• Develop your own personal excellence program, first in your mind, and then start putting it into practice in your daily life. See yourself exercising, eating more vegetables and fruits, drinking more water and less soda and alcohol, reducing your intake of poisons, attending yoga classes, reading life-enhancing books, listening to tapes on spiritual and physical growth and quietly sitting in meditation. Get a picture of yourself actually doing these new kinds of behaviors and visualize the desired results. See yourself trimmer, less out of breath, with lowered blood pressure and cholesterol readings, feeling lighter and ageless rather than aging, attractive and content with yourself. When you regularly hold these mental pictures you will begin implementing them in your daily regimen. You will begin to make time for being healthy and happy. You will find your body responding in beautiful miraculous ways to your mental equivalents.
• Use meditation regularly to create the inner harmony and peace that will allow you to become the personality that best suits your magnificent, divine purpose here on this planet at this time. While meditating, experience your own death in your mind. See yourself moving into the light and discarding the robes you have been using that you have come to call your body. Look back from this perspective on all that you are attached to, and realize in your meditation how absurd these attachments truly are. You can see from this vision that you can own nothing, that it is just as absurd to be attached to the items of your life as it would be to hang onto the characters and physical manifestations in your dream, after you have awakened. Awaken in your meditation and know that your eternal formless self is free of attachments and worries. To die while you are alive is an enormously enlightening experience. The experience removes your fears and teaches you who you really are. Discovering that invisible force that is within you allows you to treat this physical world that you showed up in with reverence but without attachment. This will free you to be purposeful rather than chasing rewards and results.
• Use your meditations to see yourself free from the labels that you have placed upon yourself and to become free of the big lies about your inability to change certain things about yourself. Get very peaceful about being perfect and having all that you need to live your purpose. Meditatively activate your knowing that you do not need another thing to experience miraculous changes in your personhood. Allow yourself to experience the feeling that you already are everything, including a miracle.
As you contemplate all of the messages in these four chapters on manifesting real magic in your life, think about these words from Hermann Hesse, and work each day to make them apply in your own personal reality.
There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.
Your miracles are an inside job. Go there to create the magic that you seek in your life. That is indeed your only reality.
7
REAL MAGIC AND YOUR PHYSICAL HEALTH
Our bodies are our gardens, to which our wills are gardeners.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
This book emphasizes your unique capacity to create real magic in your life. The central premise is that you become what you think about all day and those days become your lifetime.
It is my belief that you have been taught the physical limitations of your own body. You have been taught what it can do and how well it can do it, how often it gets sick or injured, how difficult it is to stay at perfect health, approximately when it will die, and what diseases and addictions it can and cannot overcome. You have been subjected to what amounts to an indoctrination on your own limits as a physical being. This chapter will help you unlearn most of what you have been taught, for entering the magic garden of miracles means the emphasis is on developing a consciousness of possibility, rather than impossibility. To create the miracles that you seek in your physical body, you will need to follow some new strategies.
I will not be writing about what foods you should be eating, what exercise program you should adopt, what nutritional information you will need to consider, how much rest to get, what vitamins and minerals to use and so forth. I do not discount the importance of these things; quite the contrary, I pay close attention to all of them, as should you. Obviously you know that vegetables are better for you than Gummi Bears. You do not need to be told that exercise is better than being a couch potato if you want to achieve maximum physical health and benefits. You know that proper nutrition involves eating more fruit and less fats and sugars, and drinking a lot of water.
If you need to learn more about proper nutrition, exercise and fitness programs or diets that work, there are many excellent books available at your local library or bookstore. My particular favorites are Perfect Health and Unconditional Life, by Deepak Chopra, M.D., and Fit for Life, by Harvey and Marilyn Diamond.
Yet with all this information so readily available, why are so many of us trapped by physical limitations, and why do so few of us attain peak physical health? It is in this area that I choose to write directly to you.
I know that you are already a physical miracle waiting to unfold. I am absolutely convinced that you can have it all when it comes to your physical body, and that you need not experience the limitations that characterize your way of living. I also know that you know what to do about it. You do not need another diet book or another exercise video.
What you need is the ability to translate what your mind already knows into physical reality. And this is all accomplished by realigning yourself along the principles outlined in the first part of this book. Now it is time to get specific about your physical body, and get you started on manifesting miracles in your health and physical accomplishments.
DEFINING YOUR MIRACLE
As you approach this subject of real magic for yourself as a physical specimen of perfection, keep in mind the body in which you have showed up in the first place. You will not be asking yourself to be six foot six inches if you elected to show up here in a five-foot-six body. You do not want that six-foot-six-inch body and you are aware of that. Perhaps next time!
For now, as you consider what it is that would constitute a genuine miracle for yourself related to your physical being, just ask yourself the questions that are truly important to you. What would you genuinely like your body to look like? What would you like it to be able to realistically accomplish? What poisons would you truly like to see out of your body permanently? What healings would you love to see take place so that you can truly live the miracle?
After asking yourself these questions, try this terrific exercise. Stand before a full-length mirror and close your eyes. Now envision precisely what you would like this physical body to be able to accomplish, how you would like it to look, how healthy and addiction-free you would like it to be. With your eyes shut, get this vision firmly planted in your consciousness. Now, open your eyes and look carefully at the body that you have created. Yes, I said that you have created. Do you have a knowing or a doubt about your ability to fulfill your inner vision?
If you’re like most people, you doubt your ability to create your miracle. Most people I have talked to about this matter of miracles and their physical bodies define it as the fulfillment of a dream that they know is remotely within the realm of possibility, but that they currently believe to be impossible.
As you go about examining what it is that would constitute a miracle for yourself in this area, keep this thought uppermost in your mind: Anything that has been accomplished by any other human being in the physical realm is within the field of possibility. This is a reminder that the universal law that allowed any miracle to have ever occurred in any human being at any time has not been repealed! Do not be afraid to imagine for yourself anything that has ever been accomplished, even if at this time you do not have the confidence that you could pull it off in the body you currently occupy. (You just might have to transform your body in order to make it happen!) At this p
oint just allow yourself to imagine what it is that would constitute real magic for yourself and keep it uppermost in your mind.
Defining your miracle is the first step toward making it your reality. Perhaps it is in having your body look and feel as it once did, even though you have lost that magic feeling and haven’t seen it for a long time. Perhaps it relates to an illness that you would love to see removed from your body, but you doubt your ability to heal yourself. Perhaps it is in overcoming an addiction or series of addictions to toxic substances that have dominated your life. Perhaps you would love to complete a triathlon or run a mile, or swim across the lake, or anything that simply has always seemed to be out of your reach.
I am not asking you to walk across that lake, or fly over the treetops, or change the shape of your nose with magic thinking. I am asking you to simply and clearly have in mind what it is that would constitute a miracle for you, and you alone. Get the vision, and just for a few minutes as you read through this chapter, suspend your disbelief and your skepticism and allow yourself to take this journey toward real magic.
Remember, your body is only the physical package that houses the invisible part of you that we call your soul or higher self. How that body functions, its relative state of health, and all of its abilities stem from the mind. As you think, so shall you be. So let’s consider what you need to do with your mind in order to create real magic in the realm of your physical body.
BECOMING A WILLING STUDENT
Remember the ancient Zen proverb I quoted at the beginning of this book? “When the student is ready the teacher will appear.” If you want to see a miraculous transformation in your entire physical being, a shift to super health and super accomplishments that you once thought impossible, then you must shift your inner world, that invisible self called your mind, from the state of “wishing it were only so,” to an intention of willingness to pay attention to whatever comes your way that will assist you in this endeavor.
Become a student of your physical body. In your mind decide that, in spite of present physical health or abilities, you are already a miracle. You are in possession of a body that is filled with the universal flow of life. Just being able to contemplate such an exciting state is miraculous all by itself. You could be a stone, or a cement block, or a tomato plant. But no, you are filled with something that allows you to breathe, and touch, and taste, and see, and contemplate and be alive in the universe.
If you are committed to seeing your physical self with wonder and awe, and if you can know deep within that your invisible self wants the body it inhabits to be as healthy as possible, then you are a student who is ready. However, if you are really only deluding yourself with this kind of thinking, and somewhere in that invisible higher self that occupies your body you are filled with doubt, saying, “I would like to maximize my physical body and experience this real magic, but I know that I can’t do it because I’ve never been able to do it before, and basically I am weak and I will give in to the very first temptation that comes along,” then you are not a student who is ready. Instead you have some real work to do in the invisible realm that is your very essence here in the material world.
Let’s assume that the nagging doubt is still there, and you are in a position of wanting to experience real magic in the physical body you occupy, but you seriously doubt your ability to do so. What will happen if this is your story (and it is indeed a very common one)?
The answer is in the Zen proverb: “When the student is ready the teacher will appear.” What you guarantee with mental doubt is that you will not receive the guidance and assistance that you need. In other words, you have refused to let the teachers appear who can assist you in this endeavor. It’s not that the teachers are not there, and unwilling to assist you. It’s that you are unable to allow them to come to your aid. Your mental doubt, those thoughts which direct the machine called your body, are sending real magic away. If this is what you have believed, then you are substituting real tragic for real magic. Make no mistake about this. You create the absence of real magic with intentions that doubt your abilities. The tools you have used to create your physical self are your thoughts, those that have been imposed upon you as well as those you have decided upon as your way of processing your universe. I am assuming that you are still in a doubting mode, otherwise you would have experienced that real magic of perfect health. It is incumbent upon you to examine how to change those thoughts around so as to give yourself the opportunity to create real magic in your physical being.
Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, in a passage from Healers on Healing, explains how she had to unlearn some of the things that she had been taught throughout her career:
At one of my workshops a huge man, weighing perhaps four hundred pounds, suddenly and unexpectedly went into an acute homicidal rage. I could see that I had to rescue a woman who was much too close to him. I stepped forward and pushed her away, but in the process the man brought a rubber hose (which was supposed to be used to take out anger on a phone book) down on my bare toes with all his strength, crushing them.
I could not stop to focus on the pain. I capped my big toe with my hand, ignoring the pain, and focused all my energy on the enraged man in order to push him even further into the depths of his rage, so he could go all the way through it and get it out. Then, suddenly, he was over it and the group was safe.
I found myself wondering why I was sitting in such a strange position, pulling my right knee up and holding my big toe. Remembering what had happened, I took my hand away to look at my toe, expecting the worst. To my amazement, there was no trace of any injury. It had been instantaneously healed.
I have had several other experiences of spontaneous physical healing in emergency situations. In each case, the reason I was able to heal myself was that I did not have time to think. As a physician I have been trained to believe that such instantaneous healing cannot happen. But in emergencies, when we have to focus totally on the situation and have no time to think, we do not block our innate potential for self-healing—a potential that I believe each of us has. If we would develop more trust and faith in our own inner healing ability, spontaneous physical healing could occur more often.
Although this passage focuses on physical healing, Kübler-Ross’s conclusions apply to all aspects of one’s physical well-being.
If you are a student truly getting ready to be ready, you will assume responsibility for all that you have created. Your body’s relative state of health, your physical attractiveness, your addictions or bad habits that serve to restrict you from experiencing perfect health—these are all the results of your intentions over a lifetime. Your first step is to accept complete responsibility for all of this. Then, reexamine how you have used your mind to create the physical body that houses your soul on this glorious spiritual journey here in human-beingdom.
In order to remove nagging doubt and transcend the old way of thinking and creating your physical body, take an honest look at how it has been working and then commit yourself to a trial period of change. Once you have firmly entrenched a new way of processing the creation of your physical life, your teachers will begin to show up just as they have all along, but now you will be in a position to accept the assistance they will provide.
SEVEN STEPS TO MANIFESTING REAL MAGIC IN YOUR PHYSICAL BEING
You can learn to develop more trust and faith in your body to heal itself and stay healthy. How? Begin with a review of the seven beliefs for achieving real magic that I presented in chapter 1, as they apply to your own physical body.
1. Recognize that there is an invisible life force within you. Have you recognized the all-powerful invisible life force that is within you? Even though you can never experience it with your five senses, learn to tap into this life force when you are trying to understand the physical workings of your body. When you make contact with this life force in a positive, believing way, you will begin to act automatically upon what that force within you dictates. For example, if you have convinced yo
urself that you are incapable of being physically fit, that you are too weak to accomplish certain tasks such as swimming or running long distances, or that you are sickly and unable to transcend the diseases that run in your family, this is the direction that your body has taken. Others have very likely taught you to believe in such pronouncements and you do not know any other way. Each day you look in the mirror and you see a flabby body, or a weak body, and tell yourself how unfortunate you were to have inherited big bones, or genes that don’t allow you to be healthy. Then, the life force that is always within you works at reinforcing your thoughts.
In order to be a student who is ready, begin to reexamine those inner voices and, at the very least, start to challenge them firmly. Just as Dr. Kübler-Ross realized the amazing ability of the body to practice self-healing instantaneously, so too must you convince yourself, at least in your mind, of the power of your body to heal and strengthen itself.
2. Know that your thoughts originate with you. Rid yourself of the belief that you are not in control of your body. Shakespeare, in the quote at the beginning of this chapter, referred to our “wills.” Yes, your will is the gardener that tends the garden called your body. That will is totally invisible, but nevertheless it originates with you, and only you. Give yourself permission to use that invisible will in a way that opens up your physical world to what has seemed impossible. Know that your thoughts originate with you and that they control all of your physical experiences. Although you may not be able to create a world-class body-building physique that will win you an Olympic gold medal, you do have the capacity to be grandly, divinely healthy and capable within the body you have.
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