The Secret of Life Wellness: The Essential Guide to Life's Big Questions (8 page)

ing being next to each other. I say the love was pure because our

connection felt soulful. At one point we embraced, forgetting all about din-

ner. It was one of the deepest and most heartfelt hugs I have ever had. In

fact, it felt like time stood still, and we were just two souls experiencing

oneness.

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The most incredible love flooded through every cell in my body. At one

point, I could really understand what it meant to be an energy being, as

nothing felt physical anymore. It was like love was vibrating through the

whole room, the couch, the flowers, the walls. The experience was magnifi-

cent and unforgettable. Through it, I felt like I was healing my relationships

with people, men in particular, but also my feelings about myself and the

fact that I was worthy of being loved deeply, purely, and unconditionally.

You, too, are worthy of being loved deeply, purely, intimately, passion-

ately, and unconditionally.

Processes for Loving and Connecting to Yourself

Below are three processes that can help you to practically connect to yourself and be more

loving. They include asking questions, writing down what makes you lovable, and expanding

your capacity to receive infinite love. You can do them all together or one at a time.

Connect with Yourself

In order to deepen your connection with yourself, find a place where you won’t be inter-

rupted for at least fifteen to 30 minutes. Sit up with a straight spine and take slow deep

breaths. Extend your middle and little fingers and place the others on the tip of your

thumb. Do this with both hands. Focus your attention within.

Ask yourself the question,
Who am I?
Wait for an answer. Then ask the question

again, this time reflecting on:
If I am not my body, if I am not my thoughts, feelings, beliefs,

or experiences, then who am I?
Allow yourself to explore this question while also being

aware of your thoughts and the space between these thoughts.

Do this for as long as you feel comfortable. Whether it is ten seconds or thirty minutes, it

will be highly beneficial. This exercise will help center you and allow you to begin exploring

who you really are, beyond the physical, mental, and emotional aspects that you know.

You can practice this process several times a week, to strengthen your connection

with yourself as well as explore the deep silence that is within your soul. This will help

you to feel calmer and more grounded in your everyday life.

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The Secret of Life Wellness

Recognize What Makes You Lovable

To love yourself, you need to recognize all the ways that you are lovable and valuable.

Take a few minutes to reflect on all the qualities that make you lovable. Write those

qualities down and place them next to your bed. Read them every day for a week.

When you read them, allow yourself to really take them in. During the week, ask all the

people you care about what they love about you. Write down what they say and then

focus on accepting those qualities within yourself. Really listen to what people say and

thank them for telling you what is great about you.

Once you know that you are lovable and valuable you can begin to attract the expe-

riences, people, and things you really desire into your life because you will know that

you deserve them.

Visualize Infinite Love

Place your hands on your heart. Close your eyes and visualize a big infinity sign on

the ground. Walk around this sign as if you are tracing it with your feet. As you

are walking around this sign, focus on everyone and everything you love in your life.

Keep walking around this sign until you feel an incredible amount of love and grati -

tude. Then stand in the middle of the sign. Open your arms wide and imagine that the

infinite love of the universe now flows into your heart. Focus on breathing this love into

every cell of your body.

Now, concentrate on connecting to the people you love from a place of infinity and

deep love. Give yourself permission to share your life with and communicate with them

on a deep and profound level. Allow yourself to feel their love and care for you.

Say: “Divine Healing Intelligence, using the pink ray of unconditional love, sweep

through my mind, body, heart, and soul and energize every aspect of my being with

Divine Love. Allow me to know myself and my soul on the deepest level possible. Give

me the highest, clearest, and most perfect guidance. Allow the Divine Love within me

to dissolve all fear, doubt, anger, disconnection, and any other obstacle to my happiness,

love, and freedom. Thank you.”

Repeat the word “CLEAR” several times until you feel lighter.

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3

How You Can Embrace Your Shadow

and Work with Your Inner Child

I heard that we have a light and shadow side. Can you expand on this?

Also, what is a role of the inner child in our lives and how can we work with it?

In order to regain your inner power and know and love yourself fully, it is important

to understand and embrace all aspects of your light and shadow. As you study the

third and fourth chapters, you will encounter the four archetypes which are part of our

human makeup, including the inner child, prostitute, victim, and saboteur.

Each archetype is the keeper of many gifts and challenges and can assist you in

understanding your unconscious and subconscious patterns, behaviors, and reactions.

Working with archetypal energy can help you heal past wounds, release self-

sabotage, let go of fearful and limiting patterns, reach your highest potential, reclaim

your integrity, have more choices, and become self-empowered.

Embrace Your Light and Shadow

Our shadow side consists of aspects of ourselves we are least familiar with, bury, resist,

and suppress. It is a secret hideaway where we try to mask all our insecurities, fears, dis-

appointments, and failures, as well as our potential greatness, influence, beauty,

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integrity, and uniqueness. We yearn to be accepted and acceptable. Often our greatest

fear is to be labeled as different, weird, or unusual. Thus, we try to detach ourselves

from our deepest apprehension, that somehow we are unwanted, worthless, false, unlov-

able, shameful, guilty, or damaged.

In order to escape from looking within and discovering our perceived darkness, we

attempt to cover up, either by trying our hardest to please or to resist others. We also

often project unconscious aspects of ourselves on to others. This can include positive

and negative characteristics or personality traits that we disown.

We neglect to understand that our shadow aspects are the keepers of our greatest

power. Much of our authenticity, potential, greatness, creativity, success, passion, and

contribution in life are concealed within our own self-imposed barricades.

Since many of us are encouraged to strive for perfection, we lose sight that our true

beauty, lovability, growth, and evolution arise from embracing and loving our imperfec-

tions, idiosyncrasies, and individuality.

Our ability to fully love and accept ourselves and others is greatly hindered by our

need to hide and deny our limiting patterns, emotions, and behaviors. Instead of allow-

ing our highest aspects to lead, being comfortable with ourselves, and showing others

who we truly are, we hand over control of our lives to our fear, resentment, rejection,

hurt, anger, and neediness, without the awareness that we are doing so.

It’s incredible how many of us are as terrified to discover that we might be

powerful, ingenious, and extraordinary as we are of finding out we are average, weak, or

dull. Our shadow aspects become dominant when we refuse to have empathy for our

own and other people’s challenges.

The shadow can be viewed as painful, unprocessed parts of ourselves, which have

the potential to hinder many aspects of our lives at the most inappropriate moments,

when we are least prepared. As our shadow aspects are often controlled by our subcon-

scious mind, it is easy for them to permeate our daily life and wreak chaos without us

being aware of how this is occurring.

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The Secret of Life Wellness

Our self-sabotage can manifest in subtle and potent ways when we arrive to places

late, miss opportunities, become involved with questionable characters, misread things

people say, destroy potentially empowering relationships, and so forth.

When you disown your shadow, you embark on a journey of fear, guilt, anger, and

separation. You stop listening to, or trusting, the combined wisdom of your mind, body,

heart, and soul and begin the process of internal confusion and conflict.

If you choose to solely follow your feelings, you can turn into an over emotional,

needy, insecure, doubtful, indecisive, and dependent person. If you allow the mind

to rule, you can become judgmental, controlling, and over analytical. You are likely to

make decisions based on logic and what you know without taking feelings, intuition,

and wisdom into consideration. If your spiritual aspects are given all the power, you can

become impractical, dreamy, and unrealistic, lost in mystical fantasies and desires of

being saved. The idea is to create a healthy balanced relationship between your heart,

mind, and spirit.

As long as the mind, emotions, and soul feel split, and do not have an ability to

communicate with each other, you will feel doubtful and unsure about what actions

to take, how to connect to others, and how to live in harmony with yourself. Your

shadow aspects can push you toward healing, by motivating you to start asking

questions and embracing more of who you are.

In order for you to become self-empowered, you need to move from living outside

yourself to connecting to your body, intuition, and inner life. This requires bringing

light to the shadow aspects of yourself that are entrenched in limiting patterns and

helping them to mature.

For example, you may be repressing the fact that you are not emotionally and ener-

getically compatible with your partner. If you were honest, you would confront your

partner and work together on changing your relationship, or choose to leave the rela-

tionship. This would require courage, trust, candor and a lot of personal growth.

However, if you were to keep suppressing the fact that your relationship is not working

because you are afraid of being alone, you might become negative, aggressive, lie, cheat,

or cause destruction in your life and create dis-ease just to be safe.

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A huge part of your healing journey is to confront your shadow aspect and take

back your power, your life force energy, and expand your freedom and the choices avail-

able to you.

Colin’s Story: Confronting the Shadow

Colin, a successful businessman, was married with four children. When Colin

first called me for a distance healing, he was extremely secretive and pro-

tective. While I was tuning into him, I received an image of a frog who was

trying to pass himself off as a prince. (I often see archetypal images that

help me to understand what is really going on in a person’s life.)

I had a strong impression that he was dishonest and destructive in his

life. After a little prodding, I discovered that Colin was trying to be a savior

to women who had been abused and who were often deeply unhappy.

His mother had experienced severe abuse from his father and had lost

several members of her family in her youth. As a child, Colin stood helplessly

by her side, watching her suffer. By trying to help the women who showed

up in his adult life, Colin was trying to save his mother. The problem was that

these women were becoming attached to him and draining him of all his

energy. Colin’s pattern resulted in him neglecting his family, lying to his wife,

and entering into sexual relationships with the women he’d tried to help. It

was like Colin was living two separate lives but was not present in either.

However, the risk gave him such a high that he felt addicted.

I saw that Colin was walking on the cliff’s edge. He was gaining weight,

feeling heavy and powerless, and losing his energy and concentration. He