The pair left the next morning, two days early.
STEP 2
Welcome Your Spirit
Simple Lesson: Welcome Your Spirit
This step asks you to welcome your Spirit and invite it fully into your life. The practice that follows guides you to create a loving and receptive home for it in your body. With this new awareness, you’ll come to view your physical self as your faithful ally and friend and become happily grounded in your own skin.
Getting over yourself—your false ego self—is the first step toward living a blessed, charmed, peaceful life. But that’s not enough. Once you disconnect from your false self, your ego, it’s important to actively connect with your authentic, Divine self—your Spirit.
Begin by accepting that you have a beautiful, blessed, gorgeous, holy force that lives in the center of your heart and gives you life: a brilliant flame of Divine love. It’s a force that we all have, we all share, and we all depend on for our existence. In other words, this holy spark of life is the essence of your authentic self as a Divine Being. While the ego is finite and dies with your body, your Spirit is infinite and lives on without physical limitations. Your Spirit after death simply returns to the great Creator, the Holy Mother/Father God, and resumes being the light it is made of.
A miracle happens when you stop believing that you are your ego self and start connecting to your Spirit—when you stop controlling and fearing life and start enjoying it. This is because when you’re in Spirit, you align with Divine mind. You become one with God. And as my mother always said, “When God is with you, no one is against you, because nothing is greater than God.”
Another reason why life becomes instantly better when you connect with your authentic self, the Divine Spirit within, is that you join with all else that’s Divine, such as beauty, harmony, and our greatest of all desires, peace. In Divine mind, there’s no war, sickness, poverty, combativeness, insecurity, fear, anger, or anything else that the ego mind is so addicted to and injured by. Instead, all is peaceful all the time.
To merge with Divine mind, identify with being the holy, sacred Spirit that you are. Of course, your ego mind will scoff at the very notion by saying, Who do you think you are? or That’s ridiculous. It doesn’t want you to know that you’re Spirit—at least not without a fight, anyway—because as soon as you acknowledge that you are, it loses power. To claim your Spirit automatically displaces your ego and pushes it out of the job of running (and ruining) your life. Naturally, it doesn’t want this to happen.
The paradox, however, is that when the ego mind is displaced by your Spirit, it actually relaxes and begins to enjoy life, because it’s in its natural right place once again: following and supporting your Spirit, not fighting against it.
Years ago, when I was around ten years old, a gentleman came to our house to speak to my mother, who was an artist and portrait painter. Based on her reputation, he asked her if she would be willing to paint a portrait of the family of a well-known guru from India who was visiting at the time. Before she agreed, he told my mom that she’d have to prepare herself because the guru’s presence was very holy, and in order to receive him, she—and all of us—would have to be in the right, high vibration. Checking out the vibes in the household, he gave us the basic okay but said that we’d need to ready ourselves, nevertheless.
We were required to clean the house, use special incense, pray, groom ourselves, put on our best clothes, and serve special teas and fruits. As we readied everything, I begrudgingly asked my mother if all of this was truly necessary. Why was he so important? She said that it was necessary, but not for the reasons I thought. She explained that it wasn’t so much that he was special or holy or more important than us in any way—it was just that he remembered how holy he was. He recalled that he was a child of God and treated himself with the love and respect we all deserve. He served as a role model to remind us that we are holy and deserve the highest level of reverence because everyone’s Spirit is worthy of that.
She emphasized the need to be mindful of our Spirit and its holiness, but not to confuse the Spirit with the ego.
“How do you know the difference?” I asked. “How can you tell? It seems to me they’re easy to mix up.”
“It’s not hard to distinguish ego from Spirit,” she answered. “When you’re connected to Spirit, you feel as though you’re a part of life and your heart opens to everyone. When you’re tied to your ego, however, you want to pull away. You separate yourself from others. You adopt a me-against-you attitude and close your heart.
“An easier way to discern ego from Spirit is to check in with your vibes. When you connect with your Spirit, you feel good, positive, self-loving vibes. When you connect to your ego, you feel irritable, critical, depressed, and tired vibes. Simple!”
Our conversation left a big impression on me. We should all treat our Spirit as a sacred guest and receive it with the same attention and care we would extend a special visitor.
Imagine your Spirit as a sacred guest taking up residence in your life. If this were the case, how would you prepare to receive your company?
Imagine doing the very things for your Spirit that you would do for someone you loved, even adored: Invite it into a calm space in your body. Relax and greet it with your most gracious smile and welcoming attitude. Make it feel at home. Imagine speaking to your Spirit with kindness, affection . . . even reverence, as it’s a holy essence.
Your Spirit is a sacred and holy part of your life. It’s only appropriate that you prepare for and host it to the best of your abilities. This means creating a loving, grounded home for your Spirit to reside in by taking care of your body. Just as you would probably not want an important visitor to come into your home if it were messy, chaotic, or toxic, neither should you impose this kind of disrespect and disarray onto your Spirit.
Give your Spirit a healthy, happy home to dwell in. This means, among other things, offering it a body that’s properly fed, well rested, somewhat exercised, clean, and appreciated. That certainly is far more inviting to it than one that’s overstuffed with bad foods or starved altogether; or that’s exhausted, full of toxic substances, lethargic, and ignored. In fact, if the environment of your body becomes too unhealthy, your Spirit leaves because the vibration is too low. It literally steps out of your physical self, seeking to get away from the disaster and dissonance inside.
If a person’s Spirit has departed from his or her body, it leaves nothing but a fearful, controlling ego to run the show in its place. If the Spirit has vacated, you’ll see no light in the individual’s eyes—no spark, no fire, and no luminescence. When you look into them, you’ll only perceive a dull emptiness, as if no one is home.
Sadly, neglect isn’t the only reason the Spirit steps out of the body. Trauma, abuse, physical injury, self-loathing, extreme anger, or fear also can dislodge it. Fortunately, when the Spirit steps out, it doesn’t go far—it simply moves outside the physical body yet remains connected by what metaphysicians call the silver cord above it. The Spirit continues to be energetically connected to you but isn’t embodied. This leaves you weak, and easily influenced by lower vibrations.
Don’t worry if you feel that yours has left your body. It can happen to any of us from time to time if we’re not aware of, and loving toward, the Spirit. It departs due to long exposure to intense negative vibration, such as when you get into an angry argument with another, when you abuse drugs or alcohol, or when you experience or perpetrate severe violence. Your Spirit also leaves if you’re on a path that doesn’t serve you, which is what happened to one of my clients.
A young woman came to me for a consultation not long ago. When I looked into her eyes, it was clear that her Spirit wasn’t at home. Her eyes were dull, her energy was low, and there wasn’t an ounce of enthusiasm or joy to be found in her being. She loathed her job as a middle-school counselor for behaviorally challenged adolescents and had wanted to quit for more than two years. Yet the fear of lacking income kept her goin
g to the job, day after day—at least, it kept her body going. Her Spirit had left and wasn’t involved in any part of that decision, only her ego.
When I suggested that she quit and follow her Spirit to where it wanted to be, which was working as an intuitive guide and counselor, her ego immediately rejected the idea, saying that if she did that, she wouldn’t make it. She didn’t register that without her Spirit, she wasn’t surviving well already, nor was she doing the kids at school much good, either—a fact I pointed out to her. The entire vibration of the situation wasn’t good for her, and she suffered as a result of continuing to go against the grain of her Spirit.
Listening to me, my client had to admit that the vibration of the job was toxic for her. It was never a comfortable fit, and she’d never liked being there. In fact, she said she hated it, a clear sign that her Spirit had left. The Spirit never “hates” a thing, only the controlling ego does.
As we spoke, she actually started to entertain the idea of quitting and perhaps working at a local spiritual bookstore, both as a salesperson and a counselor. Just the thought of this possibility lured her Spirit back in. Her eyes lit up, her smile returned, and she sighed with relief.
I wasn’t the only one who noticed. She felt it, too. “Oh my goodness!” she exclaimed. “That would be so wonderful . . . I feel better just thinking about it.”
Evidently, she began to honor the need for her Spirit to be in a better vibration than she was in at her school job, because I heard that she did quit and was teaching and doing spiritual counseling through the bookstore, just as we’d talked about.
The minute you decide to welcome your Spirit—to place loving attention on it; to give priority to it; to treat it as a holy, sacred guest in your heart; and to honor it and put it in a positive atmosphere—you raise the vibration of your body and it snaps right back in. No problem.
Remember that everything in this universe ultimately comes down to vibration, which is either positive, kind, loving, appreciative, respectful, harmonious, and life affirming (the frequency of God mind) or dissonant, negative, demoralizing, guilt tripping, judgmental, critical, hostile, and life destroying (the frequency of ego mind).
To be critical, hostile, and shaming toward your authentic self is the equivalent of hurling insults and garbage at your holy guest in residence. It’s life destroying and patently unacceptable to your Spirit. You wouldn’t treat an invited human guest in this way, so why would you ever agree to do this to your Divine Spirit?
You get my point. So do not attack yourself anymore, because it is hurtful to the Spirit. Instead, welcome, embrace, and honor it fully. It’s a sacred guest residing in your heart. The more you treat it so, the more beautiful your life will become.
Simple Practice: Love Your Body
Probably the thing we love the least about ourselves is our physical bodies. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, has been bombarded with crazy ideas about what constitutes a lovable physical body; and no one, and I do mean no one, has that body. This is because “that body”—the externally perfect, gorgeous, lean, strong, sexy, flawless body—is not a human one. It’s a fiction of the media and doesn’t exist . . . not among human beings. And even if it seems to exist, as in the case of some Hollywood stars, it either doesn’t for long (bodies change and age) or it comes at such a price of fear, control, obsession, and addiction that although the outside may temporarily look terrific, the inside is usually a disaster.
Our obsession with our bodies is rooted in the notion that if we look good (whatever that means), we have far greater chances of being loved and feeling secure. The problem with this notion is twofold: (1) Feeling loved in this way is based on winning other people’s approval, which we know the ego can never get enough of; and (2) the notion of what is beautiful is very subjective and changeable, so we’ll never get it “right,” even if we try.
For example, one year the “look” is to have long straight hair; the next, it’s to have short curly hair. One year it’s to be heroin-chic thin; the next, it’s to be muscular and lean. One season men need facial hair to be considered “cool” or acceptable; the next, they should be clean shaven with shoulder-length hair. And that’s only in the Western world. I just read an article about how extreme obesity in young women is considered to be supreme beauty among men in Mauritania, so girls are fattened like geese, forced to eat to pile on the pounds so that they’re attractive bride material. Some are so overweight that they can’t even walk, yet these are considered pearls of great price there.
This standard of beauty is ridiculous—not to mention downright ignorant—and is abusive to these women. To subscribe to it is insanity . . . but it’s no less toxic or absurd than our doing hothouse yoga in 150-degree rooms on an empty stomach. Don’t you think, in the name of self-love, it’s time to stop and ask ourselves—especially when it comes to our bodies: “What the heck are we doing—and why?”?
If we actually believe that looking a certain contrived way physically is the key to self-love, we’ve completely disconnected from our Spirit. Over the years I’ve counseleda number of actresses and models, all considered gorgeous. Underneath their perfectly coiffed, manicured, cellulite-free, abs-of-steel bodies, however, are some of the most unhappy, ego-obsessed, miserably self-loathing, spiritless people I’ve ever encountered. Their lives have been reduced to gyms, beauty salons, and mirrors; and there’s room for little else. It’s sad and boring and wastefully joyless! And it’s not self-loving at all . . . it’s ego-controlling, and the control is being reinforced by popular opinion, which is rooted in absolute fear, terror of rejection, and misery. So what kind of reward is that?
Regardless of how we look, it’s how we feel in our own skin that matters. And until we consider our bodies to be our friends and our faithful and devoted servants—recognizing that they, too, are sacred and holy creations, just as our Spirit is—we can’t feel good or ever be at peace.
Treat your body as your friend, because it is: It tirelessly serves you—in spite of your attitude toward it—and allows you to serve your Spirit and support your life with love. It’s a miraculous vessel that takes quite a bit of abuse, while still working for you every day.
To love yourself, you must love your body as well—it comes as a package deal. No matter what kind of body you ended up with, it’s the only one you have, so you must live with it whether you want to or not. Realize how important your physical self is to your life’s journey —not for the approval it wins from others, but for the service it provides your Spirit. It’s your vessel, your carrier, your means of experiencing life. Like a car that gets you from point A to point B, it’s your mode of transportation on Earth and will work much better for you if you treat it with a little respect and care.
There are a lot of commonsense reasons to love your body, topped by the fact that if you don’t, sooner or later the neglect and rejection will come back to haunt you in the form of sickness, fatigue, depression, or some sort of pain. So first and foremost, it’s a practical choice to befriend your body. And the easiest way to begin is to appreciate it from the inside out. Stop obsessing or worrying about how it looks (because, after all, unless you’re in front of a mirror, you aren’t scrutinizing it anyway), and start paying attention to how it feels. Especially pay attention to what makes it feel better.
One thing that I know will make it feel better is kind words. The body is a sensitive, vibrationally responsive vessel. Kind words have a highly positive physical effect on you, while harsh criticisms—voiced or internalized—have a stressful impact. So talk to yourself in a loving way.
Years ago when my daughter Sabrina was only four years old, my husband, Patrick, lost his patience with her because she was being uncooperative, and he lashed out at her with some harsh words. Shocked, she stopped and took in what he said, sitting silently for a moment. Finally, she responded, “Dad, that’s no way to talk to my Spirit, and my belly feels bad when you say that! Say you’re sorry now so my belly feels better.”
/> Surprised, but realizing Sabrina was being absolutely honest about the impact of his words on her stomach, Patrick immediately apologized. She was quiet for another minute, absorbing what he said. Then she remarked, “Okay, my belly’s better now.”
This was a clear reminder to all of us that the human body is sensitive and responds to what it’s told. When you tell it harsh things, it feels bad. Magically (or so it seems), when you tell it loving things, it feels—guess what?—better.
Our habit of negative self-talk is so entrenched within us that we’re not even aware of it. When listening to people talk about their bodies, the words I hear most often are I hate: “I hate my hair, thighs, balding head, waistline, feet, crooked teeth, freckles, wrinkles,” and so on. Would you say that to your worst enemy, let alone to a friend who works tirelessly to transport you around? Of course not. Yet the pattern is there.
To break this habit, I believe we need lessons in, or at least reminders of, how to speak to ourselves. Make a list that reads: “When I talk to myself, here’s what I need to say. . . .” Then write down as many loving, affirming statements as you can think of and would want to share with your best friend. Start from the inside out, and focus on what’s within more than the outside.
For example:
You are so faithful, body. Thank you for getting up and going every day.
You are such a good friend. Thanks for being reliable.
You are intelligent, creative, and funny.
I know that I can count on you.
You are hearty, resilient, and powerful.
I appreciate all you do for me.
The Answer Is Simple- Love Yourself, Live Your Spirit! Page 3