is no time requirement.
- When you feel you are finished for now, drop your hands to your lap, close your eyes, and take another deep, even breath. Open your eyes and pick up the book. Don’t you feel great?
You’ve just learned two very valuable pieces of information—the benefits of deep, cleansing breathing and how to create a MindLight. Tomorrow morning, when you wake up, don’t allow yourself to think of anything except that MindLight you just created. Was it for peace? Wisdom? Happiness? Say the word you associated in your mind with the MindLight several times as you rise to consciousness, eyelids slightly fluttering as you emerge to greet the day. Push all other thoughts aside—every single one. Just keep the word in your mind as you get up and begin the movements of meeting your day. Again, don’t line up those tasks like little marching soldiers of personal duty. Instead, put that MindLight in your cup. That’s right, let the MindLight of happiness, positive self-worth, peace, or creativity (whatever you called it) sink slowly into that steaming cup of coffee or chilled juice. Drink it. Say to yourself, “I will meet every task as I should. The day will progress with plenty of time to achieve all I desire, and I will feel energized, positive, and useful until I go to sleep tonight.” Now, go about your day. Throughout the day, should you become stressed or overburdened, think of your MindLight like a fun bouncing ball. Be in the moment with that MindLight ball. Re-create the light in your hands when you are particularly stressed. Remember to breathe deeply and slowly. See your MindLight dancing on the boss’s head when he’s acting pushy because he’s majorly stressed. Or over there at the screaming cab driver. Or under the dining room table tickling your son’s feet (you know, the kid who is throwing the tantrum?). Bet you’ll be surprised at what happens!
Meditation is nothing more than the moment you make magick.
Meditation is the wizard of the mind.
And the next night? Make a new MindLight, just like the first one. It can have the same theme or a different one. Then, when you wake up the following morning, repeat the sequence—don’t think of anything except that bouncing, lively MindLight the first few minutes of the day. Continue to play with that MindLight all day and evening long.
Remember to stay in the moment with your new mind tool.
And if you make MindLights all week?
Expect your life to change and welcome it. You’ve just learned how to change your life in a positive way with very little effort—and now you know precisely what it is to meditate.
Meditation is the still point of unlimited opportunity.
Friday Night Fights!
We’re standing on a big, well-lit canvas square flanked by ropes secured at the four corners by metal poles. Already we can smell the sweat and heat of human bodies mixed with the aroma of popcorn and hot dogs, stale beer and flat soda. You are surrounded by loud music and people laughing in a swirl of popping, glaring lights and you move your feet a little bit—darned shoes are too tight, they’re pinching, and so you add this tidbit of irritation to your experience of “too much input”! The electric anticipation in the atmosphere flicks at your temples like a cat’s whiskers before the clawed strike, so vividly that you think you can reach out and touch that energy, and for a moment, you ride a high as never before. Like the air you breathe, you can’t see the charged energy, but you know that it’s there. Suddenly, the crowd leaps to its collective feet, screaming and shouting, roaring into a combined beast of amazing power while a simultaneous clanging of bells heralds the beginning of the event in a cacophony of heady vibration . . . darn those shoes anyway!
And in the background, like a voice echoing in a rinsed-out soup can, you hear, “Are you ready to rrr-rumble!?”
Welcome to your life.
Every day we wrestle with the cause and effect of our own actions, which are a physical manifestation of our thoughts. Like the Friday night fights, we show up in the ring, prepared or not, to put on the gloves and duke it out with our problems, frustrations, fears, and personal foibles, now and then riding a whirlwind high that makes it all seem somehow worthwhile. On occasion we celebrate a marvelous TKO and other times we hit the mat in head-crunching pain, only to rise again in the final count. Now and then, the fight is a draw and we save it for another day, when perhaps the stars and our brains are more in our favor. We are successful when we’ve managed to heal ourselves to the point of acceptable re-entry into that big ring of life where we will fight courageously to obtain the world champion prize: ourselves.
The blood, violence, and gore of fight night a little too blatant for you in a book that’s supposed to be about spirituality? That’s the point! We are physical people in a rough and tumble, hard-core world trying to put the proverbial square peg of reality as we built it in the round hole of spirituality as we wish to perceive it. What doesn’t help is that we create the reality we know based on a self-conditioning that often gives our power away to the roaring crowds around us and pinches us uncomfortably just to remind us that we are still living (like those shoes that are a bit too tight).
Several years ago when I was on tour for one of my books I carried a drum with me. Part of every seminar was to have the participants, five or ten at a time, scream the following into the open end of the drum: “I take back my power!” And as each group stepped up to the plate of change, I encouraged the crowd to become a cheering squad (everyone needs a little helping hand once in a while). The results were astounding. People left the seminar smiling, joyful, feeling very good about themselves. Later, I would receive letters and e-mails about how much their lives had changed in a positive way. Why did this change occur? Because for at least a second or two they had collected and solidified the courage to create their own reality at the top of its game, to send out a message to themselves and others that they had aligned their energies to create a wholesome self in control of their own destiny. Right then, right there, they stayed in the moment of power and change with the help of the cheering crowd, their very support obliterating fears and worries of the past.
Did it last, that feeling of power within themselves? Yes, for a few who went on to make positive, radical changes in their lives—for those people that seminar was the tipping point to success. Whether they knew it or not, they’d been preparing themselves for a positive change for quite some time. What about the others—those who did not go on to the success that they desired? Was there something wrong with them? Actually, no. Due to past self-conditioning, they simply weren’t in agreement with themselves to let go of the negativity in their lives long enough to move forward—and, in most cases, probably because they were bored stiff with life in general.
And there’s the rub. For many of us think we’ve seen it all, heard it all, done it all to the point where we are so unbelievably bored that we continue to seek the addictions of our old emotions to keep us feeling like we’re still in the game of life—like we’re still a major player, no matter what field the game is commencing on. We’ve created a pattern that “sort of” works for us, so in lieu of anything better, we keep dragging out the same pattern, brushing it off and twisting it in new ways in hopes that it will work better for us. The problem with this scenario is that once you’ve hit the critical first-time high with any pattern, every time thereafter gives us a little less adrenaline rush, and a little less, and a little less, until most crises play themselves out due to our own invariable boredom. Ever meet a person whose life is one continuing drama after another? It’s because they’re bored stiff and each new action-packed psychological scenario loosens up the joints for a little bit so they don’t remain under the Medusa’s spell conjured directly by themselves in the first place. How many of you agree? Raise your hand. Mine’s up first because I’ve done this to myself innumerable times. How about you?
Before I write any book (and I think this is number nineteen) I always go to various bookstores to see what’s happening in the genre I’ve chosen. Then I look at other genres to see what seems to be in vogue there. Since I wanted to write a book on meditation, I found myself all over the darned place. Granted, I wrote a great deal about how to meditate in my book To Stir a Magick Cauldron several years ago, and this book has sold over 300,000 copies, but now I wanted to approach the subject in a different, more simplified and active way. What were other authors currently producing on this subject? My bookstore jaunt showed that some meditation books were in the religious studies section, some were in the occult section (or whatever they’re calling it this season), others were in self-help, and still more could be found in the new, flashy, huge motivational section. In all, I found only about five titles in the whole store that dealt specifically with meditation. Why, I wondered, would such a terrific tool for self-empowerment have such minute appeal? Well, because it’s boring, that’s why. Meditation hit its tipping point back in the early 70s—it reached its level of saturation, and the world (most of it) moved on. Why? Because it is like everything else. We learn how to do it and then we lose interest. It no longer gives us the emotional high we first experienced. Motivational books are the same way, and frankly, this is how any fad begins. We try it, we like it . . . yawn . . . now we’ll try something else because the rest of our life does not agree with what we’ve learned. Granted, some things were very successful while we were playing with that new high, but, in the end . . .
Aunt Jane is still a monster.
You still owe $20,000 on your credit card.
Your job still stinks.
You’re still stuck in the same old cruddy house.
For some people, what they learn in motivational studies works for them. Aunt Jane goes away to Florida, they pay off their credit cards, they change jobs, and they move into a nice new house along with a plethora of other successes. They embrace the fact that since they are changing they will have to let go of the old stuff—which sometimes includes one’s job, one’s dysfunctional family, or the highs from bad habits—and all this can be painful. Some don’t make it past letting go, and they slide into the comfortable pattern, which includes evil old Aunt Jane suddenly moving back into their lives. Others learn to deal with old problems in new ways, and so they keep advancing simply because they don’t allow themselves to be bored in a positive way. What makes these successful people different from the ones who have lost interest?
Just a simple agreement.
By accepting the agreement, you are the observer who collapses energy into the form you desire.
Whether we are discussing martial arts or magick, religion or science, in the end it’s all about balance and remembering to stay in the moment. A productive life is where the major player (which would be you) has attained a sense of inner satisfaction of the self, which extends a type of peace and power outside of you, touching others in a positive way. Struggling to find that grace, for some, will take an entire lifetime.
But not for you, because you have already gotten on the fast track to self-improvement in a variety of ways. Anyone who wants to take the power of quantum science (magick) and mix it with their own life has already shown that he or she has the guts, the power, the determination, and the faith that anything can be accomplished. And that, my friend, is the biggest hurdle!
Now it is a simple matter of putting it into practice.
I Agree—The Quantum Wand of Mental Magick
In his book Gifts of Unknown Things, biologist Lyall Watson describes his encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he and another astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the trees to reappear, then “click” off again and on again several times . . . Perhaps we agree on what is “there” or “not there” because what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected.[1]
Articles like this one are all over the Internet, and some of the more cutting-edge books on human consciousness have been playing with this idea for the past few years. For about five years before writing this book I spent numerous hours searching and sifting, reading and commenting on how quantum physics affects our lives, specifically in the venue of magickal religions, which allow the idea of infinite possibilities to exist as a part of their platform of enlightenment. No matter how long or how short the Internet or magazine article, the book, the video, or the DVD, all are “agreeing” on the main theme that objective reality does not exist, and that what we do experience is nothing more than a consensus of the human holographic neuronet based on four agreements within ourselves—physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual—that build into the collective unconscious as a single whole in the moment. It is then that reality becomes such as it is.
Yes, I know. Take a deep breath—that’s a lot to swallow.
Then, you say, if that were indeed true, we might throw up our hands in despair and theorize, “If reality is controlled by the whole (by everybody)—there is no hope for me because . . .” and you would list your current woes, and you would choose a structured religion that brings fate and damnation into your life, and worship the energy of that structure so that you won’t get creamed again. Yet, as occultists who have worked years of ritual, tons of spells, and thousands of prayers, we know that the skilled individual in the sciences of the Spirit can, indeed, “click” an aspect of our world “on” or “off” like the dancer in the above example. Some call this natural ability magick, others call it a miracle, and then there is the “will of God” scenario. Indeed, to agree that we could simply change our lives by “agreeing” on any one issue is so profound that it is frightening.
Puts a whole new twist on the Rapture, doesn’t it?
According to quantum physics, everything is energy, which changes by the direct effect of the “observer.” Energy unfolds into patterns that we, the observer, create. We humans, in this instance, are the observers, and therefore we constantly affect the outcome of any situation by our participation on whether we “agree” or “disagree” that any object or situation exists. The more observers there are, the more complicated or more solid a thing or issue becomes. Now, the interesting thing about quantum physics in the realm of human existence (if we view it in this way) is that the use of this power is like breathing—we don’t necessarily realize it, yet we do it all the time. In essence, we change reality every moment by our mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual agreements within ourselves and in combination with others and their inner agreements. Manipulating our environment in this way, like breathing, is second nature, and therefore we don’t particularly concentrate on the skill. We just do it.
We haven’t figured everything out. If we had, we wouldn’t need to write books to help each other, do further study, and continue to plumb the depths of science or reach for the heights of the stars. If we had all the answers, we wouldn’t even be here. Incredibly, finding the answers is the creative fun of it all.
So where does the power really lie? If a group can affect the outcome of a situation and an individual can equally affect the outcome of a situation, who wins the tug of war when the individual and the group disagree?
Ah, good question! So brave of me to ask and so bold of us to try to find the answer.
In the end, I think, it is the individual who carries “the power.” We all know that magick and ritual (as the Pagan world understands it) done in secret will statistically work well and with some semblance of speed:
- if we do not discuss what we are doing with anyone, thereby limiting the number of observers, or
- when our inner agreements coincide with the inner agreements of others, such as in group prayer work. This works because we all agree to be in the moment.
In essence, quantum physics tells us that we have the freedom to choose our own world, but this choice is predicated on those four agreements. The four agreements I’m talking about could be categorized in this manner: If you think about it, we have four ways of responding to any event—physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Our biological systems being what they are, any one of these agreements can outweigh the other, making things rather lopsided—which puts the desire out-of-kilter. Result? No manifestation—or, worse, a misfire.
When we are desperately in trouble and we pray to a higher power, the totality of our being is giving that issue to a higher power (as we personally visualize it) to agree for us, because we obviously haven’t been able to flip that switch by ourselves. We can’t flip the switch because one of those four “elements” within ourselves is holding us back. A higher power, as I define it here, is absolute and total perfection. Perfection must inherently agree. When we agree that perfection agrees, miracles have been known to happen. This doesn’t mean that you must believe in a higher power—this is just an example of how today’s human usually operates predicated on religious bias/belief when they are deeply in trouble.
Then there are times when miracles don’t happen, even though we’ve invoked that higher power. Why not? Because we didn’t really agree that Perfection actually has a handle on the situation. If we see God as something vengeful, cold, and retaliatory, then we have made Perfection imperfect. If we are angry with the cloak of Perfection—the religious clothes we dressed God in—then failure is most likely an absolute. If we don’t trust the intermediary we’ve created—the “face” of God we’ve chosen, the archetype, you name it—the issue is a wash. We’re done for.
If we do, indeed, create our own reality, then how can something we inherently and naturally do every day be so complicated when we try to tear it apart and reconstruct it in a focused way to make our lives better?
Because we really don’t agree, that’s why. Our individual agreements (physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual) simply aren’t in sync. We’re out of balance (and how many times have you heard that one?).
Perhaps we should look at balance in a new way.
Perhaps balance is agreement within the moment.
Psychoneuroimmunology
Psychoneuroimmunology is a modern science that studies how what the mind manufactures (attitude, emotion, belief) affects our physical health. Psycho means “mind,” neuro means “nervous system,” immuno means “system of health defenses,” and ology translates to “the study of.” This new study has discovered that our minds constantly communicate to every single cell in our body. Emotional chemicals, called neuropeptides, are the information highway of the body, transmitting to every cell with a steady flow of emotional data, which at any given moment greatly affects the physical stability of “you.” What I find interesting (and amusing) is that for years people outside of the occult world (and those within it who are convinced they know it all, which means they know nothing) have laughed at us when we say “Fill your body with white light. Fill the room with mental white light.” Yet recent studies have found that by mentally staying in the moment, breathing deeply, and filling your body with mental white light affects the neuropeptides,[2] encouraging them to carry healing energy to all points necessary.
Rather than read about it, let’s try it. Right now! Here we go!
The White Knight
Read through this little exercise, and then try it for yourself. Won’t take long. Promise. It has no religious bias, so it’s cool for you to do. Ready?
Close your eyes. Take three deep, even breaths. Nice and easy, nice and slow. As you breathe in, visualize the air coming into your body filled with pure white light. Still a little tense? No problem. Take three more deep, even, relaxing breaths. As you breathe in, see the white light rushing into your lungs, then traveling up to the crown of your head and down to the tips of your toes. Take your time. With each breath, let the light advance further and further into your body. If you are currently sick, you may find this a slightly difficult visualization. That’s because you are filled with icky energy that doesn’t want to budge. It’s partying in there and doesn’t want to get out. However, the light says, “The bar is now closed.” The white light is the ultimate bouncer—if you let it. Which means, of course, that you have to agree to allow the white light to haul the trash out of the establishment. Now that you have expanded the white light in your body, make it glow! Feel yourself pulsating with pure white light. With every breath, the white light grows stronger and stronger. In your mind, see the area around you also glowing with white light. When you are totally relaxed, open your eyes and stretch. Doesn’t that feel cool?
Now I want you to think of a problem. Ugh. Do you feel tense, unhappy, constricted? Especially around the shoulders and neck—like you are carrying a horrible weight there? This time, I want you to close your eyes and see your body filled with chattering neuropeptides that have their knickers in a twist over your problem. The beating of your heart is the thundering of hoofbeats on cobblestone. It comes nearer. And nearer. Suddenly your mind is filled with a huge, glowing, white horse (a Lippizan is a good choice). Feel the power of this magnificent animal fill your being! Straddled high upon the horse is a man (or woman—your choice) cloaked completely in light. The left hand holds the reins of the horse, the right hand is in a fist over his/her heart. The horse rears and the rider screams “Ye-Sah!” in a thundering voice while snapping the right arm out with a powerful thrust. Blazing white light streams from the fist and into all the upset neuropeptides, which change from a dull, grumpy blob to glowing, pure white light. Feel the warmth of emotional peace fill your entire body, and say the word “perfection.” Take several deep breaths and open your eyes.
There is much more you can do with this healing visualization. For example, maybe a white light feels too inanimate to you. Then pick a positive form of deity. In Pow-Wow German healing techniques, the focus is on the Holy Spirit. And what is the Holy Spirit but the agreement of perfection often visualized and shown in books as pure white light that has power in the moment! Children respond well to hero-type characters—a White Knight that battles the sickness, or a white dragon (I used that one often for my kids), or an empowered female in battle garb, or a favorite martial arts individual, etc. There is nothing wrong with an adult using character visualizations such as these. Many adults will call on Holy Mary to fill them with the healing energy of God. In the end, it doesn’t matter the religion or the archetype—what matters is your agreement that perfection exists and can touch you.
If you use this little visualization for small ills, you’ll find they pass quickly; but what about the big stuff? Just keep doing it in combination with your regular medical treatment. As the Pow-Wows always say, “You didn’t get sick in a day, you won’t get healed in a day”—meaning that you allowed negative thoughts to pile up, now you have to systematically clean them out, and it may not happen overnight because negative thoughts include patterned behavior. Pow-Wows always recommend that when you are very ill you should work at least three times a day with the mental visualizations and the agreement to touch perfection (which in their realm is the Holy Spirit, as I mentioned before).
What if, however, you want to meditate for Sally, or Joe, or Harold? Can you do this visualization on them? Certainly! I do it for my children all the time. Oop—I heard that! Someone just said, “But what about their free will?”
I’m so glad you asked. Let’s put that monster down right here and right now. You have the free will to work on anyone you want. If they don’t agree within themselves—guess what? You can visualize until the cows come home and it ain’t gonna work. I tell my students to go ahead and work for anyone they desire; however, I also tell them to include a prayer or statement (depends on your belief system) that if the healing energy is not accepted, to ask that the energy be given to the person in the universe who needs it most at that moment.
When someone says, “May I pray for you?” take it! Accepting good thoughts is never a bad thing. And the reason why magickal people often ask if they can “work” for you is to set up the energy-shot (just like in volleyball) for the serve to go through to success. By asking you are receiving a verbal agreement, which helps to push the healing energy forward. If you are nervous about accepting what the inquirer might fling out at you energy-wise, then an appropriate response is: “I will accept all good (or positive) thoughts. Thank you.”
Deep breathing helps to fill those little neuropeptides with whatever you want to put in them. Breathing in fills, exhaling expels. Breathing in gathers and balances, breathing out repels and sends out information. While studying this concept I went back to the Pow-Wow healing information Preston Zerbe taught me. I discovered that all the chants he gave me worked on breath in a way I had not previously considered. Yes, the words are important because what was being done had to match the faith base (although most Pow-Wows simply whispered to make the healing more effective). However, every chant works on the premise of breath. You breathe in the power of “God,” you expel the chants, which carry the healing—except it isn’t the chant, per se, it is the breath. That’s why they called it the Breath of God or Ghost Breath (Holy Ghost)—the energy of perfection carried on the expulsion of air. To really factor it down for you: if disease can be airborne, so can God; ergo so can perfection; ergo so can healing.
This is why we must stay in the moment—because in a single moment, we can reach perfection. And it only takes one moment to build.
You can do it!
Healing—Oh, How Tricky It Can Be
Let’s run through an example so that I can bring my thoughts into agreement with yours about the difficulties in healing anyone, and let’s make it rather complicated—just to keep us all from being bored. Let’s say that Doris comes to you with a healing issue. You don’t know Doris very well, so you have no presupposed ideas about her that would necessarily imbalance your four agreements. You’ve done lots of healings, had lots of successes, so Doris should be healed in no time, right?
But maybe Doris, consciously or subconsciously, is not in agreement with the healing at all. Maybe she thinks she deserves this horrible disease because of something she’s done in the past. Maybe she’s been told by some goofball that God is punishing her. Maybe she’s experienced some sort of physical or mental abuse in the past and this is how it is manifesting because she’s never really dealt with it. Maybe Doris has been thinking that living really is pretty hard, and maybe checking out in a way society accepts would be okay—like getting sick. Could be that Doris is being hounded by bill collectors, family members, or whatever, and she is just so tired of it all that she secretly feels she can’t go on. Maybe Doris is so bored with her own life that it has manifested in sickness. Yet, a little part of Doris has come to you asking for help.
Now what?
As our healers have been saying all along, you can’t treat just one part of the body. You have to treat the whole. If for one second you can get Doris into “agreement” with herself that she really wants to be well, then you can get her to add another second, and another, and build a new neuronet for herself. Then a miracle through your healing is not only possible, but probable. If you cannot get Doris to reach a point of integration—a point of successful agreement—you may fail. Remember, Doris is feeding information to her neuropeptides all the time.
What may really twist the problem are the people Doris interacts with on a daily or weekly basis when she doesn’t come to you for a prayer session, a hypnotherapy appointment, a Reiki experience, even a typical office visit with an upbeat physician, etc. For example, let’s say she visits her specialist who tells her there is no hope. His staff agrees, and because they are supposed to be experts in these things, Doris believes them. They are in agreement that she is a dead woman walking and that’s what Doris becomes if she buys into their diagnosis. Sort of kills that word “hope.” Or, maybe there is a family member who is secretly looking forward to clutching Doris’ bank account in their greedy little hands, and therefore makes fun of Doris on a continual basis when she talks about alternative healing. Conscious behavior or subconscious, it doesn’t matter, the result is the same. That person, by moral standards, is a murderer. Or, how about the religious person in Doris’ life who tells her that she is sick because she is paying for her sins? By playing on Doris’ fears and poor self-image, they are enticing Doris not to agree with the healing on an emotional level, which affects the physical one, which affects the mental one, which affects the spiritual one. And those neuropeptides are running rampant with negative junk.
In this scenario, who really has the power? Doris does! She just has to accept that she has it and to agree within a single moment that she has personal power that isn’t predicated on past fears and negativity. If she can come into agreement with herself in the moment, the rest will fall into place if she acknowledges the moment and then chooses to make another, and another, and another.
Perhaps what makes orchestrating reality difficult is the idea we hold that the process must be complicated because our world appears to be such an incredibly intricate place. If constructing our reality is so simple, then we’d be eagerly doing it every day, right? We’d never make any mistakes and our lives would be perfect.
The joke, the illusion if you will, is that we inherently weave our reality without “thinking” about it based on a lot of shoddy emotional input, and when we do concentrate on something, it is often clothed in the negative feelings we are experiencing. Where is the money going to come from to pay my bills? Why can’t I get better? Why am I always sick? Why won’t my husband or partner listen to me? Why does my boss treat me so terribly? Why is my friend ignoring me? I hate my house. I hate my aunt. I hate rush hour traffic. I hate people who don’t think the way I do because they make me uncomfortable. And on, and on, and on. We collectively fill our days with so much negative frustration it is amazing that the world has kept revolving!
And yet, the planet has continued to spin on its axis because somewhere within us all, we want to be in that ring with the lights, the action, and the emotional high (even if it is an old one), slugging away at our foes and, at the end of the day, we desire to march home victorious as the world-class champions of owning ourselves. Past self-conditioning fibs to us, telling us that Fight Night is the only way we will win.
Well, I have another way. It’s a lot less violent, but it can be a real head trip the first time you try it and succeed. If you’re game, move on to chapter 2—but not until tomorrow.
Because tonight you are going to do a cleansing exercise in the shower and tomorrow morning you are going to remember to do your MindLight. We agree, right?
And honey, this is only the beginning!
Shower Cleansing Exercise
This exercise is so easy you’ll want to do it every time you take a shower once you’ve experienced how great it makes you feel! And, assuming no one watches you in the shower, you have all the privacy you need. For young parents or a busy household, normally the one place you have all to yourself for a few minutes each day for total privacy is the bathroom.
In the shower with the hot water running and all that luscious steam surrounding you, cross your hands over your chest. Take a deep breath. And another. Allow yourself to be in the moment. Note the feeling of the water on your skin, the sound of the falling water as it strikes the walls, curtain, shower floor, the gentle steam that opens breathing passages. As you stand there enjoying the sounds and feelings of the water, bless the water in your own way. Thank the water for providing cleansing energy. When you are ready, take a deep breath. Then, as you exhale, fling your hands down over the front of your body and out, visualizing all negativity being cast off from your body. Do a quarter turn. Repeat. Another quarter turn. Repeat. One last quarter turn. Repeat. Now, raise your arms over your head and allow the water to rush over you. As you breathe in, think of white light filling your entire body from the tips of your fingers to the soles of your feet. When you are feeling very good (stay in the moment—no thinking about anything but being right here in this shower right now), keep your left hand up in the air, palm facing the heavens, and move your right palm down to your side, palm toward the ground. Heaven is above you. Earth is below you. You are in the center. This is balance. The ability to walk between two worlds. Take three deep breaths, staying in the moment. Move the right hand up into the air, right palm facing the heavens, and move your left arm down, palm facing the earth. Again—this is balance. Stay in the moment. Totally secure. Totally at peace. Finish by crossing your arms over your chest. Say to yourself, “I am!” while you close your eyes and fill your entire body with white light. When you are finished, turn off the water and flick water drops from your fingers three times in quick succession. This portion of the meditation is done.
As you dry off, dress, and attend to any other bodily needs, think of nothing but what you are doing. Stay in the moment. No worries, no feelings of fear, no to-do lists. Stay in the moment until you open that bathroom door. If you practice this every day you will be amazed at the concentration and ease with which you go about your daily tasks. Even if you don’t do another single meditation in this book, if you just manage to keep up this simple, relaxing daily practice, you will see amazing results within yourself.
I know I did.