CHAPTER 1 “The Present”

The Effect of a Cause

“To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.” – Emily Dickinson

When was the last time you really loved your life and felt that it was overflowing with awe-inspiring moments? Do you find yourself fretting over the one percent of a situation that is beyond your control while overlooking the ninety-nine percent that is? For most of us, stress in some form is the main problem affecting the quality of our lives. Sadly, as long as you see stress as an externally based problem, you will never know that it is the way in which you allow it to affect you that is the real reason you are exhausted, over-reactive, irritable, and often overwhelmed! Most stress related issues stem from a lack of understanding about why stress affects us so negatively. 

Are you ready for an insight that will forever change the way you relate to every kind of stress? Here is the most important clue: Once you react improperly to stress in any form it begins to control you. How? The key factor behind why we succumb to stress has mainly to do with one very significant emotion: "resentment.” When resentment, irritation, or anger are the underlying emotions that stimulate your reactions to stress, you become primed to fall into a trap that leaves you in a counter-intuitive state of mind. The secret of total mastery over stress is actually very simple: If you will mentally and emotionally step back for just a split second and observe your response to any form of stress, the possibility of shifting the polarity from negative to positive exists in that very moment.

For over 30 years I have helped hundreds of thousands of people to recognize and accept the gift of freedom that is only available in the present! No matter what happens in your life you have to choose to make something wonderful out of it. The positive energy of present-based awareness systematically inspires you to let go of all forms of negativity and enables you to appreciate the growth potential inherent in the problems and challenges of everyday life. Right now you cannot realize how many blessings are inherent in each moment because your awareness is shackled. This book reveals an essential centering methodology that guides you into discovering these blessings through attaining the vast power of a “now” attitude. 

This process makes all the difference between a mere existence and a life filled with joy and abundance. Modern scientific research has confirmed the link between mind and body so often spoken of through the wisdom of the ancients by demonstrating the effects of thoughts and feelings on our physical health. In fact, one notable new study whose findings appear in the online BioMed Central journal, BMC Cancer, was covered by (Reuters), September 14, 2008. The article, entitled “Stress May Increase the Risk of Breast Cancer,” brought to view important hard-hitting facts that must be seen as evidence of the missing vital focus on the spiritual connection to stress.

The study “compared 255 women younger than 45 years old, who had been diagnosed with breast cancer, to 367 healthy women of similar age” and “evaluated interactions between severe life events and breast cancer.” The research team’s analysis “revealed a positive association between exposure to more than one adverse life event and breast cancer.” The article went on to say that “compared with healthy women, women with breast cancer also demonstrated significantly higher scores of depression and significantly lower scores of happiness and optimism.” Finally, the article quoted the first author of the study, Dr. Ronit Peled, as having noted that “general feelings of happiness and optimism seemed to offer protection against breast cancer” and “the more you are happy and feel optimistic with your life, the less the probability of developing breast cancer.”” 

The link between breast cancer and stress is just one major example taken from among many other horrible mental, emotional and physical conditions we experience. This book is especially dedicated to the countless millions who have suffered and will continue to be debilitated from stress-related illnesses under the current medical establishment, which has utterly failed to identify and direct patients in the ways of holistic healing, but instead readily performs major operations for potentially preventable and treatable conditions causing bodily mutilations without hesitation! Until the spiritual component of dealing with stress is clearly understood, the vast suffering of cause-and-effect related illnesses will continue unabated!

In spite of all the modern scientific evidence of the connection between mind and body, our mainstream medical culture does not readily support becoming in touch with the deeper spiritual causes of our destructive emotions. Anger, resentment, fear, judgment, blame, and guilt are only a few of the negative states that are toxic to the mind and body, and especially to the soul. Sensitive internal balances are disrupted and energy blockages are created through negative thoughts and unexpressed feelings that in turn become the birthplace of toxic attitudes and physical diseases. Every negative impulse or response to any stress contains a potentially deadly spiritual “toxin” that enters our psycho-spiritual being and insidiously violates our original soul substance.

This is the equivalent of what doctors call “trauma.” It is in reality a “soul infection”. With each uncontrolled response to stress, the negative force from the source of that stress penetrates our natural defense mechanisms and becomes lodged in our being in much the same way a virus invades our body and begins to take over and convert healthy cells into diseased cells. Our state of spiritual being either makes us well and keeps us vibrant, or causes illness and keeps us in darkness. The deciding factor of presence affects us far more deeply than anyone even imagines. In fact, presence is actually “spiritual reprogramming” that overrides and regulates the thoughts and emotions that affect all aspects of our lives including health, relationships, and finances. Throughout the years of my experience as a motivational expert and peak performance counselor, I’ve seen that health and relationships are the two most common personal issues that suffer the worst impact of negative thoughts and emotions. 

Throughout the eons of human experience, stress has never been clearly understood by more than a handful of enlightened souls. These are the avatars and teachers whose presence and energy still resonate with all sincere truth seekers. Sadly, without understanding what stress actually is, there is no way we can begin to properly remedy what it does to us. We typically attempt to do whatever it takes to cope. We medicate ourselves or escape into various activities in order to avoid facing the painful truth that shows itself as anxiety, depression, and countless uncomfortable feelings. Escape, however, only temporarily diverts us from struggling with stress and sets us on a course that leads to progressively much worse conditions. The definition of disease taken from the Random House Unabridged Dictionary includes these as synonyms: “morbidity, complaint, derangement, distemper, indisposition, infirmity, disorder, and malady.” These synonyms show that disease is just that, dis-ease. 

When the mind is in a morbid state and the attitude is full of conflict, disease is born. This is the unseen result of being infected by ubiquitous but undetected negative energy. Having been affected to a certain degree our entire lives, it’s no wonder we feel overwhelmed and become ill. These many conditions are what have been termed “the effects of stress.” Many of us spend our life not knowing what we actually feel, let alone why we are unable to express or release our pain. We do everything but acknowledge anxiety, which is a manifestation of our suffering soul knocking at the door of our consciousness in an attempt to cause us to recognize it and become present, thus allowing the now energy to release the authentic self from the prison of negativity. There are numerous avenues through which we choose to escape these feelings. Work, food, alcohol, pharmaceuticals, relationships, even exercise are among a few of the most commonly chosen. 

Dependence or addiction to any of these indicates that we are using them to avoid knowing what our feelings are attempting to communicate to us. Feelings are our natural gauges. Anger, sadness, fear – they are all results of built-in sensitive psycho-spiritual instruments letting us know that something is happening within our spiritual being. In addition, depending on what we do in response to these various signals, an outcome is determined as to whether we will be liberated, or kept in bondage to what is harmful. Suppressing uncomfortable feelings inside or releasing them in a negative way can equally cause sickness.

As you learn to become present, the natural result is that you instinctively begin to simply “watch” these feelings. That effortless “watching” can trigger an automatic release mechanism that allows the negative emotions to escape, or vaporize, rather than staying stuck inside where they ultimately lead to the debilitation of mind, body, and soul. In the present, our spirit can be replenished and the amazing power that accomplishes that renewal causes a degree of our ultimate potential to be unleashed. Most of us think that when we are angry, we are just expressing a natural emotion. 

But, it is not natural to be angry. You weren’t born angry. You learned how to be angry. Do you think that anger is a positive emotion? I know some people do. Some people thrive on being angry, upset and irritated because there is energy that comes from those emotions. But this energy is from the wrong source. Deriving the energy to function from the wrong source creates a negative counter-self. It is a fact that once you have become upset, you lose a portion of your original, authentic identity and become an extension of whatever, or whoever upsets you. At this point, there is a lingering, residual imprint of the experience and it typically carries with it some degree of anxiety. There is also a sense that something precious has been lost – the ability to ben at peace.

To be continued...