reclaim your brilliance - paul scheele · “photoreading,” “natural brilliance,”...

Paul R. Scheele

Reclaim Your

Brilliance

SCHEELE LEARNING SYSTEMS PRESENTS:

Reclaim Your Brilliance

Drop Into Geniusby Paul R. Scheele

Published by

Scheele Learning Systems

2000 Plymouth Road, Suite 300

Minnetonka, Minnesota 55305

USA

Phone 952.470.7368

www.scheelelearning.com

www.dropintogenius.com

“Drop Into Genius,” “Meditate with the Himalayan Masters,” and “Ultimate U Retreat” are registered trademarks and/or servicemarks of

Scheele Learning Systems worldwide.

“PhotoReading,” “Natural Brilliance,” “Paraliminal,” “Genius Code,” “Memory Optimizer,” and “Sonic Access” are registered trademarks

and/or servicemarks of Learning Strategies Corporation worldwide.

The eidetic imaging exercises in this book were developed by Dr. Akhter Ahsen and are the result of his work and research which spans

over the last 55 years. This acknowledges that Dr. Ahsen holds the copyright for the eidetic instructions and images and has extended his kind

permission to reproduce them here. All rights reserved. No part of Dr. Ahsen’s work included in this book may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise,

without the written permission from the author, Dr. Akhter Ahsen.

The Seven Da Vinci Principles are trademarks of Michael J Gelb and are used here with his permission.

Design by Design:Marmo, Inc

First Edition

©2010 by Paul R. Scheele. All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Table of Contents

IntroductIon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Page 1

chapter 1: Can you transform your life with a single image? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 7

chapter 2: Can you learn and transform in your sleep? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 30

chapter 3: Can you read a book with the palm of your hand? . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

chapter 4 : Can you trust your inner guidance to achieve a big goal? . . . . . . .Page 60

chapter 5: Can you meditate like a master in three minutes? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 78

chapter 6: Can you heal yourself and others with a single touch? . . . . . . . . . Page 92

chapter 7: Can you accelerate your learning of anything? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Page 111

chapter 8 : Summary and Next Steps. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Page 132

It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes a community towrite abook. Indeepappreciationformycommunity,Iwouldliketothankandacknowledgethemanypeoplewhohelpedproducethiswork.

I had been teaching on the topic of genius during several workshops whenWendyYellen (now an Eidetics coach) suggested I meet Dr.AkhterAhsen inYonkers, NewYork.Fortwodays,Wendy,Dr.Ahsen,LeslieDagnall(Ahsen’sleadEideticstrainer),andIimmersedourselvesinthehistoryandmythologyofgenius.Myworkimmediatelyheadedin exciting new directions.Ahsen presented me with his astounding scholarly work,Illuminations on the Path of Solomon (1994). In it, he traces the origin of the Jinn (orGenie)inMiddleEasterncultures,andthroughtheancientRomanandGreekconceptofgenius. My understanding of the nonconscious genius potential within us all will beforeverenrichedbyDr.Ahsen’sperspectives.

TheDrop Into Genius book conceptbrewed for twoyears beforeAlexMandossian, afellow member of theTransformational Leadership Council (over breakfast in Maui),insistedthatIstartwriting—immediately.

MybusinesspartnerCherylValkhelpedorganizethe“AskYourInnerGenius”campaign,invitingawillingcommunity-of-practicetosubmitquestionsthatwouldultimatelyshapethebook.Throughtheliveteleconferenceseries,participantsexploredandtestedmanyoftheexercisespresentedhere.Theirenthusiasticinvolvementandfeedbackbecamethefoundationforeachchapterpresentedinthisbook.

JessicaKalieta skillfully turned the recorded teleconference sessions intowritten tran-scripts.Writing and training design colleague, Susan Foster of BrainyTraining, thensteppedintoartfullyturnmyspokenwordsintosentencesthatareeasytoread.ItwasatthattimethatIworkedtocrafteachchapter.

LeslieDagnall,mypersonalEideticscoach,hasalwaysbeenmypipelineandlifelinetotheastoundingworkofDr.Ahsen.Iwillalwaysbegratefultoherforhergraciousandmeticulous contributions to this book; helping preserve the purity ofAhsen’s words,andthescholarlyintegrityofhisworkasitispresentedhere.IalsoowemanythankstoDr.Ahsenforreadingthemanuscriptsandcontributinghispersonalthoughtsandenthu-siasticencouragement.

Mydeepthankstothewonderfulteamofeditorsandproofreaderswhodidalotofheavylifting and careful inspections within tight timeframes. Kitty Baker, Nancy Fursetzer,LibbyScheele,CherylValk,JimValk,MarkMcHugh,andBenScheeleareallchampionsofthefinaledition.

BrentMarmoofDesign:Marmo is thecreativegeniusbehind thebeautyof thefinalproduct.Thanksforyourgreatwork.

Yayteam!

A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

PaulScheeleisamanwhobelieveshumanshavevastuntappedreservoirsofpossibilitiesand potential. In his new book, Drop Into Genius, Paul shares full demonstrations ofwhatispossibleandwhentheexerciseswithinitarepracticed,thepotentialwithintheindividualawakensandnewpossibilitiesappear.Paul’scareerpathhas takenhimonajourneythroughtherealmsofscienceandmetaphysics,businessandspirituality,allwhilehe made significant contributions to both organizational and personal development.DescribingPaulScheelecanbeadaunting task.He isa foundingpartnerofamulti-milliondollarinternationalcompanyandabrilliantresearcherwhocaneasilyintrigueleadingexpertsinanyfieldwhileremaininganapproachablesoulwhoseesthedivinepresenceineveryone.Mostimportantly,Paulisapassionatevisionarywhomovespeopleandorganizationsupwardtowardstheirhighestgood.

Asachild,Paullovedexperientiallearningandfeltthatmostclassroomsweredifficultplaces to learn. His challenges with traditional education led him to seek innovativestrategiestousethewholemind.Whenhewas19andpursuinghisBachelorofSciencedegreeinbiology,hetrainedtobecomeaprofessionalhypnotistandstartedhisjourneyofdiscoveringwhatispossiblefromwithinthemind.Duringhisfirststagepresentationofhypnosis,Pauldemonstratedtheprofoundeffectsofpost-hypnoticsuggestiononhisaudienceandhadalife-alteringepiphanythatsetthefoundationforhislifework.Herealizedthateverydaypeoplearethrowingawayperfectlyaccessibleresourcesofmindandbodybyacceptingtheself-negatingsuggestion“Ican’t…”

Paulrealizedhisrealworkwasnottoputpeopleintotrancebuttoawakenpeoplefromtheself-limiting,self-defeatingtrancestheyarein,havingacceptednegativesuggestionsfromtheirfamily,friends,schools,religions,andsociety.Paul’sfurtherresearchhasfoundthereisavastuntappedresourceofthenonconsciousmindtoacceleratelearning,success,health, improverelationships, improveproblem-solvinganddecision-makingskills,andraisethequalityoflife.

Since 1975, Paul has been a witness to the genius within humanity, and has helpeddevelopandpublishbooksandprogramsthathelppeoplegrowintotheirfullpotential.He has earned a Masters degree in learning and human development technologiesandhe is an international expert in thefieldof accelerated learning, neuro-linguisticprogramming,andpreconsciousprocessing.

Now,PaulisadoctoralcandidateforaPh.D.inLeadershipandChange,andhisfocusisontransformativelearningandfacilitatingtransformationalchange.Thisbook,Drop Into Genius,istheculminationofhisworktoshowhowanyonecanaccessthevastresourcesoftheirowninnergenius,tolearntoexpressthefullpotentialthatistryingtoemergethrough themas them,and transformthequalityof lifeon theplanet.To learnmoreaboutPaulandhiswork,visitwww.ScheeleLearning.com.

a b o u t t h e a u t h o r

www.scheelelearning.com

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Introduction

Drop into what alreaDy exists for you.

Every chapter offers an immediate demonstration of an ability you have always possessed.

Your greatest gifts of mind were probably buried, early in your schooling. Natural internal resources of unbridled enthusiasm, curiosity, inspired creativity, intuition, healing, rapid learning, emotional freedom, inner peace, and more usually fall victim to subtle, ongoing discouragement by society. Even when

you were eager to learn, the domination of compulsory education forced you to sit down, be quiet, and pay attention as you were instructed on what to learn. But, were you taught how to learn?

Did a teacher ever say to you, “Before we take this next test, let’s all close our eyes and connect with the accelerated learner inside us. There is a powerful nonconscious mind within that determines the results you create in life. More capable, fast, efficient, and infinitely more intelligent than your limited conscious mind, it is your nonconscious through which your ‘genius potential’ is expressed!”

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In minutes of simple guidance, you would have opened to the real power within you. You would have been able to practice using it every day. You would have learned with greater ease, performed with greater competence, and enjoyed a life of creativity and abundance, discovering more about who you really are for all the rest of your days.

Dr. Buckminster Fuller, author and inventor, wrote in the foreword to Mario Montessori’s book (1976), “All children are born geniuses. 9999 out of every 10,000 are swiftly, inadvertently, ‘de-geniused’ by grown-ups.” It happens, he claimed, because of the efforts of well-intentioned adults that curtail the child’s spontaneous exploration of the natural world. I have heard many clients say, “I’m no good at math,” “I can’t sing,” “I’m a terrible artist,” “I have a terrible memory for names,” or any number of other limitations. This happens because at one point in their childhood, it became easier to affirm a fictitious incapacity than to face the humiliation of another possible failed attempt. In a society where we are judged on the effectiveness of our performance with grades and advancement, many of us learn to not show up to face negative consequences.

When we do make mistakes or fail to learn, the emotional and psychological wounds can go deep. If we fail to learn, we often learn to fail most successfully. We learn to repeat our failure to learn in spite of anyone’s attempts to help. For many people, it becomes “safer” to be a failure at something, than to engage in the messy business of learning. This unfortunate misstep is a by-product of our global system of schooling.

The word “education” comes from a Latin root “educare” which translates to “bring up.” That root is related to “educere” meaning “bring out” or “bring forth what is within” or “bring out potential.” Also, the root “ducere” means “to lead.” It is generally agreed that combining these roots to create the word education give us the definition, “to draw out the child.”

In its worst sense, education is instruction—the process of “stuffing into” the empty vessel of the child’s mind. In its best sense, education and the profession of teaching is devoted to the process of drawing out the abundant genius potential already within the full vessel of the child’s mind.

I love the best efforts of teachers who devote themselves to helping students learn. I have personally been inspired by many wonderful teachers in my lifetime. At the same time I’m deeply disturbed by any system of education that focuses on instruction. Such systems twist teachers to serve institutions instead of serving the unfolding brilliance within humanity.

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“Schooling” is my shorthand for the antagonist of your genius—a process of training obedience. Your schooling probably included the interruption of mental activity with bells every 50 minutes, to prevent any deep or meaningful reflection. Immediate obedience to the domination of instructors and administrative mandates was fully expected of you at all times in school. In response to less-than-full compliance, swift disciplinary action was doled out. The “educational fundamentalism” behind compulsory education systematically “kills the spirit” (Smith, 1988) and denies the vast interior resources of our genius potential, subverting it by forcing us to focus externally. The inner world of intuition, creativity, holistic thinking, and reflection is mistrusted and strategically denied as a source of knowing, in favor of conscious attention to and recitation of information, most of which is delivered by verbal and written instruction.

The good news is that those days of schooling, and the worst effects of instruction, can truly be over for you—forever. No matter how wounded you may have been in order to fit the mold that society put you in, the healing can begin now. No matter how much you might claim to have limitations, the genius potential that may have been lost or buried is still in you. So, let’s take it from here. Life is rich outside of the school classroom, and your brilliance as a gifted learner can be reclaimed.

Learning can be messy, chaotic, disorganized, turbulent, and filled with mistakes. You see, learning means building connections in the brain, developing knowledge and skills through repeated interactions with your environment. We have to pass through stages of confusion and not knowing how to do something. Even when we know what to do, we are incompetent to perform very effectively at first. Practice looks, sounds, and feels awkward and can occasionally be painful.

Slowly, through repetition of trial-error-feedback-retrial, we grow dendrites in the brain, and abilities to perform. As a baby, saying your name, reaching for a cup, taking a step; all these things required patient exploration using your whole body and all of your senses. Through lots of trial and error, you learned to succeed. Capabilities like spelling, read-ing, calculating, and creating art or music are all attained through processes of learning, understanding, associating, and remembering. How about the gifts of joy, peace, intuition, healing, and creativity? Those can be attained as well.

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Together, through the chapters in this book, we will explore a provocative set of demonstrations:

⋅ Can you transform your life with a single image?

⋅ Can you learn and transform in your sleep?

⋅ Can you accelerate your learning of anything?

⋅ Can you trust your inner guidance to achieve a big goal?

⋅ Can you meditate like a master in three minutes?

⋅ Can you heal yourself and others with a single touch?

⋅ Can you read a book with the palm of your hand?

The genius potential to do all of the above has always resided in you, whether you believe it or not. Playing with the fun techniques in this book, you will discover you can do far more as well.

My term “genius” will be a shorthand way of referring to the full measure of natural processes in the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual expressions of your life, before they were marginalized and denied by the well-meaning adults who instructed you about how to behave in the world.

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How we will work together in this book

There are a number of unique features in this approach that will enhance your understanding of concepts at a deep level, accelerate your application of the principles, and create greater access to the genius within you.

Written to activate your holistic intelligences

Within you are four holistic intelligences: PQ (Physical Intelligence), IQ (Mental Intelligence), EQ (Emotional Intelligence), and SQ (Spiritual Intelligence). Each of them is wired differently in the brain. For example, brain structures associated with SQ use “synchronous neural wiring” and allow for experiences of unity and perceiving the “big picture.” PQ on the other hand, uses “serial neural wiring” and activates regions associated with “fight or flight.” To activate the true brilliance in you, all of the holistic intelligences are addressed in the design of this book, and full engagement of your whole brain is purposefully accomplished through the activities offered.

Every chapter begins with a script for your nonconscious mind

Specially scripted guided imagery sessions are written for you to read out loud into a recording device. The effect of listening to your own voice offering supportive, encouraging, and inspiring statements—calling yourself by name as you do so—is both powerful and healing. Almost magically, your emotions and inner dialogue begin to shift for the better. The wounded learner in you begins to relax and have hope. Resistance that kept you stuck in the past begins to fall away. These sessions accelerate transformational changes in the ways you think, feel, and act. You discover that you can gracefully achieve the results you desire, with greater ease than ever before.

Simple exercises make it all real and demonstrate your genius potential

This book is intended to be practical. Every chapter contains fun exercises that have the potential to delight you. Some of the demonstrations will be so outrageous that you will wonder if it was a trick or really possible. Could you really be psychic and know things before they happen? Can you tell someone the contents of a book by merely holding your hand over it? Can you enter profound meditative states like a Himalayan Master in less than three minutes? If you have not yet demonstrated such abilities, you are in for a lot of remarkable experiences!

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Related questions from a community of practice

The content of this entire book was determined through dialogue created on social me-dia. I posted a note on my Facebook page that gave an overview of my thoughts regard-ing a provocative question. For example, “Can you read a book through the palm of your hand?” The posting also invited readers to join in on a teleconference. Prior to the call, participants posted questions on my “Ask Your Inner Genius” webpage. The structure of the call was then designed around responses to those questions. Each chapter is derived from the transcribed and edited dialogue that took place. The various questions are cited and responded to in each chapter.

Hyperlinks put you in touch with resources on the web

Special free recordings of coaching sessions, video explanations, special reports, home study courses, and more are yours with a click. You can even connect with a community of others playing with the same techniques to learn tips on how to apply what you learn in creative new ways. As more free resources become available, you will be notified and updated.

Are you ready to play? I will guide you right now to drop into the genius potential within you. If you are willing to play full-out, you will quickly reclaim the brilliance that is yours to enjoy!

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Chapter 1

Can you transform your life with a s ingle image?

Start small. One image can hold the key to attaining your highest purpose. The power held in one image can free you from repeating unsuccessful patterns.

Harness the power of the image to create your perfect future.

CHAPTER 1: CONCEPT, PURPOSE, BENEFITS

I have guided an enormous number of people in how to benefit from visualization and mental imagery using techniques of mind control, self-hypnosis, and neuro-linguistic programming. For more than three decades, the transformational power of internal imagery has been a common thread throughout my work and presentations.

You could describe the universe as a giant, personal ATM: Input goals or visions and expect the universe to spit out the result. When you combine visualization techniques with affirmation, it becomes remarkably easy to produce miraculous results. It can be quickly demonstrated that we can change the results we produce in life by changing our internal dialogue or changing the images that we hold in mind.

In the late 1990s, I took a different approach to interacting with the full power of the mind and the universe. When I began using imagery inspired by a higher consciousness— a higher intelligence—what emerged for me was a more congruent and effortless way of attaining my highest goals.

In this chapter you will learn a way of approaching higher consciousness—letting the universe guide you to your highest expression in life, instead of forcing goals and ambitions on the universe that originate from the limited thinking of the conscious mind.

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In this chapter you discover how to:

⋅ Open yourself to receiving the higher good that is trying to emerge in you all of the time.

⋅ Use simple practices to overcome blocks and barriers to achieving goals.

⋅ Develop imagery skills to invite success, improve health, enhance relationships, and assist in your spiritual and even physical transformation.

The topic areas we will explore in this chapter include:

⋅ Defining inner genius and communicating with it.

⋅ The difference between visualization and imagery.

⋅ How to develop imagery as a skill.

⋅ How imagery can help to achieve goals and results.

⋅ How imagery can be used for better health.

⋅ The process of creating lasting personal transformation.

In addition we will explore questions on gaining clarity, releasing fear, resolving issues, and recovering from the effects of trauma.

OPENING RELAXATION SCRIPT

Read the words below into a recording device, and play it back to yourself. These words will help to develop your internal dialogue. The relaxation processes build throughout the book, strengthening your ability to quickly and easily “drop into” that place of genius within you. You will find the relationship with your genius potential improving each time you listen, because it becomes increasingly more accessible and freer to serve you. At first it might feel strange to say your own name where you are asked to do so in the script. However, the effect is remarkably beneficial. Speak the words in a slow and steady rhythm that sounds calm, kind, and relaxing to you. Enjoy!

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T R A N S F O R M W I T H A N I M A G E

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To learn in an accelerated way, it is ideal to be in a state of physical relaxation and mental awareness. You are beginning now to learn how you can attain a profound state of relaxed awareness in a matter of seconds. Simply sit back and relax your physical body for comfortable listening.

All right (NAme). It is time to just take these next few moments to drop into the rich resources within you, and place yourself into the ideal state for learning…a state of relaxed awareness. Set aside whatever else is going on, just for a couple of minutes, so that you can…right now…simply close your eyes and become aware of yourself from head to toe. Observe yourself, resting in this space your body is occupying.

You can withdraw your senses from the world around you (NAme), and bring your awareness into a quiet internal place of relaxation. Just notice how your body is breathing…and simply follow the movement of your breath with your mind. You might notice your breath in your chest, in your abdomen, or in the movement of your shoulders as you breathe in and out. Simply observe how your breath moves you, almost as if your breath is breathing you. Feel the movement of your breath in your nostrils. And, if you can, notice the way in which the breath flows in that space between two points…from the place where the nostrils attach to the upper lip, up to that place where the nostrils pass between the center of the eyebrows…in through the center forehead.

If you can, become aware of the subtle feel of the breath, the gentle flow of the breath—in and out. And see if it is a little cooler on the inhale, and slightly warmer on the exhale.

And breathing in this way…slow, relaxed…notice the length of each breath. See if you can let the two parts of the breath take the same duration, so that each inhale and exhale is of equal length. If there are any pauses between the breaths, see if you could smooth those out…so that you breathe in and out in one continuous cycle of inhaling and exhaling…just so.

Your shoulders can relax even more as you are learning to easily drop into this place of inner calm. You have a greater awareness of the peaceful and expansive internal experience that is your natural state within, (NAme). You are increasing your connection to these vast resources of mind, body, emotions and spirit that help you achieve the goals you set for yourself. even when you are asleep (NAme), the genius capacities that organize and run the habits and functions of your life are continuing to learn and integrate all that you need to live a full, rich, and rewarding day today. The higher intelligence of your genius potential continues to work out all the details necessary to guide you most effectively throughout your day, helping you to accomplish each step as you attain the results you desire.

Resting in the confidence that the genius within you is more fully available right now, you can feel yourself becoming more refreshed and alert, aware of yourself from head to toe, really feeling good. Aware of your breath as your body has continued to breathe you so perfectly. The natural abilities of your mind, body, emotions, and spirit are fully accessible to you now and always.

maintaining this awareness of the breath, you can gently open your eyes, and become aware of the world around you, even as part of your awareness maintains the sensation of the flow of your breath—in and out.


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YOUR INNER GENIUS AND COMMUNICATING WITH IT

Inner genius is something that was characterized by the ancient Greeks as a spiritual presence. To them, personal genius was an angelic presence born into the world along with you, and remaining as a constant companion through your life.

Do we need to embody this presence as something outside of you and call it an angel? Does it need to be a Divine Source or the mind of God that is other than our own? Not at all! Using more modern terminology from the neuro-cognitive sciences, the nonconscious mind is more than our normal conscious awareness. I use the term “genius mind” to indicate the nonconscious or “beyond-conscious” resources of the brain and mind. These resources, unlike any thought or sensation you are holding in conscious awareness at the moment, include the whole range of capabilities that are always fully accessible to you.

Gaining access to the resources of your nonconscious mind is the ability to be present to the source of the genius that flows in you and through you, as you. Genius is a greater presence, a state of being more than the experiences that have shaped your personality, and more than any thought you may have about yourself. Your personal genius is the greater presence that you really are.

What is being described in this book, is that at any moment—wherever you are—you can drop into the source energy that is your very essence. It is a genius potential that is with you always. It came into the world with you when you were born. When you access it, it often comes into your awareness as an intuition; a feeling, a picture in your imagination, or a quiet voice described by mystics as “the still, small voice within.”

A challenge faced by most people is to distinguish between intuition and the normal operation of the conscious mind. Are you “just imagining” or is this an intuitive communication from the higher intelligence within that you must heed? The only way to know for sure is to experiment. Like discovering anything else in your world, you need to experiment with your intuition and get feedback. That is how an infant brain learns in the world. It makes connections with the world around it. It feeds forward some behavior; it tries something and then it gets feedback on what happened. You take an action and witness the effects.

In my book, Natural Brilliance (Scheele, 2000), I explain a four-step model for realizing your natural brilliance. The steps are: release, notice, respond, and witness. Using this process, you can improve the power of your intuition. Be still (release) to increase your awareness (notice). Act upon the subtle communications within (respond) and then observe (witness) the result. You will discover an increased access to the genius within you.


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The key to developing your intuitive access to the genius potential within you is plAY. Think about a young child who is asked to come and play. What would happen if, as soon as she starts playing, she is criticized, “You are not doing that right! What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you do this?” If you castigate that child for playing, how likely is she to come out and play again? If you struggle with accessing your own intuition, it is probably because you were shut down at some point early on in your life. You may have become a wounded learner—emotionally wounded by others and closed down regarding some of your most precious qualities. As a wounded learner myself, every time I tried to approach a similar area of life in which there was an opportunity to learn, I immediately felt a huge stop sign was in front of me. I would think, “I can’t go there. It is not something I have the ability or even the potential to accomplish.” Math was an early example for me. For others it may be art, music, science, or resolving interpersonal relationship problems.

Simply by playing, you will overcome most of your inner barriers and early wounds. As an adult you can rely on feedback from within you, rather than needing to rely on outside authority or opinion as you did when you were a child. Stay encouraged regardless of the results you experience as you apply the many fascinating techniques in this book. Stay curious. Notice what happens.

It might not be such an easy game at first because immersive play in the “pure imaginal realm,” like the play of a fully engaged child, is either welcomed or discouraged when we are children. Most of us fall victim to the demands of critical adults that we must conform to a more rational world view and dismiss our relationship to imagination.

Tobin Hart, in his book The Secret Spiritual World of Children (2003), described the effect of this conformity to standards of what is real and what is not, behaviors that are acceptable or not, and standards that bring inhibition and constraint instead of that boundless openness to imagination that nature intends for us. The negative effects are devastating for all of humanity because imagination is a prime language of the spirit. In the foreword to Hart’s book, Joseph Chilton Pearce wrote:

The ancient Sufis considered imagination—that internal making of images not present to the outer senses—to be the very way in which we are made in the image of our Creator. Fostering a child’s intuition, imagination, and capacity for play is a critical part of that spiritual growth that twines with intelligence like a double helix, giving birth to God in and as that child.

As adults we can encourage and re-initiate the use of our imagination’s transformative power. Because contained within us is all that we need to live our lives at the full capacity and expression of our magnificence. Our genius minds may have been shut down for a


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while, but with our time together using the ideas and practices of this book, the mind is already on a path to reclaim our inner genius and express our lives more fully.

You and I are now in a process together. You are reading this to access your genius capacities. I am a life-long learner continuing to grow and develop more of my own capacities. I will assist you in doing the same. Together we can make powerful progress.

To encourage your further growth and development, I intend to bring you to areas of conscious reflection on the magnificence in you. Every time you get interested in a topic we explore, you will open more of your inner genius and gain the insights necessary to take an important next step forward in your life.

GAIN ACCESS TO THE PURE IMAGINAL REALM

My approach to life has evolved from taking a command-and-control position with the universe, to inviting the universe to direct my thoughts and actions in a dynamic, interactive, co-creative way. Let me share what prodded me along that path.

A colleague of mine named Wendy Yellen asked if I had ever heard of Eidetic Psychotherapy, and I had not. She kept asking me to look into it and after about a year and a half she said, “You are a PhotoReader. Why don’t I just send you a bunch of my books? I’m coming into Minneapolis to take your retreat, so you can give them back or send them back to me after the program.”

Wendy sent me a seventeen pound box of books. It was a massive amount of information. Fortunately, with PhotoReading, I was able to get through all of the books quickly. She knew the main author, Dr. Akhter Ahsen, and she set up an appointment for me to meet him in Yonkers, New York. I flew out and found an amazing level of resonance with him and his work. He opened my mind to new possibilities. As I explored the technology of Eidetics, I began to appreciate its power and depth. It has taken my work to a completely new level.

Dr. Ahsen, a psychologist originally from Kashmir, started his work in the late 1950s and came to the United States in the mid-1960s.

During his research, Dr. Ahsen noticed that cases of mental illness were on the rise in industrialized societies throughout the world and humanity was in crisis. As he explored the trend, he realized that much of the human malaise resulted from a loss of connection to a valid mythology to serve humanity in reaching its full potential.


http://www.eideticlifecoach.com/

http://www.eidetictraining.com/

http://www.imagepsychology.com/

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In April of 2010, Akhter Ahsen discussed with me his use of mythology, saying that he “receives the Eidos (form) which the Greeks talked about as messengers from the gods that desire to be seen.” To him, mythology is “always at the root of all cultures in various forms.” As he explains it, “This is a shared essence as well which creates the togetherness in all humans, whichever time they belong to, ancient or modern.” Ahsen’s contribution is to bring out the meaning of mythology in modern consciousness which is thirsting for it and is denied by mechanistic thinking. At the bottom of the historical, developmental images is this mythology. Ahsen asks us to bring the mythology forward into one’s life to free it from current rigidity. The true nature of the mind’s quest is this natural, deep freedom.

Ahsen realized that we might want to pay attention to how images work in the mind. He saw that thoughts occur as direct communications from a higher intelligence. Because of his interest in mythology, he began thinking of humanity’s historical perspective on “the gods” in a more psychological sense. Ahsen “receives” the images and actively brings the mythology into one’s life. To the ancient Greeks, “Eides” were known as the messengers of the gods. Ahsen chose them to represent our highest consciousness—not so much in religious or spiritual terms, but more in terms of how the organization of human consciousness is assigned.

His brilliant approach of Eidetics is primarily an act of paying attention to the somatic response and meanings that communicate through the imagery of our imagination and emerge out of the “pure imaginal realm” (1965). This is quite a different perspective from visualization or mental imagery work that had become popular in the early 1970s.

The Eidetic image is a bright, lively picture seen in the mind much like a movie image or filmstrip. It is different from other types of mental images in its unusual clarity and its ability to reproduce life events with exact detail. Through the Eidetic image, one can re-experience a life event with all of its basic elements intact: the visual image (I), the physical and emotional feelings associated with it (S), and the meaning or significance it contains (M). These special images are neurologically recorded in the brain and systematically stored away for future reference. When recalled, the Eidetic image recreates vivid experience of events and conflicts in a person’s life with drama, clarity and detail. In Nature, the Eidetic is the “Genetic Hologram” which allows entry into the pure mind of the individual.

Ahsen told me a fascinating story about working with a female patient who was challenged with Multiple Sclerosis and could not lift of one her feet. Sitting in her presence, Ahsen noticed what emerged in his own consciousness. He saw her as a little girl wading in the sea,


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and saw mermaids swimming around her. Ahsen spoke to the woman and invited her to imagine a school of small silver-colored fish swimming all around her legs, in between and around her toes as she waded in the Mediterranean Sea. Moments later, she was able to lift her toes and foot.

In our further discussion, Ahsen commented that as humanity learned to harness power through visualization and imagery, we also learned to use imagery to manipulate circumstances. This application removes us from the natural flow of our highest good. When an Eidetic image occurs to us, rather than using it as a way of manipulating our world, we must notice what appears in our imagination and follow it. This is what children naturally do. When we do, Ahsen has proven that we will better understand the flow of consciousness and will express our highest state of good in life.

In Ahsen’s book titled psycheye: Self Analytic Consciousness (1977). Dr. A. T. Dolan, the Chief of Psychiatry from Yonkers General Hospital, wrote the introduction where she quotes Ahsen’s writing:

‘Man likes the word because through this he can manipulate, misrepresent and twist the natural endowment to fit his preconceived models of control. The birth of this verbal man symbolizes the pinnacle of control obsession…man’s attempt to control his environment and his internal fate creates an internal war.’

‘What Pavlov said about the individual also holds true about society. There comes a period in human history where thinking assumes a negative posture and needs to be redeemed by the artistic process. It is possible that a whole era of Man can think itself into a trap, and spin without resolving anything, instead creating new problems.’

‘…the eidetic becomes the symbol of much needed fresh experience. In this sense, eidetics not only serve an important function in the psyche of the indi-vidual, they also represent a sociological mode for the progress of civilization.’

Ahsen’s new description of how imagery works can shift our mistaken thinking and the misuse of thought that characterizes our modern civilizations. The intensely outward-moving imagery blazes a powerful new path to the expression of our greatest inner gifts in the world. As I point out numerous places in this book, when we focus on our gifts instead of our issues, results follow, because where your focus goes is where your energy flows.

Next, we will explore the difference between visualization and eidetic imagery. This will help you visualize what you want, so have a goal in mind.


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WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN VISUALIZATION AND IMAGERY?

Let’s say you are going into a meeting and you want it to go well. You visualize a positive outcome occurring. Your mind will be more likely to assist you by making all of the necessary resources within you fully available.

Using eidetic imagery is different. The eidetic image progresses spontaneously on its own and moves towards growth in the psyche. The image is the guide; you do not guide it. Instead of briefly visualizing a positive outcome, you hold the image of the meeting that you want to go well. While you hold that image, you start noticing some of the dimensions of that image—the color, the saturation, the vividness. Perhaps you will see objects within that image that catch your attention.

Go to those objects and discover more about the image. As the scene begins to “unfold”, explore the interactions that take place. Follow what emerges rather than insisting upon what is there. Engage what emerges as dimensions or components of the image.

You might, for example, see someone in the meeting pick up their materials and walk out of the room. Follow the person walking out of the room. Go where you are led. See what happens next.

I worked with a man who was a brilliant president of a subsidiary company in a corporate conglomerate of 16 companies. He was exceedingly resourceful and an excellent public speaker, everywhere except in front of his board of directors during his annual 45-minute presentation to them. Although he was the “golden boy” of all the subsidiaries, he anguished over his annual talk, and it kept him from performing well. He desperately wanted to get over his barrier to success.

When I asked him to imagine going into the room with the board of directors, he saw a large conference table surrounded by people with either bored or scowling faces, frequently looking at their watches. Normally, at this point, he would shut down his imagination and dread having to give his presentation. But I asked him to stay and look around. As he explored the room more carefully, he noticed that several faces began to change to looks of engaged interest and smiles. Soon the whole group was hanging on his every word with eager attentiveness. He felt fully present with them, excitedly sharing ideas and creative directions in which he was taking the company. In his mind the presentation was fun and he felt great.

In a follow-up call, my client expressed astonished joy at the incredible success he experienced. No subsidiary president had ever spoken for more than 45 minutes. But he


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was asked to stay and continue speaking for two and a half hours! During his presentation, the group was having a great time, asking him questions, generating creative ideas, laughing, and celebrating his success.

Ahsen personally led me through an eidetic process he developed involving the exploration of Twelve Stages of Consciousness (2005). He had me imagine twelve scenes, in time periods ranging from my infancy, early childhood, adolescent, and adult years on into my future at eighty years old. As I imagined each of these segments of my life, we examined what was present in my imagery.

In the Stages of Consciousness process, Ahsen noticed that I sorted negatively for a lot of my personal history. I continuously saw whatever did not work well, and felt a need to view those scenes as my mistakes in life. He looked back to see the point where this emotional orientation had taken hold. It stemmed from an image of me as a toddler.

When I was around two years of age, my family had moved from a home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to a home in Mount Vernon, in Westchester County, New York. I had no recollection of it consciously, but rich imagery was there when I looked inside. We worked with that image of the toddler and with a feeling of balancing as I learned to toddle. I became the toddler, in my body, learning to fall down, get up, fall again, and explore happily. Then we went through all the rest of the images a second time and miraculously everything had shifted to very positive experiences of learning effectively.

I was no longer sorting for what I did wrong in those memories, but what I learned and how I grew from what went right. It was stunningly remarkable for me that all of these relatively fixed images in my mind had suddenly shifted to very positive imagery. Ahsen explained that it was my history—laden with symptoms—that was battling with the mythology residing at the base of the psyche. At the deepest core of who we are is the organic, true, pure mind waiting to reveal all the potentials we can express in life.

HOW CAN WE DEVELOP IMAGERY AS A SKILL?

When you are taught to envision your ideal life experience, many thoughts, feelings, and images are likely to occur to you. People have asked me if it is possible to create one image or symbol encoded with all those desires and experiences, and concentrate on that as an all-encompassing focal point. The short answer is “Yes!” However, there is a bit of a danger in assuming that your conscious mind should pick the image. If you consciously choose an image, it is likely you are attempting to use visualization as a means to control your outcomes in life.


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Taking an Eidetic Imagery approach, you would instead receive an image from the future, from an ideal future you, and follow where it leads you. This approach is one of exploration; it becomes a way of presencing what is attempting to emerge as the ideal future you.

Try this remarkably powerful image, the Eidola, that Ahsen published in 1990. If you can, have someone read this to you, or read it into a recorder for playback to yourself. Then you can restfully absorb the effect of each line by hearing and visualizing accordingly:

Eidola

There is a past, present, and the future.

The past is way back, and appears remote and covered over.

The present has a lack. It is a void, and emptiness.

This lack is a painful lack.

Something from the future is needed to fill this void.

See an image of lights or of a Being who is a futuristic visitor in this void.

It is beautiful, awesome, with an omen; any one of these or all of these, and it has a special power.

This is a visitation which is futuristic.

This is called Eidola. This is a futuristic visitor.

Now describe it to me, this image, this Eidola that you see.

Now feel its awesomeness.

There is a feeling of a message there, in the image. What is the message? Experience the vibrations from the Eidola.

How does it change you when you look at the Eidola?

Let the futuristic message from Eidola pass through your mind and transform you.

Do not resist; become like the Eidola. Experience the vibrations.

Become yourself vibrant like the Eidola.

Now experience these special feelings in your being.

There are intimations of the future in your body.

Experience the vibrations of actions in your being.

Let the actions flow. Let yourself become futuristic.

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When I teach the use of imagery, I encourage that you see the image that appears when a request is made within. For example, ask your mind to show you the highest expression of your gifts in any area of your life. Let an image appear in mind and follow it. Notice how the image begins to shift and move as you hold it. Then follow those shifts because they move you toward the pure expression of your higher self—the futuristic you. Learn from the perfect you. Open the interior space for it to share areas of strength, beauty, and growth with you. Images are meant for release, learning, exploration, and engagement.

If you sense there are areas of your life where you are waiting to break through, explore the images. Let the images locate the internal resources that will enable you to live in your highest state of evolution. Those resources may be beyond your conscious mind’s capacity to visualize them, so let the genius within guide you to live life from the most robust, powerful expression of your gifts.

Do not worry if an image you explore changes and morphs into a new image. Keep playing with it, following where it leads you. Allow yourself the opportunity to let the image of your future evolve as your consciousness continues to evolve and change.

In the section that follows you can look at several very stable images that Ahsen refers to as the Eidetic Parents Test, a cornerstone test of eidetic images published in his book Basic Concepts in Eidetic Psychotherapy (1968). This will enable you to practice with eidetic images and see the difference between visualization and eidetic images that regulate the development of your mind and the results you produce in life.

Read the instructions below slowly and allow the image to be formed.

EP1: House Image

⋅ Picture your parents in the house where you lived most of the time with them, the house which gives you the feeling of a home.

⋅ Where do you see them?

⋅ What are they doing?

⋅ How do you feel when you see the images?

⋅ Are there any memories connected with the picture?

Write what is seen in the mind before reading further.

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The home should create feelings of security and warmth in a child. As you concentrate on images within your home, you will feel the dynamics of the situation. Other things may evoke something other than security and warmth, and that’s fine. That helps you to better understand what needs to be resolved.

The first time I practiced this, my father was up in his office on the second floor of the house and my mother was in the kitchen. Ahsen shows us that the house is a key image that reveals immense information about the relationships to parents, to siblings and their relationships with each other.

To take this a little bit further, read through the following slowly and allow the image to be formed.

EP2: Left/Right Image of Parents

⋅ Now, set aside this picture of the house and see your parents standing directly in front of you.

⋅ Tell me, as you look at them, who is standing on your left and who is standing on your right?

⋅ Now, try to switch their positions.

⋅ Do you experience any difficulty or discomfort when you do this?

⋅ Try to switch their positions again.

⋅ Do you again feel any difficulty?

⋅ Do you feel that these images are independent of your control?

Try it now before reading further.

Most people will see the father on the left and the mother on the right. If not, the “inversion” indicates there may have been separation from the maternal side of parental energy. A number of things can happen when you begin to switch the positions of the father and mother. As you look at the image, the mother might suddenly disappear when positions are switched. Or the father might become much larger, or they both might become indistinct. It is as if the image has its own level of permanence, and when you try to change it, the image will not let you.

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Here is a brief explanation. The position of parents, as they stand in front of you, always appears fixed. The inability to switch their positions without some difficulty, suggests that these images are strongly identified in your mind and that their special relationship has a specific neurological representation.

At this point, you begin your detective work. What happened when you tried to switch the images? Start to follow that. As you go, explore what that may signal for you.

Ready to try another image? Read through the instruction below slowly and allow the image to be formed.

EP16: Parents Sniffing

⋅ Picture your parents sniffing the air in the house.

⋅ Who appears to like the house air more, mother or father?

⋅ How does the other parent respond to the house air?

⋅ Concentrate on father sniffing. What are his thoughts?

⋅ Concentrate on mother sniffing. What are her thoughts?

⋅ Is the parent who approves of the house air active or passive?

⋅ Is the parent who disapproves of the house air active or passive?

⋅ How does the father reconcile his conflict about the house?

⋅ How does the mother reconcile her conflict about the house?

⋅ How do you respond to the conflict in the house?

This image indicates whether the atmosphere in the house is harmonious and pleasant or discordant and unpleasant. It also indicates the level of involvement of the parent in dealing with conflict.

This is just one way you can begin to understand how things are set up in your own consciousness. Let’s try one more exercise.

The Threshold Image (1965) deals with a very interesting dynamic of growth and change. The person is asked to stand on the threshold of the house, ideally when he/she is entering adolescence. The threshold is one foot beyond where the house ends and the outside world begins. When the person is entering this new phase of life in front of him or her,

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there is a natural desire to leave the warm, heavy air inside the house and face the outside world which beckons freedom and openness to new possibilities beyond the home.

Read through the following and then practice it.

Threshold Image

⋅ Now see yourself at the spot where the house ends, and the outside world begins.

⋅ Now stand at the threshold of your house, facing the outside world.

⋅ Breathe in the fresh air as you face the outside world.

⋅ Feel the air passing through your nose into your lungs as you face the outside world.

⋅ Deepen the image for about five minutes, by concentrating on it and experiencing it.

⋅ Now turn around and feel the air coming from inside the house. Inhale the inside air.

⋅ How do you feel about it? How do you feel about your mother and father as you stand on the threshold?

Try it now before reading further.

Ahsen (1989) wrote about the transformational aspects of the Threshold Image. In the transcript below, notice how following what emerges in the Eidetic image produces an expanded understanding and energy without external guidance.

As I stand on the threshold and breathe in the fresh air, I am less conflicted. The human conflict is behind me. I am feeling the challenge of the more open, ever widening world in front of me. The wind says I should go forward. There is that powerful blue sky and the line of green trees at a distance. The images of the school playground are at a further distance. The air from the green trees is a little bit warmer, and has some conflictual signals, but the air from the blue skies is completely different. It is much more open. It is like a cascade of fresh air from a source in the sky. The feeling that there is a forever source of air in the blue sky is exhilarating. This is the source of energy that will not stop. As I stand at the threshold facing the outside world, I lift myself up on my toes. In an outstretched fashion I drink in this rich air from the blue,

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this pure source of things. At this point there is not a trace of conflict left inside me. The air is going in all parts of my body, my bones, my face, my hair. As I stand on my toes, my whole body rises up to receive this air and drink it all in from the crisp blue sky. I stretch my body at the toes to receive it. Even the cells seem to expand. Where this air travels into my body I feel power and renewal.

As I stand at the threshold and look back at the house, the house is now empty. Just the threshold is there. The sun is coming in the porch. Suddenly I see my parents again. They look happy too. They are in a different altered state of consciousness. I am also in an altered state of consciousness.

The images we have explored so far play a significant role in your consciousness and influence how you organize your internal experience. My purpose for introducing Ahsen’s meticulously researched eidetic images has been to invite you experience the difference between visualization and imagery. Ahsen’s Image Psychology is used in psychotherapy and in the fuller expansion of consciousness.

HOW CAN IMAGERY ENHANCE VISUALIZATION AND HELP TO ACHIEVE GOALS?

Participants in self-development programs almost always start by establishing goals and by visualizing the life conditions they desire. I encourage two additional steps; writing a description of it and letting imagery emerge. For example, what would be your ideal average day? Not your perfect day, but your ideal average day. Describe that by writing it out in detail. Then write a description of what your best average week would look like, and what your best average month would look like, and your best average year. Include who you want to have for friends, where you travel to, the kind of work you do, your income, the kind of house you live in, the kind of vehicle you drive, that sort of thing.

Finally, as you write about and explore your best average experiences in the future, be open to explore the imagery that emerges. I invite you to go beyond visualization and let the “Eides” or the messengers of your higher consciousness guide and inform you. Follow the images that emerge. They will inspire and expand your vision of your highest ideals.

Q: What if I feel a change is needed but do not have clarity on the change that I want?

When you feel a change is needed in any area of your life, go to that area in your imagination and explore how the eidetic image appears. Imagine the future as you did with


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the Eidola image. Let the future take you where it is going. Move in the direction of that ideal future. As you go, it will become very clear what you need to focus on first, second, or third.

Consider making a recording of what you see as you explore your images. Speak out loud into a recording device so that you can replay it later. Often, imagery that is morphing or moving does not make sense to the conscious mind. As you are visualizing in the ways described in this chapter, you are close to the pure imaginal realm, in a state very close to the nonconscious mind. Afterwards, when you begin to feel and think through images, additional imagery will appear to help explain the significance of the “big picture” you received during your imagery process. Eidetic images are repeatable and progress spontaneously on their own. Significant areas will be revealed and movement toward resolution will occur.

Q: How can imagery help to let go of fear?

Many of us organize ourselves with anxiety as a starting point for change. Instead of leading with confidence, we lead with worry. Try switching your expectation from distress to success. Think back to something you accomplished that made you feel really good—literally “high” on success.

Throughout this book I will reiterate the concept that our energy flows where our attention goes. If you are in a state of fear, your attention is focused to ensure you have no access to the rich resources that can assist you. Use Ahsen’s Heart and Desire Image, from Hot and Cold mental Imagery (1999), to feel an immediate shift in your emotional state.

Heart and Desire Image

Think of all the desires you have.

Let all of these desires come into your mind and let your heart beat with those desires.

Let the world know your desires and let your heartbeat know the world. Go with your desires into the world.

The above Eidetic is lovely in its simplicity and profound in its ability to connect into the beneficial resources of your body, mind, emotions, and spirit. It positions your attention with the ideal in mind.

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HOW CAN WE USE IMAGERY TO IMPROVE HEALTH?

The work we are doing together in this chapter is exploring the link between the mind and body. As a spiritual being living in a physical body, your mind and body—also known as the psyche and the soma—are completely linked together.

Practicing what Dr. Ahsen calls an Emanation Technique (1968, 1977), is a way to enhance your physical health. Eidetic emanations help break the status quo in the mind which is too fixed and unable to break free. The Emanation Technique helps replace the frozen state with a fast moving, liberating experience. It is a magical part of our identity which flows forth when released for the fuller expression and joy of our being. Like a creature of Nature, when we are freed from the trap of the past, we can move forward into our natural state of being and not even look back to what was keeping us down. It just drops away. Try it and notice what happens to your body image.

Emanation Technique

⋅ Select a situation either from the past or in your current life, in which you faced a problem which you could not resolve.

⋅ See yourself in the image and experience the emotions and problems in this image in an intense manner and experience how you are blocked.

⋅ Now see another self-image jumping out of the first self-image, and see how the new image acts and how it differs from the previous image, and how it resolves the problem.

⋅ If this does not happen and the new self-image is still unable to break the knot, see yet another self-image jumping out of the previous one.

⋅ Continue this until you find that the progression of experience in the form of these leaping-out self-images finally resolve the problem.

I have found that you can use this emanation of your own image to get closer and closer to the future perfect expression that you are choosing to be in life. It is a very powerful way to invite the highest ideals into your life and a great way to connect with your emergent future.

From my studies in Neuro-Linguistic Programming I have taught another way to work internally which is especially helpful when you have a pain or illness inside of your physical

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body. Instead of rejecting the feeling, welcome it, because it is a part of your experience right now. Your natural state of “ease” has been maligned in some way, for some reason, detracting from your wholeness. Your body/mind is in a state of dis-ease. Still, welcome the feeling of it. You can even welcome the feeling of wanting to reject it. It is okay to have that dialectic tension inside you.

Notice the details of your inner representation of pain or illness, and notice what happens as you hold it. If there is an area in your body that is in pain, you have a representation in consciousness of what that pain looks like, including its size, shape, thickness, texture, color, temperature, and sound.

As you imagine your internal representation of the pain you are experiencing, think of its size. How would you describe the shape of it? Look at the edges. Are they thin? Thick? Is the surface smooth? Bumpy? Spiky? What color is it? Is it red or blue or green? What temperature is it? And what sound may be associated with it? As you hold the image, as you welcome it, experience it and look at all of the subtle distinctions of that internal representation.

Then ask your higher mind, “How might this size, shape, thickness, with this surface, color, and temperature begin to change to bring about the return to my personal wholeness?” Then notice what happens to the image. For example, the perception of the area might:

⋅ Morph into a different color or pattern.

⋅ Change temperature.

⋅ Become sharper or smoother.

⋅ Change thickness.

⋅ Transform from rigid to fluid.

What I have offered above is not a comprehensive list of possible representations. Notice as these images begin to change. Then, refer back to the physical (somatic) experience. As the image changes, the somatic or feeling state also shifts. Pay attention to that shift in the image, notice the corresponding change in the soma. You will be able to assign a different value or meaning to what has been presented to you by your higher consciousness.

Q: What image can I use to help my red cells grow into mature cells before they die?

First, research what perfect red blood cells look like as they mature. Check resources online, medical texts or ask your doctor to help you find an image. Then put those images up

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around your home in places where you spend the most time, certainly where you sleep. If you use Feng Shui, put the image in your success and health directions.

Holding an internal image of the perfect red blood cells, imagine interacting with your blood. Imagine holding it in your hands. Imagine holding a mature, healthy, red blood cell in one of your hands and look at an immature one in the other hand. Just hold those images next to each other, not trying to do anything with them. Allow the infinite intelligence within your mind and body to change the picture. Notice what happens. Keep exploring it. Keep following it. See where it takes you.

The healthy cell might begin teaching the immature cell so that it takes the perfect shape. Perhaps a red blood cell will take you for a walk in the forest. You do not know where it is going. Follow it! Find out what it has to say and show you. Your higher consciousness always works toward your best interests. Rather than insisting how it is supposed to show up, allow yourself to follow it.

WHAT IS THE PROCESS FOR LASTING TRANSFORMATION?

If a man holds an image of his wholeness but everyone around him considers him broken, can the negative collective consciousness of others be overcome? The answer is “Yes.”

Ultimately, you are the only person who can determine how your life will be lived. You are the producer, director, and main character in the play of your life. You determine how your life will act out, and yet other influences will affect you and the results you produce.

We are all products of the social systems that shaped our behavior when growing up. Also, we are unconscious of all of the influences that were in the environment which formed us, including family systems, school systems, religious systems, and other cultural influences. Many of our preferences and unconscious prejudices were formed from the conditioning that came out of our family/cultural systems. This acculturation creates systemic “blind spots” or lack of awareness in our ongoing behavior. Because of this lack of awareness, what we may take for “normal” may be the very thing the culture wishes to exclude and tries to marginalize. For example, if someone told you what you “can’t do,” it was most likely a result of some conditioned response that grew out of his or her own family dynamics or social system.

The unconscious dynamics of our culture were established by distant ancestors. What was normal for them may no longer be normal for you, so others may observe you and


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think that you are somehow flawed or broken. They will attempt to bring you back to “normal.”

Think of it this way: If everybody was lined up in a single line and you took a step forward, everyone else in that line could feel that they just took a step back. To a certain extent, that is what happens when social systems influence you. But, you do have the capacity to change your response to those dynamics.

Many images that you consciously hold about your life and future were established by experiences when growing up. Yet, the full magnificence of who you are—the true genius potential that you are ready to reclaim—is far more than the images that you have accepted until now.

Let’s say you want to replace an old mindset (such as a negative image that was given to you by parents or teachers) with something new and better. As soon as you realize the existence of limiting images, inquire internally about how the images could change. Dr. Ahsen recognized that what is fixed and what is flexible in current situations is limited by many factors. But the fullness of who you are yet to be is ready to emerge from the pure imaginal realm into your life experience right now.

Seeing Dr. Ahsen in his late seventies, you would recognize a profoundly spiritual presence who lives life purely in the mythic realm. He has overcome the limitations of his own history and lives in the pure mind. Anything that enters his consciousness he chooses to manifest without any attachment to belief systems. I personally believe he is modeling a possible evolutionary step for all of us.

Q: How can imagery help transform a relationship from feeling strained into a relationship

of communion?

Imagine you and the other person standing next to each other. Imagine your ideal future self and this person’s ideal future self standing next to each other. Notice what is there for you.

Now try shifting positions. Notice where you go, where you are taken. You may go on a walk together or you may see that something shifts in that image. Keep following it. That is a perfect way to explore.

Q: Can a single image help transform a childhood trauma?

After working with many people and recognizing the deeper mythos attached to early childhood trauma, Ahsen developed a very potent image of this concept.


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He asserts that trauma is like a black hole in the psyche. Once you have experienced the trauma, it is as if all other happy memories of childhood get sucked into that black hole and disappear. In the realm of the psyche-soma, we can allow light to emerge from that black hole. You also can emerge, transformed.

Here is the image Ahsen created to transform trauma called the Blue Panels “Boom!” Exercise, published in 2004.

Relax with eyes closed and image along the following lines.

Blue Panels “Boom”

See two rectangular panels in your mind standing side by side, the right panel in dark blue and the left panel in light blue. See a sliver of the sun peeping through the chink in the middle.

Shift your attention back and forth many times between the two panels.

Now place the negative memory in the empty chink between the two panels where the sun is peeping through.

Hear the sound “Boom!”

Report how the experience of the memory changes as a result of the sound.

Describe any idea or feelings that come to you following the sound “Boom!”

Repeat steps from 1 to 5 again and again.

Describe any new details which appear in the memory at each repetition.

This is a very powerful way to use a single image. It is just one example of how you can use prescribed eidetic images to facilitate your emergence from a black hole in your psyche. Q: Can I permanently transform my life to be free from past patterns and issues, no matter

how deep?

Permanent transformation is absolutely possible. When you make a significant change, I suggest that you call it a transformation. Transformation is a unique type of change in which the former state is inaccessible. Take a caterpillar, for example. When it transforms into a butterfly, it is transfigured. The caterpillar’s internal organs are dissolved. There is nothing about the caterpillar that is apparent in the butterfly. The change is complete and irreversible.

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Transformational changes in consciousness create such a profound shift that there is no going back. A profound transformational change may even trigger a complete life change. Your mind will bring up everything that is at odds with its transformation, and release what no longer works.

For example, let’s say you believe you have become unconditionally loving. You can only feel and act lovingly toward others. To facilitate the full release of that which no longer represents you, your mind will show you areas of your life where you are not yet fully loving. In this way, your mind helps you bring discordant areas into harmonious alignment or resonance with your new paradigm.

CONCLUDING SELF-REFLECTION

Take a few moments to reflect on what we have played with in this chapter. Imagine if you were able to apply the principles and integrate the skills described. What positive difference would they make in your life?

Imagine a scale from 1 to 10, where 10 is a perfect future in which you fully live according to the knowledge, skills, and attitudes presented in this chapter, and 1 is the absence of all knowledge of what was presented. Where would you place yourself on that scale today? Whatever number you wrote to the question above, why did you choose a number so high and not lower? (Write your ideas about what is already working.)

What is a possible next step you can take to move yourself one point higher on that scale today?


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Chapter 2

Can you LEaRn anD TRanSFoRM In youR SLEEP?

Sleep learning is just the beginning. The dream world is not only the playground, it is an internal universe to discover, and the most exciting place

to learn complex skills and abilities without effort.


Qigong Master Chunyi Lin sleeps only a few hours a night. The rest of the night is spent in “the emptiness” in deep meditation. Swami Veda Bharati, a Yogi from Rishikesh, India, enters Yoga Nidra or “Yogic Sleep” to maintain health and accelerate learning. In fact, over the years he has learned

to speak twelve languages fluently by merely going into the state of Yoga Nidra.

For thousands of years, masters of meditative techniques have identified a unique form of “sleepless, dreamless sleep.” Imagine a sleep where your brain is producing deep delta brainwave rhythms normally associated with completely unconscious deep sleep, yet you remain aware of everything around you. In this kind of sleep, your body and mind are restored to full vitality, illnesses can be healed, learning is integrated, problems are solved, and positive personal changes can occur.

Back in the 1970s, I was trained as a professional hypnotist, and I learned to program my mind to “reboot” my energy anytime and anyplace in a matter of minutes. In college, I would regularly take twenty-minute “alpha naps” to refresh my mind, integrate my studies, and recharge my body for alert studying. A short meditation before and after sleep allowed me to function at peak performance on five and one-half hours of sleep a night. Years later, for

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my company Learning Strategies Corporation, I created the 10-Minute Supercharger Paraliminal recording to produce the same effect of programming the mind for an alpha nap. Working with Swami Veda and a team of skilled Yoga teachers and Swamis, I helped design the curriculum for a Yoga Nidra retreat, teaching learners around the world about the ancient science of Yogic Sleep. From the guidance you will get here, you can begin benefitting from the skills of Yoga Nidra immediately.


⋅ Use the simple practices to receive the most benefit from your sleep.

⋅ Get much more than mere rest during the third of your day you spend sleeping.

⋅ Use sleep as your nightly opportunity to benefit your mind and body, refresh your spirit, free your soul, and accelerate your personal and professional achievements.

The topic areas include:

⋅ Enhancing the quality of sleep and the benefits we receive from it.

⋅ Programming your mind before sleep.

⋅ Dreaming and lucid dreaming.

⋅ Spiritual practice and journeying in sleep to other energetic dimensions.

⋅ Meditation and Yogic Sleep (Yoga Nidra).

In addition, we will explore questions on learning, changing beliefs, learning languages, and more.

⋅


Read these words into a recording device, and play it back to yourself. These words will help to develop your internal dialogue, which will strengthen your ability to quickly and easily Drop Into Genius anytime, anyplace. You will find your relationship with the genius potential improving each time you listen, because it is increasingly accessible to serve you most powerfully in creating the life you choose.

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To start learning anything in a more accelerated way, you can easily enter a state of physical relaxation and expanded mental awareness. Once you have learned how, you can do so within a matter of seconds. Take a moment now (NAME), while sitting back in a comfortable way, to learn this simple process. While you are pausing to let go of whatever else is going on in your world, just for a couple of minutes, you can…right now… simply close your eyes and become aware of yourself from head to toe. Observe yourself in the space your body is occupying. This is your time to take a few moments in your busy day and drop into the rich resources within you. You are purposefully placing yourself into an ideal state for learning anything you choose to explore.

Bring your awareness into a quiet internal place of relaxation. Just notice how your body, present in this moment, is breathing…and follow the movement of your breath. Feel the movement of your breath in your nostrils. Notice the way in which the breath flows in that space.

If you can, become aware of the subtle feeling in the flow of the breath—in and out. And see if it is a little cooler on the inhale, and slightly warmer on the exhale.

And breathing in this way…just so…you have the opportunity to notice the length of that breath. If there are any pauses between the breaths, see if you could smooth those out…so that you breathe in and out in one continuous cycle of inhaling and exhaling…just so. Make each inhale and exhale of equal length.

Your shoulders can relax even more as you are learning to quickly drop into this place of inner calm. You have a greater awareness of the peaceful and expansive internal awareness that is your natural state within, (NAME). You are increasing your connection to these vast resources of body, mind, and spirit that help you achieve the goals you set for yourself. Even when you sleep, the genius abilities continue to learn and integrate all that you need to live a full, rich, and rewarding life. The higher intelligence of your genius potential continues to work out all the details necessary to guide you most effectively throughout your day, helping you to accomplish each step as you attain the results you desire.

Resting in the confidence of the genius capacities within you, you can feel yourself more refreshed and alert, aware of yourself from head to toe, really feeling good. Aware of your breath as your body has continued to breathe for you so perfectly. The natural abilities of your body, mind, and spirit are fully accessible to you always.

And now, maintaining this awareness of the breath, you can gently open your eyes, and become aware of the world around you, even as part of your awareness maintains the sensation of the flow of your breath—in and out.

You really do feel good.


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EXPLORE STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Begin the transformation of how you sleep by exploring the different states of conscious-ness. There are four states we will consider: first is wakefulness, then dream, then sleep, then a fourth state that is known as the unaltered state.

Wakefulness

Dream

Sleep

Unaltered

You and I are working together now because you are interested in fully manifesting all the potential for good that may currently be unexpressed in your life. You accomplish this by accessing the fullest expression of who you are in a wakeful state. That might mean a fuller expression of health or a better relationship. It might mean spiritual expression. It might be success or abundance.

To achieve your full potential, you must reclaim the pure self, the true genius of who you are that underlies all states of consciousness. Who you are in your true nature—that perfect being—always has been and always will be fully and completely resourceful. You can gain access to far more of that brilliance inside you when you work with dream states, sleep states, and meditative states. They all work together in an additive way to produce the highest benefits in each of the states. In this chapter we will focus on using the full consciousness potential of your sleep state.

The Yogi who initiated me into the Himalayan tradition of meditation (more than 30 years ago) recently offered a beautiful statement about understanding and making full use of our creative powers. Swami Veda Bharati said, “Your night is a glimpse of God having withdrawn the universe.” In essence, when you sleep, your senses are sleeping but you are not unconscious. You are in a very restful mode of consciousness, having withdrawn your senses from the physical world, and your experience is that of having withdrawn the universe as well.

When most people sleep, they merely go unconscious. But there are much more fulfilling options for the sleep state. The easiest way to benefit is to recognize that sleep is a valuable state and affirm a simple statement before going to bed. The statement Swami Veda recommends is:

“I now return to the singular nature of consciousness, not unconsciousness. I return to the unmanifest nature of creative consciousness that I am.”

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And the singular nature of consciousness is that focused, pure, unadulterated consciousness that is the true self. As such, rather than going unconscious into a state of unconsciousness, sleep is a return to a unique creative consciousness that lies dormant before becoming manifest in the world. Each return brings a new beginning, a fresh opportunity for the transformation of your life. When you truly grasp the nature of creative consciousness that you are, you discover true genius—that true possession of the self that is infinitely more expansive than the physical form you inhabit.

To help you take full advantage of your sleep state, let’s get into specific steps you can follow to sleep well and dream well. Additionally, we will look at how to distinguish between sleep and preconscious or pure self.

HOW TO SLEEP WELL

Sleeping well is all about how you prepare for sleep. Since your stomach needs to sleep too, it is best to stop eating a couple of hours before going to bed. Otherwise, your digestive functions are still churning away which can interrupt your sleep.

Have a half glass of water before going to sleep. Make sure there is plenty of fluid in the body but not so much that you get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. [*If you do get up in the middle of the night, use that time as a back-up opportunity to program your sleep.]

Some simple stretches are also suggested to help loosen up the physical body. I usually do a little yoga or breathing meditation before going to sleep. Then in the morning, I begin with some yoga stretches and then sit in meditation. With this process, I bracket my sleep with relaxation stretching and meditation. My sleep state tends to be very effective, physically beneficial, and very productive.

If you go to bed tense or upset from the day, you will tend to carry those emotions into your sleep state. Whenever possible, do the complete relaxation exercise we used at the beginning of this chapter, or something like it. If you go to bed rested rather than completely exhausted, you will find that your sleep is much more productive and your body has a greater capacity to restore itself. Your sleep state will be less agitated.


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HOW TO PROGRAM YOUR MIND

As you fall asleep at night and as you wake up in the morning, you pass through a “twilight state.” Sleep researchers have discovered that this is a highly suggestible time. In other words, during the twilight state, your mind is receptive to the suggestions that you give it.

Once you are relaxed, you can program your mind with remarkable ease and effectiveness. Using a simple form of self-hypnosis or auto-suggestion, you affirm the outcomes you will achieve during your sleep that night. If you are dead tired and know you will pass out as soon as you hit the pillow, I recommend you do your mental programming while sitting up on the edge of the bed rather than lying down.

When you program the mind, you simply drop into a state of relaxed awareness and tell your mind what it is you want to have happen during your sleep. Give it a very confident directive and then envision it with all your senses. In other words, see it, feel it, and hear it actually taking place.

For example, if you have a big meeting in the morning and you want to perform well, you might say something like, “Tonight I will sleep deeply and rest thoroughly. In the morning, I awaken refreshed and energized. In my meeting, the information I share is exciting and flows freely through my mind. I deliver an effective and compelling presentation.”

If you know you need to resolve a relationship problem, you might try, “As I sleep tonight, all of the issues that are between me and this other person will be emotionally resolved. When I see this person, I will have a smile on my face. We will talk openly, listen actively, and resolve the differences between us in a spirit of kindness.”

After you have programmed your mind, let it all go. Allow yourself to drift off into sleep. Do not go into problem-solving mode. Do not try to figure out how it is going to happen. Just tell your mind exactly what it is you want to have happen and allow it to occur.

This simple formula of auto-suggestion is perfectly applied prior to going to sleep: Want it to happen, expect it to happen, get out of the way and let it happen. You tell your mind what it is you want to have happen, you imagine it vividly so that you expect it to happen, and then you get out of the way. Simply allow it to occur as you let it go.

During the night, your mind runs a number of very complex algorithms that enable the end result to occur. Your mind is perfectly capable of doing this without any participation from you at a conscious level. In your wakeful state, your conscious mind is operating with a small fraction of the full power and potential of your genius mind. In your sleep state, the mind is free to find the best ways and means to achieve your goals.


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In addition to programming your mind for desired goals, you can also specify physical benefits you expect to gain from your sleep. You may have had the experience of saying before sleep, “Yuk! I feel miserable. I am going to bed so late! I’m sure I’m going to wake up feeling awful tomorrow.” When you say those things to yourself, what other result can you expect to manifest? You must tell yourself what you want for an outcome. For example, you can say “In the few hours I sleep tonight, my rest will be deep and completely restorative. I will receive the equivalent of eight hours of restful sleep and awaken feeling refreshed at 7:00 a.m.”

If you feel a cold or sore throat coming on, it is easy to remember all the times it got worse by morning. That is repeating history rather than creating your future. Tell your genius body/mind to cleanse, balance, heal, and restore itself to perfect functioning. You can program it by saying, “My body has perfect integrity. As I sleep tonight, it restores perfect working order and balance to all my physical and energetic systems so that I awaken feeling great in the morning.” You might as well…it is your choice!

HOW TO LEARN IN YOUR SLEEP

A lot of research has been done on sleep learning. In addition to programming your mind to solve problems while you sleep, you can also expand your knowledge while you sleep. We tend to sleep in 90-minute cycles. During each cycle, a series of transitions occur in the brain. The first one is from the beta state directly to a deep delta state. At the end of that 90-minute cycle we surface up a little toward an alpha state. In our first sleep cycle, that alpha state is relatively short: three to five minutes. It is in alpha states that we tend to dream most and have the clearest dream recall.

As your sleep progresses, each 90-minute cycle has slightly more alpha brainwaves at the end of it. This is why you have your most vivid and emotionally intensive dreams when you are close to waking up in the morning. Research suggests that you can acquire learning when you are asleep and producing alpha brainwaves. When you go into a delta state, you tend not to be able to recall or bring back anything that you may have received.

In the two hours prior to awakening, you are exiting the previous 90-minute cycle and entering the final 90-minute cycle. This is the time when you can achieve the greatest benefit from sleep learning. If you listen to recordings, keep the volume at a very low level so it fades into the background.


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As an example of how this might influence you, consider your experience with a radio alarm clock. The radio begins playing while you are still sleeping. Before you fully awaken, you hear the radio and subconsciously incorporate what you are hearing into your dreams. If you are listening to a symphony upon awakening, you might be playing in an orchestra or attending a concert. Your brain takes in the auditory information and incorporates it into your dream with no direction from you.

If you want to test sleep learning for yourself, try it for a few nights and then stop for a few nights. See what kind of quality differences you notice in your sleep. To make it easy, use a Paraliminal recording. Most Paraliminal recordings include a “sleep learning track” which is essentially the change-work part of the Paraliminal learning session. During the change-work, in your right ear, I provide a step-by-step process by which you can achieve the goals that you have established for yourself. In the left ear, I provide all of the direct and indirect suggestions to integrate everything that you are learning.

If you can set your audio player to play for a period of time and to repeat a single audio track, that is perfect. Simply set it to play three to five cycles and then turn itself off. Or, if you can set a player to turn on in the last one to two hours before you awaken, that would also be extremely beneficial.

HOW TO DREAM WELL

So far, you have explored how to sleep well, how to program your mind, and how to learn in your sleep. Now you will discover how to dream well.

Dream consciousness has been the subject of extensive research…including my own. To gain the most from your dreams, the first thing to do upon awakening is to remember your dreams in as much detail as possible. The best way to make that happen is to set it up before you sleep. Try this: upon going to sleep tonight, tell yourself, “Tonight I am going to dream and I will remember the dreams. When I awaken, my dreams will linger in my consciousness in vivid detail for easy recall.”

The dream state is fragile so it tends to vaporize when the conscious mind has taken its attention into the outer world. To test this theory, help someone else remember their dreams. Before awakening someone, quietly advise them to pay attention to the dream they are having. I will often awaken my wife by gently saying, “Good morning my love, what were you just dreaming?” Almost without fail, she has excellent recall. I get a very different response if instead I say, “Good morning, it’s a great day. Would you like me to


http://scheelelearning.com/products/paraliminals/

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feed the dog?” and after she replies I ask, “Did you have any dreams last night?” If she remembers having a dream she rarely recalls the specific dream content. You will find that with a gentle and mindful approach, dream recall is very easy.

When you recall your dreams, write them down in a dream journal. If you know how to “mind map” I recommend this fabulous whole-brain approach to note-taking (created by my colleague Tony Buzan) so you can capture your dreams quickly without involving your analytical mind. As you chronicle your dreams, within a few weeks you will become familiar with the imagery and symbolism they contain. The symbolism of your dreams is the language of your nonconscious.

To help interpret the meaning of your dreams, record the imagery, language, and symbols and then ask yourself, “When I think of this image from my dream, what feeling state does it create? What does it remind me of?” Learn to decode this language and it will be easier for you to communicate with your genius mind. The Genius Code home study program I co-authored with Dr. Win Wenger can help you learn and use the language of your “beyond conscious” resources very quickly.

You can create a way to help analyze your dreams by working with a friend to explore the connection between symbolism and meaning. Make a list of symbols from your dreams, for example an automobile or a vase or an apartment you lived in. Give the list to your friend, who will read the first word and take notes on what you say. Your job is simply to free-associate the thoughts and feelings that come to you. When you review all the as-sociations, you get a sense of what your dream symbolism means to you…and it will be unique to you.

As you learn to remember your dreams on a regular basis, the next step is to program your dreams. Before going to sleep, tell yourself what you would choose to dream about. For example, you might want to dream about the resolution of a problem with another person, or a problem you are trying to solve at work, or how you could achieve the best outcome in a situation you are facing in the near future.

Try this. As you are going to sleep, simply tell yourself:

⋅ What you will dream about.

⋅ What issue you choose to have worked on and resolved in your dream state.

⋅ That upon awakening, the answers will be revealed as a symbol or an image that will help you remember the dream and the answer to it.

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http://www.thinkbuzan.com/uk/


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When you give yourself clear directives, your mind is absolutely willing to help you in your dream state. The key is to deliver a positive affirmative suggestion to the mind. Years ago, in an article on using suggestion in the field of emergency medical technology, I found an excellent mnemonic for how to deliver effective suggestions. The author used the acronym “credible.”

C is for confidence. Deliver your statement to your mind with confidence.

R is for rapport. You want to have a working relationship with your mind. When I speak to myself, I actually address my genius mind as an actual presence with which I can interact. For example, I might start by saying, “Mind, tonight as I sleep…” This enables my consciousness to connect with this energetic field known as mind. The mind influences all states of consciousness and creates allresults in life. So, it is essential to maintain rapport with it.

E stands for expectations. When you deliver suggestions, you must have a full expectation that it is going to be returned exactly to the measure that you had specified.

D stands for directives. A directive states exactly what you want to happen. To avoid wishy-washy directives, stick with what you want. If you state what you do not want, it is difficult for the mind to imagine.

I stands for images. Create rich and vivid images that have all the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic sensory detail associated with your expectation.

B is for believable. Even if it is a stretch goal or a completely new experience, you know it is possible because others have accomplished it. Make sure that your directive is not too outrageous, because if your mind doesn’t believe it is possible, “it is never going to happen to me” is what will be inadvertently affirmed.

L stands for literal. The mind is very literal, so check your language and specify in sensory detail exactly what you want. For instance, I have a tendency to faint during blood draws and injections. So prior to having my wisdom teeth removed, I programmed my mind to receive the Novocaine injection well. The next day, however, I received three injections and on the third one, I fainted. I had literally told myself, “For the first one, you will be fine.”

The final E is for enthusiasm. Deliver your directive with enthusiasm. The excitement you express helps your mind gauge the relative importance of what it is you are choosing to create.

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Follow the “credible” approach as the best way to give yourself effective directives for programming your mind, programming your sleep, and programming your dreams.

HOW TO INVITE LUCID DREAMING

Once you are able to remember your dreams, you can begin to explore lucid dreaming. With lucid dreaming, you are actually aware that you are in a dream state dreaming and you can respond to the events in the dream as they unfold.

Everyone is capable of lucid dreaming and we all do it from time to time. You can increase the frequency of lucid dreaming through a technique that Steven LaBerge teaches in his book, Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming.

The technique is to remember to recognize when you are in your dream. As you are falling asleep at night, say to yourself, “As I dream tonight, I will remember to recognize that I am in my dream, dreaming.”

If you awaken from your dream, simply say, “As I go back into my sleep state, and return to dreaming, I will remember to recognize that I am in my dream, dreaming.”

As my children developed this capacity, one of my sons said, “You know how I remember to recognize when I’m dreaming? When I’m in a dream, I look at the back of my hand to recognize that I am in a dream.”

This is the exact technique that Don Juan talked about in the Carlos Castaneda books. If you want to be a lucid dreamer, look at your hands or find another symbol that will help you remember to recognize that you are in a dream.

On occasion, you may experience a “false awakening.” For example, you awaken, look at your digital clock, see a time and think you were awake—even if someone else in the room can verify that you were not awake at that time, you will be absolutely convinced that you awoke and looked at the clock.

To test for false awakening, any time you think you have awakened, look at the time on a digital clock. Then close your eyes and immediately look again. If you are in your dream, the time will show up as something completely bizarre like 38:72. At that point, you will know that you are having a false awakening and that you are in a lucid dream. From there, you can take off and do a lot of fun explorations of the universe.


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Some people are concerned that remembering dreams may disrupt their sleep state. My personal experience, along with impromptu surveys of audiences worldwide, indicate that people actually sleep more soundly and productively when they journal their dreams when they awaken in the middle of the night. Even though you lose a few minutes of sleep, you actually rest deeper and better because you are in harmonious communication with your genius mind.

If upon awakening from a dream, you fret and affirm, “Now I am going to be tired in the morning and miserable in my meeting,” of course you are more likely to experience exactly that, because you suggested it to your brain. If you do not worry about it, you will be just fine. Only affirm positive statements about your dreams and your sleep, especially when you are in a naturally suggestible state of mind.

CONSENSUAL DREAMING

The next type of dreaming to consider is called consensual dreaming. In the 1970s, my wife Libby and I participated in a group called Search and Prove in St. Paul, Minnesota. On Saturday nights, we would get together for a meeting. Then, later that night, after we all went back to our homes and went to sleep, we would meet again in the dream world and share a consensual dream.

The following week, we would gather again and talk about the dream that we shared. It was fascinating how we remembered seeing each other and shared the various details we each remembered. We found a lot of corroboration of how this process worked and determined our group was actually meeting on the “astral plane” of consciousness.

Some people struggle with the concept of consensual dreaming and planes of consciousness. Yet, we do all have access to these distinctive energetic realities. There are rules and protocols that we operate under in other planes of existence, just as we do in the wakeful state we have become most accustomed to. Places like airports, restaurants, and gas stations all exist in the astral plane. And there are people in service to us when we travel in our dream bodies. They are there to assist and help us out.

If you ever find yourself in a recurrent dream—one that you have had many times before— you have a unique opportunity now to notice that you are in a dream state you recognize. Play! Take some kind of action. You can use that time productively to travel, to see things, resolve problems and more. You have access to a tremendous amount of universal wisdom in that space, so by all means take advantage of it.


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YOGA NIDRA

Next, let’s turn to Yoga Nidra and further dimensions of learning and programming the mind. In the Himalayan tradition, Yoga Nidra (or “Yogic Sleep”) is a bridge state between dreamless sleep and the consciousness of pure self, also known as Samadhi or Turiya. You want to practice Yoga Nidra at a time during the day when you can go into a deep, restful sleep state, or conscious sleep state. This is NOT recommended to be done as you are going to bed tired from a long day.

To practice, you lie on your back in the “corpse pose,” with your feet about 18 inches apart. Your arms rest about a foot away from your body with your palms facing up. Your neck and your knees should be propped with a rolled towel or something similar to take the pressure off of your spine. All Yoga Nidra exercises are done in the corpse pose. This is a challenging pose to maintain and hold properly, so if you are unfamiliar with it, research it online or get guidance.

When you are in position, progressively relax your entire body. As you breathe, consciously bring your attention to all the major muscle groups of your body from head to toe, and back up again from toe to head. As you bring your awareness to each point, relax it and move on until all the parts of your body have been brought to absolute stillness. When you get into this place of silence, you will be led naturally into this state of Yogic Sleep.

My colleagues and I offered Swami Veda’s first International Yoga Nidra class and produced a new set of audio recordings for a home study program called Meditate with the Himalayan Masters. The four meditations in the program guide you to develop the skills necessary to enter the Yoga Nidra state. He guides you through point-to-point breathing as well.

Thomas Edison kept a cot in his laboratory to go into a sleep state without falling into deep sleep. He aimed for a state between sleep and wakefulness. If he fell asleep, his hands would open and the ball bearings he was holding would fall and awaken him. He trained himself to go into a bridge state between dreamless sleep and the consciousness of the pure self. He said that all of his creative ideas sprung from this state.

When Swami Veda traveled to countries in which he had not taught, he would listen to the language and briefly look at the written words in that language before going into Yoga Nidra. Upon awakening the next day he was able to deliver guided meditations flawlessly in the language. He has learned twelve languages in the Yoga Nidra state following that procedure.

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YogaNidrabringsyoutothethresholdofadimensionbeyondwakefulness,dream,andsleep. It is an important fourth dimension of consciousness.This is the state of the“unmanifest,”identicaltothestatereferredtoinChapter1whenIdescribedthe“pureimaginalrealm.”Whenyougointothissleeplessordreamlesssleepstate,youaredissolvingtheouterrealityandgoingtothatplacewhereallofcreationbegins,andwhereanythingispossible.

This is the state that leads you to discover who you really are, a process the ancientspiritualmasterscalled“self-realization.”TheyogiscallittheSamadhi.Inthisstate,youmakedirectcontacttoSource,withoutidentificationorattachmentstotheexternalworldandtheworldofobjects.Youidentifywiththatpurestatethatiswhoyoutrulyare.

RELATEDQUESTIONS

Q: Can you “re-program” yourself while in a sleep state or Yoga Nidra state?

HereIliketoreferenceanage-oldsaying:Whathasbeenlearnedcanbeunlearned.Thesleepstateisastateofdissolvingandcreating.

Forexample,let’ssayabehaviorthatwasonceusefulforyouaschildhasbeeningrainedandhasnotevolvedasyougrewtoadulthood.Whatusedtobearesourcehasbecomeanuisance(noiseorpollutiontoyourlife)andismoreofaliabilitythananadvantage.Youwouldbenefit fromreplacing thisbehaviorwithanewapproach thatproducesbetterresults.Whenyouunderstandthat,youcanre-programanyresource.

Toillustrate,youcanthinkofabarrelofcrudeoilasagreatresource.Itpowersourcountry.ButifIdumpitallovermyoffice,itisnolongeragreatresource,itispollution.Itisonlyagreatresourceinthepropercontext.

Similarly,everyprogramthatisrunninginyourlifeonceservedyou.Butpatternsandbehaviorsthatinformedyourearlybeliefsanddecisionsneedtochangeasyougrowandevolve.Whenyouknowbetter,youdobetter.Perceivedweaknessesandbeliefsyouheldthatarenolongervalidmustchangeifyouaretogrow.Whenyoumustmovethroughsituationsyouwouldordinarilyavoid,reprogrammingisessential.Insteadoflettingyourinsecuritiesruleyourbehavior,begintostrengthenthequalitieswithinyourselfthatyouhavebeendenying.

Harnessingthepowerofyoursleepstatesistheperfecttransformationaltool.Asyougotosleep,directyourmindtoresearchyourareasofwastedresourcesorpollution.Seewheretheresourcehasservedyou.Thendirectthatresourcetoshowuponlyinthecontext


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and situation in which it will be most useful to you. In this way, you are programming your mind to take over as an automatic pilot. Because it does not require your conscious involvement to accomplish success, areas of unresourcefulness can be converted to a great resource much faster.

Q: How many nights does it take to program my mind to get the desired result?

It can happen in a single evening. If you want it to happen, expect it to happen, then get out of the way and let it happen. Allow the beautiful algorithms of the mind you programmed to induce the results you want. Your mind can work unhindered by your conscious intervention. Let it go and let it happen.

Q: Before falling asleep, could I program myself to wake up with a feeling or symbol or

message that supports me in reaching my goal?

The answer is YES! The mind can give you that symbol if that is what you ask for. The symbol will let you know that your expectation is manifesting. The symbol is a communication from the inner mind saying, “I did the work for you, get ready for the result that you want. Trust me...it’s taken care of. Go on and live your life and whatever is necessary will show up.” When the desired reprogramming has taken place, get ready to receive the full benefit and full measure of necessary resources (that are available to you now) delivered to you in consciousness.

There is another way to find a symbol of your growth and development. I often invite retreat participants to go on a walk in nature and notice some object that catches their attention. It is a kind of mini “vision quest.” When they pick up their objects, they contemplate what it symbolizes about the goal or answer to a question they are seeking in life. The insights that emerge are often profound.

Q: Can we use sleep states to also reprogram cell memories in the body to let go of

conditions or unhealthy coding that may be embedded in our genes?

In Qigong we call this “generational energy” or the coding that is within your genetics or DNA. If you study with Master Lin, the Qigong master of Spring Forest Qigong, he talks about generational energy in his meditations. His meditation takes you back to when you were a developing child—when the conditioning or programming of the world was not yet deeply ingrained. You focus and remember what that state is like. Then prior to going to sleep, simply say to your mind, “As I sleep, the re-patterning of my genetic coding can take place.”

I created a Paraliminal called New History Generator which can take you back through your generational energy. This enables you to reprogram your genetic code. To go back


http://www.learningstrategies.com/Qigong/Course.asp?aff=9scheelp08

http://www.learningstrategies.com/Paraliminal/History.asp?aff=9scheelp08

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several generations, imagine your ancestors free from all worldly concerns. See them in that state of freedom as children: your great-grandparents’ freedom passing on to your grandparents’ freedom, then your parents’ freedom getting passed on to you. You all escape from the tyranny of toxic ancestral energy to generate a new legacy of openness and optimism. Then you pass on to future generations this harmonious intergenerational dynamic of freedom. Imagine the freedom to express a particular quality or characteristic you desire. That will be a powerful way to make sure your expectations are met.

Q: How do I recharge like Thomas Edison did?

You sit back, relax, and say, “I’m going to rest for ten minutes. In ten minutes, I’ll awaken fully refreshed, relaxed, alert, and ready to continue with my day.”

Look at your watch or clock and say, “Mind, see how long ten seconds takes to pass; awaken me in exactly ten minutes.”

Close your eyes and enter a state of stillness.

Your brain goes into delta state and reboots itself, very powerfully, very quickly and easily.

When you feel yourself coming back into a state of consciousness, open your eyes and check the time.

You can also program yourself to awaken at a certain hour in the morning and get the same kind of benefits. Rebooting can be beautifully done in three minutes to forty minutes. If you go over forty minutes, it is more like going to sleep so waking up is a bit more challenging.





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Chapter 3

Can you read a book with the palm of your hand?

You can! It is not the same process as reading visually, but it can prove an even more useful and informative tool than traditional information gathering.

Reading through your hand engages your inner genius to direct you to information you need in order to move forward right now. The guidance of your nonconscious mind can seem random at the outset but often proves to be both deliberate and

prescriptive in retrospect.


Ifirst heard stories of this technique of reading with the eyes closed when one of my PhotoReading instructors was working in South America. She said that shamans in Peru were teaching children how to read by taking off their shoes and running their feet over books. My response was, “While that sounds interesting, I do not think it will

fly in most any business context in which I consult!” Can you imagine everyone around the conference table unlacing their shoes as I say, “Okay, let’s get into the contents of the annual report…”

The next time I heard about a similar technique, I was teaching PhotoReading in Mexico City. Raphael, a man in my class, had brought two of his children to a course on reading with their eyes closed when they were in pre-school, before they learned how to read normally. Their teacher had shown them how to close their eyes, run their hands over the pages of a book, and report on what the book was about. He said his children lost their ability to do this as they aged. His daughter retained the skill until age 12 and his son to age 10.

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Dr. Buckminster Fuller’s declaration that children will be systematically de-geniused by the time they reach the fifth grade seemed to corroborate Raphael’s experience. I find that girls have a tendency to hang on to their abilities for a couple years longer as they mature. Boys tend to lose it a little earlier.

“De-geniusing” happens when innate nonconscious genius abilities are banned from the classroom. Instead of leveraging these nonconscious abilities, we marginalize and exclude them. Students cannot be allowed to read a book with their eyes closed! That is not reading—that is just plain crazy. Even trying it is ridiculous!

If we cannot try new things without suffering ridicule, our natural childlike curiosity atrophies. The brilliant capacities of the human mind and spirit get squelched in most traditional educational settings. They do not fit with a factory model of education designed to socialize people into good worker bees in an industrial society. Brilliance and difference is marginalized and the “norm” is dictated by “the powers that be” in charge of education.

In this chapter we will explore the technique for reading a book through the palm of your hand—how you can do it right now and what it can achieve for you.

You will discover how to:

⋅ “Read” books through the palm of your hand.

⋅ Perceive a world of energy instead of a world of objects.

⋅ Facilitate change in yourself and others and overcome internal barriers.

⋅ Attain greater mental clarity and vividness.


⋅ Why the energetic reading technique is important.

⋅ Opening intuition.

⋅ Gaining greater confidence.

⋅ The impact of age on mental effectiveness and how to stay open to success.

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R E A D W I T H Y O U R N O N C O N S C I O U S M I N D

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Read these words into a recording device and play it back to yourself. You have learned how to Drop Into Genius anytime and anyplace. Use this recording throughout your day to recharge and refresh your body/mind, and to keep your mental focus on creating the life you choose.

Let’s begin the exploration of reading with the nonconscious mind with a brief relaxation mind-centering exercise of Dropping Into Genius. You already know how to do this exceedingly well, (NAME), and you are continuing to develop a beautiful contact with the rich resources of your mind. You can place yourself into this ideal state for learning anytime and anyplace you choose.

Right now, simply withdraw your awareness from the world around you and all the busy activities of the day and move your attention to the space that your body is occupying. Become aware of your entire being (NAME), physically, emotionally, mentally...and comfortably enjoy how rapidly you can expand your internal awareness.

As you relax your face you can bring the hint of a gentle smile to the corners of your eyes and the corners of your mouth. You can notice the gentle flow of breath in your nostrils. Inhaling and exhaling, gently, slowly, make the process of breathing into one continuous, smoothly flowing cycle.

Your shoulders can relax even more as you easily drop into this place of inner calm. You have a greater awareness of the peaceful and expansive internal experience that is your natural state within. You have set yourself free (NAME). The genius capacities that organize and run your life are continuing to learn and integrate all that you need in order to live a full, rich, and rewarding day today. You enjoy growing confidence that the genius capacities within you are more available to you now than ever before.

As you explore the simple techniques of reading with your nonconscious mind, you can feel a familiar playfulness and natural childlike curiosity coming forward…the same natural genius you enjoyed when learning new things so many years ago before you even started school —free and expansive, full of curiosity, wonder, and infinite possibilities. This delightful feeling you enjoy right now, (NAME), is fully accessible to you anytime you choose.

And carrying this delight with you, feel yourself becoming more energized and alert, aware of yourself from head to toe, feeling good all over. Aware of your breath as it continues to refresh your body so perfectly. The natural abilities of your mind, body, emotions, and spirit are effortlessly available, now and always.

Maintaining awareness of the flow of your breath in your nostrils, you can gently open your eyes, and become aware of the world around you with calmness in your mind and expansive joy in your body.


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HOW TO READ THROUGH THE HAND

In 1993, I had dinner with a psychologist in Mexico City who tested pre-school children who had completed a course on how to read with eyes closed using their hands. She conducted a 16-channel EEG study of the pre-schoolers and a group of adults while they all read the same book. The adults read normally and the children read by sweeping their hands down the pages of the book with their eyes closed. She found that in both cases, the adults and the children had the same brain centers firing off in the exact same sequence.

My curiosity built further when I heard about Qigong masters teaching children how to read books by holding a hand over the book. There was so much evidence of the effectiveness of this technique that I decided to try it at the first 5-day PhotoReading Retreat I conducted for Learning Strategies Corporation in 2004. We had over one hundred people in the room and everyone brought ten books to share. We had tables piled with books separated into different subject areas. I had people select any book they had not seen before, set it in front of them and stand.

I explained that they would read the book through the palm of their hand, holding one hand about eight inches above the book. They would select a page in their mind and imagine what that page looked like. If they were asked to describe what the page talked about in general, what would it say? After they mentally described the page, I asked them to open their eyes and look at the page they selected in their mind. You should have heard the gasps in that room. It was something to behold. They were astounded.

Ready to do it yourself?

You will need a book that you have not read. Have it closed in front of you on your lap or on a table.

Hold your dominant hand six to ten inches above the book. You are not physically touching the book because it is easier to discern the energetic content of the book from a slight distance.

As you hold your hand there, close your eyes and imagine the center point of your energy just behind your navel. This energy spot is about three inches below your physical navel, between your spine and the front of your body. In Qigong this is called the lower dantian.

From this center point of energy, imagine your energy flowing up through your heart center, up through your throat area, into your shoulder, down your arm, into your hand, and out through your palm into the book.

Allow your energy to move into the book and interact with the energy that the author put into expressing this information. Feel your way into the pages of the book with your energy.

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Let your mind present to you a page number that it has selected for you. Imagine this page number in your mind.

Now imagine that with your mind’s eye you can actually look at the physical page you have selected. Feel that page and imagine that page in your mind. See how the page is formatted, whether there are pictures on it or just text, headings or bold type, see whatever is there.

Imagine that your mind reads the page and you can think about what the author is attempting to communicate to you. What is the message on this page? If you were to describe the contents of this page, what would you say?

Now open your eyes, pick up the book and flip to the page that you had imagined. Notice how the page looks and how it is formatted. How does it match what was in your mind? If it is slightly different, look one page ahead or behind. Sometimes, we perceive a page before or after the number we imagined.

Read the text to learn its content and consider how it matches with what your mind presented to you.

Continue to play with this technique using different books you have not read before. You might also play this exercise with books you read years ago, to notice the messages your mind brings to you.

Mary from Minneapolis picked up the book Wisdom of the Ages by Wayne Dyer. As she was reflecting, the number 12 came to her. When she mentally scanned that page, she became a little frustrated because she was not getting any picture; her mind seemed to be drawing a blank. As she imagined what the author was trying to communicate to her, the only thing she could imagine was something about “the now.” When she actually opened the book to page 12, it was exactly as she had envisioned it in her mind, which was nothing. Page 12 was a blank page. Page 13 was on the right hand side. The title on page 13 was “Patience.” That spoke clearly to her about being patient in the now of her life.

For Mary, this was an example of “beating up the kid who has come out to play a game with you.” If this happens, forgive yourself and say, “I won’t doubt you. I do want to play and explore. Let’s find out what else might be possible.”

Mary also found this activity enlightening. Before she started, she had an idea in her conscious mind about what page to turn to. Then when she was directed to let her mind present a number, her intuition guided her to a different page. The experience confirmed for her that her intuition was guiding her to what she really needed to see and remember.

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This “genius presence” was born into your life to guide you to the fullest expression of who you are. If that part of you has been marginalized by society, bring it back by being more responsive to your inner guidance.

WHY THIS TECHNIQUE IS IMPORTANT

If you can receive information from a book through the palm of your hand, what does that mean for you? As we know it, this is not a process of reading. Reading is decoding words, one word at a time. Instead, we perceive energy constructed by the author and represented in a binary code of dark print on light pages. Each letter carries a code. Groups of letters carry codes, and groups of words carry codes. Learning to read enables us to decode written language. This method transmits energy from the author to you through a number of translations before you can make sense of it. We are exploring an alternative method of receiving the author’s message.

Consider this: Everything in our environment is a waveform perceived through lenses. Lenses include our eyes, ears, and touch receptors, and through all of them we interpret the external world. What does a lens do? A lens objectifies. It turns an experience of light, sound, or pressure into an objective reality. When we look through a telescope, we objectify the heavens. When we look through a microscope, we objectify the things that are too small for the naked eye to see.

With our conscious mind, we perceive a world of objects. But that world of objects is really a translation of a world of energy waveforms. Even though we naturally perceive energy directly, we have conditioned ourselves to see objects. For example, if you have been blind all your life and suddenly are given the capacity to see, nothing coming through your visual field will make any sense to you. You literally have to go back through the building blocks of visual perception; seeing squares, circles, triangles and primary colors, and putting those elements together as an infant’s brain must do to decode the world. You are conditioned to navigate in a world that others explain to you: This object here is a chair, this is a ball, and this is a glass of water. To get your needs met, you learn to manipulate your environment.

However, at a fundamental level of energy processing, you are picking up waveforms. Watch newborn babies look at your face. They will look around your head, looking at the energy field, not at facial features. When your energy field lights up, they smile at the beauty of the lightshow you give.

When you close your eyes and go inside, you perceive the communication from your inner mind more directly than when communication consists of objects and words


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filtered through your eyes. Your inner mind is not tethered to an object-world. It can move from waveform to waveform. Think of the waveforms that represent the book you just used for the exercise. Your mind was freed to interact with the waveforms directly, discerning them and translating them into meaning you can think about and express. This process is significant because it enables you to work more efficiently with the information-laden world around you.

I will give you an example that happened with a PhotoReading student named Julie. She had heard the word “serendipity” and was wondering, “What is the formal definition of serendipity? What does it really mean?” That summer morning, as she walked downtown where she lived, she noticed a bookstore with the door open. She felt drawn to the store, so she walked in and right up to a particular rack of books. She pulled one book off the shelf. She opened the book to a page that said, “The definition of serendipity is...”

Julie read the definition, closed the book, put it back on the shelf and walked out thinking, “How cool was that?!” Truly, what better way was there for Julie’s genius mind to answer her question than to give her the direct experience of serendipity? You can say this is just a remarkable coincidence because you could try this a zillion times and never reproduce it. However, because it happened and she could testify to it, I have continued to research how this kind of phenomenon occurs and how we might make it work for us on a regular basis.

When I connect Julie’s experience with the stories I had heard about children reading with eyes closed before they learned to read, it began to make more sense. Children perform this skill before they begin turning words into objects, which then requires numerous internal translations. Children perceive waveforms directly, before they become conditioned to perceiving symbolic languages of numbers and words. The fact that you have been conditioned will not hinder your ability to use this technique brilliantly…as long as you are willing to approach the task with the same open mind and open heart as a playful child!

Edgar Cayce and others have “read” entire books by sleeping with the book under their pillows. This technique, similar to a practice called stichomancy, is over 3,000 years old. It is divining meaning from the printed word. Could it be that word divination is a process of seeing the energy of a book’s contents and understanding it at a conscious level? What would it be like to close your eyes, imagine a book, allow your mind to read the entire book outside of your own conscious awareness, and receive the information that will be most relevant to you?


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Reading through your palm is a similar process. The idea of absorbing a book by sleeping on it appeals to many learners of all ages. From my own informal surveys, I have found many who have tried it. In every case they were hopeful that it would work, but I never found anyone who would reliably produce a benefit from it. In spite of that, we are about to take the procedure one step further. I suggest you do not need to be near the book. It does not have to be under your head, or your foot, or your hand. You simply need to choose to intentionally engage that book.

Recently, when I was at home meditating, I mentally selected a book from a bookshelf downstairs and read it…not through the palm of my hand but through a couple of floors. I picked a book called Leadership for the Disillusioned by Amanda Sinclair and the page that came to me was page 83. When I imagined what this page was communicating, I sensed that it talked about how people may or may not be able to follow a leader. I was really thinking about follower-ship. Sometimes, people are skeptical and they are not interested in following in a particular direction. And how might a leader work with folks like that?

When I went downstairs and opened the book it said:

“Research confirms that individuals police themselves and their peers more vigorously than a manager with a stopwatch can ever hope to…In particular, the work of David Knights, Hugh Willmott, Cynthia Hardy and others in the field of organization studies has weaned us from a simplistic model where power is held totally by the powerful and exercised over the powerless in visible situations to induce compliance and conformity. Power is present in almost all situations, and it does not necessarily feel negative or coercive…the theories summarized above can inform a better understanding of leadership and guide leaders who have an intention to liberate.”

To me, my experience of reading at a distance was fairly accurate. When I saw the page in my mind it was absolutely just a page of text with no headings or bold print or graphs—just one big block of text.

My business partner Cheryl Valk used the same distance-reading technique with a book that was 1,200 miles away. When she returned home and looked at the book, in addition to getting the meaning accurately, she got a picture that was on the page. There was a picture showing how energy flowed in a wave-like form, which she had seen very clearly in her mind.


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FACILITATING CHANGE FOR SELF AND OTHERS

In studies of hypnosis and post-hypnotic suggestion, it has been shown that once you believe you cannot do something, the brain goes through an “abort” mechanism when attempting to access information or a skill. It is exceedingly common that people assume they cannot do something because of an early childhood conditioned response. Consequently, instead of accessing many of the fabulous capacities that are possible to develop, they tend to marginalize the ability or ignore the opportunity.

Let’s say the brain has to go through a cascading set of steps to access a particular resource or ability. As an analogy we might say the brain has to get to the right neighborhood within the neural net, find the correct building, climb to the correct floor, enter the correct room, go to the correct file cabinet, open the correct file drawer, and locate the correct file. If you believe you cannot do something, once you get into the neighborhood, your brain will convince you to walk away and give up.

The reason we doubt our potential is because we are conditioned to accept the past as a predictor of the future. When you imagine reading through the palm of your hand, the culture in power says, “This is not reading. You cannot do this, so do not bother trying.” Do not accept that. Go ahead and play with your abilities. You will discover that the more you play with it, the more internal barriers you release. Try it a few times a day for the next week.

One of my teachers, Richard Bandler said, “If you do not like the voice in your head, put more voices in there.” The energy of books will also put more voices in your head. Go to the library and pick out a stack of books on intuition, psychic abilities, genius, or whatever interests you. Pick books on spiritual topics, and engage with the energies of the books before you go to sleep at night. How does it change your dream state? Wouldn’t it be powerful to access information directly in your dreams?

If you see somebody with a book, say, “Have you read that book? May I borrow it for a second?” Hold the book in one hand and hold your other hand over the book. Let your intuition present a page in the book. Hand back the book without looking at it and say, “This is the page that came to me. I’ll tell you what I saw and you tell me if there is any correlation.” If you are close, you will be taken for a genius. If you are way off, a complete lunatic. In that case, shrug your shoulders and try it with somebody else. Experiment with the technique. Entertain the possibility. See what happens.


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MENTAL CLARITY AND VIVIDNESS

Simply by playing with your internal sensory perceptions, you will overcome barriers to your genius mind that you accumulated while growing up. Be encouraged, regardless of the results you experience when reading through the palm of your hand. Stay curious. Notice what happens. If it does not seem to corroborate what you imagined, look at the surrounding pages. The page that you selected and the idea it presented is a communication from your inner mind. It is using this book as a way of getting the message to you.

When playing with the technique in a group of people, 20-40 percent of the group will have an experience they consider significant. At least 15 percent claim they received nothing at all. Inquiring further, I often discover that a person expected a certain result and did not notice that other results were presented by the mind. For instance, when a person read the actual page, he claimed it had nothing to do with what he imagined. However, when he looked at what the page did say, contained within the text were answers to significant questions he had been holding in mind. On many occasions the page selected not only contained essential information important to the reader, it was also seminal to the overall message the author was addressing in the book. Furthermore, if the reader had formulated a purpose for reading the book, the page selected contains an idea central to the purpose of the book.

The only way I could have discovered this unconventional reading potential is by playing. As a researcher I am intrigued by the historical roots of this process. I am also curious about what internal attitudes and approaches make the results more reliably available to the practitioner. My earnest belief is that if any one person can do this, literally anyone can do it.

Contained within you is all that you need to live your life at the full capacity and expression of your magnificence. It may have been shut down for a while, but your mind is on a path to reclaim your inner genius and express it to enhance the quality of your life. To encourage your further growth and development, your inner guidance brings you to areas for conscious reflection. Consider again your experience of reading through the palm of your hand. Notice the page your mind selected. Every time you pay attention to where your energy is attracted, you open to your inner genius to reveal the insight necessary to take the next step forward in your life.


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RELATED QUESTIONS

Q: How old is the oldest person you know who can read a book this way?

I have not met anyone beyond 70 years old who has played with this technique. I would love to hear a report from any octogenarians who use it. My sense is that there is no lower or upper age limit. Is it too conditioned out of us by the time we get past age ten? Not really. The fact that you are reading this book indicates that you are already someone who thinks that such a possibility could exist.

Q: How can I acquire this unconventional skill at this point in my life? If I acquire the skill

will I retain it?

We have long heard the adage, “If you don’t use it, you lose it.” That is true for a lot of skills like math or playing music or speaking a second language. How about riding a bike? Do you ever lose the ability to ride a bike? Anything that you do with your whole brain stays with you. Once you learn to PhotoRead, you will never lose your ability to Photo-Read. As you play with it, you will become more proficient. In other words, you become more confident and willing to use it in all areas of your life.

Q: Can the PhotoReading method help prevent mental decline due to aging?

When you access the further resources of your brain and mind, you build new connections and strengthen the brain’s production of neural secretions which keep your neurons alive and firing. When you read a book through the palm of your hand, notice how curious you are when you go to “the” page. Notice how engaged you are. Notice how you wonder. That state of wonder is critical to keeping your mind fully active and engaged in the learning process. It also develops a tremendous number of positive learning behaviors that will serve you in other areas of your life.

Taking a few seconds to select a book and locate a page, you aroused some curiosity. Wouldn’t it also be great if in fifteen minutes you could finish that entire book with your conscious mind? You can assist your brain and mind in developing tremendous capacities if you simply play like this.

Q: How do you keep on target yet remain open to relevant connections with the content

of the page?

When you go through a book, it is important that you have a focus or intention in mind. Consult your inner mind in determining what you should be curious about in that book. In this way you allow your nonconscious mind to bypass the critical faculty or editing


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function of the conscious mind. You can then plug into the information of a book much more easily. The clearer you can be about your intention, the easier it is for your mind to provide you the information needed.

Q: When can we understand through vibrational waveforms and not be limited by

language?

PhotoReaders can practice and learn to understand books and languages not their own. They can PhotoRead books upside down and backwards and then describe the book in general as well as describe some scenes in vivid detail. Because the material is in a language they cannot read, this suggests that they were not interacting with words, but with the energetic waveforms of the book. You can interact with energy regardless of the language in which it is written.

Petra, a PhotoReading instructor from Austria, regularly demonstrated a remarkable skill. When traveling, she would request to borrow a novel—written in a language she did not know—from someone reading poolside. She would flip the pages of the novel upside down and backwards, once through. She would then close her eyes and describe what she saw in her mind’s eye. Invariably, the amazed owner of the book would remark that Petra had described the general storyline of the novel and some scenes from the book in precise detail. This remarkable ability of the mind is also yours to be tested.

My colleague Asanara and I are collaborating on a project to bring energetic books out into the marketplace. For example, a book designed for healing is written with the vibrational energy of healing. This means that your body can take on the energetic meaning of that book and the value of the healing processes contained in it, simply by interacting with the book. Healing images will also be included in the books to facilitate the attainment of healing outcomes.

The idea for an energetic book advances a concept I found in a rare book written in 1893 called Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography. The author, Henry Wood, was famous in the New Thought Movement in his day. Back in the 1970s I presented a workshop on this powerful idea at Unity Church, before the development of PhotoReading or reading through the palm of your hand. What if we could bypass the conscious mind altogether and use energetic reading to get the results that we want?

The universe is in a state of expansion. It is expanding in this world. The evolutionary impulse uses us and expands through us. We are representatives of the emerging future. Therefore, when you access the full resources of your genius mind and engage its full expression in your life, you are engaging in the co-creative process with the universe.


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TWO-MINUTE MEDITATION

Take a moment for a short meditation at the close of this chapter. If you can, read the following into a recording device and then play it back to guide your meditation.

Pause for a moment right now to close your eyes and again Drop Into Genius with the gentle ease you have developed through the various exercises throughout this book. Aware of yourself from head to toe, aware of the space your body is occupying. Aware of the gentle feeling of your breathing in your nostrils as you inhale and exhale slowly, smoothly, in a complete cycle without pauses, just a beautiful, continuous flow.

You are developing the rich resources of your genius mind, (NAME), learning ways to express the power and talents within you for improving the quality of your own life…and the lives of those with whom you feel connected. You are mindful of the presence and power that you are…the Soul self, living in a magnificent physical form, residing in the world, here for the purpose of having the experiences you create. You are gaining additional mastery with the full range of talents within you, each time you Drop Into Genius and connect with the vast resources of your nonconscious mind.

Throughout your study and play with the principles and exercises of this book, you have developed the greater capacity to approach your life with an open mind, an open heart, and an open will. You are more present to the emerging future and able to receive guidance from the higher intelligence within you.

Now (NAME), you know how to move beyond the world of objects and appearances to perceive the energetic waveforms around you. You are seeing more deeply, listening more deeply, and feeling more deeply to discover the next steps you can take to realize the highest potential of your life’s expression. You really do feel empowered, right here, right now. Your body relaxed, your mind aware, your emotions at peace, your spirit expressing love, as you expand this beautiful state of wholeness into every area of your life. Breathing just so…inhaling and exhaling with a gentle awareness of the remarkable individual you are. At a rate that is comfortable for you, maintaining an awareness of the flow of your breath in the nostrils, open your eyes and live in peace.


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Chapter 4

Can you trust your intuition to aChieve a big goal?

Yes. Anything can be achieved when you harness the power of your intuition and leverage the knowledge of the universe. All you have to do is ask your mind

the right questions, listen carefully to that still, small voice within, and follow the guidance provided.


A client posted a wonderful testimonial about my technique for using one’s hand to read a book. He had meaningful results for the first three books on which he practiced the technique. His mind consistently picked pages from the books that had something very specific to do with him and what he was

currently thinking about and experiencing. As he continued to practice, he made it a goal to become more accurate, precise, and refined.

Very soon he became discouraged. He would quickly skim through a book, see that it did not perfectly match his perceptions, and wonder why the technique quit working. With a little analysis, he realized that he had been more focused on the energetic content of the first three books. He had shifted his focus to looking for literal translations, which blinded him to the energetic information that was presented to him by his mind.

His assumption was that, by its very nature, his intuitive ability did not need to be developed. Instead, he came to realize that even intuition needs practice—he needed to become more aware of how his intuition works in order to enjoy its fruit. Practice helps set a trajectory for using and trusting your intuition. Regular practice enables you to become more aware of how your intuition is already working.

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In this chapter, we look at the question: Can you trust inner guidance, overcome self-doubt, achieve a big goal, or fulfill a vision?

You will discover how to:

⋅ Work with your nonconscious mind.

⋅ Pose questions for your nonconscious mind.

⋅ Access knowledge reserves not available to the conscious mind.

The topic areas we will explore include:

⋅ What is intuition?

⋅ Distinguishing between intuition and the conscious mind.

⋅ How we can develop intuition.


Read these words into a recording device, and play it back to yourself. These words will strengthen your ability to quickly and easily Drop Into Genius whenever you choose. You will find your relationship with the genius potential is improving each time you listen.

This is your time (NAME), to be in a state of physical relaxation and expanded mental awareness. Take a deep breath in, and with a gentle exhale, close your eyes and drop into the genius potential that resides within you. You are already able to quickly attune, as you bring your awareness of yourself to this space that your body is occupying.

Turning inward to the expanded resources within you is a powerful way to stay connected to your intuition. Letting your sensory systems explore your inner world with inner eyes, inner ears, and an inner body opens even greater access to the rich resources in you. In this way, you develop greater accuracy in communicating with your intuition and applying its guidance to raise the quality of your life experience.

You have shifted into an ideal state of learning, this beautifully comfortable state of relaxed awareness. You can check to notice the relaxation of your forehead and jaw. You can let your shoulders drop…even further, and further now. Feel the gentle flow of the breath as your body breathes your chest, your abdomen. Feel the sensation of your breath in your nostrils. Inhale and exhale gently and slowly without any pauses between the breaths.

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T R U S T Y O U R I N N E R G U I D E

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Inhale and exhale in one continuous cycle. Smoothly. One breath flowing into the next. Observe that continuous, balanced flow. Feel your breath and bring your awareness to how you feel when you are engaged in something that you really love to do.

You are developing a beautiful communication with your beyond-conscious resources, your intuition, your nonconscious mind. Whenever you begin learning something new (NAME) by relaxing and going within, you are making it easier for you to anchor, embody, and integrate all that you learn. Your mind and the vast resources of the universe work in harmony for your highest good, creating greater ease and grace in all areas of your life.

Again, be aware of your physical body and your breathing. Feeling refreshed and aware, gently open your eyes. Maintain awareness of the flow of your breath even with your eyes open and enjoy the calmness and clarity of mind that you established so beautifully.

WHAT IS INTUITION?

Intuition is direct knowing. It is understanding or knowing something to be true without having previously learned it at a conscious level. However, having not previously learned it consciously does not mean you did not previously encounter it.

It has been demonstrated that human beings can perceive a tremendous amount of data in the blink of an eye. When you see people, in a fraction of a second you can know almost everything about them. You know all of their personal history, you know what their home looks like, you know what their preferences are, and how they organize their lives. If you hear them speak, you have a complete download of everything about their family system. All of it is contained in the waves of energy emanating from that individual.

But you do not necessarily know what that information means because you are trained to experience the world through your sensory systems: eyes, ears, feelings, sense of touch, smell, and taste. All of your sensory receptors are taking in waveforms and your brain works to “objectify” the energetic waves into a world of objects.

When you look through a telescope, you objectify the heavens. When you look through a microscope, you objectify something too small to be discerned by the unaided eye. You see and hear a world of objects, time, space and distance. However, you actually only perceive waveforms with two dimensions. One dimension is amplitude—how much energy that waveform carries. The other dimension is frequency—how rapidly the wave moves. Those are the only two dimensions; amplitude and frequency. In the domain of waveforms there is no time or space. All space and all time is contained in the movement of a waveform, and it all exists right now.


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By observing ocean waves, Polynesian cultures could “see” a thousand miles from their shore. Specific wave patterns could indicate landforms and weather far from their home islands. They were amazing navigators because they could translate the information in each wave.

When you look at something, you perceive a waveform of visual information: A light wave. If you go within to the part of you that perceives energy instead of interpreting a world of objects, you will be in direct contact with the full spectrum of information. The transmission of the true energy form is always happening right in front of you.

These letters, words, sentences, paragraphs that you are reading…what are they really? They are a method of transmitting energy through time and space so that my energy can be perceived by you whenever you choose to experience it. You could just as easily close your eyes and know this entire book (and I will show you how to do that later in this book).

When you hear a voice, you translate the sound waves into meaning. If you are ready to be healed and you hear the sound of a healer, you will receive that healing capacity. If someone is clear and willing to serve as a conduit for the perfect manifestation of the cellular tissues of your body, and you are ready to be healed, you can receive that healing through the touch or the pure intention of that person. Notice any area of your physical health that you choose to have improved. You can experience a marked improvement in that during your interaction with the words here. You are receiving the loving prayers of health and fulfillment right now.

Everything can be known by you. In agreement with ancient spiritual wisdom—Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. If you ask a question and are quiet enough to listen to the still, small voice within you, you will hear a correct answer to the question that you have asked.

When you think you are operating in a world of objects that exists outside of your creation of them, you start to get in trouble. If you think, “There is time, and space, and distance,” you will have to deal with one or all of those variables. Believing in what you objectify as having power and substance other than what you give it, you cause the world to operate as if it is outside of you. This is a sure way to become subjected to a world of objects and circumstances—a victim of the world you see. In truth, you are objectifying the world. You are the cause of all you experience in life. There is one field of energy from which all energy and matter in the known universe arises. You and the universe are indistinguishable. Your consciousness is a condensed form of the one energy of the universe. When you realize there is “no out there out there,” then you subject this energy to your consciousness instead of being subjected by it.


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A perfect example is shared by my personal coach, Arnold Patent. A national pastime of the United States is the game of baseball. Baseball is such a great game because we do not believe we already know the outcome. Every pitch and every swing of the bat could lead to a random set of events, none of which are predictable. We love not knowing what is going to happen.

When you think about receiving a gift and imagine what is inside of the box, you do not know what is in there. You might like to guess, but there is an excitement in thinking that you do not really know everything that is going to take place. You cannot predict what is going to happen, and that unpredictability gives you the fully human experience.

As a soul self, you already know everything. You are completely aware of every past incarnation that you have experienced, as well as everything that is going to happen in this lifetime. So what fun would it be if you already knew all of the outcomes?

If you are just awakening to the full power and potential of who you are, then it is fun to discover that you are a healer, or that you can predict things. In the Yoga tradition, these powers are called Siddhis. Spiritual masters admonish you not to get caught up in your psychic powers or ability to heal through touch or transmit thoughts telepathically.

If you focus on them to the exclusion of your purpose here on earth, you detour from the path that you are on. Imagine that you are traveling down a highway, and come to a road sign. You get so excited by the road sign that you decide you are going to stay there instead of moving on to the destination of the full realization of who you are.

If you remain at the place of miraculous powers, then the ego takes over to guard you and protect you from failing. It will guide you to stop what you are doing because you might fail at it. If you try to demonstrate your abilities to other people and fail at it, that would be embarrassing and you do not want that to happen. The crux of developing your intuition is learning to notice what is emerging. Let it show you the way to the full realization of your magnificence.

THE SOURCE OF INTUITION

To fully comprehend the significance of intuition, consider the philosophy that my spiritual teachers teach: You are a descended master from the heavenly realm, born into the physical realm. When you were born into your life, you made two agreements.

The first agreement was to have amnesia about who you are and how powerful you are. One culture describes this as embracing the tree of forgetfulness. Just before birth, we make this agreement to forget who we are so we can have a fully human experience. The


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human experience is a feeling experience, where opposites exist: yin and yang, correct and wrong, yes and no, day and night, black and white. You are born to have this human experience that you cannot have as a soul living in the expanded heavenly realm. At the soul level we are all one, continuously experiencing one loving presence that goes forever without beginning or end. Our earthly existence is one of contrasts.

The second agreement was to hide your power. The place we choose to hide our power is the place where we would never think to look for it. That place is the place of our greatest fear. This is where your ego comes in. The ego is your creation and will be with you as long as you have a physical body, because its purpose is to protect your physical existence. The ego completely identifies with the physical body. Its first job is to protect your helpless, vulnerable, infant body that is completely dependent on the external world for support. Its second job is to guard that gate of fear where we have hidden our power. It distracts us from the one place where we could reclaim the full power and potential of who we are.

All of this is a big backdrop or setup to living in the human experience. Having been born into the physical world, we naturally feel separated from the presence and power of God. We come to believe that we are not connected to the spiritual realm. We think we are vulnerable and alone in a hostile universe. So the guardian or the protector part of us, the ego, gives us information to help us stay safe and get our physical needs met. The voice of the ego is necessarily deceiving, because it promotes the idea of our vulnerability and that death is ultimate annihilation. That makes sense because without a body, the ego does not exist.

So, who are you really? You are not merely human, here to have a brief existence in an attempt to become a more spiritual being. You are a spiritual being—the eternal, timeless, deathless soul self—a descended spiritual master here to have a human experience.

As a spiritual entity inhabiting a physical existence, you are not bound by time and space. You have absolute psychic powers. You have absolute powers to heal. You can do all kinds of amazing things, including reading books through the palm of your hand.

Contemplate the distinctions I have just described above. These will help you to reclaim the fullness of the power and potential that comprises who you really are. Why not read a book through the palm of your hand? If you could receive communication from a higher consciousness that is indistinguishable from you, wouldn’t it be useful to be guided by it on an ongoing basis, wherever you happen to be? Drop Into Genius and the guidance is there for you.


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BARRIERS TO EFFECTIVE INTUITION

To get the most from your intuition you must be aware of the three barriers to effective intuition:

⋅ Asking the wrong question (or asking the question wrong)

⋅ Not listening to answers

⋅ Not following guidance

Asking the Wrong Question

When it comes to trusting inner guidance, overcoming self-doubt, and achieving large goals and visions, the biggest problem by far is asking the wrong question. When you ask a question like, “How come this is not working?” your mind runs through your physical, mental, and spiritual universe searching to answer the question.

Your question presupposed that something is not working, so your mind looks for evidence to validate or answer the question based on that presupposition. It is essential to ask the right question, as specifically as possible. For example, in leaving my house today for the recording studio, I ran through my mind, “What else do I need to remember to bring to the studio session today?”

Most people ask the question, “Am I forgetting anything?” If the answer is Yes, what does that mean? Does it mean “Yes, I am forgetting some specific thing”? Or does it mean “Yes, I am forgetting something general in my life ”? The brain is extremely literal. You must pay attention to what are you asking and what answers you are receiving.

The better question, “What else do I need to remember to bring today?” immediately puts the brain into a search mode for a productive answer.

When I was 19, my hypnosis teacher taught me that if you ask someone during an interview: “Is there anything else,” the answer is usually “No.” (It is kind of like going into a store and getting the question: “Can I help you?” The answer is often: “No, I’m just looking.”) But if instead you ask: “And what else?” or “Say more about that,” the mind will open up and continue to generate responses. Pay attention to the subtle differences of questions and refine your questions so that they produce the results you desire.

Try this in conversation: Ask someone, “What happened in your life today?” When she strings a number of things together, ask: “Is there anything else?” Generally that question will bring everything to a quick stop. It is as if the mind goes blank.

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Not Listening to Answers

The second big challenge in tuning into your intuition is being quiet enough to listen to the answer. A regular practice of meditation is the best training to develop a quiet mind. I will give you a number of great ideas to develop your ability to meditate in the chapter titled, “Meditate Like a Master in Three Minutes.”

Keep a “portable memory bank” in your pocket or purse. This is a simple pad of paper or index card on which you can write down thoughts that occur to you during your day in response to a question you posed to your higher consciousness. The best ideas tend to slip into our awareness when we are temporarily distracted or give ourselves the opportunity to let our thoughts wander creatively.

In The Genius Code, Dr. Win Wenger offers a number of excellent relaxation exercises that reduce the “noise” of the mind, so that it becomes easier to notice inner pictures, hear inner sounds and voices, and feel more clearly about any questions you ask of your higher consciousness. Part of the trick to better inward listening is to outrun the editing function of the conscious mind. Surprising yourself, distracting your conscious mind, and discovering creative ways to receive answers are all part of the Genius Code training. Consider getting the home study course if intuition, problem-solving, and creativity are key topics on which you would like to gain more skills.

Not Following Guidance

The third big problem in using our intuition is being willing to follow the guidance that is given. If for example, you ask for guidance, and guidance is given but you do not follow it, the higher power that sent that information to you at a conscious level generally responds, “She’s not serious about this.” Or “Yeah, he is asking but he is not willing to follow through. I will wait until he is ready to follow through.” Essentially, the power and energy that is waiting to express the expanding universe through you, backs away to wait until you are serious. It can wait. Do you want to wait, or start now to live life to the fullest?

HOW TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN INTUITION AND CONSCIOUS MIND

To help discern intuitive messages from other random thoughts, let’s look at some training scenarios. The first is very much a gut-level response of sensing what is and what is not. We call this the Yes-No Response.



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Neuro-Linguistic Programming Technique

When I studied neuro-linguistic programming, one of our paired exercises was called crystal ball gazing. You hold a crystal ball between you and your partner, and your partner gazes into the ball. When you look over the crystal ball at your partner, you look for any subtle changes in nonverbal appearance or behavior. Then you begin to dissect the universe into Yes and No questions.

For example, you might start by saying, “I see you are thinking of either the past or the future.” You notice which one gets a greater response. Maybe your partner really lit up with widened eyebrows or dilated pupils. Perhaps you notice fuller lips, smoother skin or bulging veins. All of these subtle changes indicate your partner is more attuned to one of the two possible answers. You then say, “Ahh...yes, I see you are thinking about the future.” You are simply reinforcing or amplifying that Yes or No response.

Here is a simple way to try this on yourself. First, become aware of yourself from head to toe. Then, read the following aloud.

⋅ “My name is George.”

⋅ Notice your response. Now, in your mind say, “My name is George.” Again, notice your response. (If your name really is George, use a different name here.)

⋅ Now say, “My name is_______” with your actual name.

⋅ Now say someone else’s name, e.g., “My name is Marilyn.”

⋅ Now say your own name.

As you recognize your true name and a false name, consider your answers to these questions:

⋅ What difference do you feel in your body?

⋅ Where do you notice it?

⋅ Do you notice it in your gut?

⋅ Do you notice it in your face?

⋅ Do you notice it in how the energy shifts within you?

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Ideo-Motor Response Questioning Technique

Early in my career, I used a technique called Ideo-Motor Response Questioning to get information about deeper issues going on with hypnosis clients. I held the client’s hand at the wrist, gently supporting the wrist. Then I would touch the thumb and say, “When I ask you a question and the answer is No, your thumb will move. Show me a No response,” and the thumb would move slightly.

Then I would rub the top of the index finger and say, “When I ask you a question and the answer is Yes, you will indicate by moving your index finger. Show me a Yes response,” and the finger would twitch slightly. It is a slight twitch because the conscious mind will tend to move large muscle groups. But the nonconscious mind—or as I used to call it when doing hypnotism, the “subconscious”—will tend to move the finer, subtler muscle groups.

I could easily get a clear Yes and No response from the subtle twitches of the index finger and thumb. As long as I was asking a yes/no question, I could ask any question and get a response. In this way I could proceed with my questioning to track down the client’s issue and the resources needed to resolve it.

Pendulum Technique

You can also use a pendulum to get a reading of your own subtle muscle movements. Tie a small object like a ring on a string. Anything you can dangle from a string or a thread will work, but a thinner object is better because it moves more easily. Some people use a weighted pendulum at the end of a short thin chain.

You wrap the chain over your hand and drape it over your index finger so that the pendulum hangs down and swings freely. Hold your arm up so that your hand is in front of your midline with the pendulum straight down.

Then say, “Between questions, I’d like to see this circle in a clockwise fashion.” Then watch as it circles clockwise.

Then say, “Show me a Yes response.” It will move one direction: either forward and back, away from you and toward you; or back and forth, left and right of your midline.

Then say, “Show me a No response.” It will move in the opposite direction from the Yes response: either forward and back, away from you and toward you; or back and forth, left and right of your midline.

Now that you know what a Yes and No response look like, you can ask questions and the subtle muscles of your arm, your shoulder, your hand, will cause that pendulum to swing as your subconscious or nonconscious mind directs the subtle muscles to make a shift.


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Dowsing Rod Technique

Finding answers from the nonconscious mind can also be accomplished with dowsing rods. Learning Strategies Corporation co-created Marie Diamond’s Diamond Dowsing course which includes dowsing rods and training on how to use them.

Dowsing rods are elongated L-shaped extensions you hold so that the longer part of the “L” stretches out in front of your midline. You could use a coat hanger or any metal rods, but copper and brass rods work best. Bend each rod into an elongated L-shape.

Hold them straight out and parallel to the ground, which is the neutral position, just floating there. In response to the questions you ask, your subtle energy will move the two rods apart or together. For me, the rods move apart with a Yes response and cross each other for a No response.

To use the rods, start by asking, “Is there a negative energy form here?” You walk toward an area and do not see anything change in the rods. Then ask, “Is there a positive energy vortex anywhere here?” You move toward that area and see the rods spread apart.

You can say, “How far out does this person’s energy emanate?” If you walk that direction, you will see the rods open up as soon as you enter the person’s energy field. You can also use dowsing on a person’s body to locate a problem that needs to be healed.

Ideo-Motor Response Questioning Technique, pendulums, and dowsing rods are all outgrowths of this fundamental self-sense that you get when you ask yourself a yes/no question. What is the response that you feel?

I trained myself for a Yes response to a relaxing feeling in my jaw line, and for a No response, a knitting feeling in my forehead between my eyebrows. I can ask, “Should I do this?” and get an answer from my face very quickly.

A friend of mine from a mastermind group we belonged to was very intuitive, but her parents did not abide by it. She was raised with a strict Catholic education and they felt there was something wrong with her.

Once, in the middle of the night, she woke up with a dream that her cousins were burning to death in a fire. She ran into her parent’s bedroom and said, “We have to save my cousins. They are burning!” Her parents said, “It is just a nightmare. Go back to sleep.” In the morning, they got the call that a fire had occurred and her two cousins had been killed in it.


http://www.learningstrategies.com/Dowsing/Introduction

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Her parents never acknowledged that their little girl had the precognitive dream. Similarly, our culture tends to dismiss these kinds of gifts in people. Every single one of us has genius capacities within, but they get marginalized or excluded as a result of our enculturation.

When my friend would ask somebody, “How are you doing?” if that person lied about their situation, her back would hurt. After awhile, her back would be in such excruciating pain, she would say, “I’ve got to stop you. I asked how you were doing and I have intuition that communicates to me through my back. When my back hurts, I know a person’s lying to me, and my back’s really hurting right now.” Then the person she was talking to would come clean and admit, “You are right. Things aren’t so good. Here’s what has been going on...”

We develop discomfort around negative energy so that the message gets our attention and creates an impact. It is like waking up from a nightmare. Our nonconscious mind has been giving us the message day after day after day, and if we keep denying it or walking away from the message, finally it has to crank up the volume so loud, that we get shaken awake in the middle of the night.

I suggested to my friend, that rather than having back pain as the signal for lying or negative energy, she could change the signal to a twitching right ankle or left thumb. Do not make it physically uncomfortable. You do not need an intense signal if you are willing to pay attention—to be still enough to hear the response. Your brain, body, mind and spirit will be happy to give you very gentle guidance.

Muscle Testing Technique

Muscle testing is another way to check for a Yes or No response. You can test muscles on other people or yourself. To test others, have that person hold his arm out. Then you apply pressure at his wrist. If his muscles are strong, the arm is harder to push down. If his muscles are weak, the arm is easy to push down.

When the muscles go weak, it is generally the result of negative energy. This is the equivalent of a No response (No = negative = weak). In a positive energetic field, muscles will tend to go strong. This would be the equivalent of a Yes response (Yes = positive = strong).

To check this on yourself, press your thumb and index finger (or your thumb and middle finger) together on one hand. With your other hand, make a hook with your index finger and pull your other thumb and finger apart. Feel how hard it is to break that circle.


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Next, say, “Show me a strong response.” Then try to break the circle. You probably will not be successful.

Then say, “Show me a weak response.” Try again to break the circle and see how your body goes weak. Say, “Show me a Yes response” and feel how it goes strong. Say “Show me a No response” and feel how it goes weak.

You can ask any question and get a yes/no response in this way. This technique does not require such a subtle, internal response. When I go grocery shopping, for example, or when I go to a restaurant, I say, “What is it that my body needs to eat? Do I need this? Or do I need that?” Each time I go weak, I just avoid it. And each time I go strong, I put it in the cart or order the menu item.

Let’s consider some other simple applications of muscle testing. Say you are wondering which movie to purchase from a selection of available titles. You could muscle test for the answer. Or if you have a couple of movies at home and you are wondering which movie you want to watch tonight, you can muscle test as you look at the title. Does it even matter which movie you watch first? Your next step could be very important to consider.

We are the conduits through which the expanding universe does its work in this planet’s physical domain. As descended masters, information comes to us regarding which next steps to take along our journey. To illustrate this, when my child was coming down with an illness, my wife and I could tell his energy was a little off. Invariably, he would always ask for and watch an old video of The Chronicles of Narnia. Sure enough, the symptoms of his illness would become more apparent. Watching the movie, he was contacting his spirit to receive the necessary information to make his way through his illness. It was also a good opportunity for my wife and me to do healing work with him.

For me, the movie Thunderheart was the one I would turn to when I was feeling off-center. It is a powerful film about recognizing and being true to your heritage, the land, and yourself. You might have a favorite film that serves you in times of need. Looking at the title of the film and knowing the energetic content, your body can tell you, “At this time, this is the one for you to watch.” Now if you say, “Which film should I watch? This one? No. That one? No. Should I watch any film tonight? No.” Listen to your intuition!


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TESTING INTUITION

Jack Canfield likes to use this formula: E + R = O.

⋅ “E” is the event

⋅ “R” is the response

⋅ “O” is the outcome

Make a study of your own life. By trial and error, notice that when you respond a certain way, a certain outcome is produced. Say for example, you are driving to a meeting downtown and several routes will get you there. Ask your intuition, “Which route should I take? Should I take this route? Yes or No? No. Should I take this route? Yes or No? Yes! Then take that route and notice what happens. To test your intuition, next time take the “No” route and see what happens.

A little caution about going against your intuition: I am only suggesting testing for the early stages of discerning your intuition. Once you have opened to this gift of natural intuition and recognize that the communication from a higher consciousness comes through you, I recommend you do not go against your intuition to test it.

To take an example from my life, my family was going through a significantly difficult financial time. My wife was great at making ends meet with whatever meager financial resources we had at the time. As the sole breadwinner, I was concerned that everybody was going through a difficult time. So I asked higher consciousness, “Will I be out of this at some point? Yes. How soon will it be? Will it be in the next six months? No. Will it be in the next twelve months? No. Will it be in the next eighteen months? Yes. Will it be longer than eighteen months? No. Will it be less then eighteen months? No. So eighteen months? Yes.”

Every want or need was going to be fulfilled for me. I would want for nothing, if I just kept doing my work. Every couple of months, I would check to see if there was anything else I should be doing. “No, you are doing fine. Stay the course.” “How many more months will it be?” At that point, the answer was always what I had been told originally. That test was absolutely accurate. Everything opened up for us financially by the exact month specified.


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RELATED QUESTIONS

Q: I’ve had a hard time trying to recognize the difference between intuitive guidance from a

higher source and imagination that is a personal fantasy about obtaining my own desires.

Guidance from the pure genius mind comes into your imagination through vivid imagery, vivid somatic experience (bodily sensations), and vivid meaning. The difference between imagination and fantasy is subtle and will be most detectable by exploring the imagery and somatic representations you receive.

Everything you think comes through the filter of your imagination. At a nonconscious level, your mind determines which perceptions you experience. So the question becomes: When is your perception a self-generated fantasy out of a wish or hope for personal gain, and when is it a bona fide connection to the highest good that is attempting to emerge in your life? The only way to discern the difference is by asking the question and exploring. You have to make it your own personal research. When you receive some guidance, honestly examine your own intentions. Follow the images and find out where they take you. Working with an Eidetic Imagery coach could be very helpful as well. My colleagues Leslie Dagnall and Wendy Yellen are certified by Dr. Akhter Ahsen to serve as Eidetics coaches.

In The Genius Code course, you can find out more about asking a question and then noticing the imagery that occurs in your mind. Instead of trying to produce an image, you observe an image that emerges and then follow it. Ask it to take you wherever it needs to, and show you whatever you need to see. This will take you on a bit of a fantasy.

Your nonconscious mind will communicate in symbols and feelings and images but you might not accurately interpret the meaning. The conscious mind wants to rush into an interpretation. I encourage you to observe it and then ask questions of it. “What is it that I am supposed to know about this image? This object that I am seeing in my image, why is it here? What is it here to show me?” and so on.

Begin a dialogue with the image that is presented. This is your imagination that you are operating by asking discerning questions. In subsequent intuitive communications, you make subtler discernments.

Q: Is it possible to base the Yes or No response on a positive or negative feeling?

Yes. Think about the energy in your body. In response to the question, “How are you doing?” you have heard people say, “I’m really feeling up.” Or “I’m feeling kind of down.”


http://www.eidetictraining.com/

http://www.eideticlifecoach.com/

http://www.imagepsychology.com/


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Up and down are literal representations of where the energy in your body is at that moment. When you feel your energy moving up, that is probably what you are referring to as a good, positive feeling. When you feel your energy drop or go down, that is probably a bad, negative feeling.

The challenge I have with saying, “Give me signals by manipulating huge feelings” or “Make me feel bad every time I get a No response,” is that you do not have to feel bad to get a clear signal. I encourage you to go for a subtler shift: a slight rising or falling of the energy rather than a strong good/bad feeling.

Q: I use the Pendulum technique quite effectively, but it can create a distraction in public.

Would you please go over the thumb and forefinger yes/no response technique?

If you are a skilled practitioner with a pendulum, you can just look at your hand and say, “Give me a Yes response,” or “Give me a No response,” and see your signature twitch. For example, a twitch in my thumb does not come at the tip of my thumb, but in the tendons down toward the heel of my hand. With my index finger, I see movement of the tendon in the back of my hand more than the tip of my finger.

Here is a quick review of the thumb and forefinger approach:

Rest your elbow on a table and hold your other hand up so that you can look at it. (It doesn’t matter whether it is your right hand or your left hand.)

Your wrist is limp. Your hand is relaxed.

Look at your thumb and index finger.

Ask for a Yes response.

Observe your whole hand and notice any subtle movements that occur.

Ask for a No response.

Observe your whole hand and notice any subtle movements that occur.

This can still be a little off-putting in public. You might try some sensation in your right or left foot or sensation in your face like I get in my jaw and my forehead. There are a lot of ways to get that Yes or No response.

Q: What spurs people to adopt common ideas around the globe and create a movement?

Often, when we do the work of a bigger evolutionary movement on the planet, we are not alone. Other people all over the world, simultaneously, get the same message. Those

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who respond often say, “I’m being called.” To think that they are the only ones being called is unlikely. It makes more sense to say, “I know that I’ve received this call, I am going to respond to it.”

For example, Lynne Twist woke up in the middle of a dream one morning and said, “I had the weirdest dream last night.” Her husband Bill said, “I did too. I imagined this jungle native with this bizarre headdress on.” And Lynne said, “I did too.” They both had the same dream of the exact same tribe in the jungles of the Amazon Rainforest. As a result, they ended up tracking down the native from their dream. They went to visit a culture that had been living in a very remote way for centuries.

Because the Achuar indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest are a dream culture, they reached out in the dream world and called Lynne and Bill. And they did not just contact one couple. They sent the dream out to all of humanity. Lynne and Bill just happened to be in the right place at the right time, in the right frame of consciousness to pick up the call and receive the message.

Your intuition could be part of a more powerful global movement for humanity, an important spiritual awakening that is occurring. When you get the call, it is up to you to decide whether you will heed the call and go for the awakening or not. I am actively working to help awaken humanity from a nightmare, and working to change the dream from one of emptiness and unsustainable consumption, to one of social justice, sustainability, and fulfillment. As you explore the messages in this book, you will find your dreams of wholeness and fulfillment are able to be answered. An organization devoting its efforts in a global way is called 4YearsGo. Take a look at their initiatives.

CLOSED-EYE MEDITATION

Take a moment for a closed-eye meditation at the close of this chapter. If you can, read the following into a recording device and then play it back for your meditation.

Take this moment right now to close your eyes. Become aware of your own breathing. Become aware of the flow of breath in your nostrils and realize how your body has continued to breathe for you. Notice the rise and fall of your abdomen, your chest, shoulders, as you breathe in and out. Notice the flow of breath in your nostrils and take a moment to be with yourself and the space that your body occupies. Feel a sense of gratitude and really thank yourself for taking this time to focus in this way.

In reclaiming your genius, it is important that you heal any wounded learner that resides in you. Connect more powerfully with that communication from source, from higher power. That higher level


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of consciousness is always expressing through you the true presence and power that you are. Determine now to find ways to play with your intuitive guidance, to connect in to your intuition to ask the right questions, to be quiet enough to listen, and to be willing to follow the guidance that is given.

And at a rate that is comfortable for you, bring your awareness to the space around you and see into the energy all around that supports and sustains you. Maintaining this feeling of grace and ease, walk in peace throughout your day.






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Chapter 5

Can you meditate like a master in three minutes?

Yes. The yogis in the foothills of the Himalayas have been practicing and teaching meditation for 5,000 years. They have tested every possible option.

This is a simple technique that can be absolutely effective in three minutes.


Once, while I was presenting to a civic service club, I led a very simple minute- and-a-half meditation that involved closing the eyes and thinking of the word “Relax” as if it was being repeated in a space behind the eyes. After the demonstration, a man said, “You know, I need to share this…” as he

pulled out two pieces of paper from his coat pocket. He said, “These are two prescriptions for tranquilizers that I got this morning from a doctor. Now I do not think I need them. I haven’t been that calm in over six months!” It proved to me that just a couple of minutes in state of relaxation can have profound effects.

If you currently have a regular daily practice of meditation, congratulations! One of my meditation teachers said that when you are meditating, you are building an elephant chain. When an elephant is very young, to bring it under control, trainers put a large chain on the elephant’s leg and it pulls and pulls against that chain but it cannot release itself. Later, they can control the elephant with a small rope because it has learned that if it tugs, it is not going to be successful in breaking free.

The conscious mind is like a powerful elephant that will make quite a mess unless you keep it under control and tell it what you want. A daily practice of meditation is like putting another link on the elephant chain. The day that you stop meditating, you break the

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chain and have to start all over again. The analogy of dog training also applies. If you have trained a dog, you know that you need to be consistent in the reinforcement that you give a dog. If you give a command to a dog but do not follow it up with a consequence for disobedience, it learns that you are not serious.

In the early days as I learned to meditate, I heard this and I thought, “Wow. I’ve got to be really serious about this.” So I followed very stringent practices, and today I can share that there is a delightfully refreshing possibility beyond all those disciplines.

When you meditate, you do not enter an altered state of consciousness. To the contrary, the yogis describe meditation as your most natural state of mind. The state in which you identify with the world around you is the altered state. Your unaltered state is the calm that you attain when you drop into the interior place, guided by your own breath.

The purpose of meditation is to expand consciousness. It activates synchronous neural wiring and allows you to experience holistic vision of the unity and interconnection of all things.

In this chapter you discover:

⋅ How to quiet your mind.

⋅ How to meditate most easily.

⋅ How meditation can be applied to connect you to your inner genius.

⋅ How to quickly realize the benefits of meditation.

⋅ How to raise the quality of your life, and improve the results that you create.


⋅ The ‘right’ way to meditate.

⋅ Meditation sounds or mantras.

⋅ The astounding immediate and long-term benefits of meditation.

⋅ Related technologies and techniques.

In addition, we will consider other questions about meditation including the best timing for meditation and how to avoid falling asleep.

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⋅ OPENING RELAXATION SCRIPT

Here is your opening script. It is a lovely guided meditation that you guide your own mind to follow. Read these words into a recording device, and play it back to yourself. These words strengthen your ability to quickly and easily Drop Into Genius. Each time you do, you free yourself to create the life you choose.

It is true that you can meditate like a master in three minutes (NAME). In the chapter you are studying on meditation, you will learn everything you need to know to benefit from a quick, easy practice of meditation. And the words you are hearing right now will begin the process of learning how at a deeply personal, experiential level.

With a deep breath in and a gentle exhale, close your eyes and simply bring your awareness of yourself to the space that your body is occupying. All of the body is in the mind and in a busy day sometimes the mind is not all in the body but wandering outward in the world. Bring your mind to your body, become aware of your being, right here where you are now (NAME).

This simple step lets you Drop Into Genius—allows you to contact the rich resources of your mind—and places you into the ideal state for learning. Relax your forehead. Just let it smooth out. Release the muscles around your jaw so that your teeth unclench. Imagine a gentle smile at the corners of your mouth and the corners of your eyes.

Feel the gentle flow of breath as your body breathes in and out. Feel the sensation of breath in your nostrils. Inhale and exhale, gently, slowly, without any pauses between the breaths. Become aware of how the air feels as it flows from the base of your nostrils where they connect to your upper lip, all the way up through your eyebrows in the center of your forehead. Breathe as if your inhale and exhale were one continuous cycle, smoothly flowing into each other. Breathing in, think the sound “Sooooo” with the inhale, then the sound “Hummmm” with the exhale.

This Ancient Sanskrit phrase, “Soham” means “I Am That.” Let it be as though the sounds flow together as a single stream. When you observe the flow of that stream, maintain the feel of the breath. Follow the breath as it flows in your nostrils, inhaling and exhaling in one complete cycle of breath in a continuous flow. Hear the sound “Sooooo” with the inhale…“Hummmm” with the exhale.

I Am That I Am. Maintaining this awareness, without breaking the flow, gently open your eyes.

Maintain the flow even with your eyes open (NAME). Maintain the calmness of the mind. Resolve in your mind to calm your mind this way many times during the day. Because whatever you do repeatedly with your mind becomes the mind’s habit. The mind will rediscover its original calm nature.


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HOW TO QUIET YOUR MIND

My meditation teacher used to say, “Unless you can meditate in Grand Central Station in New York City during rush hour, you are not really meditating.” Noise is a constant in modern society. But wherever you might be, there is stillness within you. That natural state of stillness is always available to you.

Instead of accessing our inner stillness, we tend to identify with the sounds of chaos and noise. For example, if you have ever tried to fall asleep and there is a dog barking in the neighborhood, what do you think about? Most people think: I want to go out there and stop the dog from barking, or tell the owner to keep that dog quiet. If it is not a dog, perhaps you can hear a faucet dripping in the kitchen and that drip is driving you nuts.

Studying hypnotism, I learned a way to exploit the noise and leverage it to your benefit. Give yourself a suggestion that every time you hear that dog bark, the barking will bring you to a deeper state of calm, an interior relaxation. Or every time that faucet drips, the water brings you to a deeper state of inner peace. This way, you identify with your internal state as opposed to what is going on around you.

Similarly, many of us identify who we are:

⋅ First with our body—This is who I am.

⋅ Second with our emotions—I am what I’m feeling right now.

⋅ Third with our thinking—I am what I think.

In fact, Descartes said, “Cogito, ergo sum” which translates to “I think, therefore I am.” He was close, but according to Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes got it backwards. In his book Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, Damasio found the truth to be: because we exist, we are able to think.

In meditation, we dis-identify with the body, we dis-identify with the emotions, we dis-identify with the thinking, and instead identify with the soul. The first process in meditation is becoming aware of what is happening around you. Then you begin to withdraw your awareness from the external to focus on the internal.

This inward focus can happen quite profoundly within the first few moments of meditating. You are creating a distinct psycho-physiological state of low physical arousal with a high level of mental alertness. This process characterizes meditation. The quickest way to change focus is through the process used in the beginning of this chapter.

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First, withdraw your awareness. Bring your mind that has been running around out in the world into the space your body is occupying. This establishes your intention so the mind knows that these next few minutes are not for the world, but for connecting inwardly. Where your attention goes, your energy flows. You are sending your energy within, bringing your mind to yourself so you are aware of your physical presence in the moment.

Next, you bring relaxation to your face. Focusing on smoothing your forehead has a very strong overarching effect through all of your physiology. Relaxing the forehead, the jaw, and bringing a gentle smile to your face, releases neuro-chemicals that rapidly pass through the entire body. Many studies have been conducted to show the importance of relaxing your face to enter meditative states.

Next, you become aware of the flow of your breath. Notice the gentle touch of breath flowing from the base of your nostrils through your eyebrows in the center of your forehead. Concentrating on the flow of your breath automatically brings your awareness into the present moment. When you feel the sensation in your nostrils, it is a present-moment awareness, so this simple act brings you instantly into the “here and now.” In the present moment, you are not accessing past feelings or future thoughts.

The next step is to balance the length of the breath. Inhale and exhale for an equal time with no pauses between them. The breath is an invisible link between your mind and body. Balancing the breath brings about balance in the mind and body. The active and the passive sides of the brain, and the active and passive sides of the body all come into harmony as your breath flows in one continuous cycle of inhalation and exhalation. That is why a sense of equanimity begins to emerge during meditation. As you calm the breath, you calm the mind, which calms the body simultaneously.

In fact, at any moment, you can become aware that one of your nostrils is more active than the other. Right now, I am noticing that my right nostril is a bit more active. You can test that by covering one nostril and then the other as you breathe in and out and notice which seems to be more open.

The final stage of meditation is a “focus word.” This keeps the conscious mind in a state of concentration and contemplation, so that it does not wander off. Your focus word can be anything; One, Peace, Love, OM, the holy name of your spiritual master, rosary prayers, you can decide. Simply imagine a sound flowing with the breath. During the opening relaxation script you used Soham; “So” with the inhale and “Ham” (pronounced “hum”) with the exhale. The use of focus words or mantras will be explained in more detail below.


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To summarize the three-minute meditation practice, here are the steps:

⋅ Withdraw your awareness to the space your body is occupying.

⋅ Relax your face and shoulders.

⋅ Notice how the flow of your breath feels in your nostrils.

⋅ Breathe in one continuous cycle of inhale and exhale.

⋅ Imagine the sound “So” with the inhale, “Hum” with the exhale.

You are meditating!

MEDITATION SOUNDS OR MANTRAS

Here is a bit more on the sounds used in meditation. A mantra is a sacred phrase recited —most often done silently in the mind—during meditation. The Sanskrit word Soham, pronounced “So Hum,” is the simplest phrase used by meditators in the Himalayan Tradition. Soham means, “I Am That.” In the Old Testament Bible, when Moses asked the burning bush, “Who should I say you are?” it answered with one word that meant, “I am that I am.”

The usefulness of the mantra is described in a parable yogis tell about a young spiritual seeker who went up in the mountains of the Himalayas to become a disciple of a great Swami. The swami was heading out for the day and told the disciple, “Do not wake the sleeping giant out back. You can still chop wood and carry water but whatever you do, let him continue to sleep.”

After the master had been gone awhile, the disciple tired of the strenuous chores. He decided to wake that giant to finish the chores figuring that when the work was done, the giant would go back to sleep. Then the disciple woke the giant who immediately said, “Give me work or I’ll devour you.”

The disciple directed the giant to the pile of wood in need of chopping. In the blink of an eye, all the wood was chopped. Then the disciple directed the giant to carry water from the well. Again, in the blink of an eye, all the water was carried. Then the disciple was out of work. So the giant started after the disciple to eat him.

To escape the giant, the disciple ran as fast as he could. During the chase, the terrified disciple passed the master. To save the disciple, the master told the giant, “Climb up and

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down that tree over there.” So the giant climbed up and down the tree and was kept busy and distracted from eating the disciple.

My teacher explained, “The immense power of the mind is designed to work all day long for you. But if it does not have a task to focus upon, it will consume you. This story explains that if the giant of your mind is awake, you must direct its awareness to focus on the breath flowing up and down the (nostrils or) spine.” In the three-minute meditation we focus the mind on flow traveling up and down in the nostrils along with the mantra or focus word. Practicing this simple procedure frees you to more fully engage your natural state of bliss.

THE ‘RIGHT’ WAY TO MEDITATE

Starting in 1974, I became a fairly disciplined meditator for seven or eight years and then drifted away from it. After some years, I tried to get back into the practice of meditating. I still had my “mala beads” used to count the number of repetitions of my mantra. I would repeat my mantra whenever I felt the greatest need and always benefitted from it, but I never really got back into a regular practice. Early in the year 2000, I felt myself being called back into meditation, feeling a need to be more disciplined about my practice.

The opportunity came when I went to a silence retreat with the person who initiated me into Raja Yoga (the “Royal Path” of Yoga), Swami Veda Bharati. On the second day of the retreat, he said, “All of you who studied with me in the early days (and that was thirty years earlier), you know that we had a lot of disciplines. Forget it. Forget about them.”

That blew my mind because he was my model for discipline. He used to claim, “No, I’m not very disciplined. In fact, if the word ‘discipline’ is written on a piece of paper, I’ll run out of the room.” But that was not my experience of him. He had a very disciplined practice. He explained, “I have simply trained my inclination to meditate.”

Training your inclination is like learning to brush your teeth. In the early days your parents probably had to force you to brush your teeth. But eventually, they trained your inclination to brush your teeth when you wake up in the morning and before you go to bed. Now you would not start the day without brushing your teeth. And that is how practiced Swami Veda was at meditation.

So there I was sitting in the retreat when he dropped his bomb on me: Forget about following the meditation disciplines?! I was so stunned that I almost could not believe it.


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At the retreat, I discovered that I did not have to go through dozens of disciplines to enter a state of meditation. All I needed to do was drop into an inner place of silence. That is precisely what Swami Veda was telling us. For just two or three minutes at a time, drop into the silence. Throughout the day, whenever the thought occurs to you, meditate.

THE BENEFITS OF MEDITATION

In 2004, The Institute of Noetic Sciences published a paper by Michael Murphy and Steve Donovan on the physical and psychological effects of meditation. The paper was a review of contemporary research with a comprehensive bibliography. They surveyed over 2,000 scientific studies that documented an enormous range of benefits from meditation which included:

⋅ Physiological changes in metabolism and respiration.

⋅ Alleviation of pain.

⋅ Positive psychological and behavioral effects like shifts in perception, concentration, brain physiology, and attention.

⋅ Enhanced subjective experiences like a sense of equanimity or internal balance, and extrasensory experiences.

They found that meditators have a significantly more youthful physiology than non-meditators, as measured by a number of classic biomarkers of aging. Most importantly, they found that meditation is the only factor that has been demonstrated to raise levels of consciousness.

HOW TO REALIZE BENEFITS QUICKLY

Dropping into meditation and following the three-minute process several times a day will result in greater benefits in a shorter timeframe than attempting much more elaborate disciplines once a day. When used every couple of hours throughout the day, this three-minute process reaps immediate personal benefits by creating a groove or a channel for the mind to fall into. Your mind becomes far more attuned when it is brought back to center on a regular basis rather than aimlessly wandering as it normally does.

I was a nervous, twitchy kid when growing up. At age 18 when I first started meditating, someone mentioned, “You are a very calm, relaxed person.” I could not believe my ears because I had always thought of myself as extremely wound up. Ever since then, I have been a big advocate for developing a meditation practice. The key is to keep it simple.

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Swami Veda and I produced a recorded meditation series, Meditate with the Himalayan Masters. The series makes it possible for anyone to use a simple three-minute process to meditate like a master anytime.

To anchor your meditation state, we start with a 30-minute meditation that brings you into a very deep state. That guided meditation is followed immediately with a three-minute version of the same experience. This three-minute version is repeated every couple of hours throughout the day to bring your mind to this same place of deep inner silence and calm, instantly. All day you reinforce that deep state.

A major advantage of using the recordings to meditate is that you can make rapid progress and rely on the skills of an enlightened master to guide you in exactly what you must do. Once you feel comfortable doing it on your own, the recordings are no longer needed, but are always available for refreshers.

When you meditate in three-minute sessions, you drop into your genius quickly and effectively. You are training yourself to enter gracefully into the presence of your true power and potential. You immediately feel calmer, more focused, and centered, and become more present to what happens throughout the day. This state of “presence” will result in a heightened sensory perception and heightened intuitive ability. Other natural powers like the ones described in this book (accelerated learning, healing, transformation) become more accessible to you as well.

To connect with the great knowledge database of the universe and learn new things, the best way is to meditate and ask for what you want. In asking, the answers come almost immediately on the heels of phrasing of the question. For example, after I was initiated into this Himalayan tradition, I began wondering, “How can I help people most effectively with the work that I’m doing? How can I help raise consciousness and give people access to the full resources that are within them?”

Within a short time of asking the question, the concept for Paraliminal technology literally dropped into my consciousness. I began to explore and create Paraliminal technology by asking for further guidance. Today, Paraliminals benefit clients world-wide and represent an enormous product line for my company. I am convinced that the idea was inspired—literally “breathed into” me—by the higher consciousness supporting my purpose in life.



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MEDITATION TECHNIQUES AND TECHNOLOGIES

Whatever you do with your mind on a regular basis becomes the mind’s habit. The mind’s habit has been to identify with events of the external world and forget about the magnificent resources within you. You do not have to be a victim of emotions or worldly events. Instead you can recognize the deep sense of love, the sense of peace, and the blessings here for you as your natural state. Tapping into that internal resource regularly, you will recognize that your daily experience of life improves.

Holosync

Holosync, developed by Bill Harris at Centerpointe Research, is a sophisticated form of audio technology using offset binaural frequencies to induce the brain wave patterns of deep meditation. Holosync frequencies are included in Learning Strategies Corporation’s Sonic Access and Sonic Access Four Seasons programs. The Sonic Access recordings are remarkable sets of deep meditations that focus on increasing your energy and the attainment of success, health, improved relationships, and spiritual growth.

Technologies for entrainment of brainwaves can also be found in audio-visual entrainment (AVE) devices, also known as sound and light machines. I have personally used the D.A.V.I.D Pal machine and have coached its use with clients in retreats. Entrainment can be an excellent way to help your brain accelerate the development of neural capacities for sustaining deep meditative states. To learn more, consider reading Bill Harris’ excellent book, Thresholds of the Mind.

Paraliminals

Every Paraliminal recording is a meditative experience. Each one is carefully scripted and artfully recorded to bring you to an expanded state of consciousness within. These recordings put you into contact with the resources you need to accomplish your desired goals, and assist you in applying those resources to improve the quality of your life. In addition, Paraliminals carry a unique set of Holosync frequencies that assist in bringing you to desired states of consciousness with little cognitive effort on your part.

Group Meditation

If you have meditated with a group, you know that it is easier to get into a deeper state when you are with others. There is a natural body wave frequency that develops around meditators that resonates with your own. When you go into silence surrounded by others also going into silence, the palpable silence that is always in you becomes far more apparent and accessible.


http://www.learningstrategies.com/SonicAccess/Course.asp?aff=9scheelp08

http://www.learningstrategies.com/FourSeasons/Course.asp?aff=9scheelp08

http://bio-medical.com/products/david-pal36-with-session-editor-software.html

http://www.amazon.com/Thresholds-Mind-Bill-Harris/dp/0972178007

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According to the Himalayan Tradition of Yoga meditation, the moment that you drop into a meditative state, the lineage of meditation teachers and disciples going back thousands of years supports and guides you. In all spiritual traditions throughout history, the spiritual energy of those who have attained enlightenment remains available to relieve the suffering of those who follow, until all humanity reaches enlightenment.

If you would like to create a group to study meditation, have your group use the Meditate with the Himalayan Masters home study course together. For example, play the first 30-minute meditation with the group. Then throughout the week, each person can listen to the three-minute version. The following week, play the second recording. This way, everyone deepens their states progressively. If each person has the course, everyone can listen to the 30-minute meditation daily until they feel comfortable with it. Any other time during the day, they can listen to the three-minute version until they become comfortable enough to do it on their own.

Any techniques and technologies that help you meditate better are heartily encouraged. Use every tool in the box to assist you, including Paraliminals, Holosync, audio-visual entrainment technologies, and the meditation procedures you learned in this chapter. Simplify your meditation so that you feel you can practice every day. For instance, if you do a Holosync meditation for an hour a day, you will get excellent results. If you do not have the time and energy to meditate for an hour, then several times during the day, drop in for three minutes and you will create a groove in your mind that brings you more easily into the deep silence of meditation.

RELATED QUESTIONS

Q: Will yoga or stretching exercises enhance the meditative experience?

We need regular exercise. I attend exercise classes three times a week. Every day I do some form of exercise on my own. Walking benefits me from head to toe. As a means of transportation, walking will not get you places very quickly. But if you never walk, the life support systems in your body will eventually start to break down.

If you can do regular exercise and practice Hatha Yoga or Qigong, it will absolutely help your health, strength, and longevity. It will also strengthen your nervous system and its capacity to carry a profound load of spiritual energy. Working on a physical level will definitely enhance your meditation practice. A colleague shared this analogy: You live in a house with four rooms that represent the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual



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dimensions of your life. To be balanced and healthy, you need to spend time in each of the four rooms every day.

Q: Is meditation always a no-thinking, silent process?

In the Himalayan tradition, many different types of meditation exist. If you try to force yourself to stop thinking, it gets strange. Rather than saying to yourself, “I will meditate to stop thinking,” say “I will meditate to remember the deep state that is the presence and power that I am.”

Q: What are the best times to meditate?

Traditionally, many meditate first thing when they arise and last thing before sleep. These times are naturally good because you are more unplugged from your daily routines and your identification with the external world.

If you meditate upon waking and before sleeping, it would be helpful to listen to the 30-minute recordings from Meditate with the Himalayan Masters. Then every couple of hours throughout the day, drop in for three minutes to reinforce your ability to quickly attain deep states of meditation.

Q: How can I keep from falling asleep while meditating?

Most of us are conditioned to sleep when we lie down and close our eyes. Make certain you are well rested so your mind may go into meditation instead of sleep. I start with 20 minutes of stretches to get my blood flowing, my joints limber, and my organs working. Then I sit and meditate immediately after that.

Spring Forest Qigong Master Chunyi Lin, who we partner with at Learning Strategies Corporation, says that sleep is the body’s natural meditation. It is the way in which the body/brain recycles itself and brings itself back to a state of balance. Even if you fall asleep, you still attain physical, emotional, and spiritual benefits. Perhaps you will not realize immediate value at a cognitive level, but certainly you will find value in other areas of your life.

Swami Veda describes sleep as that time when we drop from identifying with the world and come back to that true place where we connect to the infinite. If you meditate and fall asleep, as you come back into awareness, thank yourself for the benefit of sleep and encourage yourself to enter a state of more awareness and peace.

Q: What specific meditation techniques will help me go deeper?

The Association for Himalayan Yoga Meditation Societies International in Rishikesh, India offers additional courses in the Himalayan Tradition. These courses are presented in


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16 countries around the world. Children can also learn to meditate. Consider attending a retreat for youth and family.

Q: Can meditation help reprogram my subconscious to create what I want in the world?

Think about the subconscious as an energetic repository of everything that has happened to you physically, emotionally, and mentally throughout your life. The yogis describe this repository as energy sheaths or samskaras. You do not have to work through these layers to get to a place of meditation. With meditation we bypass samskaras. Other mental practices will facilitate your ability to recondition your energy sheaths. Consider the release technique by Sedona Method, or The Work of Byron Katie. Both are techniques that I present in my Abundance for Life course.

When you are meditating and random thoughts blur your focus, observe the thoughts as they come and pass. Go back to the breath. Go back to the feeling of peace that is within you and stay in that state. Eventually, the mind will recognize that it can support a calm, undistracted, inward focus.

I had the opportunity to go into the Biocybernaut Laboratory with Dr. James Hardt, and had eleven electrodes hooked up to monitor my brainwaves for seven days. Every day, I spent hours in a lightproof, soundproof room, just interacting with my brainwaves. What I discovered is that in order to make progress in the expansion of my consciousness, I needed to identify areas of my life where forgiveness was needed, and to then experience a state of forgiveness, toward myself or toward others. Each time I located another issue to forgive, my brainwave measurements reflected a richer state of consciousness. Spring Forest Qigong Master Chunyi Lin explains that developing the attitudes and mental habits of love, forgiveness, and kindness will refine and strengthen your spiritual energy and bring you spiritual enlightenment and lasting happiness.

Meditation alters your body’s biochemistry as well as your brain circuitry. It also builds regions of your brain to expand your capacity. Use the natural ability endowed by your human mind to harness the power of meditation. Bring a simple practice of meditation into your daily life…even if it is for only three minutes today. Within a few short weeks your life will be richly enhanced. The practice of meditation carries with it a 5,000-year-old guarantee!

M E D I TAT E L I K E A M A S T E R

www.themeditationcenter.org/jnana/

www.themeditationcenter.org/jnana/

http://www.sedona.com/

http://www.thework.com/index.php

http://scheelelearning.com/products/abundance-for-life/

http://www.biocybernaut.com/



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Take a moment for a short meditation to complete this chapter. If you can, read the following into a recording device and then play it back for your meditation.

Take this moment right now to close your eyes. Become aware of your own breathing. Become aware of the flow of breath in your nostrils and realize how your body has continued to breathe for you. Notice the rise and fall of your abdomen, your chest, shoulders, as you breathe in and out. Notice the flow of breath in your nostrils and take a moment to be with yourself and the space that your body occupies. Feel a sense of gratitude and really thank yourself for taking this time to focus in this way.

In reclaiming your full access to your genius potential, it is important that you take time in your day to Drop Into Genius. Connect more powerfully with the source that is your higher power. That higher level of consciousness is always expressing through you the true presence and power that you are.

Determine now to dedicate the few minutes it requires to quiet your mind and meditate like a master periodically throughout each day. If only for three minutes, you still gain immediate benefits. Now, carrying this good feeling with you, gently open your eyes and maintain awareness of the flow of your breath as you walk through your day in peace.






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Chapter 6

Can you heal with a s ingle thought or touCh?

Absolutely. Recognize that every symptom is an outward manifestation of an energetic cause. Imagine a full representation of the disease state: how it looks,

sounds, and feels. Then change that mental representation to a state of wholeness and hold that as a complete image. As you do, allow yourself to be informed by the higher

intelligence of your genius mind that operates in you and through you. Follow the natural, intuitive healer within.


Years ago, I was teaching a small seminar on personal development and positive thinking. About a dozen of us were sitting around a conference table talking about the derivation of the term “positive thinking.” It comes from the root “posi” which means to place firmly in position. So positive thinking is

positioning our thinking with the end result(s) in mind. Negative thinking comes from the root “negate” which means to invalidate. And it negates or limits our access to the abundant resources that are within us.

In the seminar, as we explored semantics, a participant named Bob held up both hands and said, “I want to tell a story. This hand (he raised and waved his right hand) was ready to be amputated just nine months ago.” As we looked at his hands, there was little distinction between the hands except that his right hand looked younger. There were no scars or marks. It glowed as if it had new skin and was as smooth as a baby’s bottom.

He told us that he had been doing electrical work in his basement. He was installing a big cartridge fuse in the main circuit box and as he put it in place, it exploded and tore

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his hand completely open. All the bones, nerves, and sinews were exposed. Muscles were hanging. He immediately had the thought, “My hand is going to be okay.” He plunged his hand into the nearest bucket of liquid, which turned out to be dirty engine oil he had drained from his car. He then carried his raw open wound in this bucket of dirty engine oil to the stairway. His friend who was working with him came downstairs and asked what was going on. Bob said, “You gotta get me to the emergency room!” The friend asked, “Why?” Bob held his hand out and his friend fainted on the spot, so Bob decided to drive himself to the emergency room.

When he arrived the doctors examined and cleaned the wound and agreed that his hand was a goner. There was basically nothing left of it; he would never have any nerve sensation in it again. And with the mess from the oil, the risk of infection was too great. The consensus was to amputate the hand. He said to them, “My hand will be fine. Just clean the wound and wrap it up.”

Against their better judgment, the doctors finally agreed to do as Bob asked. Over the next several weeks, they just changed the bandages. Within a fairly short period, his hand had completely restored itself, but he had absolutely no sensation in it. A few months later, when he and his wife were walking into a K-Mart store, his hand suddenly burned with excruciating pain. He had to sit down. He felt faint and broke out into a cold sweat. After his wife made sure he was okay, she hurried through her shopping. By the time she came back, all of the sensation in his hand was completely restored.

Since all of this was pretty much medically impossible, I asked him if I could see his medical records. He found them and brought them to me to review. There were diagrams of everything the doctors had seen and done and the recommendations they had made. If not for Bob’s insistence, they would have amputated the hand. I was teaching about positive thinking and Bob was a perfect example of what positive thought can do. The moment the accident happened, he positioned his thinking with the end result in mind; that everything was going to be fine.

In this chapter on healing you will discover how to:

⋅ Help the healing of others and yourself.

⋅ Gain confidence in yourself as a natural born healer.

⋅ Help to heal specific diseases.

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H E A L W I T H T H O U G H T A N D T O U C H

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⋅ What is illness?

⋅ How can we differentiate between symptoms and causes?

⋅ What is healing?

⋅ What roles do meditation, daily rituals, imagery, and environment play in healing?

⋅ What can we do to facilitate optimum health?


Here is the script for this chapter. Record it and listen to it several times throughout your day. Each time you Drop Into Genius, you strengthen your relationship with the genius potential in you. You free up your healing resources and direct them to improve the quality of your life and the lives of others for whom you care most deeply.

To begin your exploration of your natural healing power (NAME), simply take a deep breath, and with a gentle exhale, close your eyes and attune your awareness of yourself to this space that your body is occupying. In this beautifully comfortable state of relaxed awareness that you enter so quickly, you can let your shoulders relax, relax even further now. Feel the gentle flow of the breath as your body breathes into your chest and abdomen. Feel the sensation of your breath in your nostrils. Inhale and exhale gently and slowly without any pauses between the breaths.

You Drop Into Genius as you turn inward toward the rich resources within you. Letting your senses explore your inner world with inner eyes, inner ears, and an inner body, opening even greater access to the expansive resources within you, more so now than ever before. You are developing deeper listening and communication with your genius mind and applying its guidance to improve the quality of your life and the lives of those with whom you interact each day.

People can see changes in you. They can hear it in your voice when you speak. You carry yourself with greater confidence and ease, walking in a more open and upright way. Where your focus goes, your energy flows (NAME), and your actions are becoming more effective in producing the results you focus upon.

You are developing a beautiful communication with your nonconscious mind and accessing more of your natural creativity and intuition, much like when you were a child. Your body/mind remembers times when you were very young, healthy, and free. Your body remembers the expression of perfect

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health, when you moved with ease and played joyfully. There is a beautiful integrity to your body and the energy within it always moves with intelligence to perform every function precisely as it is designed. Each cell knows exactly what to do, what to become, how to repair itself from damage, and how to restore itself to wholeness.

Again, be aware of your breathing. What a miracle that it continues whether you think about it or not. How beautiful that your heart continues to beat in its ideal rhythm all by itself. Feel the perfect working order of your body as it supports your existence in the world.

Feeling refreshed and aware, gently open your eyes. Maintain awareness of the flow of your breath, even with your eyes open, and enjoy the calmness and clarity of mind that you just established so effortlessly.

WHAT IS ILLNESS?

There is a natural healthy integrity to the physical body. When that integrity is disrupted or compromised, the body shifts away from the state of wholeness to a state of illness.

Syndrome illnesses seem to be occurring with greater frequency today than ever before. These illnesses are designated as syndromes because there is no clear etiology. One viral agent or specific cause cannot be determined. Since doctors cannot establish a clear cause, they call it a syndrome.

I was with a physicist in the Washington, D.C. area and asked where the headwaters of the stream behind his house originated. He said, “It does not originate from any one source. There is not a nearby spring or a lake. In the dry season, there is not any water in it at all.” When I looked at it, it was full to the brim. It was the result of millions of tiny drops of runoff that form a stream. It was a fractal, the emergent result of millions of similar causations over a large area of land.

In much the same way, many symptoms of physical illness are the manifestation of millions of multifarious interactions. When those interactions appear in larger or smaller symptom groups we go to an outside expert to fix the problem. We go to the doctor and ask, “What is going on with me?”

When outside experts like medical doctors study our symptoms, they use their senses to testify what they see, but can only hypothesize what the causes might be. If they cannot determine causation, even after a number of tests, they may give you a prescription to make you comfortable while the body takes care of the problem.


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When there is no clear cause, no clear definition, and no clear solution to the problem, it is called a “Type III” problem. An “expert” is not going to fix it. We must learn about what is going on and explore what the next steps might be. Medical treatment has been known to create many unintended side effects when prescribing solutions to Type III problems, and those side effects can be worse than the original symptoms.

Alternative or “complimentary” medical approaches including Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurvedic Medicine, are very different systems than the Western Medical Model that I experienced growing up. Each of these alternative systems approach the examination of symptoms and causation based on energy flow rather than pathogens.

When both you and your medical doctor admit that a Type III problem is present, it is time for you to enter a learning mode; stay curious, explore, and do not give up until you find the answers you are looking for. If you turn inward during meditation and contemplate what is happening to you physically, you might begin to see into the causation of your difficulties.

GERMS OR ENERGY

So how can you find the source of an illness when the medical profession cannot? Keep in mind that most likely there is not one causal source.

Let’s take a moment to distinguish between germ theory and energy theory. There are all kinds of germs living in your body today. They do you no harm. In the Eastern traditions, energy theory maintains that it is not about the germs. Germs have a tendency to proliferate in areas where there are energy blockages. Think of a stream of water. If there is a blockage in the flow, there will be too much water above the blockage and too little water below the blockage. There are illnesses associated with excess energy and illnesses associated with depleted energy. Western medicine looks at the germs growing in each area and says the causes of the problems are the germs. Eastern traditions of medicine say it is the energy imbalance.

Natural seasonal cycles of energy flow create a need to cleanse and restore wholeness to organ systems and cells in the body. For many years, I practiced internal cleansing according to the yogic traditions of Ayurvedic medicine. One technique washes the lower gastro-intestinal tract at the turn of seasons from Fall to Winter and from Winter to Spring. The practice, called the full body wash, is to flush the digestive system so that the water coming out of you is as clear as the water going in. This cleans all the sloughed off cells from the intestinal walls and allows the body to function more effectively. The flushes are accomplished with saline water to induce diarrhea. Another wash of the upper gastro-intestinal tract, called the upper wash, is performed by inducing vomiting. Diarrhea


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and vomiting—do these remind you of the flu season? Western medical doctors saw the symptoms, called it an illness, looked for the causes, and noticed many germs and viruses there. In truth, it is the body attempting to regulate itself by naturally cleansing and flushing as dictated by the energetic changes of the seasons.

The same concept applies to a cold and the practice of the sinus wash using a small spouted pot called a “Neti Pot.” Using it, you pour a warm saline solution into one nostril as you tilt sideways, letting the water run through to the opposite nostril. Germs and mucus are flushed out of your sinus passages. As you pour the solution, you experience watery eyes and a drippy nose. Same symptoms as a cold, right? Left to its own devices, your body will cleanse itself without your intervention. Consider using the yogic wash practices to make the cleansing experience more gentle on your body and effective in results.

STARTING THE HEALING PROCESS

As you continue learning what it means to restore yourself to wholeness, you will continue to piece together the effects of such contributing factors as gratitude, forgiveness, eating well, resting, and deep prayer.

Consider what it takes to restore a building back to it is original condition when it is all worn out and dilapidated. It requires a lot of work, in a lot of different areas, in a lot of different ways, with a lot of different tools. You might use one tool to scrape off paint. The next day, you might use a different tool to replace hardwood floorboards. So bit-by-bit, you take the steps, always holding in consciousness that you are whole and healthy.

Many doctors believe that nearly 100 percent of all illnesses have their origins or causation in the mind. Disturbances in the psyche or mind affect the energy of the soma or body. According to this understanding of illness, the most powerful intervention is to change the psychosomatic flow.

Begin all healing with relaxation, regardless of the type of medical treatment you subscribe to. Relaxation leads to a reversal of the psychosomatic energy flow so that the soma begins to influence the psyche. Because the mind takes the shape of the object it perceives and wraps its attention around that image, we must begin by pacifying and quieting the mind through relaxation and meditation. Then, the mind becomes molten and can be reshaped. Dr. Stephen Parker, a psychologist, Sanskrit scholar, and expert in psychosomatics suggests:


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Relax the physical body. In this way we lose the habit of being “body- bound” or thinking that we are the body. When we relax to the point of feeling free of the body, the body is free to change.

Develop awareness and relaxation of the energy body, or the subtle body. This allows greater malleability of the mind and greater potential for positive change.

Go into silence, quieting the mind itself.

Reshape how the mind works from within. If you desire to become the change you want to see in the world, follow the formula of Intention— Resolution—Decision. Feel that you must become the change, then that you have to become the change, then you are going to become the change, and lastly become the change.

As we continue to explore and learn more about how we create our physical conditions, a number of lifestyle shifts can occur. For example, the way you interact with others at work or the way you perpetuate the anger you feel in traffic affects other areas of your life. The daily practice of those micro-interactions becomes habitual—a chronic condition of the mind that you carry with you throughout each day.

Be mindful of what you reinforce while you drive your car; what you think about when you watch TV; how you respond when you see the news. Feeling tense or threatened keeps a certain level of toxin constantly pumping into your system. Your system must bail out the toxicity and is always working to isolate or eliminate those poisons. If you are constantly replenishing the poison, it eventually catches up to you. Illnesses are often the body’s response to recalibrate and balance its many systems.

FINDING CAUSATION

In the middle 1800s, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby was a clockmaker and repairman in the Boston area who had a fascination with Mesmerism. An early precursor to hypnosis, Mesmerism involved passing magnets over a person, causing them to enter trance states. Because the effects were so pronounced, Quimby studied the phenomenon in an attempt to make it a legitimate science.

Quimby went on tour to demonstrate Mesmerism with a young man named Lucius, who exhibited amazing psychic abilities when Mesmerized. During his presentations, Quimby

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placed Lucius in a mesmeric state, and then people in the audience asked him questions. Lucius would mentally travel to remote locations and describe the happenings and answer the questions. The press gave great reviews of Quimby’s performances.

At the time, Quimby suffered from severe kidney disease. According to his doctor, one of his kidneys was so significantly degenerated that a piece of it about three inches long was hanging by a couple of threads. Quimby was in excruciating back pain almost all the time. His doctors felt it would kill him within ten years.

After one of the presentations, Quimby asked Lucius if he could see what was going on with his back. The young man closed his eyes and gave the exact same diagnosis that the medical doctors had given. His kidneys were degenerated. One kidney was so bad, a little section about three inches long had separated and was just barely hanging on.

Fearing the worst, Quimby asked, “Is there anything that can be done?” Lucius replied, “I’ll fix it right now.” As the psychic placed his hands on Quimby’s back, Quimby felt amazing heat there. The next day, Quimby was without any back pain whatsoever. Within three days, he seemed to be restored to perfect health. He never had another problem with his back and according to the testimony of every doctor, he had been completely healed.

As Quimby began to explore what had happened to cause his healing, he recognized that the only thing our senses can attest to is the symptom. Our senses cannot determine causation. Causation seems to be at a level of energy or consciousness that even the medi-cal community cannot access. Because we can only perceive the symptoms, we have a tendency to think of illnesses in symptomatic terms.

Quimby started researching the Christian Bible to understand the healing miracles that Jesus performed. He determined that Jesus was a scientist who had figured out the sci-ence of healing. Quimby codified the pattern of how Christ used the science of healing to bring people back to wholeness. Based on his research, Quimby wrote a manuscript about the Christ Scientist and the Science of Healing.

One of the many people that Quimby healed, a woman named Mary Baker Eddy, went on to establish a church in the Boston area called the Church of Christian Science. A descendent of Quimby republished The Quimby Manuscripts, which is one of the best metaphysical texts on the science of healing.

WHAT IS HEALING?

Healing is the restoration of wholeness. As a healer, I believe my clients hold the keys to their healing. The most powerful mindset I can hold is an ideal meditation mindset. In


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the yogic tradition, the mindset is: Truth, Love, and Simplicity. Qigong Master Chunyi Lin uses the mindset of Love, Forgiveness, and Kindness. Others focus on the three transcendental principles or Verities: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. If we hold these in consciousness, we hold a space in which the pure form that we are here to manifest in the physical world is able to be fully expressed.

Is our image of wholeness limited to a physical lack of symptoms? If we transcend that view we can begin to look at the soul that came into a physical body to live in the world. We are here to have the physical experience we are having. If that includes physical symptoms, appreciate how they have led us in the direction of greater self-discovery.

Children are amazing healers because they have not yet denied their natural gifts. When my children were toddlers, if I had any symptoms of an illness, I would say to one of them, “Honey? Would you please put your hands on this area and give me healing energy?” With complete willingness he would leave his toys, toddle over to me, and place his little hands on the area I pointed to. He would close his eyes with his face turned slightly upward. After ten seconds he would toddle off and go back to playing with his toys. Every time a remarkable shift in my physical state would take place.

My youngest son Scott, after attending a healing retreat with Chunyi Lin, would regularly heal kids at his high school. If someone complained about a physical symptom, he would ask, “Would you like to be healed?” If they said yes, he would perform a Qigong healing on them for a few seconds and ask, “Feeling better now?” With stunned looks on their faces their replies were always, “Yes! That was amazing!”

Since wholeness is our natural state and we are all born healers, let’s explore how we can attain our highest possible expression of physical health and well-being.

HOW TO HEAL

The simplest way to heal is to hold a complete image—a full representation—of what wholeness looks, sounds, and feels like. Gather as many details as possible. For example, if a person is complaining about an affected area, mentally go into that area and explore what you perceive. In your imagination, make the affected area look large or make yourself very small and explore inside of the area. Explore how the disease state looks, sounds, and feels. Then mentally change that state to one of wholeness and hold that complete image. This is the same healing technique Spring Forest Qigong Master Chunyi Lin uses for his amazing results. When he first experienced Qigong healing, he was sitting in a stadium.



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He mentally saw his uncle who had been suffering from abdominal pains for many years. When he explored inside his uncle’s stomach, he saw a big hole obviously eaten away by an ulcer.

Mentally, Master Lin made the stomach the size of a house with a big hole in the wall. He imagined patching the hole and fixing it up. He made sure all the colors were perfect and restored. The next day, he talked to his uncle and found that his uncle’s problem had miraculously gone away.

Chunyi recognizes that his ability to heal is common and simple. As he studied Qigong, he wanted to know how healing could happen for anyone. Most Qigong masters said, “You have to practice fifty years before you can heal.” He said, “I know that that’s not true because I knew nothing about Qigong and healed my uncle. There must be other ways to do this!”

In Spring Forest Qigong, illness is described as a blockage of energy. Chunyi teaches how to explore and detect where energy is blocked. You can do this mentally or you can scan the body with your hands, passing your hands over the body to detect the blockage through manual sensations.

When you notice where it is, break up the blockage with what is called “sword fingers.” It is a hand posture as if you are pointing at something, but with two fingers instead of one. Put your index and middle fingers together pointing straight and fold your little finger and ring finger toward your palm covered by your thumb.

Point the sword at the energy blockage and cut it up by running the sword back and forth a few times. Then mentally, as if your fingers were long tendrils, reach in with your fingers, grab the energy blockage you just broke up and pull it out of the area. Toss the blockage to the far end of the universe. Reach in, pull it out, and throw it away. Keep doing that until it feels like you have removed all the excess energy and blockage you broke up. Then, using the palm of your hand, send energy into the unblocked area to restore the normal flow of energy.

With Qigong, there are a couple of caveats. For example, do not point sword fingers toward the heart. The heart does not like strong yang energy with the points of the fingers. It prefers more yin energy with the palm of the hand. Similarly, when working with a toothache, do not use sword fingers toward the teeth or head, just reach in and pull out the blockages and put energy back.

Spring Forest Qigong, Reiki, and other energy-healing technologies each have unique ways of representing the same story. I have been most interested in discovering what is similar in all of the healing modalities.


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Q: What is the first thing to do when someone comes to you for healing?

The philosophy I maintain with anyone who comes to me for healing is that every symp-tom is an outward manifestation of an energetic cause. Whatever part of consciousness that is causing the symptom is functioning in the person’s highest interest. I explore what the individual’s consciousness is attempting to create and how it might be accomplished without physical symptoms.

Based on this philosophy, the first thing I do is ask the person for a representation of what health means to him or her. I ask, “What will it look, sound, and feel like when you are living in the fully restored, healed state?”

It is common that people want to describe everything that is wrong with them. For example, they say “Well I’ve got this problem with my back.” I keep them focused by say-ing, “Do not tell me what is wrong. Give me the representation of what would be right. What would your back feel like if it was in full working order?”

A woman came to me with a degenerative arthritic condition. An active person by nature, the prognosis was that she was going to be confined to a wheelchair. No more golf, no more tennis, no more dancing—all the things she loved to do in life. Her medical doctors said they had done everything they could and there was nothing more that they could do for her. She met with me and asked what I could do.

She sat back and closed her eyes and I asked to contact the part of her that was in charge of the degenerative illness. I reassured her mind that my intention was not to eradicate that part of her, but to understand it. Entering into dialogue with that part of her, I found out the degenerative arthritis was an attempt to get her to slow down. She was doing everything for everyone else and not taking care of herself. Her body was being protected by this part of her mind. It responded, “If I’m going to take care of her, I’ve got to get her to slow down.” Of all the possible alternatives to accomplish this outcome, it picked an illness that the doctors labeled as degenerative arthritis.

We asked that part in charge of protecting her if there might be new and creative ways to get her to slow down without compromising her physical well-being. It came up with several alternatives including having her teenage daughters help with housekeeping and cutting back on some of her work and volunteer responsibilities. Then, sure enough, the degenerative arthritis reversed and went away. The neurologist who had been working with her asked, “What are you doing?” She said, “I’m doing a kind of meditation.” He said, “Keep doing it because whatever you are doing is working!”


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Q: Where should the healer focus thought?

Be fully engaged with what is being presented to you in consciousness. Then realize that when someone comes to you with an illness to be healed, they are showing you a dimension of your own consciousness, which will also receive that healing energy. In other words, as you are working on this person, you are working on an outward expression of some part of you as well. In healing others, you heal yourself.

While performing a healing service with his congregation, Reverend Dr. Michael Beckwith of the Agape Spiritual Community, discovered a parishioner had severe kidney disease. Reverend Beckwith invited the congregation to imagine the healing of their own kidneys and the healing of this person’s kidneys every time they urinated. With the combined visualization of perfectly restored kidneys and all the healing prayer energy from the congregation, the parishioner overcame the kidney disease.

CONFIDENCE IN HEALING YOURSELF AND OTHERS

Working with your own internal representations, you can heal. Recognize today that you have a very powerful healing ability that you can develop and use to heal yourself and others, and in some cases the healing can take place instantly. When some people hear this they worry about what might happen if they should become ill. If you are a healer and you come down with a cold, how do you feel about it? Some people feel embarrassed. Some feel inadequate. Some feel like a fraud. Let go of your concerns about your self-image. If you become ill, focus on healing yourself. You never judge or blame anyone for manifesting an illness and the same should apply toward you. Always, an illness is an opportunity to pay attention and grow in your strengths as a healer.

When you work on others, you are letting energy flow through you as a prayer of well-being for them. You have no attachment to the outcome. In fact, whatever the outcome, it is always perfect. In other words, do not lose sleep over it if the next day someone you worked with says, “Nothing worked, nothing happened.” Instead, keep exploring, keep on engaging your representation of the ideal end result and asking internally what an ideal next step can be.

I have a story to illustrate this point. In the Spring of 1989, my eldest son Ben, age 7, came down with a severe flu. He came home from school on a Thursday and that night, he was vomiting. My wife had just given birth to our third son who was only a month old, so she had to take extra precautionary measures while caring for Ben. I was teaching


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that weekend so before and after my classes, I did my best to help him any way I could. At night, his fever spiked pretty high.

All day long, my wife stayed in contact with the clinic and they said, “Sounds like Ben has the flu that seems to be going around.” Each night I did healing work with Ben and prayed over him. I visualized his healing, worked with his mind, used hands-on healing, and did anything I could think of to help him heal and make him comfortable. I worked with him for hours every night. But by Sunday night, he had a 105-degree fever and his eyes were crossed. I got him into the emergency room and they immediately recognized that he had spinal meningitis.

Then I got angry. I was angry at God and the universe. I thought, “How come all this healing stuff that I learned over the years did not work? Why didn’t it work when I needed it the most?”

When the doctors did the spinal tap on little Ben and the analysis came back, they said, “He’s got such a rapidly spreading form of bacterial meningitis it should have killed him within twelve hours. His little immune system has been fighting a valiant battle.” When I heard this, I wept. I realized that as angry as I was, it was for naught. The healing work that I did probably facilitated his body’s best work until he could get the necessary help from the medical profession. Should he have been healed? Should I have been more successful? His body did exactly what was necessary and the end result was exactly what was needed. It was perfect. I was humbled and apologetic to God for my doubts.

It turned out that in Chicago, just two months later, seven children contracted the exact same strain of meningitis. Four of those children died from it, one was permanently blind, one was permanently deaf, and only one child out of the seven came out unscathed. Ben had come through his ordeal unscathed as well.

In all the modalities I have studied and all the techniques I have practiced—hands on healing, distance healing, you name it—I have found that if you have the attitude of an explorer, you will discover each technique provides additional insight.

To heal someone at a distance, just close your eyes and mentally imagine the person standing in front of you and see that individual return to wholeness. That is all you need to do. However, for different issues, you can practice finer distinctions. For example, making the affected area large enough to walk around in and fixing it in your mental representation.


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All healing systems were created by practitioners who were researching profound healing in an attempt to understand it. They had the attitudes of explorers. Chunyi Lin, the developer of Spring Forest Qigong, is constantly learning about what works.

You will learn more about what works through trial and retrial. When something does not work, ask “What is going on here?” Then explore a little further. Each time you ask the question, your higher power, your higher consciousness will guide you another step along the way.

HEALING SPECIFIC DISEASES

Dr. Akhter Ahsen, whose work I described in Chapter 1 of this book, developed the use of Eidetic imagery for healing. A practitioner of Eidetic Image Psychology named Nancy A. Bent wrote a book called Beyond MS about her healing from multiple sclerosis using eidetic imagery. This book is the personal story of Nancy’s victory over MS and her journey of images, which took her beyond MS to greater health and physical vitality. She does a beautiful job of describing Ahsen’s methodology and approach. She also shares the special Eidetic images that obliterated the MS symptoms by counteracting the underlying negative imagery of her history.

Master Chunyi Lin experienced something similar in helping a woman heal from breast cancer. He was given the image of planting a rose in the breast and letting the roots grow into it. He then took that rose and planted it in the garden. After their session, the woman said that she smelled roses everywhere around her.

How did Chunyi know to plant a rose in the image of her breast cancer? Would a rose work for every other illness? Explore what is possible. And be fully present. Close your eyes and be present to what emerges. The perfect next step is always given. Rather than compartmentalizing and separating it all out, think of healing as a journey that returns us to wholeness. Stay open. Rather than trying to inform yourself through your senses, allow yourself to be informed by the higher consciousness within—that higher perceptual capability or higher level of vibrational intelligence that operates in you and through you. That perfect state is your birthright.

Q: My symptoms of fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue are much diminished. Should I go off

my medication?

Work closely with the people who put you on the prescription. Inform them about what you are thinking of doing and ask them to work with you in reducing dosages. As your


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energy vibration increases, a smaller amount of medication may have a greater impact. Stay in regular contact because your doctor must ensure that you do not regress.

Homeopathy is similar. A homeopathic remedy has a very small vibrational frequency that is generalized to restore areas of our body to wholeness. Work with your practitioner to create the best process for your desired end result. Communicate frequently and be patient.

SELF-HEALING

Andrea Fisher was driving a Honda Civic across the country when she was hit head-on by a semi-truck. Three months later, she woke up from a coma on a respirator. When the doctors saw that she was awakening, they explained to her what was going on. Her spinal column had been crushed. She was quadriplegic. She had no sensation from the neck down and no likelihood for recovery. She would probably remain on the respirator for the rest of her life. Because her spine had been pulverized, metal rods braced her spine.

At her bedside, her husband told her that he could not take it any longer and he was divorcing her. She had been a very successful executive in the Los Angeles television industry but all of her support had been yanked out from under her. Still, she realized that she would beat this and walk out of the hospital one day.

She spent a lot of money to help bring in all the help she needed. She changed to a whole foods diet. She had a Swami come in and work with her on meditations. Even though she could feel nothing, she had massage therapy and regular chiropractic adjustments. Within a year she was off of the respirator.

Almost three years to the date after her accident, the last vestige of doubt was finally removed when she stood up next to her bed. Her body could not support her because her muscles had all atrophied, but having recognized that she could do this, she started physical therapy in earnest. Close to seven years after the accident, she walked out of the extended care facility.

She had regenerated all of the nerve connections in her spinal column. No international authority in the field of neurology could explain what they witnessed when examining Andrea. They could only say it was a miracle. She insisted that everything is a miracle including our heartbeat and breathing. And she said she could explain everything she did for her recovery.


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When I asked her to speak at corporate training sessions of mine, Andrea would show off by bending over and touching her toes. When you watch her walk across the room, you would never know she had been in a catastrophic accident. Her recovery illustrates how a single-minded determination and persistence can change our own healing outcomes.

Q: Is meditation a way of healing oneself?

Meditation is absolutely a way of healing oneself. As my teacher explained it, “Meditation is the process of practicing your own death experience.” In meditation you stop identifying yourself as a physical body. Instead, you begin identifying with Soul self, ever free, ever pure, ever wise, timeless, and perfect in every way. From your perspective as the Soul inhabiting a body, you can work with your physical body as if you were working on someone else’s body. Imagine yourself laying out before you and laying hands on those areas that seem to need some particular attention. Imagine the perfect healed state of wholeness returning to those areas.

As you are reading this chapter, you may notice areas in your body that used to have discomfort are actually feeling better right now. As you have been reading about others’ bodies, your consciousness has been reflecting on areas in your own body. Every time you bring an image of wholeness to those areas, the flow of energy to them is the restoration of that perfect pattern of health.

Q: How does the role of ritual and environment affect the healing experience?

Rituals work at an instinctive level with the old brain—the limbic brain, and the reptilian complex. When we produce a ritual, we create a sacred space where healing can occur and be maintained. Create your day as a sacred experience where all the resources you need are constantly provided.

A colleague of mine, Leonard Orr, was diagnosed with five terminal illnesses and dementia. He started practicing a yoga ritual that involved a number of specific meditations and sleeping next to a fire every night for forty nights. He not only overcame the five terminal illnesses but the dementia as well, all of which were supposedly impossible to overcome.

Leonard first introduced me to “immoralist philosophy” in the early 1970s. As an immoralist, he knew that contracting all these illnesses was a wake-up call, and he would find a way to get past it all. So he explored his options. When he found something, he tried it and it worked for him. Will the process that worked for him work for everyone on the planet? Maybe, but how can we know? Have the attitude of an explorer and keep searching.


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RELATED QUESTIONS

Q: If I send out healing energy, will my own energy level become depleted?

Absolutely not, because the energy is not coming from you, it is coming through you. And anything you heal in others, you heal in yourself. That person is a mirror image of some part of you which has been removed from a state of health and wholeness at some point in time. Every bit of healing you do actually bolsters your energy.

Q: Can you heal two different areas at a time? Absolutely.

Q: Can I heal certain parts of mind and body just by thinking that I want to? Absolutely, direct your consciousness to any area you choose.

Q: Can we send healing energies to ourselves from the future? And can we send healing to

other people in the past like our parents and siblings?

Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunn wrote a book called Margins of Reality published by the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory. For 18 years, they researched technical remote-viewing and the influence of thought or consciousness on various random-event generators (devices that produce random events, like a computer that flips a coin 20 times a second).

I had lunch with Jahn and Dunn at Princeton University. They told fascinating stories about affecting the outcome of something that has not yet happened. You can affect healing out of sequential time—in the past or in the future. It is called “asynchronous healing.” Simply put, we live in a time and space continuum so most of what is perceived as time and space is something we imagine. We can imagine moving through time and space to other times and places and have very accurate representations of what is happening there.

How? Close your eyes and do it! In your imagination, go to that “future you” or go to that “past you” or that “past parent” and do a healing session there. I have personally experienced the powerful effect of a healing meditation that I felt went six generations into my past. I could hear a series of snapping sounds and a collective sigh as the healing took place. My relationships with my middle son John and my father Evan immediately took on a greater sense of peace and loving support.

Master Chunyi Lin describes using “generational energy,” the energy of your own genetic coding, to facilitate healing. Contained within it is a perfect pattern of health and wellness that can be called upon to restore your state of wholeness.


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Q: Can you heal without changing consciousness?

Healing is the return to an original state of wholeness. We had to alter our consciousness to be in a state other than wholeness.

Is the change back to a state of wholeness a change in consciousness or a restoration to the true state of pure consciousness? It is not just a matter of semantics. You do change consciousness from the altered (diseased) state that you have placed yourself in, back to the original state that is your true self.


Take a moment for a short meditation to conclude this chapter. If you can, read the following into a recording device and then play it back for your meditation.

Take a moment (NAME) to close your eyes and envision an entire circle of individuals. Envision all of the people you are associated with, all receiving a higher vibrational message about what it means to live in wholeness, live healthy, live free.

To continue this process of unfolding, you will create health, abundant wealth, prosperity in every dimension, energetically, physically, and financially. It flows into your life and into the lives of all whom you care about, and on to your community, your nation, and this planet.

See this beautiful blue sphere in space—the beautiful blue planet Earth—breathing, being restored to complete wholeness. This world works for everyone. See this world as socially just, spiritually fulfilling, economically and environmentally sustainable, with a beautiful quality of life for all of its inhabitants.

Imagine your body, mind, and spirit restored to a natural state of wholeness. Imagine all the beauty and good you can create in the world. Feel that you are fully rested and eager to explore. You can dare to dream and then create the dream life you choose.

At a rate that is comfortable for you, maintaining a gentle, mindful awareness of your breathing, return to an outwardly directed state of awareness, feeling at peace.


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Chapter 7

Can you aCCelerate your learning of anything?

Yes. Anything—any subject, any skill. And it is easier than you might imagine. Old notions of linear learning no longer need hinder your innate abilities.

Tap the vast reserves of your mind and enjoy learning new subjects and skills with calm confidence.


Think about how you learned before you ever went to school. Everything you learned was relevant to your life. For example, remember when you wanted to get at those cookies? You had to learn to climb. You wanted to learn. You initiated your own learning. With an expectation of success, you were highly

motivated. You had no concept of failure. If you were not successful right out of the gate, you were undaunted. You just kept on trying until you reached the cookies.

If you could not yet communicate, maintain balance and walk, or reach out and pick up a cup, it was just a matter of figuring it out. Unlimited repetitions did not flag your resolve. You learned through action, not theory.

You learned problem-solving with no instructions. Real-life challenges tended to be fun, involving exploration and adventure. All around, you had high-visibility models available for you to imitate. Most of the time you would get immediate feedback and all your responses were okay because they hastened your success. Your learning was generously supported and rewarded. Your progress was swift. You were not living in your head. You were physically engaged in your learning.

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You were and continue to be a naturally gifted learner. In this chapter you will find out how to use those gifts to accelerate your ability to acquire, retain, and apply whatever you choose to learn.

We will explore the depths of how your inner genius can help you learn and how you can overcome the blocks to learning that you may have accepted during your formative years.


⋅ Open yourself to new ways of learning and accessing information.

⋅ Use all of your sensory input to empower your learning.

⋅ Speed up learning and increase retention of new information.


⋅ How to overcome barriers to learning.

⋅ How to accelerate learning and memory.

⋅ How to gain fluency in new languages faster.

In addition, we will explore questions on increasing creativity, applying PhotoReading techniques and helping others learn effectively.


Read these words into a recording device, and play it back to yourself. You are learning to quickly and easily Drop Into Genius anytime, any place. With this script you are improving your relationship with the genius potential in a vitally important area of life that affects everything, freeing you to create the life you choose.

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Set aside this time, (NAME), to be your own, just for elevating the quality of your life. You are actually accelerating the way you learn anything that is important to you, beginning with the simple step of entering an ideal state of physical relaxation and mental awareness.

Close your eyes now and bring your awareness of yourself to this space that your body is occupying. You can already relax and center your mind using this relaxation exercise and any others you have experienced. As you do so, you contact the rich resources of your mind and shift into an ideal state of learning, this state of relaxed awareness becomes easier and easier to quickly attain.

Relax your forehead and jaw a little bit. Perhaps even let your shoulders drop. Feel the gentle flow of the breath as your body breathes. Now feel the sensation of your breath in your nostrils. Inhale and exhale gently and slowly without any pauses between the breaths.

Inhale and exhale as if you were breathing in one continuous cycle. Smoothly. One breath flowing into the next. Only observe that flow. Now, bring into your awareness the way you feel when you are engaged in something that you really love to do.

Learning is easy and fun when you are doing what you love to do (NAME) and the pleasure and rewards of the effort are obvious to you. Think of what it took for you to be able to relax and center yourself at will. The joy you experienced long ago when you were fully immersed in something you loved to do is available to you anytime you desire to learn new things that benefit your life.

Again be aware of your physical body and your breathing. Gently open your eyes. Observe the flow of your breath, even with your eyes open, and enjoy the calmness and clarity of mind as you play with the delightful information and useful skills you are learning.


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OVERCOME MYTHS THAT ARE BARRIERS TO LEARNING

There are four common myths surrounding learning.

Myth #1: you cannot quickly learn difficult subjects like math and chemistry. They take a lot of time and study. Truth: there are effective ways to accelerate your ability to learn highly technical and analytical skills.

Myth #2: when you listen to classical music at sixty beats-per-minute, you produce an alpha brainwave and can learn much faster. Truth: although sixty beats-per-minute music helps to facilitate an alpha brainwave state associated with increased ability to learn, the elimination of fear makes the biggest difference around learning more rapidly. It reduces the emotional and cognitive barriers to learning and increases the number of choices available to help you proceed with a learning activity.

Myth #3: if you want to learn to speak another language fluently, you have to do it before age five because you will lose the necessary brain wiring as you age. Truth: you can learn a language that is very different than your own much later in life. I met a man in Mexico and we got to talking about his passion for languages. In addition to speaking fluent Spanish, English and German, he had written a thesis at a French university. At 57 years of age, he decided that he was going to challenge himself a little more and learn a language that was not a Romance language. At the time that I met him, he was learning Russian.

Our brains do tend to prune back certain neurons that allow us to perceive sounds if you never encounter those sounds in your native language. Yet you have the ability to grow new neural connections. Through a rich immersion in the tones of other languages, you can perceive tonal nuances that you do not normally hear. Also, listening to classical music helps to present comprehensive tonality that enables the brain to rewire itself and make the necessary connections to hear and speak another language.

Myth #4: you cannot teach an old dog new tricks. Truth: people are not old dogs and education is not a bag of tricks. It is a fact that you can learn well into your later years. The oldest PhotoReader was 91 years old when he took the PhotoReading Course. He learned the technique because he did not know how many years he had left and there was so much more he wanted to read!


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DISCOVER NEW WAYS TO LEARN FASTER, BETTER

There are many ways to learn. An individual’s approach to learning may be uniquely his or her own. Educators have created a tremendous variety of approaches that can help inform you about what might be best for your unique style of learning. Here are a number of philosophies and techniques to apply immediately that have been important in my human development work with individuals, organizations, and institutions.

Break Through Slow Learning with Superlearning

Dr. Georgi Lozanov, a Bulgarian educator and psychiatrist, developed the Suggestopedia system. It involves playing very specific, relaxing Baroque music with a tempo of sixty beats-per-minute as spoken information is delivered to the student with near-operatic-quality voice tones that follow the melody between each piece of information. The tone of voice is alternated for each bit of information to prevent monotony and engage the brain.

In 1971 and 1972, a number of professors at the University of Iowa at Ames, Iowa, were instrumental in helping to research and test some of the theories that Lozanov was using and proving behind the “Iron Curtain” of Soviet-controlled Eastern Bloc nations. Lozanov’s theory and practice triggered an accelerated learning movement in the West.

The book Superlearning, first published in 1979 by Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder with Nancy Ostrander, is credited with importing Lozanov’s theories. Superlearning is also a term for a multi-sensory teaching system to help people learn large amounts of information quickly and easily.

Other great accelerated learning resources include:

⋅ Quantum Learning by Bobbie DePorter.

⋅ The Learning Revolution by Gordon Dryden and Jeannette Vos.

⋅ Accelerated Learning for the Twenty-First Century by Colin Rose.

Get the Big Picture for Success with Whole-to-Parts Learning

Learning from whole to parts can be very effective. When you know the big picture about where you are heading—be clear about the end result first—and then work backward to determine how to get there, you are engaging more of the whole brain.

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Dr. Ken Blanchard is a best-selling author of many books including the One-Minute Manager. When he taught at a university, he gave students a copy of the final exam on the first day of class. Throughout the semester, they searched for the answers to the questions. By the end of the semester they could take that final exam with confidence.

Many of the other professors thought that Blanchard’s approach constituted cheating. He determined that it was the best way to demonstrate competence in each area on the exam. If the students demonstrated competence by the end of the semester, then they met his criteria for the grade given.

Dr. Charles Reinhert, professor at Southwest State University in Minnesota, had a similar process in his teaching of college physics. He distributed the final exam at the beginning of the semester so that as students went through the lessons, they would be able to see what he considered the most important items necessary for success.

This approach gives you the big picture and the end result first. It is helpful because it taps into natural learning behavior—the same way you learned before going to school. A simple way to practice this is to: 1) preview the material you are going to study, 2) determine what the ideal end result will be, 3) visualize yourself successfully attaining the results you desire, and 4) imagine the steps that lead to the successful end results you attained. Do these for one to three minutes before you begin learning and you will immediately shift the way your inner resources work for you. Learning takes less effort and the quality of your work improves.

Increase Creativity, Memory, and Learning with Mind Maps

Let’s say you are trying to learn in an academic environment. Rather than leveraging natural learning behavior, learning is confined to a linear format. How can you determine what information in a text or lecture is relevant? Lacking the ability to predict what might be in an exam is a source of tremendous stress for many learners.

When you take notes as mind maps, it is easier to see what is most relevant in a text or lecture. Instead of taking notes in a linear outline from the top of a page to the bottom, take notes in a visual and spatial way. Turn the blank note page in a landscape format. Write the main topic in the center. Then draw rays out from that central concept as you go into each new topic so it looks like the branches of a tree. Tony Buzan, author of The Mind Map Book, calls mind mapping “radiant thinking.”

Begin by mind mapping pretty much everything you have to take notes on—from brain-storms, creative problem-solving sessions, book outlines, and creative writing to lectures.



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Instead of writing every word, write a maximum of four words to capture any single idea. Seeing those four words on the end of a ray connected to other ideas stimulates the brain to remember the original idea in its entirety.

Throughout an entire lecture or presentation, mind map your notes. Fill up as many pages as you need to. When you compile all of the mind maps onto one master mind map, very quickly you will see the main topics that are central to what is being presented. In reviewing your mind map notes, you teach yourself how to see the connections of everything and also how to spot what is most relevant. Using your whole brain in this kind of note-taking and learning creates an effect that is immediate and powerful in improving your memory. And as a creative technique, it is invaluable. I always begin a creative project with mind mapping. You can also spot topics that are highly relevant to a teacher by watching body language and observing animated gestures. Listen to the quality and tone of a teacher’s voice. You will readily notice what is most important to that individual. When talking about the most relevant topics, a teacher will light up or beam with enthusiasm. Make a note of those key moments.

A company called LiveScribe created a product called the Pulse Pen. This technology is a useful way to digitally store the notes you take during lectures. Just touch your notes and a recording of the lecture replays exactly at that point when you wrote those notes. The pages and recordings upload easily into your computer and you can post your notes for others to see and hear. I use it all the time for keeping track of what happens in meetings I attend. It is one more method I use to enhance and accelerate my learning. If you go to my LiveScribe page, I have a special message for you to see and hear now.

Improve Your Memory and Eliminate Test Anxiety

A psychologist failed her state board exams several times after receiving her Ph.D. When interviewing her, I discovered that every time she went blank when trying to come up with an answer, she would hear a very harsh, critical voice in her mind yelling at her, “Oh you should know this! What is wrong with you?” That negative voice caused her to feel like an inadequate little child and shut down her ability to recall anything.

I showed her how to change her internal dialogue and create a more supportive inner voice tone that said calmly, “You know this. You can remember what this is.” As she changed the internal voice tone, she was immediately able to access information she had studied and learned but had previously been unable to access in the pressure of the state board exam. The next time the psychologist took the exam, she passed easily.


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When it comes to memory, anytime you can release fear about performance and pressure about achieving outcomes, you become more able to stay engaged in the material. It is like putting a message in a bottle and having it float back with the answer in it.

Have you ever driven away from the house and said, “Oh no, I forgot to bring the…X!”? Usually, such an event is followed by self punishment that sounds like this: “Darn it, I have such a lousy memory! What is wrong with me? Why can’t I remember stuff?”

In truth, when you drove away and remembered what you left behind, you were successfully remembering! Yes, you remembered it a bit late to be convenient, but you were remembering. Yet we tend to affirm “I forgot!” Why do we not affirm, “Oh I just remembered the…X. Next time I will remember it before I leave the house!”?

Surely you have had the experience of knowing that you know the name of a book or movie or person while not being able to recall it. Trying hard and cursing yourself does not work. You will only put your brain in the wrong gear for what you want to accomplish.

If you have an issue of delayed remembering, focus on the gift, not the issue. Allow yourself a much more open flow between the conscious mind and the nonconscious mind. You know that you know the information. If the information is not coming up into consciousness, remember that you know it. Give yourself permission to wonder how soon it will come into consciousness for you. Ask your mind to please bring it up for you and simply let go of any concern. Consider the power of your nonconscious database and link into it with your conscious mind:

⋅ Think of your conscious mind as a vast database, filled with trillions of bits of information you have acquired over your lifetime.

⋅ Imagine shining a flashlight on the floor and seeing the small circle the beam of light creates.

⋅ Imagine that beam of light is everything that you have available to you at a conscious level—your conscious database.

⋅ Now imagine you are standing in the center of a circle that is eleven miles across. ⋅ You have a beam of light, a foot or so around, inside eleven miles of darkness.

⋅ The eleven miles is the database of your nonconscious mind.

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Everything that is known is inside the eleven-mile circle. It is all available to you. It is the repository for all information you learn. To be able to bring it up, allow that beam of light to pinpoint the area within the eleven miles where it resides. Then it can bring information from the non-conscious neural network into your conscious awareness.

If you want to get something out of the memory bank, you have to sign a withdrawal slip and give it a few moments to get processed. Anxiety and tension can paralyze normal banking operations.

Recognizing Blind Spots in Learning

Blind spots are areas of our perceptual field that we cannot perceive because previous training has installed preferences and patterns that our brains will continuously attempt to find. Have you ever learned a new word, and in the next week heard it three or four times? Is it that no one ever used it before or that you suddenly became capable of hearing it? Have you ever thought of purchasing a particular model of car and suddenly started to see them everywhere? Is it that there were not any on the road until that day, or that you had trained your brain to sort for them? In the song Amazing Grace the line is “…was blind and now I see.”

A deer hunter has an uncanny ability when driving down a highway to spot deer that stand motionless and camouflaged in the woods. As a kid, I was known as “Eagle Eye” for my ability to spot a pheasant poking its head above the grass when we were driving on country roads while bird hunting. But when I went trout fishing in New Zealand, it was almost impossible to see half the number of fish my trout guide could see in the rivers. Even though he would point right at them, my brain could only see the surface of the water.

Information may be right in front of us, but we literally do not perceive it, because it does not match a pattern that our brains will sort out from the rest of the data in our perceptual field. It is estimated that out of the ten million bits of information that are processed each second by the human eye and brain, only forty bits will actually reach our conscious awareness.

We cannot see our own blind spots, yet they can have a significant impact on our lives. Instead of ignoring these areas that have the potential to derail our success, we can expand our knowledge to explore more deeply into our blind spots.

Dr. C. Otto Scharmer’s work, Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges, speaks about how we can begin seeing into the blind spots that were put into place by our social system.


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Also, Dr. Ronald Heifetz, a professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, talks about the capacity to get a perspective from “up in the balcony” in his book Leadership Without Easy Answers. In my Natural Brilliance book, I explain how we can gain this greater sensory awareness that allows us to perceive what we have been unable to perceive up to now. The four steps of my Natural Brilliance model—release, notice, respond, witness—take you step-by-step to higher perspectives and greater success.

Here is why the Natural Brilliance model works. Stress keeps our perceptual field narrowed and it negatively affects our brain’s ability to process information. See the figure below:

The key is to take stress out of the processing equation. The Natural Brilliance model does that. When you release tensions and stresses from the body, your sensory abilities come back online. Then you can notice more of what is all around you. When you re-spond in new ways, based on the greater information now available, you are more likely to succeed. When you witness the effects of your actions, you learn, grow, and become more skilled at producing the results you desire. Following the Natural Brilliance model of learning, you can break through to greater success, even when you might have been completely stuck until now.


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Another wonderful book, The Solutions Focus, written by my colleagues Paul Z. Jackson and Mark McKergow from the UK, describes an excellent process for discovering new choices in areas of our lives where we may be stuck. Their simple Solutions Focus approach is rapid and effective. Try it out:

⋅ Think of any area of your life in which you would like to create different results. Imagine your perfect future regarding this area of your life.

⋅ Imagine where you are today on a scale of one to ten, where ten is the perfect future and one is that you have not even started thinking about your future.

⋅ Where would you place yourself right now on that scale of one to ten? (Let’s say for example that you came up with a three.)

⋅ The next question is, “Why so high and not lower?”

That provocative question catches the mind off guard. You think, “Three is high? Why so high?” The question helps the brain sort for all of the things that are working for you, everything that has brought you up to a “three and not lower.” If you said you are at a seven on a scale of one to ten, the same question applies: “Why so high and not lower?”

⋅ The next key question is: “What would move you one point up that scale— from a three to a four, or from a seven to an eight?”

When you ask your mind a question it instantaneously starts generating ideas and options to answer your question. The Solutions Focus approach provides quick insight into how to move things forward in areas you have been working on unsuccessfully. It is a brilliant way to facilitate looking into your blind spots and discovering resources you did not know were there. The use of it is generative, meaning that it generates more skills in every area in which you use it. I consider generative processes like Solutions Focus to be essential “learning-to-learn” techniques.

Learning-to-Learn Techniques

In creating human development programs, I always include learning-to-learn skills to help participants acquire whatever knowledge and skills they need to attain. Below are some of the key skills.

⋅ Attain ideal states of mind: Begin any learning session with a short “mind calm” exercise as we do at the beginning of each chapter of this book. In

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those exercises, incorporate a little visual imagery, positive suggestion, and music. This helps engage the whole mind while increasing focus and retention of anything you learn.

⋅ Read faster: Try reading an entire college text book every night for two weeks, but only give yourself 15 minutes to complete the book. In the process, you will reinvent reading. Try it! You will easily double your reading rate immediately.

⋅ PhotoRead: To process written information more effectively and read rapidly without stress, the phenomenal skill of PhotoReading is life-transforming PhotoReaders can multiply their regular reading rate by three to ten times, and applying the concepts, they can blast through five books in a single evening.

⋅ Listen more effectively: To hear and comprehend more of what others say, watch the speaker’s hands and eyes while noticing your own hands in your peripheral awareness.

⋅ Write faster: To get your ideas down on paper so you can communicate more readily with your genius mind, use mind-mapping first. Then transform your mind maps into more linear written materials for others. This is a great technique for enhancing creativity as well.

⋅ Remember better: Learning and memory are processes of constructing and reconstructing information. If, for whatever reason, you cannot remember something you have learned, there is a gap in your ability to reconstruct the original construction of an idea. To facilitate remembering, improve the original construction of the information, then practice reconstructing the original memory until the new information is completely tied into your neural network. This is a process Vera Birkenbihl calls “Intelligent Gap Management.”

⋅ Learn more rapidly with others: Studies have shown that collaborative learning is a better way to learn. When you can share ideas with others, your own neural connections become more powerfully activated. If possible, create your own study group with the chapters of this book. Listen to home study courses with a “learning buddy” and you will improve your concentration, retention, and recall of anything your learn collaboratively.

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Additional ideas that I often teach, depending on the course content, include:

⋅ How to take math tests, essay tests, or multiple choice tests.

⋅ How to learn through research and study.

⋅ How to work with the mind and body, including your own brain chemistry.

⋅ How to benefit from physical movement like educational kinesiology.

⋅ How to use sound and light.

In addition to providing learning-to-learn skills, I also work with teachers and facilitators to create ideal learning environments that are more brain-compatible. They learn how to establish goals, conduct mini-lectures and demonstrations, and engage in experiential learning. They learn in simulations, and engage physically and spatially. They learn how to facilitate collaborative learning activities and establish goals for success. Teachers can facilitate learning in a variety of ways. Use the techniques and processes in this chapter and you will facilitate your own process of learning.

HOW TO IMPROVE RETENTION OF MATERIAL YOU LEARN

All new information you want to learn must be constructed as an internal representation. The internal construction is the first part of what we call learning. To access it later means to reconstruct it. Only when you can construct and reconstruct information can we say that you have “learned” something according to formal definitions of learning. But we need to take this one step further. For learning to be useful it must be connected, stitched onto, and integrated into the pre-existing neural network of the brain so that we have long-term access to the information and skills. To effectively retain what you learn and build further skills upon a solid base, it is best to: 1) anchor (connect), 2) embody (stitch onto), and 3) nest (integrate) what you learn.

⋅ First, you anchor the learning. Anchoring is essentially stimulus-response conditioning. Whatever you are learning—whether it is how to drive, cook, or speak in public—you need to see it, hear it, and feel it with your tactile senses and emotions so that your whole body and whole brain are involved. This is how you engage fully in learning new information. It is the best way to ensure that material you learn becomes fully constructed and is at least temporarily connected to your neural network. Temporary threads will eventually fade unless we strengthen the connection.

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⋅ Second, you embody the information through deliberate practice. Reconstructing an original construction, like recalling, reviewing, associating, thinking about, and practicing what you learned causes the brain to strengthen the connection between the new information and the neural net. When you perform a skill, you get a feeling for how it works. You discriminate subtle distinctions that allow you to improve your ability to perform it with greater competency. The apprenticeship model of learning has been the traditional approach to embodying skills. Embodying means that the skills become automatic—they become habits of behaving and “second nature.”

⋅ Third, you nest the learning. This means that a simple skill becomes part of a larger skill set, fully integrated whenever you need it. For example, if you hammer that nail so it is flush to the board, the activity of nailing comprises a basic behavioral unit or T.O.T.E. = Test, Operate, Test, Exit. I test to see that the nail is sticking up, then I operate by swinging the hammer down onto the nail head, then I test again to see if the nail head is flush to the board. If I see that the nail head is not flush. I continue to operate: whack it again and look again. If it is still not flush, operate again until it passes the test. When it is flush, then I exit.

A carpenter has anchored, embodied, and nested many skills—nailing a board with a hammer being only one. So that when a wall needs to be built, all the skills come into play. I have done a fair amount of home “re-muddling” in my day. When I work side-by-side with building professionals, I can be in awe at the distinctions they make and their ability to execute a plan they create. They can do several times more than I can in far less time, and have it turn out many times better. That said, they too had to endure being a beginner, way back when.

Back on the river in New Zealand with my fishing guide…when we spotted a trout in the current, I was instructed in how to present my dry fly to it. Although I intellectually understood what to do, my ability to execute on demand was fairly minimal. By the end of a week of fishing with my guide, I could reliably put the fly where it needed to be. Each time I did, the fish responded appropriately, and I have pictures to prove it (the Rainbow Trout pictured on the next page was blessed and returned to the river unharmed):

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Everybehaviorthatyouengagein,startingfromtheveryearliestthingsyoueverlearned,areallnestedT.O.T.E.s:test-operate-test-exitbehavioralunits.Speaking,walking,writ-ing,ridingabicycle—alloftheactionsyouareabletotakewithoutthought—theyareallanchored,embodied,andnestedandfullyavailabletoyouwhenyouneedthem.Ifyouhaveeverbeenparalyzedandregainedmobility,thebrainhadtorelearnthosenestedbehaviorstoperformsimpleskillslikewalkingandspeaking.

Someresearchersrefertotheskill-buildingprocessas“scaffolding”yourlearning.Theythinkintermsofahierarchylikeagiantpyramid.Thebaseisverybroadandtakesmoretimetoconstruct.Thehigherupyougoonthepyramid,thesubtlerthedistinctionsyoucanmake.

Insteadofscaffoldingahierarchyoflearning,think“geodesically”and“rhizomatically,”witheverythingyou learnconnectedmeaningfully tootherrelevant information.TheEpcotCenteratDisneyWorldisageodesicdome.Rodsconnectatnodeswhichconnecttoothernodesbyrods.Thefinalstructureisadomethathasastoundingintegrity.

Thinkaboutthegrowthpatternsoftreesabovegroundandrootstructuresbelowground.Ifyoutakenotesusingmindmaps,theylookliketreebranches.Somepeoplethinktheylooklikeneurons.Ifyoulookatasingleneuroninsideofthebrain,ithasanarbor-likequalitytoit.Eachofthenodesattheendisconnectedwithothernodesattheendsofotherneurons.Thehumanbrainhas about10billioncellswhichpass signals toeachotherthroughasmanyas1000trillionsynapticconnections,makingitthemostcomplexphenomenonintheknownuniverse—unlessyouconsidertheinteractionsbetweenthebillionsofbrainsontheplanet.


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Now instead of thinking of learning as a branch, think of it as a rhizome, the thick horizontal stem on some trees that produce roots and shoots that develop into new plants. Rhizomes tend to grow and connect. For example, if you are in a room with fifty people and every one of you touches two other people and are touched by two other people, then all those in the room will be interconnected. It will not look like a tree. It will look like a patch of rhizomes connected with each other. This “rhizomatic” view of learning may be the most accurate way to think of how the human brain learns. Here is an example.

If I ask, “How many times does the word ‘flag’ appear in the Star Spangled Banner?” most folks will have to sing the entire song and count the number of times that the word appears. That is because we learned the song by singing it in a linear and sequential manner—start to finish. Another way to access this information is to learn how it is all connected in a visual-spatial way. If you did, you would see that there is only one time that flag appears in the song: “that our flag was still there.” If you learn your alphabet visually instead of auditorily, you would see the interconnection in the way that the letters are presented in a very different way.

To anchor information differently and learn it effectively, learn and practice new informa-tion and skills through multiple channels and many entry points. Learn geodesically and rhizomatically so you have multiple ways of embodying it. When it is time to use it, you will access the information much more easily.

Let me illustrate in another way. You can write your signature in the air with your index finger. Try it. Now do it with your left elbow. Now, try it with your right hip. How about your left ankle? How strange that any part of your whole body can be used to sign your name on your first try! This is possible because you learned to sign your name by engag-ing your whole body/mind, and embodying it completely.

Textbook and Lecture Techniques

When you have a chapter to read in a textbook, do not read it word-by-word from start to finish. Instead of taking that linear approach, preview the chapter and then read the questions at the end of the chapter. Then go find the answers by looking through the chapter. Notice the areas where the answers are contained and read just those sections. This is a much more geodesic approach to learning. You are connecting with the chapter in a whole-to-parts way.

For more effective learning, I developed two unique Paraliminal recordings through my company Learning Strategies Corporation: Personal Genius and Memory Supercharger.


http://www.learningstrategies.com/Paraliminal/Genius.asp?aff=9scheelp08

http://www.learningstrategies.com/Paraliminal/Memory.asp?aff=9scheelp08

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They have been changing lives since 1988 in 185 countries around the world. Paraliminal technology offers new ways of accessing the resources of your inner mind and using those resources to transform your outcomes. They will also help you to visualize yourself succeeding, especially when it is time to take an exam.

For those individuals who cannot get around to what they need to learn, these Paraliminals help you stop procrastinating and start putting your learning into immediate use. The New Behavior Generator is another powerful Paraliminal that uses visualization and time distortion technology to help you learn more effectively.

If you do not have the PhotoReading home study course, let me suggest an approach to immediately start building your PhotoReading skills.

⋅ Take any book that you need to learn. Give yourself only fifteen minutes to read the entire book.

⋅ Flip the pages in front of your eyes in a steady way as you gaze through the center crease of the book. This helps the eleven miles of your vast nonconscious mind absorb those pages.

⋅ Then study the book. Go to those chapters that you need to study. You will find yourself more able to bypass unimportant things and immediately home in on what is most important.

I have seen people go from 100 words-a-minute at 50 percent comprehension, to 1500 words-a-minute at 100 percent comprehension. Practice this activity each day for a couple of weeks and you will find you are able to access the information you need quickly and easily.

HOW TO GAIN FLUENCY IN NEW LANGUAGES FASTER

Any new language is a set of distinctions. For example, in my doctoral studies, I recognized that I am learning a language of scholarship. I present ideas to an academic community in that language so that they can easily read and understand my communication. Scholarship uses a different vocabulary than I use with other audiences. For example, I use a constructivist- developmental epistemology in my research. This academic language is perfect for other researchers and completely incomprehensible to almost anyone else.

Each distinction you learn in a new language helps you to depict some internal representation

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—something that you are trying to comprehend. For example, when I was trying to learn Spanish I saw a little lizard run by and I asked my friend, “What is the word for that critter there?” He said, “It is a la lagartija.” As an English speaker, I had no connection between “la lagartija” and my word for “lizard.” How can I get such an unfamiliar word anchored into my neural network to make it stick, to store it in a way that I can access it again?

All new information must be constructed as an internal representation. Then, it must be connected, stitched onto, and integrated into the pre-existing neural network of your brain. It is important that you make your representations visual and tactile. If you can touch it, see it, feel it, interact with it, lay it out in a visual diagram, you will have an easier time committing it to memory.

I constructed a representation of “la lagartija” by imagining a ‘la’ (meaning feminine) lizard wearing a little skirt. The word sounded like Lager (beer), Tea, and Ha (laughter). So I imagined the lizard pouring a lager beer into a tea cup and laughing. So the Spanish word for lizard temporarily became la-lager-tea-ha!

Building that representation allowed me to go back and reproduce it several times in the next few days. And each time I reconstructed that original construction, I strengthened the temporary connection to my neural net. Through practice, the temporary thread integrates into my pre-existing neural net.

Consider that everything you learn is the growing of a dendrite, a connection from one brain cell into other brain cells. Those dendrites are always looking for connections and engaging in learning. They grow and hook up with anything that resonates along that same energy pathway. A stunning example of this is in a short film of a live neuron, filmed in a chamber with video microscopy. It literally crawls around the chamber like a bug with tentacles, searching for connections. When it finds none, it stops moving. Inside your brain as you learn, your brain cells constantly search to make new connections and grow according to the demands you put on them.

When you are learning a language, get involved kinesthetically. Immerse yourself in the culture for the greatest visual, auditory and neural stimulation. You will stimulate the greatest number of neural connections. The more you embody through deliberate practice, the more you integrate into your neural net.

Q: What do I do if I have difficulties with learning languages?

When learning languages, we tend to take information out of context and dissect it into


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tiny chunks. Instead, we need to build temporary threads, like I did in learning la lagartija: take the new information and tie it in to your pre-existing neural network.

One of the best ways I have found to do this is through visualization. We all have virtual reality simulators built into us. If you want to learn more rapidly, imagine yourself with a skilled professional and engaged in learning from that person. In learning a language or learning to fly an airplane, mental image rehearsal is very important.

Let’s say you take private pilot lessons and have a difficult time flaring at the bottom of the landing, just before you touch down on the ground. You tend to come in a little too fast, a little too steep. When you land a plane badly, bouncing hard on the runway, that feeling gets stored in your body. Since you do not want to repeat the experience, you tend to over control or tense your muscles when you are coming in. You do not think about relaxing. Instead, you think about controlling the landing even more firmly.

Similarly, when we learn a language and are tested on it, we have a tendency to tense, to go into an action mode. What we should do instead is relax and go into a slow, playful mode, like we did as children, learning and speaking language for the first time.

When it is time to demonstrate learning, relaxation is key. Imagine yourself fluently speaking the language in the test situation. You have a smile on your face; the person you are speaking to is smiling and nodding. Your visual and mental image rehearsal will allow you to more fully embody the language. Because you access both hemispheres of the brain in visualization, you engage more of the brain mass itself in the learning process.

Your brain will respond to the work it is assigned by growing. For example, cab drivers in London have enlarged areas of the brain related to location and spatial orientation. Musicians and people with perfect pitch grow enlarged areas of the brain that perceive tone. The brain does not distinguish between reality and imagination. Asking your brain to engage by imagining your behavior will fire off those neural circuits, causing the actual growth of new connections. Remember this phrase: “What fires together wires together.” So if you want to learn to draw more effectively, close your eyes and imagine attending class with a drawing instructor and learning to draw. Then open your eyes and start drawing. At first, you might visualize for ten minutes and take a ten-minute lesson. Then you might visualize for ten minutes and take a half-hour lesson. Next, visualize for ten minutes and take an hour lesson. Then visualize for ten minutes and take a two-hour lesson, then a full day, then a one-week lesson. Essentially, you are accelerating how much your brain can do for you in less and less time.


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I definitely encourage the full engagement of your inner resources through visualization. Using your brain in this way, you distort time and accelerate your capacity to gain massive amounts of instruction in a fraction of the actual time required.

Q: What are the limitations to learning languages?

You are learning new things in your life every day. You can learn as many languages or subjects as you like. If you keep engaged in that material and stay immersed in the images and the culture, you will access as much of that information as you possibly can.

Becoming a lifelong learner means that you are continually engaging in new areas of learning that can assist you. One woman said that from learning Arabic she found that she was able to learn Chinese much more easily.

If you spread yourself too thin, however, you are less likely to achieve the proficiency possible with a more intentional focus. For example, you can learn ten languages today but your level of proficiency will be fairly minimal.

When learning anything, there are two types of learning that take place. Acquisition of knowledge follows a geometric progression, like a population growth chart. The other is the acquisition of “know how” or skills. That progression increases in a step-wise fashion with long plateaus followed by small upward steps. As author George Leonard describes in his book Mastery, we must learn to love the plateaus. That is where your deliberate practice lets you embody what you are learning.

Unlocking Creativity

Here are my most recommended methods for unlocking your creativity to bring you toward the change you desire in your life.

⋅ Use The Solutions Focus technique demonstrated earlier: On a scale of one to ten, where are you now? Why there and not a lower number? What would it take to move you one point up the scale?

⋅ Another way to unlock creativity is through practicing The Genius Code personal learning course that I wrote and recorded with Dr. Win Wenger. Because it incorporates the PhotoReading “direct learning” technique and Natural Brilliance model, this course is a great way to reinforce everything you are learning in this book.

How To Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci, written by my colleague Michael Gelb, states there are really seven Da Vincian principles:

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Curiosità: Take a curious approach to life—an unrelenting quest for continuous learning.

Dimostrazione: Test knowledge through experience, persistence, and a willingness to learn from mistakes.

Sensazione: Continually develop and refine your senses, especially sight, as a means to enliven your experience.

Sfumato: Willingly embrace ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty.

Arte/Scienza: Link art and science for whole brain thinking. Develop the balance between science, logic, art and imagination.

Corporalita: Embody learning by cultivating grace, fitness, and poise.

Connessione: Recognize the interconnectedness of all things. This is systems thinking or what I refer to as rhizomatic thinking.

I also highly recommend his follow-up book, Innovate Like Edison.

Recognize that within you is a magnificent natural learner. You have vast neural potential in the tremendously powerful nonconscious mind. When you engage more fully—using whole-to-parts thinking, immersion, and visualization techniques—you place yourself in a rich context where you can access the full database of your nonconscious and greatly accelerate your learning.






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Chapter 8

Summary and next StepS

Knowing that there is genius in you is the first step. Next is taking small steps to express it wherever you are. Research in the field of human development strongly suggests that you can create the life you choose. Surround yourself in a supportive

environment that continually stimulates the genius in you and encourages the courageous expression of who you really are.

CHAPTER 8: SUMMING UP

This book was created out of a rich dialogue, using social media to engage an active, global, community-of-practice that is reclaiming the genius within. You are now part of this community and have joined in on the play, exploration, wonder, testing, and inquiry.

You now have numerous distinctions about how you can use imagery, sleep, energy of books, inner guidance, meditation, energy healing, and rapid learning. Each new distinction is intended to expand your awareness of the genius potential waiting to be fully expressed in the world. Anytime you engage in the practices or exercises outlined in the chapters, you will gain further access to the rich resources within you. Deliberate practice develops skills in using what you now know.

As you access more of who you really are, you automatically “up-level” the results you produce. You also become a model for others to emulate. Anyone you share this informa-tion with will also discover genius abilities that may have been marginalized by traditional approaches to teaching and learning.

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You, along with the growing number of others in this new learning community, can facilitate a process of global transformation. This book is an invitation to participate more purposefully as a transformational leader of this process. From my doctoral studies in Leadership and Change, I have come to realize that we need to contribute our individual and collective genius to help bring about a world that works for everyone. Let’s co-envision one human family in a global community that is socially just, environmen-tally and economically sustainable, and spiritually fulfilling. As we do, we send a message of healing into a cumulative nonconscious field that influences us all.

WELCOME THE CHANGE

What changes are you ready to welcome into your life? Reflect back on what you wrote in response to the questions posed after each chapter. Consider the entire process we have been engaged in and what can happen next. Write your thoughts to the following ideas:

⋅ Imagine a perfect future in which you live completely in accord with the beneficial knowledge, skills, and attitudes presented in this book that you have chosen to integrate. What does your life look, sound, and feel like? What rewards do you enjoy in the areas of success, health, relationships, and wisdom? How might your accomplishments in life create benefits seven generations from now?

⋅ What is a possible, small, next step you can take to move yourself closer to that perfect future today?

Self-reflection is a key ingredient in transformative learning. All the efforts you have made throughout this book to reflect on your physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual existence will give you greater access to the genius in you. You are transforming your life.

The “Miracle Question” is a beautifully elegant way of envisioning the emerging future now expressing itself in your life. This fun little exercise comes from the Solutions Focus work that Mark McKergow and Paul Z. Jackson developed. Have someone read it to you, or read it to yourself into a recorder for playback, so that you can sit back comfortably as you contemplate the image.

Suppose that you finish reading this book and you go through the rest of your day, as usual, and tonight you go to your bed and you go to sleep. And then while you are asleep, a miracle happens and

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the problems that you have been thinking about have vanished completely and the perfect future has become a reality. But, you are asleep, so you don’t know that the miracle has happened yet. When you wake up tomorrow, what will be the first signs that will let you know the miracle has happened? What will be the first signs that let you know that the world has changed?

While your thoughts are fresh in mind, make a note of what you imagined.

PUT YOUR WHOLE HEART INTO THE CHANGE

When someone is fully engaged in life, we say that he or she lives “wholeheartedly.” Have you ever considered what that means? Our heart, as with our life, is both flesh and essence. When we identify with our physical life and separate it from our essence, our efforts will be lacking and our results will be less than fulfilling. When there is coherence between the two, the result is an expression of wholehearted passion in life.

When bringing about transformative change in your life to realize your heart’s desire, you can apply one of Dr. Akhter Ahsen’s images—his Imagery of the Heart in Seven Stages (1999, revised 2005). We started this book with an exploration of Dr. Ahsen’s brilliant work on Eidetic Imagery. It is fitting that we should also conclude with his wisdom.

The transformational nature of this Eidetic is compelling and will continue to play prominently in my ongoing research in human development. I encourage you to give it a try. Ideally, have someone read it to you, or read it to yourself into a recording device and play it back. It is one of the most profoundly liberating Eidetic images and a gift that Dr. Ahsen has offered to let me include it in this book.

Imagery of the Heart in Seven Stages

Stage 1: Introduction to Remembrance

Remember that during childhood you had a heart which was more loving? You enjoyed doing things, and the world was wider and more available. Gradually these feelings diminished because of what happened in your life. Now you do not feel in tune with the world and with the resources you feel inside.

Stage 2: Heart as Flesh and Essence

See your heart which is beating inside your chest on the left side of your body. The heart is flesh plus essence; it is more than just the essence or just the flesh. Note that by separating the essence from the physical, you are

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robbing the physical heart of its essence. You cannot and must not separate the essence of the organ from its flesh, the physical side. Now imagine again that you are doing things with your whole heart, the flesh as well as the essence. There is more strength, feeling of life, and activity in the image of doing when the physical and the essence of the heart are both involved together.

Stage 3: The Heart as an Eidetic Image

You have understood the danger of separating the essence from the flesh of the heart. Now we will put them together and strengthen the mind body unity through what we call “The Heart as an Eidetic.” Again, imagine that you are doing things, and your heart is participating in essence as well as in flesh. See the heart as an image, experience the somatic feeling of the heart, and allow an awareness of meaning to emerge.

Stage 4: Heart and Body

Now imagine that you are doing things with your whole heart in each thing you do. Feel the physicality of the heart as well as its essence. As you are doing things, experience the feeling more on the left side of your body. You feel that this left side, the heart side, has been undernourished for a long period of time. This support has been withheld over a long period of time due to conflicts in life. As a result, you have become weaker. As you see again that you are doing things with your whole heart in each thing you do, let the left side become stronger and more feelingful and fleshy again. Touch the left side of your body all over and feel the flesh. Touch your whole body here and there, and feel the presence of the heart every where: in the skin, the limbs, deep organs, and the bones. Feel this pleasurable heartbeat everywhere in your body.

Stage 5: Heart in Basic Situations

The heart withdrew in the child because of a bad situation at home. All other negative events are secondary to this basic situation. See that your mother and father have a sense of this bad situation. Become aware that one of the following possible situations is the cause of the feelings: (a) an economic, social or political situation which neither the mother nor the father can do anything about; (b) a parent with a problem such as alcoholism or abusiveness; (c) a sibling who is persecutive, jealous, or preferred by one or both parents; (d) trauma involving an illness or death or divorce.

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Stage 6: Revival of the Heart

Civilization is different from Nature, and it discourages the individual’s natural inclinations. It imposes its own structure on the heart through this control. The heart needs to be revived. You must begin by reviving the heart under all situations. The basic situations listed in Stage 5 represent the baseline from where revival of the heart should start. Take any basic situation, old or new, and you will find that there is a baseline where the heart has not been expressed. Lift the heart into expression from this baseline. Allow the relief and illumination to emerge in you as a result. Always remain in this natural state of illumination and radiance.

Stage 7: Heart in the World

Look around you; see that many people in the world like you have been suppressed. Your heart has been suppressed also on their account. After reviving your heart in the left side of your body and in all the limbs and bones, feel that your heart, by extension, is revived in other people’s happiness all over the world. See their eyes and feel your heartbeat in their eyes. Feel your heartbeat in the trees and in the swimming fish in the waters. Feel your heartbeat in the sun and the stars. See your heartbeat in the galaxies. There is a heartbeat in the wind near you, and you go with the wind wherever it goes.

BE THE CHANGE

Dr. Ahsen’s Imagery of the Heart reveals a foundational awareness for our day-to-day renewal, integration, coherence, and full self-expression. Take a few moments to reflect on the concluding exercises of this book and what you have come to know about yourself. Focus on one next step that you are committed to taking, wholeheartedly, in the coming days.

May you live always as the integrated, whole being that you are; fully expressed in both your physical and essential natures. May you walk in peace in all your magnificence. Each and every time you Drop Into Genius, may you feel the support of a growing community that cares deeply about our collective human potential, and know that we celebrate your brilliant light in the world.

May we meet in person soon.

Paul R. Scheele

May, 2010

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