My teacher shows me what the Revelation of Connection can accomplish in our lives and in the world. And he does this with so much love and divine inspiration that I accept this revelation into my heart, without doubt or question. I am now ready to go forward.
Sensing this, my Teacher tells me to close my eyes and trust him because we’re going someplace new. I do so, and in a few seconds, I’m treading water in the ocean, my teacher walking beside me on the gentle waves of the sea.
What are we doing here?
We are here to perform an exercise.
Who needs to exercise? We have perfect bodies here, right?
He laughs.
No, not that kind of exercise. This is an exercise in life.
This exercise would teach me the Revelation of Faithfulness. I look into the ocean, and I can barely wrap my mind around its beauty. I love the sea, and I have swum in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and in the bluest waters of the Caribbean Sea. But nothing compares to the water I’m in now. Its color changes as it deepens; swaths of turquoise and indigo give way to streaks of sapphire and navy. No postcard could capture the perfection of this paradise. And everything is vibrating. My soul feels at home.
The water is so clear and crystalline that I can see all the way to the bottom. There are dolphins, turtles, and stingrays and all kinds of sea life moving below and around me.
My Teacher disappears. I’m alone again. As I search the water for him, I see in the distance several dark boats coming toward me. But the closer they get to me, the less like boats they look.
The black shapes pick up speed and come closer, causing waves to lap at my face. Oh, no—I see what they are: great white sharks with monstrous teeth, their mouths gaping open. They’re heading straight for me. I go into complete and utter panic. They begin to circle me, no doubt getting ready to attack. I know I will be ripped to shreds by these terrifying creatures.
Just when I think I am done for, I hear a clear, strong, calming voice in my head. It is the voice of my Teacher.
Have no fear.
I send him back a mental message: Easy for you to say. You’re not here with me. You left me here to die.
He repeats the message using a stronger tone of voice.
Have no fear.
I close my eyes and work on returning to the peace and calm I experienced only minutes earlier. I let several moments pass before opening my eyes again. To my great relief, the sharks disappear. Just like that. I let out a huge sigh of relief and slowly begin treading water again.
Just as I’m beginning to feel safe again, my Teacher materializes beside me, as if out of nowhere.
I want to teach you about the negative energy that is created through fear. You see, whatever you are afraid of in life, you will attract it to yourself. If you are afraid of getting ill, you will attract an illness to yourself. If you are afraid of being alone, you will find yourself alone for however long it takes you to relinquish that fear. If you are afraid of poverty, you will not experience abundance. If you constantly disrespect your body, you bring ravage upon your body. If you are afraid of dying, you will attract death or a deathlike experience because you will be too afraid to live.
I respond to him through my thoughts. So had I never been afraid of sharks, I wouldn’t have experienced those sharks. Is that right?
Yes. The sharks would never have appeared if you had no fear of them. The moment you let go of fear, they vanished. When fear gripped you, the more afraid you became, the closer the sharks got.
So you mean whatever I’m afraid of will come to me?
Yes. That is the truth. What you fear, you will draw to yourself. Remember this, because it is sacred knowledge.
Know, too, that fear decreases your vibration and blocks people from moving forward in their lives—for example, the woman who suffers a miscarriage and is afraid to try again for fear that she will lose her baby a second time; the man who is limited in his business dealings because he is afraid to fly in airplanes; the man who is afraid to love again because his first relationship was hurtful and disappointing; or the woman who believes she will always be alone, so she doesn’t create opportunities to form new relationships for fear of rejection or judgment. These fears create a lack of movement and become the shaky foundation of a fear-based life.
Fear creates a blockage to whatever it is you do want to create. So a vital step in creating anything valuable and meaningful in your life is to let go of fear.
He sees that I’m puzzled. This is a lot of new information to digest!
Fear is simply a lack of faith, because in the moments that you are succumbing to your own particular fear, you are not trusting God. How can you trust God if you are in a fearful state of mind? God is Divine Unconditional Love and Light. Where there is light, there can be no darkness. Where there is faith, there can be no fear. Faith and fear cannot coexist. If you are afraid, you are not in faith.
You are like a garden. Fear is the weed that strangles growth. Each garden must be weeded. You must pull fear out from its source. In this way, your garden will be strong and your faith will grow abundantly. And so it is!
It’s a lot to think about, but that encounter with the sharks helps me understand how fear can overtake you. When I was terrified of those sharks swimming toward me, I couldn’t think. All I could think about was the horror I was facing. I didn’t think of God. I didn’t remember to pray. I forgot everything except my fear. I couldn’t think at all!
I recall how fearful I’ve been in different situations, and I realize now what a waste of energy this was. But can I now really let go of fear, as I have just been taught?
As I’m thinking this, my Teacher tells me that we’re going to a new place where I can practice letting go of fear. All of a sudden, we’re at the top of a very high peak, the highest in a vast range of mountains. I’m astonished by how majestic it all is.
What we are going to do is jump off this mountain together. I will hold your hand as we leap together.
This mountain is jutting thousands of feet into the air. Jumping off will surely kill us both. But I realize that he’s serious, and we’re going to do this right now.
I feel fear rising in me again as I think of us leaping. My Teacher must sense my fear mounting, because he gently takes my hand into his own. This time he doesn’t disappear.
Before I know it, we’re jumping and begin a rapid free fall off the mountain. Then, halfway down, I feel my hand go empty, and my Teacher disappears. It’s just me now, falling a very long way down and picking up speed with every second.
I’m very scared, but my fright lasts only a few seconds before I begin to control it. I squeeze my eyes shut and breathe as best as I can. I let the fear come up, then I let it leave. It’s just negative energy. I relax as I tell myself that this is all just an illusion. I realize that I’m here learning, not dying. As I continue falling, my fear begins to dissipate. It’s working!
Just before crashing into the ground, my body stops abruptly. I’m vertically suspended approximately 100 feet off the ground. It’s as if I am being held up by some invisible wires. My body starts to rotate downward, feet first, and I’m now hovering upright over the ground. I’m then lowered slowly and gently, and my feet eventually touch the ground.
My Teacher reappears.
You see, you let go of your fear and surrendered, so there was no devastating blow. You are learning the importance of conquering your fear. You are learning the power of true faith and how it vanquishes your enemy, which is fear.
I’m listening intently and thinking how all this time I thought I had faith in God—but when it comes down to it, if I had faith, why would I have been so afraid at different times in my life? I wish I could take back some of the energy I wasted being upset or afraid.
I find myself thinking that most people are afraid of death, and my Teacher quickly answers my thought.
When a person dies, the spirit is released and the physical body ceases to function.
What he says is an astonishing expression of hope: He’s confirming what I’ve seen here—that we live on in spirit form!
I’m taking in so much. I guess the reason to learn anything is so that you have a chance to do things differently. Maybe that is what wisdom is all about. Just as I am thinking this to myself, my Teacher places this thought into my head:
You are correct. Wisdom is gained from experience. It is when you are able to correct your actions and forgive yourself and others that you can move forward away from fear and pointless regret to take another, wiser path. This is the path to transformation.
Mastery over fear is such a fundamental aspect of life. Fear blocks us. It keeps us from full involvement with the opportunities that help us grow. Fear is only a “feeling” and not a reality. Once we acknowledge this, our thinking starts to change and the goodness of God’s universe opens up to us. We think more clearly, we make better choices, and we draw to us situations that bring health and happiness. Faith comes in and fear goes out. Many positive things come to us when we live in faithfulness.
I’ve been able to watch many of my patients rise above utterly hopeless situations through the power of faith. When all medical technology, pharmaceutical agents, devices, and heroic measures are exhausted, I always resort to the phrase “a hope and a prayer”—both essential aspects of faith. The case of Hope illustrates the power of faith in health and recovery.
Hope was in her late fifties and came to our hospital with intense abdominal pain. She was diagnosed with a severely inflamed bowel that required immediate surgery. Surgeons removed approximately two feet of her bowel. But following surgery, Hope deteriorated and had to undergo a second operation. At this time, doctors found an extensive amount of discolored bowel that was in jeopardy of becoming gangrenous—which meant that the tissue was dying. Because they could not remove all of her intestines, the surgeons closed her up and told me that this was a terminal and grave case.
In this seemingly hopeless situation, I offered Hope all the medical technology that was available, such as antibiotics and blood thinners. I ended my comments with optimism, and I recommended hope and prayer to Hope and her family. I didn’t realize that hers was a very religious family and Hope had a strong faith in God. The family notified perhaps 100 churches all over the state of Connecticut, and thousands of people began praying for Hope.
Hope trusted that she would get well because of her strong belief and faith. She believed in getting well against all odds and intuitively “knew” she would recover. She did not waste her energy on fear, doubt, or anger but, rather, lived in the peaceful assurance afforded by her relationship with God.
A few days later, she actually began to improve. After approximately a week and a half, she was taking nutrition by mouth, and after four weeks, she walked out of the hospital. Hope had the faith that God would save her, and she survived.
What can we learn from her story? Is there a message for all of us? It was Hope’s belief in a higher spiritual power that brought her into true physical healing. She trusted that she would get well, and she did get well. Hope embodied faithfulness and emanated the emotional vibrations that accompany it. She received standard medical care, but, in my opinion, it was her faithfulness and divine intervention that saved her.
What exactly is faithfulness? Does it mean organized religion—that is, going to church every Sunday or to Temple on specific holidays? Is it sitting in a lotus position, completely absorbed in some meditative practice? Is it searching for a guru or belonging to a group that shares a similar belief system? Is it a positive belief in yourself, knowing that you’re capable of dealing with any discouragement, handling any problem, and trusting that good will ultimately prevail, even at the most difficult junctures in life—death, disease, and danger?
Faithfulness may embrace any of these. It doesn’t mean you have to believe in the conventional notion of God or go to religious services regularly. At its core, faithfulness is the confident assurance that what we hope for is going to happen.
Tommy’s experience illustrates something important: that faith is the opposite of fear. Fear asks, “What bad things will happen?” Faith asks, “What great things are actually happening?”
One of the problems with fear is that it has a way of worsening situations. It feeds on itself, potentiates already high stress and anxiety levels, and attracts more of what you fear. There’s an old German proverb stating that “fear makes the wolf bigger than he is,” or, as Tommy might say, “Fear makes the sharks bigger than they are.” In either case, this is true.
Fear can absolutely have a harmful effect on health. I recall the story of identical twin physicians, George L. Engel and Frank L. Engel. George was a pioneering psychiatrist in the field of mind-body medicine at the University of Rochester; Frank, a respected medical doctor at the Duke University School of Medicine. In 1963, at the age of 49, Frank died suddenly of a massive heart attack.
After his brother’s funeral, George Engel had a physical examination. It revealed evidence of coronary heart disease, with some calcification (hardening) of his arteries. Engel then became firmly fearful that he, too, would suffer a heart attack. He wrote: “As time passed, I found myself increasingly entertaining the magical notion that if the myocardial infarction did not occur by 10 July 1964, the first anniversary of his [Frank’s] death, I would survive.”
True to expectation, Engel’s prediction came to be. On July 9, 1964, he had a heart attack, just one day and 11 months short of the anniversary of his brother’s death. Happily, Engel survived—and lived to the ripe old age of 86.
I once heard Engel speak at a conference about this experience, which he called his nemesis complex—when you fear that something tragic will happen to you. It is almost like placing a curse on your life. I was fascinated to hear Engel eloquently speak about his own fear of having a heart attack on the date of his brother’s attack—and how the prophecy was fulfilled.
Many patients in my practice, particularly the young, have this incredible nemesis of fear. They, like Engel, think that they will die of a heart attack or some other disease because a sibling or parent died of a particular illness. It is difficult to say how often they are right and this actually comes true, but when I see patients with this dark belief, I counsel them that it can become a self-fulfilling prophesy if they allow themselves to buy into it. This helps them reject their own nemesis complex.
You see, the danger with the nemesis complex is that people are powerful. They can create their own disease situations and, therefore, their own destinies. The things we dwell on the most can ultimately materialize in our bodies, so we must be wary of negative expectations, because they may come true.
All living things are hardwired to feel fear as a protective response to danger and to alert us to action. But chronic, unchecked fear is a tremendously harmful emotion that can deleteriously affect the heart and the body. It makes the heart beat rapidly and forcefully. It can cause heart palpitations, constricted blood vessels, labored breathing, digestive problems, and compromised immunity. Researchers from Harvard found that anxiety and fear damage telomeres, which are the proteins at the end of our chromosomes—a situation that dramatically accelerates the aging process.
So how do you live a less fearful, more faith-filled life? There’s no quick ride to faithfulness. It is a lifetime journey that requires trust, connectedness, prayer, selfless love, and a compassionate heart toward one’s self and humanity.
Faith grows within our hearts, but we must devote time to nurturing this growth. Because faith cannot exist where there is fear, one way to start is to analyze the foundation of your fears. When you find yourself obsessing about something that may or may not happen in the future, use the same advice you were given as a child when crossing the street—stop, look, and listen. Bring yourself back into the present moment. Often, that which we fear never actually takes place, because our fears are not usually grounded in fact—they are grounded in feeling. We must turn off the inner voice that keeps us trapped in our fear.
Once you recognize your fears and know that they are largely baseless, learn to release them and take a leap into the unknown. As you find yourself experiencing fear, deactivate it by becoming still. Close your eyes and connect with the divine. Tell yourself: “I am not my fear; I am larger. I release it now.” You’ll find that the day you let go of the fears ruling your life is the day you’ll actually begin to live.
I believe that we were created to live not in fear but in faith—in ourselves, in one another, and in the divine. If we stay anchored in faith, we’ll no longer be terrified. We won’t have the time or energy to be fearful, because we will be so filled with faith. That’s because faith isn’t just an attitude; it’s also an action. It’s about being in motion, doing things, solving problems, practicing forgiveness, seeking connections, conforming your life to your beliefs, spending time in prayer or meditation, and trusting in a divine power. Action, too, is one of the greatest ways to overcome fear, meaning that you should do what it is you fear.
Finally, have faith in the ultimate assurance: that we don’t really die. Death isn’t something to fear. One of the greatest gifts of my friendship with Tommy is that I am no longer afraid of death. As a doctor, I have seen death again and again. I had developed a secret fear of death, which I harbored inside myself for many years—until I met Tommy and heard his story. Tommy’s experience freed me from my fear of death because it taught me that we go on; there is no real death, only the death of our bodies—our spirits live on in a place filled with beauty and divinity.
Written in the eighth century, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is a guide to be read to a dying person for instruction on overcoming the fear of death, states that the greatest single moment in this physical life is when we die and pass through a clear light into the peacefulness of the afterlife. That light is the white tunnel of light we hear so much about from people who have had near-death experiences. Tommy once told me that the purpose of that tunnel is to take us from the earthly vibration to the heavenly vibration; we need time to acclimate to Heaven’s higher vibration.
This message that death is so gloriously momentous was validated for me many years ago, when I resuscitated a patient and brought him back from the brink of death. He came to my office for a follow-up appointment and promptly stated: “I want to sue you for bringing me back! Dying was the most beautiful and wonderful moment of my life.”
This patient and Tommy were graced with a glimpse of Heaven. Use their experiences to help alleviate your own fear of death.
None of us should fear death. You and I—all of us—are going to a better place. Death is just a new beginning. Why be afraid if you really are going home?
FAITHFULNESS
Here are four commitment steps to help you apply this revelation. We recommend that you sit quietly and examine any fears that you may have, including the fear of death, and identify faith-building actions, based on our suggestions, that will help oust fear from your life and allow your faithfulness to strengthen.
◼I will answer these questions: What do I fear? Rejection? Change? Failure or even success? What others think about me? The unknown? Illness? Death? I’ll identify the fears that are holding me back and expose them as baseless. I’ll no longer let fear keep me from pursuing my dreams or living a full life. When fear-based what-ifs come to mind, I’ll tell myself, “I’ll handle it.” This means I’ll grow from it, learn from it, and experience victory. Faith gives me the strength to make it through. I’ll let go of what might happen, what should happen, or what others will think. And I’ll overcome fear by doing. I will overcome my fear by verbalizing my fear aloud. For example, I will say aloud: “I don’t fear being alone,” or “I don’t fear my body’s image,” or “I won’t fear new relationships.” “I will take a chance.” “I will be committed to breaking through my fear by verbalizing it multiple times and thereby diminishing it.”
◼I will have trust that things happen for my ultimate good, even if I can’t see the big picture. Faith is absolute trust in the divine, no matter how hopeless or how big the obstacles ahead. I recognize that faith can facilitate healing and bring back wholeness and vitality.
◼I recognize that faith is a gift that grows, and I will actively grow my faith through connections of my choice, such as:
•Joining a spiritual community for the relationships, encouragement, and opportunities to take steps toward connecting to a higher power through prayer
•Meditating and finding stillness in my life
•Connecting to a higher power through prayer. Prayer can be as simple as having gratitude for your life’s blessings or a conversation with your higher power. There is no specific formula. You can reach into your heart and verbalize your thoughts. You might ask for forgiveness, guidance, help, clarity, or even a divine message. But prayer should be a part of daily life even if it is for just a few minutes a day. Tommy and I always say a prayer before we meditate.
•Practicing moving meditation such as yoga or tai chi or walking while praying
•Reading spiritual texts and inspirational works
•Being in service to others through volunteering or other forms of charity
•Recognizing and being grateful for healing miracles in my life and in the lives of others
◼I shall embrace the idea that there is existence after death and not be afraid of death. Those who have been drawn to the light of unending love but then are returned to Earth come back changed and more loving. I don’t have to have a near-death experience to live this way. All I have to do is live more lovingly and faithfully here and now, so that when my soul is called home, I will be light in my body.